Today I found time to visit Cley and get to know my new camera and lens setup a little better! There were plenty of birds around and my list for the visit came out at 38 species in a couple of hours. The black-tailed godwits are still in excellent summer plumage and the long-staying vagrant from America, the long-billed dowitcher is also looking very colourful.
I managed some nice shots of a swallow and a little egret.
Out on the East Bank there were a pair of ruddy shelduck. I had seen one earlier in the year at Holkham, but distantly and briefly, so it was good to see these colourful birds well. This is a species where a lot of the records in the UK are birds escaped from waterfowl collections. The real home for ruddy shelduck is central and southern Asia, north Africa and south-east Europe. It’s likely these birds didn’t come that far, but you never know. Provenance is always tricky with these sorts of species, but these were definitely free-flying, so I’m happy to put them on my list wherever they came from!
Brenda writes: “Today was a paperwork day with a meeting in the evening. There was a good variety of moths in the trap including three elephant hawk-moths. Dark arches are still common but down to around a dozen, heart and dart, and heart and club have dwindled to one or two, and finding three different species of yellow underwing is now common.
New today was a common but beautiful moth called a dusky sallow and also single-dotted wave.
One more moth, but not a new species, was an early thorn. It’s interesting because the second generation brood look different from the first.”
New species for July 11th:
Moths: dusky sallow, single-dotted wave
TOTALS TO DATE:
Birds = 206
Moths = 182
Wildflowers = 235