Getting my vote this year…

Gemma Walker, Wildlife and Community Officer
 
I am often asked what my favourite animal is. I usually respond by saying there are too many fantastic creatures living in Norfolk to choose from, not wanting to show favouritism to any particular species.

But, recently the Urban Birder, David Lindo, really got me thinking when I took part in a survey he had launched to vote for Britain’s national bird. As I scrolled through the ten nominees I was torn as to which bird to pick. Should I choose the robin, that chirpy bird that often keeps me company whilst I am digging in the garden? How about the wren? For a little bird they have such a strong, vibrant song. Or the kingfisher, always a treat to see when I am out walking next to a river, broad or dyke. No, there could only be one bird for me, only one bird that would get my vote: the barn owl.

Barn owl, photo by Nick Appleton

Often as I travel home from work I am lucky enough to catch a glimpse of this remarkable, ghost-like bird as it quarters a field looking for a small mammal or two. A favourite past time of mine as I drive back home in the dark is to spot a barn owl on top of a road sign; it’s amazing how many barn owls seem to make use of these artificial perches. No matter how many times I see this beautiful, elegant, white and brown bird it always brings a smile to my face and I realise how lucky I am to live in a county that seems to have such a good population.

Brown hare, photo by Mark Ollett

With my vote cast for my favourite bird, I felt inspired to pick my favourite mammal. People who know me would probably guess that I would vote for the grey seal as I spend many winter hours wardening a colony, but actually they would be wrong. There has been one mammal that has captured my imagination and admiration for many years. In particular I love the folklore that surrounds this magical, mystical creature. In times gone by it was thought that witches had the power to turn in to this animal to escape their enemies, and it was regarded as an animal sacred to Aphrodite and Eros, with people giving this creature as a gift of love. But, it is probably best known for its apparent mad behaviour in March, when it can be seen leaping and bounding in arable fields across Norfolk. Brown hares would definitely get my vote.
 

Common frog, photo by Brian Beckett

If I am allowed to be greedy I would like to cast my vote for one more species, and label them along with the barn owl and brown hare as my favourite Norfolk animals. At Norfolk Wildlife Trust I often get phone calls from people concerned about this animal, it is not only my heart it has captured. You may also know of people in villages across Norfolk that volunteer their time to help hundreds of these animals cross the road to their breeding ponds. The common frog would secure my final vote. To me it is an indicator of spring, when they appear in my pond in March. It always feels like you are welcoming back an old friend and to watch the development of frogspawn to tadpole to froglet is simply amazing. A natural wonder that every child should have a chance to experience.

If you were asked what do barn owls, brown hares and common frogs have in common, what would you say? Apart from being my favourite animals in Norfolk and getting my vote they are also animals that rely on a network of wildlife corridors or wildlife stepping stones which will allow them to travel safely to breeding sites, find food and shelter.

Common frogs may breed in your pond but they probably hibernate in a totally different area, and in the summer will move away from the pond to find food and shelter. So common frogs  need a safe corridor or set of stepping stones which will allow them to travel without risk of predation or being killed by cars. We sometimes get phone calls at Norfolk Wildlife Trust from people concerned that their frogs have not returned to their garden pond, one of the reasons for this may be that one of their wildlife corridors has been blocked (by a new road or a fence) or destroyed (through the building of a housing development), and so the route to a garden they usually breed in may have been lost.

Barn owls and brown hares also depend on a set of corridors and stepping stones to travel safely from one place to another and unfortunately seeing a dead hare or owl on a road is not an unusual sight. If you are lucky enough to see a barn owl you may see it flying  backwards and forwards quartering an area looking for food. Grass verges, wide field margins and hedgerows are very important wildlife corridors for barn owls as they provide habitat for small mammals, the main food source for barn owls.

Brown hares do not have burrows like rabbits, even their young are born above ground. If a predator is nearby they stay perfectly still, not moving, until the last minute. Then when no other options remains they run extremely fast, zigzagging as they go, trying to outrun their predators. A landscape consisting of a variety of different wildlife corridors, such as field margins and hedgerows allows the brown hare room to escape and evade predators.

As well as relying on a network of wildlife corridors within the landscape these three species need our help. Barn owl numbers have fallen by more than half since 1932. This decline is due to a fall in the number of nest sites as barns and derelict farm buildings are being converted into homes, plus a decline in areas of rough grassland hunting grounds.

 One way everyone in Norfolk can help in the conservation of these three species is to share your barn owl, brown hare and common frog sightings with Norfolk Wildlife Trust. Recording wildlife is an easy way to get involved in wildlife conservation. It helps Norfolk Wildlife Trust to understand an animal’s distribution across the county, and identify any areas particularly important or lacking in these species. We also pass the records on to Norfolk Biodiversity Information Service, the Local Record Centre holding information on species,habitats and protected sites for the whole of Norfolk.

The survey forms part of a community project run by Norfolk Wildlife Trust called Delivering Living Landscapes, which is working to engage people with their landscape and its wildlife. It is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Essex & Suffolk Water, John Jarrold Trust and Broads Authority.

Sightings can be submitted easily online at NWT’s website, where you will also be able to see a distribution map of all the sightings submitted so far.

You can also phone your wildlife sighting to Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Wildlife Information Service on 01603 598 333 or pick up a recording card from one of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s visitor centres.

These may be my favourite species but I also hope they are special to you too. Sharing your wildlife sightings of brown hares, barn owls and common frogs will help Norfolk Wildlife Trust and Norfolk Biodiversity Information Service build up a vital picture of where these species are in Norfolk.

The season starts at NWT Weeting Heath

Sophie Harrison, Summer Warden

There has been plenty of stone curlew action to report since NWT Weeting Heath opened for the season on Saturday 28 March. Our first birds arrived as early as 17 March, but have had a slow start due to the high winds and cold weather. Once the sun reappeared and the weather improved, our stone curlews started to establish territories. By Easter weekend nine had arrived onto the heathland. Stone curlews are most active between first light and 9.30am in the morning, and after 4pm in the afternoon.
 

Stone curlew, photo by Gary Noakes

They are incredibly territorial birds, so the last couple of weeks have consisted of a lot of fighting and running about the heath. All the stone curlews have been running around in a group, calling continuously, with wings outstretched, and tails pointed down. There were even collisions with lapwings and rabbits, which resulted in a lot of wing flapping and the stone curlew retreating to avoid a kicking from a rabbit!

When they started to separate out into pairs, a couple of unpaired individuals would duck down low in the grass and hide to avoid confrontation. This looked like a game of hide and seek, as when one bird stood up, the other would crouch down to avoid being seen. This went on until the unpaired bird was caught out, and was then rapidly chased off by the established pair.

After all this drama, we currently have two established pairs on our heathland. In one corner of the compartment, one of our male birds would forage for food, and then turn around to feed its mate. In response to this, she would lower her beak and lift her tail, presenting herself to him. This courtship behaviour indicates to us that shortly we may have a couple of scrapes being developed with eggs to follow.
 

Firecrest, photo by Neil Coe

Other news includes our little bandit thief the firecrest! This crafty individual has been hanging around our long tailed tit's nest. Once the coast is clear, and the parents have left the nest to gather more nesting material, the firecrest seizes its opportunity and swoops in to steal the nesting material.

Treecreeper, photo by Neil Coe

 A male treecreeper has taken quiet a fancy to the NWT sign and has started to build a nest behind it! Both birds have been caught on camera by a local photographer, who kindly gave us these beautiful photos.

Since the reserve has been reopened for the season, I have been also keeping a close eye on our lapwings. We currently have five scrapes here at Weeting, so hopefully in the next two weeks we will see some eggs beginning to hatch! These birds are incredibly defensive parents and have been seen doing their ‘tumbling flights’ to draw predators away.

Butterflies that have been spotted so far this season have included: brimstone, peacock, red admiral and common blue. The chiffchaffs have also been singing their hearts out, telling us that spring really has arrived!

Norfolk butterflies in spring

Nick Acheson, NWT

Peacock butterfly photo by Pat Adams

Among the most heart-warming signs that winter is dying and spring is underway is the sight of a butterfly on a bright, mild day. Through the spring, summer and autumn Norfolk’s butterflies come in waves of species; and the date of emergence of adults of each species is closely related to its life cycle and, in particular, the state in which it spends the winter. The first wave of species to be seen, in early spring or even on mild days during winter, is of those which overwinter as adults, the technical term for an adult insect being imago. Some members of the Nymphalid family, the peacock, small tortoiseshell, comma and, increasingly, red admiral, and one member of the Pierid family, the brimstone, adopt this strategy.

Orange tip, photo by Ray Jones

The first to appear of the second wave of species –  those which have overwintered as pupae – is usually the orange-tip; the male a startling flash of colour over a wet meadow. He is quickly followed by three closely-related species in the Pieridae, the large, small and green-veined whites, which have also overwintered as pupae. At the same time green hairstreaks are busy around gorse, grizzled skippers in unimproved grassland, and holly blues in gardens and along hedgerows. The latest to emerge of the species which overwinter in this form is the swallowtail.

Meadow brown, photo by Maurice Funnell

While these early species are flying as adults, those which overwinter as caterpillars are pupating in spring, in readiness for their emergence as adults in summer. These include most of our familiar grassland species: browns (Nymphalidae), skippers (Hesperidae) and blues (Lycaenidae), though not all blues are blue. Surprisingly, Nymphalid species such as meadow browns, ringlets, graylings and gatekeepers may have fed on grasses as caterpillars all through winter. A few woodland species have also overwintered as caterpillars: white admirals on honeysuckle and silver-washed fritillaries (very recent re-colonists of Norfolk) on violets on the woodland floor.

Silver-studded blue, photo by David Tottman

Though it seems counterintuitive, very few species spend the winter in the most indestructible, hardest-to-find stage of a butterfly’s life cycle: the egg. Most are small, high summer butterflies which have time in the spring to hatch, feed as caterpillars to full size, and briefly pupate before emerging as adults in summer. The Norfolk species which use this strategy are the purple and white-letter hairstreaks, treetop butterflies of oak and elm respectively; the Essex skipper, discovered as recently as 1889; and the chalkhill and silver-studded blues, both of whose caterpillars are protected, to differing degrees, by ants, in return for sweet secretions.

Just one species, the speckled wood, is an exception, overwintering as either a caterpillar or a pupa. This flexibility may account for the speed with which it has spread north through Norfolk in living memory, aided perhaps by climate change.

As you see each butterfly species this spring and summer, spare a thought for the miracles of biology it has been through to reach maturity and brighten our Norfolk landscape as an adult.  

See more of Norfolk's beautiful wildlife in our online gallery

Coltsfoot at NWT Thorpe Marshes

Chris Durdin, NWT Thorpe Marshes

One of the earliest flowers to bloom at NWT Thorpe Marshes isn’t a marsh plant. Coltsfoot grows in disturbed ground, and there’s a little patch of it beside the River Yare. Elsewhere you might see it on what are often termed ‘brownfield sites’ – ruderal conditions, in botanical speak.
 

Coltsfoot, photo by Chris Durdin

Oddly, whenever I first see coltsfoot it reminds me of when I saw the Beach Boys in concert one damp night in Thetford Forest. Bear with me on this. Lead singer Mike Love talked about how the group could sing acapella: unaccompanied by instruments in musical parlance but meaning, he claimed, ‘without clothes’. As I understand it, ‘a capella’ means ‘of the chapel’, which rather ruins the story!

Without clothes sums up the early flowers of coltsfoot as the sunny looking dandelion-like flowers appear, in March, before the leaves. Those stalked leaves have a distinctive style, coming straight from the ground, rhubarb-like, and have a pale, felty underside. They are said to resemble a colt’s foot, though with angular teeth the hoof shape takes some imagining.

Birds at Thorpe Marshes during March have included barn owl, bittern and jack snipe, with dusk the best time for all of these.

Latest news and details of Thorpe Marshes monthly walks are on www.honeyguide.co.uk/thorpemarshes.htm

Hilgay: water levels, birds and pumps

Nick Carter, Conservation Officer (Fens)

The South West corner large compartment flooded, photo Nick Carter

Well, we did it, just about. We reached the target level of 11.59 (1.59m above sea level) in the storage lagoon and maintained it for a month at Hilgay in the Wissey Valley Living Landscape. We have also been able to wet-up much of the rest of the site too so for the first time we have had significant areas of standing water in all four corners. Unfortunately the higher water levels have also exposed some of the issues on the site. The northern shores of the lagoon have suffered some minor wave erosion with the south westerly winds we have had over the winter. It also looks as though a seal has blown in the outlet sluice so that when it is closed water leaks into the surrounding land under the pressure of water from the lagoon. Both of these issues mean that we will have to let water out of the lagoon to plant reeds along the eroded banksides to give greater protection and to replace the leaking seal.  Letting water out means we should reach the target levels in all the other compartments of the site which will help kill off terrestrial weeds and help the spread of naturally occurring reeds and those that were planted in 2013.

Oystercatcher and brent goose, photo by Nick Carter

The higher water levels have also meant wildfowl numbers have built up over the winter. On the 25 March there was a record 50 tufted duck on the site, along with 3 great crested grebe. Coot, shoveler, shelduck, mallard, gadwall, teal, pintail and feral greylag, Canada and Egyptian geese are all present. A surprise visitor was a solitary brent goose which dropped onto the lagoon for a short time one misty morning. Several pairs of lapwing and one pair of oystercatcher seem to be settling down for the breeding season while snipe are still in small winter flocks. Unfortunately with the higher water levels in the lagoon it looks as though we will lose our little ringed plovers and avocets. No sand martins have turned up yet, although it is early days, but we have smoothed some of the sandy ditch sides to encourage breeding.

Panks Pump engineers winching pump out of chamber to service it,
photo by Nick Carter

It has been one year since the lagoon pump was installed by Panks Pumps so it was time for its annual service. This is not as easy as it sounds as the pump has to be winched out of a 4m deep chamber before work can start. Fortunately all seems well. It has been running for over 250 hours during the year which does not sound too much but for the first few months there was very little water on site for it to pump. It will be much busier over the next 12 months.

My Norfolk Love Affair

Ben Garrod, NWT Ambassador  

Whoever said the cliché 'it's better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all' obviously never saw some of my past relationships, where 'it's better to keep well clear rather than get into that emotional train wreck' would have been far more appropriate. We've all been there though, haven't we. But there's one love affair in my life that has never let me down and (I'm happy to say) is still going strong. My love affair with Norfolk. We've had our ups and downs and we've even split up a few times but we always come back together. I'll admit she can seem a bit frosty at times and at least once or twice, I've commented that's she's a bit distant but I love her nonetheless. Because she has a wild side. 

I've lived in a lot of different places, around the world and in the UK, but Norfolk is different. Maybe because I'm from here or maybe it just has a combination of things I've not found elsewhere but nowhere else makes me feel as Norfolk does. I've lost count of the number of times I've chatted with someone and they've come out with the line 'oh aren't there such big skies in Norfolk'. For years, I didn't really understand but it was only after I'd been gone for a few years and had returned that I finally saw what they meant. With such a low-lying, flat land, and few trees to punctuate the horizon, there just seems to be that bit more sky than you would usually expect to see. It makes for an impressive and inspiring place.

Bearded tits, photo by Steve Bond

We share this seemingly desolate and windswept county with a staggering horde of flora and fauna: from bluebell-strewn spring forest floors, to the elegant courtship displays of great crested grebes on the Broads, there's something for anyone wanting to fall in love with nature in Norfolk. I went for a 'little walk' once when I was home visiting my family. I wanted to clear my head. I ended up being gone for three days, walked from Yarmouth to Norwich and only saw a handful of people. I slept in fields and spent my days watching marsh harriers and herons, finding beautiful orchids in endless stretches of flowering meadows. I spied on squabbling bearded tits for hours and walked through a field with a scarred old Chinese water deer. 

Norfolk does that to you. It allows you to get lost. Lost in nature and lost in yourself. There are places where you can find tens of thousands of crows gather together, darkening the reddening evening sky; or where grey seal bulls trade blood-soaked blows with each other to rule the beach. Terns visit in their droves; weary travellers from around the world, to breed on our coast, and some sand dunes come alive with snakes, basking amongst the heather in the mid-summer sun. All in Norfolk.  

Growing up in Norfolk, my parents ran pubs in Yarmouth, so I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, either going on long drives in the country or even longer walks on the beach. One granddad in particular taught me to look at the world around me and to think of the interactions we have with the natural world. He was also an irrepressible story-teller, who made up fantastic (if not wholly true) answers to my constant questions about where worms come from, or how fish swim. It was that engagement at such a young age which not only inspired me to love nature but also instilled that desire to protect it. Now, as both an evolutionary biologist and a conservationist, I know that worms don’t come from the moon and that fish don’t hold their breath under water but I’ve still kept that passion to learn and that desire to protect the nature I see around me. 

Now I’m in a position where I can strengthen my connection to Norfolk that little bit further by becoming the Ambassador for Norfolk Wildlife Trust. I’m so happy to hold this position because the natural world needs people to champion it. To help show others that it’s not only fascinating and fun but that it’s also fragile and fleeting. If I can help one person fall in love with nature in that way that I did, then I’ll consider my work a success. If I can help nurture that in more people, well then that’s just a bonus. Representing a county such as Norfolk makes my task that so much easier, as I can’t see who wouldn’t love her and her wildlife already.    

NWT Holme Dunes, photo by Richard Osbourne

You don't need to travel to distant jungles or tropical beaches to see how beautiful or inspiring nature is. Whether it's humpback whales off our shores or sticklebacks in our streams, we have nature great and small; if the melodic song of the skylark overhead doesn't make your spirit soar then maybe the rasping call of the natterjack toad will brighten your mood; if staking out a marsh-side hide to glimpse an elusive bittern appeals less than watching that tame little robin at your garden bird table, Norfolk has something for everyone. That's why I love her. She never lets me down. There's always a favourite beach to visit or a new forest to explore, a beautiful meadow that I can watch change across the seasons or a bit of the Broads I'm yet to see. I love you, Norfolk. I love your breath-taking beauty, your irresistible charm and of course your untamed wild side.   

Discover Norfolk’s wildlife for yourself! Start exploring at www.norfolkwildlifetrust.org.uk 

Connecting to nature: photography and inspiration

David North, Head of People and Wildlife


Did you see the digital image of the weasel ‘riding’ a green woodpecker in flight? Well more than 12 million people viewed it in the first week it was on the web so there’s every chance you did! Amazing wasn’t it? A once in a lifetime observation of nature shared with millions.

This got me thinking about the power of photography to engage people with nature through taking images and sharing them.

Pied wagtaill perched on David's North car wing mirror

It's only very recently that so many of us carry cameras nearly all the time – cameras on our mobile phones, or small digital cameras that quite often enable both macro close ups and ‘high power zooms’ to be taken on one small device. Never before have so many people had the equipment to be ‘nature photographers’ combined with the opportunity to share images almost instantly, and not just with friends and family but with literally millions of people online. It’s said that as many ‘photos’ are taken every two minutes today as were taken in the whole of the nineteenth century!
 

Grassland jewels, photo by David North

I think this revolution in imagery does have potential, in several different ways, to help reconnect us to nature. Firstly the act of taking an image means looking – and to be a naturalist is also all about looking – nature is all around us if we have eyes to see and perhaps sometimes, even for someone already passionate about nature like me, the camera encourages me to look and helps me ‘see’.

Dorothea Lange said, ‘A camera is a tool for learning to see without a camera.’  How often have I photographed flowers only to discover back home that the image includes small insects that I hadn’t even noticed at the time. This certainly inspires me to look more carefully and makes really try and ‘see’ next time I’m looking at a plant in close up. 

Carrying a camera also simply encourages observation. Every time someone takes a photo they have found something that interests them: photography is surely the art of observation and encourages us to see the interesting and the detail in ‘ordinary’ places. Of course the nature around us in these ‘ordinary’ places, perhaps a garden or a park, or just a ‘simple’ patch of grass or tree, is by no means ordinary. We live in an extraordinary world and sometimes it takes a small digital camera with a macro lens to remind us that’s the case.

Small copper, photo by David North

Nature is full of extraordinary moments, maybe not ‘flying weasels’ but everyday there are truly amazing things, small miracles, happening around us. And more and more of these, a sunset turning a sky to fire, or dew forming in a flower’s rim at the start of a new day, are able to be shared with the people we know and love but also with people we may never meet but who visit Facebook or Flickr or any of the huge number of websites where images can be shared.

Is it possible that the growth in digital photography can inspire more people to look at the world around us in new ways – to see detail that would otherwise be missed?  To capture the ephemeral and fleeting and allow it to be wondered at long after the moment has passed and in places far away but connected digitally across the world.

People are sharing their experiences more and more, and many of those do relate to the natural world; perhaps not surprisingly as it’s our habitat too. The possibility to instantly record and then share has huge potential to profoundly alter the ways people are experiencing and being inspired by nature.

The famous pioneer landscape photographer Ansel Adams said, ‘It is my intention to present – through the medium of photography – intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.’

Grey dagger moth larva, photo by David North

My hope is that images like the one of the weasel and the woodpecker which reach millions do have the possibility of inspiring a sense of wonder, meaning and fascination with nature. I know that my own small camera has helped me to observe nature in new ways and taught me new ways to look. Being inspired by nature may be less about the things we see than about the way we see them – so let’s see the extraordinary in nature around us and let’s use this new digital revolution to share our inspiration in nature with the world.

Share your image of Norfolk's wildlife on our online gallery and be inspired by what others have seen.