RXwildlife Sightings

Sharp-leaved pond-weed Potamogeton acutifolius is a Red Data Book pondweed that is only found in a few localities in the UK in south-east England, and is very localised in the RX area. I found it at the weekend at Small Hythe. I have also seen it on The Dowels where it appeared in one ditch from seed after ditch clearance. This rare pondweed requires unpolluted fresh water, and much of the Marshes are probably too brackish for it.

The plant is a dark-green to reddish-brown grass-leaved pond-weed with characteristically sharply pointed leaves about 5mm wide, and flattened stems,  - see above. If you examine the leaves under a hand-lens they have three veins running down the leaf (another slightly similar species has 5 veins). Read the rest of this entry »

It was not just the rapidly declining greater water parsnip that impressed at this site, there were plenty of other aquatic plants of interest. These included frogbit Hydrocharis morsus-ranae, a floating plant that can be abundant in unpolluted freshwater ditches on our grazing Marshes.

This is the plant with small water-lily-like leaves, and pretty white three-petalled flowers in the photo above. Its tiny leaves are dwarfed by the much larger, but heavily nibbled yellow water lily leaves above it, and this is where this site started to differ from other bits of Walland and Romney Marsh  because Read the rest of this entry »

Grazing marsh in the RX area tends to follow a familiar theme, predominantly sheep grazed with a ditch bank sward that is kept closely nibbled by sheep, bar stands of soft rush and hard rush. So today I was pleased to cross a fantastic bit of cattle grazed marsh that was quite different, and to my mind so much better than the norm. Apart from the cattle, which produce a taller sward along the ditch banks, this area was on one of the river valleys feeding the Marsh, near Small Hythe, and the water was fresher than most areas of the Romney Marshes, all of which gave rise to a distinctive collection of plants, that will probably fill several posts.

The main reason for visiting the site today, which had a convenient public footpath across it, was the conspicuous flowering of one of Britains most rapidly declining plants, the greater water parsnip Sium latifolium.

The strongholds for this plant are The Fens, The Somerset Levels, and the Romney Marshes, and a survey a few years ago located more than 1000 plants surviving in our area. This site had several hundred at least and the reason for its healthy status were: Read the rest of this entry »

Wader highlights at high tide on the Midrips this afternoon included: 3 Little Stints, 1 Curlew Sandpiper, 14 Avocets, 45 Golden Plovers and 115 Dunlins.

Highlight this morning was a Curlew Sandpiper feeding with a flock of Dunlin at the Wader Pool. At Ternery Pool a Little Tern was roosting amongst 60 Common Terns. Also of interest small numbers of Yellow Wagtail have started to gather along the shingle ridges of the Beach Reserve, over the next few weeks the number should build to hundreds.

Over the past few months about 3000 dragonfly exuviae covering eight species have been collected on the reserve, for the first time this morning I came across an adult that had failed to successfully break out. The picture below shows a Migrant Hawker with all its head and a small part of the thorax showing. An examination of the exuvia found that the skin had failed to split along the the top of the thorax at the back of the head, but despite this fatal flaw the emergence sequence had continued.

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