Goosanders at Brickfields Pond, Rhyl

Staying for a day with Nain in North Wales, having returned her home after Christmas, on a rather cold day I was glad to find this new site to me, a well-visited pond on the edge of Rhyl housing and industrial parks. In theory I was looking for a reported Slavonian Grebe, but instead was delighted to find half a dozen or more Goosander, both male and female. Checking on the females has improved my knowledge of these birds no end.

Here is one of the better pictures of a female, showing the clearly demarcated white chin, the long-fringed crest, the sharp edge to the chestnut-red head colouring, the thicker bill at the base, and the less striped face.

The light was fairly poor, so most of the images were washouts, with relatively little detail.

Snow Buntings at West Beach, Llanddulas.

Started off at Wern Road, Llandulas at about High Tide with about 400 Common Scoter, a Guilllemot, a possible Diver, 2 Great Crested Grebes, innumerable Gulls and Cormorants offshore, with 2 Cormorants, 16 Great Black-Backed Gulls, 9 Herring Gulls and 7 Black-Headed Gulls inshore.

At Penrhyn Bay there were 7 Wigeon (5 males, 2 females) and 3 Red-breasted Mergansers (2 males, 1 female) fairly close-by on the sea. Further out there were innumerable gulls, with at least 5 Great Black-Backed Gulls, 6+ Herring Gulls and 6+ Black-Headed Gulls, and many more I could not identify. Also 40+ Cormorants, flying and feeding.

There were also 13 Oystercatchers, 10 Redshank, and 2 Turnstone roosting on the offshore rocky spit towards the Little Orme,

At West Beach, Llandudno, I walked down to the spit towards Deganwy where there were 3 Snow Buntings, 84 Common Gulls, Larus canus, 20+ Black-Headed Gulls and 25+ Herring Gulls, together with 30+ Oystercatchers.

Rosebush

Red Kite, Buzzard and Kestrel over the village/car park. Chaffinches, Blackbirds, Willow Warbler, Chiff-chaffs, Song-Thrush, unidentified birdsong, possible Dunnock, Wren.

Creeping and Field Buttercup, Greater and Lesser Spearwort, Crowfoot, Heath Bedstraw, more Ragged Robin than you could throw a stick at, CatsEar, Red Campion, Sheeps Sorrel, Wild Strawberry, Marsh(?) Orchid, Sallows and another possible (Eared?) Willow, Rowan, Bilberry, Rhododendron, Ash, Heather, Wood Avens, Hawthorn, Lady's Mantle, Birds-Foot Trefoil, a Trefoil, Tufted Vetch, Meadow Vetchling, Eyebright, Herb Robert, Cow Parsley, Speedwells, Brooklime?, Marsh Thistle, Smooth Sowthistle, goodness knows what else.

Painted Lady.

Large Red Damselflies, Emperor Dragonfly. 

Llandulas

Plenty of Common Scoter, Melanitta nigra, off Llandulas while the rain not too bad. Two or three Red-throated Divers around, very nice to see, with very white-dominated necks, and beaks upward or level I would guess.

Other birds included Great Black-backed Gull, Herring Gull, Common Gull, Larus canus, and Black-headed Gulls, Great Crested Grebes, and Cormorants of course.

Back in Bontuchel, a Robin singing on the wires at the bottom of the yard, and a Songthrush singing lustily up beyond David's house.

Snow Bunting at Kinmel Bay

The Snow Bunting only moults once per year in the autumn, into the winter non-breeding plumage, and then the change to breeding plumage occurs simply by the wearing away of the winter plumage. 

Bod Petrual - Cheilosia and Buttercups

A really great Forestry Commission site in deepest Denbighshire, even if I didn't hear the hoped for wood warblers and Redstarts on my late morning visit today! This is one of the fine parts of the huge Glocaenog Forest.

This Cheilosia on Creeping Buttercup, Ranunculus repens, really ought to be the albitarsis/ranunculi group. The first thing to note is that this insect is a male with a blue-black thorax and slightly darkened wings, and generally dark legs:

This picture shows what appears to be a fairly dense covering of pale hairs on the eyes

Moving on to the more botanical side of things, the Cheilosia above is feeding on a Creeping Buttercup flower, Ranunculus repens (L.).

The Creeping Buttercup is a herbaceous, stoloniferous perennial growing to 50 cm tall. There are many named subspecies. It has both prostrate running stems, which produce roots and new plants at the nodes, and more or less erect flowering stems  arising from a short stout "caudex" with a rosette of leaves. The basal leaves are divided into three broad normally stalked leaflets 1.5–8 cm long, shallowly to deeply lobed, borne on a 4–20 cm long petiole; leaves higher on the stems are smaller, with narrower leaflets. The leaves may be white-spotted. Both the stems and the leaves are finely hairy. The flowers are bright golden yellow, 2–3 cm diameter, usually with five petals. The nectaries are easily seen as tiny pockets at the base of the petals. The fruit is a cluster of achenes 2.5–4 mm long. It grows in fields, pastures, woods, gardens, parks, roadsides and wasteland and prefers wet soil.

Useful ID points are the spreading (not reflexed) sepals, the grooved stems and the stalked (petiolulate) terminal lobe of the trifoliate leaves. Interestingly there have been no reports of a mycorrhizal association.

Like most buttercups, Ranunculus repens is poisonous, although when dried with hay these poisons are lost. The toxin protoanemonin (apparently a break-down product of ranunculin) is not very stable and loses its potency when dry, so buttercup is not generally toxic in hay. The taste of buttercups is acrid, so cattle generally avoid eating them. The plants then take advantage of the cropped ground around it to spread their stolons.

Creeping buttercup spreads by seed and by long branching stolons that root at the nodes, forming new plants (ramets). The stolons may also regrow from cut portions to some extent. In more established woodland and grassland communities, this plant increases mostly through stolons unless the soil is disturbed. In dry conditions, flowering and seeding is more prevalent and in wet conditions, stolons are more plentiful. Seeds can germinate and seedlings can grow even under water-logged conditions. The plant is also said to be spread through the transportation of hay, implying that the seed may be present, I would imagine!

The plant is a serious invasive weed in places like North America and New Zealand. Here is a link to a useful Canadian paper on the biology of this minor threat to their ecosystems and agriculture.  http://pubs.aic.ca/doi/pdf/10.4141/cjps90-135

One of the reasons creeping buttercup is so competitive is that its stolons respond to the environment. Under favourable conditions, plants form more stolons through branching. However, when nitrogen or water is limiting, stolons tend to be longer and un-branched allowing longer distance “sampling” of a number of potential sites until more suitable locations are found. When favourable conditions are discovered, stolon branching resumes, allowing rapid local colonization to take advantage of the available resources. In general, short stolons are produced in dense turf and much longer ones appear in open fields or woodlands.

Depending on the temperature, creeping buttercup either overwinters as a rosette or dies back to ground level. In either case, the nutrients stored in the short swollen stem produce rapid growth in spring, between April and June. Stolons grow from the leaf axils in spring and summer and growth peaks in late summer. Stolons connecting parent and daughter plants usually die off in autumn, leaving the plantlets separate.

Flowers can appear from March to August with seeds soon after. Each plant produces from about 20 to 150 (this may be an over estimate) seeds. Seeds can remain viable in the soil for at least 20 years, and up to 80 years, especially under acid or water-logged conditions. Seeds are dispersed by wind, water, birds, farm animals, rodents, and other animals by adhering to them with the hooked seeds. They exhibit dormancy and also sustained viability in the seedbank.

Excessive contact with the sap of the plant can cause skin blistering in humans, and various toxic effects in cattle if they eat it in excess because they there is little else and they are hungry. Unfortunately, livestock occasionally develop a taste for buttercup and consume fatal quantities.

The age of meadows up to 200 years old can be roughly estimated by the number of plants in 100 that have extra petals in their flowers - you get about 1 plant with flowers with extra petals for every 7 years old it is claimed.  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2729631/ Mentioned in notes of nature. However the correlation coefficient is only moderate, in my view. This flower, photographed by chance a little further along the woodland path at Bod Petrual, turned out on closer examination to have 8 petals as far as I can see! I can just see 1 of the 3 sepals below I think.

and this one has 6 petals.

This on the other hand is another toxic plant, the Meadow Buttercup, Ranunculus acris, with a more finely dissected basal leaf. In this species there tend to be 5 (3 - 7) leaflets and in addition, unlike in the Creeping Buttercup, the middle (or each?) leaflet is un-stalked, giving a typical palmate rather than trifoliate appearance. The BSBI plant crib is very useful here: http://www.bsbi.org.uk/Ranunculus_Ranunculus_Crib.pdf

There is a photo below that of the characteristically even more dissected stem leaf. There were several scattered plants, in amongst or separated from the  Creeping Buttercup, apparently it appears at random. There were very many fewer of this species, and I didn't happen to see any Cheilosia on them.

The very different, almost linear, un-stalked stem leaves of Ranunculus acris (L.) acris, the only subspecies found in the UK - although there are three different races!

The fairly common confusion species to Ranunculus repens is the Bulbous Buttercup, Ranunculus bulbosus, of drier grasslands, which has sepals that are reflexed in full flower. I saw this behind the dunes at Warkworth last week I believe.

In the Meadow Buttercup, the flower is similar to the flower of the Creeping Buttercup, with un-reflexed (spreading) sepals, but the flower stalk is, by contrast to the Creeping Buttercup, ungrooved. Another feature is the chromosomal number. Ranculus repens is generally a tetraploid plant (N = 32) based on N = 8, while Rancunulus acris is also a tetraploid (N = 28) based on N = 7.

There were plenty of other plants growing in profusion, and a few were even in flower. It was particularly nice to see the Cuckoo Flower, Cardamine pratense, so long after all the ones in Kent are long over.

North Wales Coast, battered by severe storms

Amazing pair of Red-breasted Mergansers, many Common Scoters in small rafts off-shore, 1 Great Crested Grebe, 7+ Cormorants, 100+ Black-headed Gulls, 50+ Herring Gulls, 30+ Greater Black-backed Gull, at least one Common Gull, Larus canus.

This. I think, is a first winter Herring Gull from the streaky patterns on the wings and the still blackish bill, with little trace of yellow on it, and no white tip, and a dark eye. Also no sign of broadening of the white "New Moons" on the primaries. On the groyne by the Saint George viewpoint.

The greater coverts show 3 (2 and a half) rows of chevron-like blotches on the lower edge of the "wing", a much more confusing patch of blotches on the median and lesser coverts, and internal anchor-marks on the scapulars above. You can see the mid-grey on the inner part of the bill fairly clearly, particularly in the last photo. Because of the clarity of the pattern I am fairly sure it is a first winter.

I think this bird is probably a second winter bird, quite advanced perhaps. There is a lot of grey in the mantle, but no grey bar on the wing. The bill doesn't look so advanced, but there is a clear white tip to it. In this view this bird has quite a flat-topped head.

This bird in contrast is a third winter. Grey mantle, with only some remnants of brown barring on the wing, few/no obvious mirrors as yet, beak with obvious black markings across full depth of bill. Quite a lot more streaking down the neck than in the Book, but very similar to other photos on advanced websites. The eye is quite pale by now. Perhaps there is the start of a white tertial spot.

And here is an adult Herring Gull with a well-coloured bill with only a hint of black, and clear wing mirrors, a white tertial spot and no black markings on the tail. The head streaking is fairly light on this bird.

And even lighter on this one. I can't see a facial step here and the head looks quite rounded. A female perhaps:

Here is a picture of the wing mirrors on an adult with an immature bird behind. See how the immature bird is just starting a wing mirror on P6.


There were also some Greater Black-backed Gulls on the sand. Its interesting how they do tend to stick together at least to some extent. Fantastic large mirrors.