The outlier

My poor mother is used to me getting distracted by dragonflies when we go for a walk.  This time we were going to see the walled garden at Wallington Hall in Northumberland when I spotted a dragonfly over the Garden Pond.  We could both see it was brown although it flew almost constantly and it was obviously a hawker.  Each time it landed it disappeared high into the trees out of view.  Eventually I got lucky and it landed in view.

It is a poor photo but good enough to confirm our identification as a brown hawker.  One other photo shows the dragonlfy had landed to eat a fly it had caught - you can make out the wings of its prey.

I tried a flight shot but it was very difficult in the light.  This was the only one worth keeping, just a record shot.

Brown hawkers are rare in Northumberland.  There are no previous records in iRecord (the national online recording system used by the British Dragonfly Society) since it began in 2009.  The BDS Atlas of Dragonflies in Britain and Ireland published in 2014 says:

In northern England it is on the edge of its current range in Northumberland with only isolated, mainly historical, records with little evidence of a breeding population.  The most recent are single records from Morpeth and Alnwick in 2003 and 2004 respectively.

The national distribution pattern is strange.  The brown hawker is found across the Midlands (Mum even has them in her garden) and the South and East but is absent from the South West and from most of Wales.  It is also not found in Scotland.  My record is shown on the map in the outline of the vice-county of South Northumberland at the top.

So this is the first local record for 15 years.  My guess is that a small local breeding population might exist but this could also be an exploring single male from farther south.  I'll try to get back in the next few days to have another look.

Fame at last

This is a photo I took five years ago and shared then on Flickr with BBC Springwatch.  It has just been selected for the Springwatch Wild Academy.  I expect most of the children watching will never see one of these but I hope they enjoy and are inspired by the photo.

Bird of the week - Brambling

The brambling is a bird we all look out for each autumn but in recent years they have been harder to find.  Last year I saw only one, here in the garden.  This year there has been none in the garden.  These birds were at Wallington last week.

Male bramblings have grey heads in the winter but some are already turning black for their breeding colours.

Females are less jazzy with softer browns and greys.

Brambling numbers vary from winter to winter but this hasn't been a good year.  I suppose it depends a lot on the weather and the food supply in Scandinavia.  This graph shows garden sightings in the North East.  Bramblings mainly move into gardens late in winter to take advantage of bird feeders.

Bramblings breed mostly in Scandinavia and in Russia.  This map is from the EBCC Atlas.

The brambling was known to Thomas Bewick as the mountain finch.  Its binomial name is still Fringilla montifringilla.

Archibald Thorburn painted a male brambling with a pair of chaffinches

and a pair of bramblings in summer plumage.

You can watch a BTO video on identification of chaffinch and brambling here.  Read more about bramblings here.  And listen to Chris Watson's BBC Radio 4 Tweet of the Day here.

Caught red-handed

I expect you can guess the culprit.

He thought he would get away with it but he hadn't reckoned on my security camera.

He emerged red-faced but happy.  Who says crime doesn't pay?

Posing robins

One good thing about robins is that they will sit still for a portrait, unlike most other birds which are very fidgety.  This one was at Wallington in very poor light but I managed these at 1/50s with a 600mm lens.

These were at St Mary's, also at 1/50s and 600mm.  Modern digital cameras and stabilised lenses are pretty amazing.

Wallington squirrel

I haven't been to Wallington for a while so it was good to see that the squirrels are still OK.  The light is poor at this time of year near the hide so this photo is at ISO 1600 and 1/50s.  You can see his whiskers are blurred but the rest isn't too bad.

Wallington squirrels

I paid a quick visit to Wallington, hoping to see a brambling but there was none.  I did see a couple of red squirrels looking handsome in the sunshine.

Strawberry blonde

Blondes have more fun, or so they say.  This one was having a great time at Wallington at the weekend.  Its colour was markedly different from the dark, almost purple, red squirrel I saw earlier in the week.  This squirrel was dashing about for over an hour, burying nuts all over the place and getting a muddy nose and paws for its trouble.