A Sunny Saturday Morning At Oakenshaw NR

Posted on | July 4, 2009 | 1 Comment

I’ve been checking the tadpoles almost daily. The numbers have dropped considerably. The remaining ones haven’t started to grow legs yet, which is the stage I want to try and capture with the camera. The number of froglets that you see when walking round has now also dropped to the odd one or two now. So I assume that they have moved on to safer spots to feed and grow in to adults. However just as I was leaving the edge of the pond this morning I saw this little froglet (below). Why have a photographed this one, when only the other week I was putting up pictures of them? Well this one was small, half the size of the others. I’m hoping that the small blades of grass will give some idea of scale to see how little this froglet is.

I thought I had missed the really young coots. It was earlier this week that I put the photo up of the two I had seen so far, which were not that young more teenagers. But yesterday and today I have seen some real young ones. The coots are using the reeds, and long grass on the banks to give cover and help protect their young (see photos below).

Above: Damselfly

This morning was just one of those mornings when opportunities were in abundance. As I walked round the ponds I noticed a dragonfly at rest on one of the reed leafs. After having spent so long trying to get the blurry photo the other day, I was not going to miss this opportunity. So snapping away as I slowly moved forward to get nearer I managed to get some pretty good (for my camera) photos of a Four-spotted Chaser (see below). I think that this makes at least two different varieties of Dragonfly at the nature reserve which is pretty cool.

But having said that I am pretty impressed with the wildlife that this nature reserve has. Sitting on my iPhone (because I didn’t have my camera with me at the time, one of the rare occasions) is a picture from the start of the week (if I remember correctly or IIRC for the youth out there and geeky ones) of a Burnet not sure how many spots it had, but if it was a Five-spot according to that Readers Digest book I use to identify stuff with it was along way out of the area it is normally seen in (ie the South).

Of course you don’t have to go wondering far from the living room to get photos of butterflies. As I started to write this blog post, with the noise of the Crook Carnival drifting in from the cricket ground, these two fellas landed in my small backyard.

Above: A Red Admiral

Below: A Small Tortoiseshell

Above: most likely a fly and not a bee

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