RXwildlife Sightings

At Rye Harbour along the Nook Drain just east of the caravan site there is a good display of Knapweed, but in amongst it Colin Page found a good number of Blue Fleabane flowers.

I have previously reported on the numbers of this endangered plant at Dungeness and Rye, which declined by 90% and 50% respectively.  I have been delaying monitoring the Northiam population because the plants were growing so close together that the only way to count them was pull them up and count the tap roots.  I have been resisting the urge, however:

1. As they start to seed there is only so much a patient wife (and neighbours) will take, and
2. At this stage the plants produce a bed of seedlings which are disrupted if you uproot the parent plants later in the year.

The result of this was a record breaking count for this site of 1800 plants (and I may yet find more), up 550% on last year.

This plant shows a nice cyclical pattern of boom and bust so far, although Read the rest of this entry »

I am blessed with good neighbours either side of our house.  They let me do odd things like crawl over their lawn counting stinking hawk’s-beards.  I was doing that today when I had two surprises.

Surprise 1

A heath bumblebee Bombus jonellus.  This is one of our smallest bumbles and I last recorded it in our garden in 2007.  To be honest it was so long ago that I was starting to doubt the identification.  This species is superficially similar to the small garden bumblebee (but much smaller, and with a short face).  But there it was, an exquisite little 2nd generation worker about 10 mm long, feeding on a white clover flower, and unmistakeable.  This lawn is usually mown short, but had a covering of white clover flowers  held close to the ground.  Now our lawn is managed to produce flowers (they stand tall and proud and scream out Pollen and Nectar), and are inspected daily for bees, but have I seen any there this year? Eventually I did disturb it and it flew off over our garden - my 10th* bumblebee species for the year in the garden, then I had surprise 2

Surprise 2

So attentively had I been Read the rest of this entry »

Further to the recent post on Goatsbeard / Salsify hybrid (see here) - today I found another variant at the same location. The photo above shows Salsify on the right and the latest hybrid on the the left. The photo below shows Salsify on the right and the original hybrid on the the left. Read the rest of this entry »

Brian Ferry (the naturalist, not the singer) and I undertook the annual census of this very rare plant at Rye Harbour yesterday.  Creeping around the shingle on hands and knees was easier on the back than stooping, and was essential as many of the plants this year are tiny due to drought stress. 

In recent years this population has been exhibiting exponential growth, up from 10 plants in 2005 to 3035 last year (as can be seen on the graph below).  As at Dungeness this year, though not to the same extent, the early summer drought has provided a reality check, with numbers halved at 1557 plants.  In the circumstances this was a very good total.

The only downside Read the rest of this entry »

One of the big botanical finds last year was the population of stinking hawk’s-beard Crepis foetida at Dungeness, possibly the only extant native population of this species in the UK.  More than 2000 plants were present.  How would it survive this years drought, and would it benefit from additional scarification of neighbouring land?  Well, the answers are not very well and No!

At least 229 plants were counted on the site this year (though not all of the grassland was accessed) and no plants were found on the scarified strip.  This had lots of bare ground however and offers ideal germinating conditions this summer. 

Many of the plants Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago on one of our work parties at Castle Water we cut and trimmed back the vegetation along the footpath that runs from the hide to the southern end of the main pit. At the time I remember thinking that we had done too much and the path was now big enough to drive a bus down. This morning I went back to cut any bramble that was impeding any progress along the path and was amazed to see parts of the path flanked on both sides by a mass of Viper’s Bugloss. The insect activity around the plants was incredible. With no net at hand, a large all black bumblebee (ruderatus??) which refused to have its picture taken was a frustrating highlight, six other bumblebee species were present Bombus terrestris, lucorum, lapidarius, pascourum, pratorum and hypnorum.

A week ago Barny Acheson reported a brown petalled flower of Salsify growing at the east end of the new flood bank at Rye Harbour, but it was only today that I also found it! It may be the hybrid Tragopogon × mirabilis a cross between Salsify Tragopogon porrifolius and Goatsbeard T. pratensis. The hybrid was known from the Nature Reserve 15 years ago until sea defence improvements destroyed the site, so it’s good to see it back on a new sea defence structure. Be aware that both species and the hybrid only flower in the mornings - another name for Goatsbeard is Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon. Click here for more info.

Whilst walking across a field in Broad Oak when I suddenly realised I was walking over numerous fronds of the adder’s-tongue fern Ophioglossum vulgatum.  This most un-fern-like plant is associated with old unimproved meadows and has undergone a significant decline in the UK, so the news that the owner managed the field as a hay meadow with no chemical inputs was particularly pleasing.

Because it is green it Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I noticed my first green-winged orchid Anacamptis morio of the year coming into flower in Northiam.  Note the green lines on the sepals, a characteristic of the species.  The leaves are unspotted, something that was easier to see when the plant was first noticed as a rosette last September, with leaves present throughout the winter.  It therefore has a short resting period during the summer.