Month: June 2018

This is Lake Elementeita in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. Much of this lake lies within the 48,000 acre Soysambu Conservancy, of which more another day.

It is a soda lake, only about 1 meter deep. These alkaline lakes arise when there is little outflow from the lake, and the water becomes saline and has very high levels of dissolved carbon dioxide.  As a result, these hostile-seeming environments are in fact very rich ecosystems, full of algae and bacteria such as cyanobacteria, a favorite food of the flamingo.

These lakes also often host brine shrimp, which the flamingoes love and which turn their feathers pink.

 

 

These are Greater Flamingoes, Phoenicopterus rose; their bill is mainly pink, not black, unlike the rarer Lesser Flamingo:

The largest males can be up to six feet tall. They stir up the mud with their feet, and then filter out the shrimp, algae, and small crustaceans with their head famously upside down.*  Their upper jaw is movable, which helps!

The same lake hosts other waterfowl, like this yellow-billed stork:

And this Cape Teal duck:

* Even with their heads down, flamingoes are not well-suited to croquet, as Alice discovered:

In spring 2017,  the BBC Springwatch team filmed kestrels (Falco tinnunculus tinnunculus) in a nest inside our church tower. The nest was in the single window at the base of the steeple, so my photos are taken from the ground far below.

When the chicks were tiny, they were invisible from the ground, but here you can see the father leaving after feeding them.

As they got bigger, they would come closer to the edge: (This photo was taken on June 17th 2017):

And occasionally you could see several at once:

Until one day you could see that their plumage was almost adult-like:

I’m happy to say that all four chicks successfully fledged.

This summer, I could see kestrels hunting in the fields by the brook. living up to their poetic ancient name of ‘windhover’:*

and doing aerial acrobatics when they sighted their prey:

But there was no sign of nesting activity until June 10, and then, blessedly, they were back. The BBC cameraman climbed up inside the tower and saw four eggs, and got his camera working in time to show the female on the eggs. This photo is one I took of the screen on his hard drive, with his permission!  (By this time last year the chicks were already hatched and growing fast: look at the fairly mature chick on June 17th 2017 above.)

The BBC thought there were two males and one female taking turns on the nest, and that the second male might be one of last year’s young helping the parents. So, fingers crossed for another successful brood.

*From ‘The Windhover‘, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918.

“I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”

PS: The American Kestrel, Falco sparverius, is quite distinct, and much smaller. The Old World Kestrel can weigh up to 9oz, but the American Kestrel rarely exceeds 5oz.

PPS: From the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds website, here is a great video of a kestrel in flight, landing and then taking off again:

Under cover of wildlife, I am sneaking in photos of London’s latest public work of art. So, here is a wildlife photo to justify the posting:

The bird of course is a heron, and the water is the Serpentine in Hyde Park, but why is it purple? The answer is that Christo has just created this enormous mastaba made of oil drums in a red/pink/purple palette, which will be there for the next three months.

The wildlife are inimpressed:

But also undisturbed by their new view:

I first saw it on a grey day, and it felt like an intrusion, but on a sunny morning like today, it is rather joyful, so why not embrace it, as many others seemed to do.

Sometimes there is nothing dramatic to see on an English country walk, but even the tiny things give pleasure.

Sometimes creatures are not down by the brook where you would expect them to be, but up in the trees:

Or hiding in the long grass:

Or up in the eaves of the courtyard in the middle of an old country house:

Or abseiling down from nowhere onto my wineglass as I sit in the middle of the lawn:

I think this is a Cucumber Spider, Araneus cucurbitina, and it is barely 5mm long. But it should have eight eyes, and I only see six.

Cheers!

PS: The swallows arrived late this spring, and on April 22nd I photographed this one still lounging around in Kenya, having not yet started its migration back north to Europe:

PPS: Since I posted this, I have come across a wonderful explanation of how this spider must have ended up on my wineglass: here is a short video and explanation:

 

In Zambia, four different kingfishers accompanied us down the Luangwa River. (Photographing from a small moving boat, when the bird is tiny, and perches only briefly, is a challenge, so some of these shots are not up to much,)

The tiniest was the Malachite Kingfisher, Corythornis cristatus, at about 13cm long:

The middle-sized ones were the Brownhooded Kingfisher, Halcyon albiventris, at 22cm, on the left below, and the Pied Kingfisher, Ceryle audis, at about 25cm, on the right:

(The guide was quite excited by this shot, he said it is very rare to get two different ones in the same shot! Sheer luck.).

And the biggest was the Giant Kingfisher, Megaceryle maximus, at about 45cm long. (I just love the scientific name, making it abundantly clear first in Greek and then in Latin that this is a BIG kingfisher!). This one is a male:

It was a mystery to me how they hunted in this river. The water is completely opaque with brown mud, but the guides told me that the birds see tiny disturbances of the surface, and go for that. It obviously works, there are lots of them.

Presumably the size range of the different species means they favor slightly different prey fish, and thus can all share the same waters successfully.

PS: For comparative purposes, the UK’s only kingfisher, Albedo atthis, is about 16cm long, intermediate between the Malachite and the Pied. The Belted Kingfisher, Megaceryle halcyon, of the Northeast USA is 28-25cm long, intermediate between the Pied and the Giant.

June in England is wildflower time. Even very ordinary flowers are exquisite in closeup, like this clover:

And this vetch:

There is one particular field in Sherborne where every year I find this rather interesting orchid-like flower, the Common Broomrape, Orobanche minor. These were about 20cm tall, and the flowers are about 15mm long.

:

It is not an orchid, and it has no chlorophyll, so it can’t photosynthesize. Instead, it is a parasite on other plants, including both clover and vetch. The fine roots of the broomrape penetrate the larger roots of the host, reaching the vascular tissue. They usually severely hurt the host plant, and can be a major problem for farmers. In the USA, it is federally listed as a noxious weed, and banned.

The whole broomrape plant is covered in globular hairs,

The hairs are thought to serve the purpose of discouraging ants and other non-flying (and thus non-pollinating) insects from stealing the nectar. In these two photos you can see insects that have become entangled in the hairs: here’s one

and this one:

The burgundy stigma has two bulbous ends, and curves downwards, so an entering insect (usually a bee)  can’t avoid brushing its back up against it, and transferring pollen.

Once pollinated, they produce huge numbers of tiny seeds, which are disseminated by the wind, and washed down into the soil when it rains. If they make contact with the root of a potential host plant they germinate, insert their tiny root into the host, and the whole cycle restarts.

PS: The name ‘broomrape’ comes from the broom plant, a common host for broomrape, and the Latin word ‘rapum’, which means root or tuber.  

I have a few more delights to show you from my February trip to Zambia.

The Carmine Bee-eaters, for which the Luangwa Valley is famous, had not yet arrived for the season, but there are 27 different species of bee-eater, 20 of which live in Africa, and several others were there already. They more than made up for it.

This is a Little Bee-eater, Merops pusillus:

It is the smallest African bee-eater, under 20g in weight. This was perched only about a meter off the ground, their preferred hunting perch. It is definitely not threatened: their population is estimated at up to 80 million! When they catch a bee, they bash it on the ground to remove the sting before eating it.

And this is a White-fronted Bee-eater, Merops bullockoides,  (actually two of them), high in a tree by the river:

They are larger than the Little Bee-eater, about 35gm, and more social. They nest in riverbank colonies composed of several clans. Each clan has a single breeding pair, and several other adults (mainly last year’s brood) who are ‘helpers’ in incubating and feeding the young. This cooperative breeding behavior is also found in wild dogs and in wolves. Seems like an excellent model for family life, and one that human society now all too rarely follows.

[A week or so ago I did a post about the grass snake and the moorhen chicks. It turns out the BBC Springwatch team had been thinking of doing a piece on snakes, so they decided they now had an excuse, a Sherborne connection. To my great delight they used my Barred Grass Snake shot, repeated below, to introduce the piece. You are now reading the work of someone with BBC wildlife credentials!]

This weekend I tried to interest the TV crew in a series of new photos showing a spider carefully wrapping up a mayfly sub-imago all ready for grocery delivery, then hauling it towards its hideaway, where it settled in to drink it. So far, I am afraid they have politely said it is a great piece of animal behavior, but shown no signs of giving me screen time again!

I found the predator and prey hanging from a thread in mid air along a fence near the brook. The spider had already bundled up one wing. If you look very carefully you can just see the strands of silk emerging from the spinnerets.

Now it set about bundling up the other wing.

It also had to take care of the tail.

Once the bundle was complete, it ran a cable horizontally from a nearby fencepost, and then hauled it over.

 

Finally, time for dinner, twelve minutes from when I took the first photograph.

And in the morning, what was left was just a husk, still being guarded by the spider from its lair:

[We are sort of moved in to our new flat, but I am not yet organized enough to write a new post.  This was was written a few weeks ago  after I got back from Kenya, and has been waiting in the wings, so to speak.]

I always thought the phoenix was a mythological bird, but I have just met one.

The Secretarybird is a most unusual bird of prey. It is a terrestrial raptor, and it is in a family all on its own, the Sagittaridae (my star sign). Widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, it is a large bird up to 1.3m (4 feet) high, enabling  it to hunt in the long grass:

Although mainly terrestrial, it roosts and nests on the top of acacia trees, and flies up when disturbed: you can just glimpse the very long stiff central tail feathers (and I learnt a new word in researching this: they are called retrices.)

And here is an image of a phoenix from a book by Joachim Camerarius (1534-1598), surely inspired by a Secretarybird!

The Secretarybird’s scientific name, Sagittarius serpentarius, alludes to one of its favorite foods, snakes, which it kills by stomping them with its powerful long lower limbs.

This is a great video of that stomping kick in action:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/secretary-bird-stomps-snakes-with-a-killer-kick/

Its beak makes short work of snakes, mice, lizards young birds, and of course insects.

The name Secretarybird may have come from the long dark feathers on the back of the head, which apparently reminded 18th century scholars of the quill pens that (male) secretaries put behind their ears. I prefer to think of this magnificent bird as being a Secretary of State, a holder of high office, rather than a lowly office worker. It is the national emblem of Sudan: