Of naked ladies in ditches... & mixed tits in bushes...

Yes...
appearing in your local ditches now are naked ladies.
Naked Ladies, Meadow Saffron or Autumn Crocus [Colchicum autumnale] Colchique d'Automne is in flower...
it might have been beaten down a bit by the rain of the past few days, but more will spring up.
The Naked Ladies are particularly noticeable in the ditches that have just been mown....
where their almost fluorescent pink shows them off wonderfully.
They are not to be confused with  Autumn Crocus [Crocus nudiflorus],  which is a garden escape...
but now naturalised in the UK and some parts of Europe.
Nor with Crocus sativus, commonly known as the Saffron crocus, which is also a late bloomer.

A Naked Lady

Naked Ladies

And more Meadow Saffron....

In the Spring, look out for their weird fruits....
well, not exactly weird, but they do look strange!!
The bulb sends up a shoot with three leaves encasing a green, somewhat egg-shaped seed head.
The first time I saw this it took me quite a while to identify...
well, books on flowers tend to only show the flower and has seeds only if they differentiate between species that look similar when in flower....
as if you are likely going back there at the right time.

Marjorie Blamey has illustrated the fruit in the "Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe" Fitter, Fitter & Blamey....
but it isn't quite how it looks in the wild...
the seed head is far too thin....
the leaves are too wide and too short
and there is no indicator of scale....
it has been tucked at the bottom of the opposite page....
both in my '74 edition and the new 1997 edition [we have the French version]...
so no help there, then.

Keeble-Martin shows a single leaf which is much more indicative of what you see...
but not the seed head or the structure of the three leaves and seed head on a single stem...
and it is very large when you see it....
about three times as large as would be indicated by the Naked Lady herself.

Roger Philips in "Wild Flowers of the British Isles" shows the seed head and the leaves...
very long and strap-like...
but the very thin seed-head looks like a young specimen....
but it is rare in the UK...
occurring most in the Bristol area....
so difficult to justify picking more than one to photograph.

These pictures are not mine.... I can't find mine... they are Creative Commons stock...
and are by Hermann Falkner and were taken in Austria in 2008.

A nice, rounded seedhead in Mid-May 2008

The open seedhead and withered leaves in July 2008
This picture shows the long, strap-like leaves....
almost 30cms long.

So, now to mixed tits...
and warblers...
There is a lot of activity at the moment with flocks of warblers on migration...
and they tend to interact with the flocks of mixed tits...
in our case Blue and Great...
with the occasional party of Long-Tails thrown in for good measure...
At the moment the warblers are mainly Willow-Chiffs with some Garden and possibly Melodious, too.
Last week it was Whitethroats and Blackcaps with the Willow-Chiffs....
Pauline also saw a Firecrest amongst those...
next week it could be them again...
they do tend to pass in waves.

All the birds move around very, very rapidly...
but seem to ignore us humans, so it is not difficult to get close enough to watch them without binoculars....
necessary because it is virtually impossible to follow them with the binos...
they are flycatching....
the food for their migratory flights...
so you can be panning with one and it will vanish from view...
with the naked eye, you would have seen that as you were panning....
it either dropped or flew vertically...
plucking an insect out of mid-air.
Their aerobatics are well worth "wasting" half-an-hour over...
free entertainment on your doorstep!!

Chiffchaff.... an "oil painting" done in Photoshop

Willow-Chiff is the "collective" name for Willow Warblers and ChiffChaffs....
almost impossible to tell apart except in the hand...
unless...
you hear them sing!!

House of flying Baggers

Outside our bedroom window hangs a bird feeder stocked with sunflower seeds, along with a fat-ball on a wire. These are visited by a constant stream of blue tits and great tits which have become adept at extracting the seeds. Yesterday the supply ran dangerously low, so we received a deputation - three great tits and a blue tit perched on the window bars, the largest of the great tits rapping on the glass with his beak. Bagger the tom cat flung himself at the window with a great thump, much to the birds' amusement. They simply retreated a little into the sprawling branches of the buddleia while we retrieved the feeder, refilled it and hung it up again. Then straight back they came. Tim has now made secondary double glazing panels in a thick plastic film, to protect the glass from the cat, and vice versa.

Cats watching birds

Bird watching cat

We have seen other species - chaffinches, robin and dunnock picking up "crumbs" from the ground; nuthatch and great spotted woodpecker briefly in the pine tree - but the tits are always present. Behind the laiterie we installed a fat block filled with dried insects, from Gamm Vert, and this lasted no time at all! Tim is now making his own fat blocks, using the Gamm Vert packet as a mould.

Hello.... is there anybody in there?

  

I said HELLO! Rat-a-tat-tat!!!

Look.... no wings!!

More about the Crossbills

As promised here is a bit more about the Crossbills [Loxia curvirostra].
We were sitting in the garden when a 'thump' came from the direction of one of our big spruce trees.
We had noticed green, immature cones lying around the tree base and had thought that it was the equivalent of a fruit tree's June drop.
Then we heard another one fall and I glanced upward to look at the tree and saw a red flash as a bird moved.
My first though was woodpecker, but then the bird came more into view and it was red all over.
I went and got the binos at first and then the big 'scope. The first picture is of the male Crossbill wrecking the spruce tree! Not a good shot, but the best I could get... I was handholding the camera
against the eyepiece of the telescope. [The adaptor was indoors and I thought they'd fly.... in fact they stayed an
hour!!]

The crossbill feeds upside down, starting at the base of the cone and moving towards the tip. It works very systematically... down one strip, back to the top, down the next and so on. Sometimes it just levered the scale upwards... on other occasions it ripped the scale off the cone and spat it out.
The next pictures show the damaged cones.
The damage done! This was the sight at the top of the tree.

I collected up some of the fallen cones to take close up photographs.
You can see in these cones the way the feeder rips the scale up and out to get at the seed beneath.

And the final picture is of the top end of the middle cone in the above.
The little split with a hole at the end is the damage caused by the beak

We had a party of three feeding together... the male that is shown above, a female [very different... mainly green... a shade close to the cones themselves] who we only caught glimpses of and a young / immature male who was far more orange than red.
They tended to move around the tree in a parroty sort of way... lots of leaping from branch to branch and walking sideways along the branches... very interesting to watch.

There is also a side angle to this damage... as mentioned in the previous post, we have had an increasing number of small birds feeding inside the damaged parts of the cones. These include juvenile Blue and Great Tits, Black Redstarts, Melodious Warbler, our resident Blackcaps and also non-insectivorous species like Chaffinch and Sparrow