RXwildlife Sightings

Whilst at home in Northiam the amphibian season has been very slow starting, with only two male smooth newts and three adult common frogs observed in our garden pond at night so far, down on the coast the breeding season has commenced. Today I found several great crested newt eggs at Romney Warren (New Romney), the earliest I have ever found, although I suspect only because I have not looked at an earlier date.  The eggs are likely to have been laid a few days ago. One of the folded leaves containing an egg is marked with a white arrow below.

The margins pf this particular pond were choked with  Read the rest of this entry »

The Holmstone holly wood, located on Lydd Ranges is a unique shingle habitat that has received unwanted attention from people over the centuries. The trees were chopped down around 1801 by the preventative men to discourage smuggling.  This 1946 aerial photo shows the lines of holly bushes orientated along the strips of fine shingle, though with an extensive and very damaging network of vehicle tracks all over the beach (1).  The lichen heath, on which the hollies would have germinated, was reduced to a few small fragments ( see 2). The lichen heath shows up as a paler patch of vegetation compared to the very dark holly bushes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Further to Cliff’s item on Glasswort I can now report that it is flowering on the saltmarsh at Rye Harbour… but don’t rush to see a great display, because you will be disappointed. The flowers are tiny and you will need a hand lense, or binoculars round the wrong way, to see them!

Read the rest of this entry »

Sea Kale has produced lots of seed (each the size of a large pea) this year and now is the season when it uses the wind and the sea to move from place to place, seeking new shingle habitat to colonise. In strong winds the brittle branches break away from the plant and “tumble” across the shingle. If the wind takes it towards the sea the branch will float and drift out to sea, perhaps heading for the shingle in the Baie de Somme across the channel.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why not combine a visit to Camber Castle (click here for details) with a great display of a 1,000 Autumn Ladies Tresses, plus a bit of birdwatching?

The exceptional display of these creamy, white orchids, with the flowers spiralling up the stem can be seen here…

Read the rest of this entry »

A large showy flower has caught my eye in the past few days as I travelled into Rye Harbour village. Today I stopped to look and found that it was a very POISONOUS plant with the strange name of Apple of Peru - a member of the very poisonous nightshade family that also includes potatoes and tomatoes! Apparently it is also called the shoo-fly plant but the tomato is also known as the Apple of Peru or Love Apple, so beware of common names.

This plant has just appeared on a bit of bare soil in our garden at Pett! We wondered what it was. Why should they have both turned up just now?
Cliff
Read the rest of this entry »

The grazing marshes on Walland Marsh are not great places for orchids so I was slightly surprised to come across a few specimens of autumn ladies-tresses Spiranthes spiralis in a grazed field just behind Camber Dunes on Friday. They were growing on the sandy margin at the edge of the dunes and in low numbers, although whether this reflected their true abundance or the attention of sheep and horses was difficult to say.

Read the rest of this entry »

The natural freshwater pits at Dungeness, with their Transition Mire communities are thought to be unique to Dungeness, but the geomorphological processes that formed them are not, and at Rye Harbour there are similar, though younger features near the Lifeboat Station that show an earlier stage in the development of these sorts of wetland communities. All of these ponds formed as shingle ridges developing along the shoreline left low lying hollows that became open water lagoons. They are very rare natural features, primarily because shingle beaches themselves are a rare habitat, and are much more interesting than the artificial gravel pits that disfigure these shingle habitats.

Being closer to the sea the Rye pits still show a brackish influence, demonstrated by the presence of sea club-rush Bulboschoenus maritimus and bulrush Scirpus tabernaemontani. There are also stands of Read the rest of this entry »

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 »