RXwildlife Sightings

On this Rye Harbour Nature Reserve family event, we began by walking alongside the Rother to look at and taste intertidal plants, especially Marsh Samphire, which is succulent but tastes - unsurprisingly - of salt. Sea Purslane too is recommended as a crispy component of a seafood salad but seems to taste mostly…of salt. Children always enjoy bouncing on the springy mat it creates over higher mud-banks and probing among its tangled roots for sandhoppers and crabs. At low tide, the serpentine gulleys of the creeks make an exciting highway in which we searched for prints in the mud, discovering those of waders, rabbits, dogs, a great variety of trainers and a mountain bike.

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Among 80 species found at Pett Level on Sunday morning - not a bad number for June - were 9 Crossbills flying North, 4 Ravens, 8 Teal, a Cuckoo, Marsh Harrier, Buzzard and Bearded Tit.
The Buzzard was soaring above woodland west of Pannel Bridge, where it has been seen a few times recently.

This morning I watched my first White Admiral butterfly of 2008 at the north end of Malthouse Wood, Peasmarsh. None had been reported nationally to Butterfly Conservation up to June 12 when the website was last updated. Also totals of 5 Meadow Browns and 5 Large Skippers in the same area.

Three roving male White-legged Damselflies were seen near Peasmarsh and one in the Tillingham valley just south of Leasam, very near Rye. Lastly, there were single Spotted Flycatchers just east of Malthouse Wood and by Peasmarsh Place.

While pulling ragwort on the Beach Rerserve yesterday to break the tedium several small brackish pools were sampled for dragonfly larva, the only one found was a Migrant Hawker. The larva pictured would have hatched out in spring (the eggs oviposited in the previous autumn have a winter diapause), they grow fast during the summer in the warm conditions and start to emerge at the end of July.