Now I have to admit, this blog post isn’t quite as exciting as yesterday’s. I meant to go nest finding today, but I had very little success. But, as always when you take a stroll into the wild, you always see something.
So instead, my 30 days wild activity ended up being ‘Go on a local walk’. Simple, but wild.
The local river has been full of wildlife over the last few days, and yesterday was no exception.
Sand martins came down over the river for regular water intake in the hot weather and insects. I don’t know if there is a specific word to describe the call of herundines, but it is a kind of excited squealing that I think matches their style of flight. Altogether, they are a group of birds that actually gives the impression that they find life fun.
Because of these regular passages over the water, I tried to get some nice photos, but it was more difficult than I expected. 
Another reason I love these birds is that they don’t appear to have any fear of humans. Several times, when just sitting down, they flew right past our faces. Perhaps its because they are just so so fast that we never really caught them in sufficient numbers to introduce that instinctive fear.
Also while we were down there Swallows and Swifts came down to join them, and the squeals of their delight carried far downstream.
To be honest, I had been hoping for another glimpse of this rascal beneath, who I had seen there two days before…
Beautiful Demoiselle Male
I find their worming through the water pretty extraordinary, and it is unfortunately a rare sight down where I live.
Also in the surrounding water meadows Stonechats, Buntings and Whitethroats are ubiquitous.
Before this I have never had a good view of a Whitethroat, only brief glimpses on bushes hundreds of metres away. This one was foraging right in front of our faces, so that’s something special.
The Stonechats had a nest somewhere in the nettles, but we were forced to abandon the mission of finding it after forgetting gloves. I still had some nice views though, and they’re lovely birds.
The one bird whose nest Alex found was this Goldfinch. It had cunningly decided to nest on a branch overhanging the river – or not so cunningly, depending on how good at flying the chicks are when they fledge.
Nice to see anyway.
Finally, there were hundreds of damselflies, but it seemed like pretty much all the same type.
They were mostly Beautiful Demoiselles, although there were one or two Banded Demoiselles there too.
Beautiful Demoiselle male
One was trying his luck on a female, but not really having any success; she just kept flying off.
I also found this extremely pale damselfly, which I think could be a White-Legged Damselfly.
Well, there you go – I managed something wild, but I’ll hopefully bring you something more unusual and exciting tomorrow.
Thanks for reading.
