Strangely, not one of my many purchases had anything to do with birds. After spending most of the day visiting all of the many marquees now present, my main purchase was a bat detector so I could find out what is using the valley. So I returned home a little bit poorer, but with the ability to continuing recording wildlife after dark, ID DVDs for dragonflies and damselflies and butterflies, a subscription to British Wildlife - a superb bi-monthly publication that is so packed with wildlife information that I would recommend anyone interested in wildlife to subscribe to as well - and the controversial "Arrivals and Rivals: a birding oddity" by Adrian Riley.
An early shift at work the next day gave me the opportunity to investigate some of the bats using the Gaywood Valley. I spent the evening watching for owls and found at least one short-eared owl was present. Only another 11 days to go until the 10 month anniversary of the first record! A barn owl was also seen quartering over the valley and gave us some fantastically close views yet again.
We waited until it was almost dark before we started to return home. We slowly walked back as I turned on the bat detector for the first time, not knowing what we were going to find. I attended a Bat Walk in The Walks (a park in the middle of King's Lynn) and knew how to operate the detector and how to tell the difference between common pipistrelle and soprano pipistrelle.
There was nothing present on the main valley as we walked back towards the cycle path. We turned towards home and the detector remained stubbornly silent. Looking ahead, there didn't seem to be much about either, but then I got my first response. A common pipistrelle was hunting on the edge of the Springwood School field. We would never have seen it without the detector and we stood entranced as we finally managed to catch sight of it.
The bat detector has opened up a whole new world and we continued to find more common pipistrelles as we walked alongside the school. I was a little disappointed not to have found a soprano pipestrelle as we neared the Gayton Road end of the cycle path, when the quality of the call on the detector changed. Triumphantly, I changed the frequency and to find that I had definitely found my first soprano!
I left the detector on as I made my way home through the Fairstead estate and found I kept getting some kind of interference. I decided that this must be due to the street lights and ignored it. Then, as I was approaching my block of flats, I got the interference again and I wasn't anywhere near a street light. I twiddled the frequency on the detector and heard a series of short, sharp "slaps". I checked my ID and frequency guide to find that the "interference" was actually the call of a serotine bat and not the street lighting at all. This was a life tick for me, and it has been outside my flat all of the time!
I did another walk around on the following Monday and found a total of 9 common pipistrelles and 8 serotines along the cycle path between Reffley and Gayton Road. I have walked this route a number of times in the dark and had no idea that so many bats were present along it!
A butterfly transect on the 23rd proved an interesting day. Disturbingly, there were very few present and demonstrates the devastating effect the awful weather we have had through April, May, June and July. I only counted a couple of peacocks, meadow browns and only a single large white and gatekeeper. There were slightly better numbers of some freshly emerged speckled woods with 5 counted along the transect.
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| Speckled wood |
A female marsh harrier was seen and a buzzard could be heard constantly calling over Reffley Wood. But the main interest of the day lay with the dragonflies. I have had only one record of ruddy darter over the two years I have been recording in the Gaywood Valley, so it was fantastic to record many males over a wide area as we walked the transect. The first migrant hawkers of the year were also recorded today, along with an occasional southern hawker and brown hawker. A small number of female common darters were also seen ovipositing in the Reffley Reservoir.
A single grass snake was recorded in the usual basking spot in Reffley Wood, along with several muntjac and a couple of frogs. A single harlequin ladybird was noted on a hazel leaf next to the Springwood School and, just as we finished, a new species for the area was seen in the shape of a forest bug that was settled on the pedestrian crossing railings on Gayton Road!
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| Forest bug |
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