Viewing entries tagged
Southern Migrant Hawker

August went fast..

All I seem to be doing is blogging about my lack of blogging lately so let’s get straight to it. Lot’s to talk about, so I’ll naturally let my photographs do most of the talking as that’s mostly what people come here to look at anyway. The order is backwards, in that I took the Wasp Spider pics just yesterday.
Since finding the Southern Migrant Hawker at Llandegfedd with Craig Constance, I’ve turned my attention to bugs even more, which is a good thing as we won’t be hanging onto these guys for much longer. Cold and wet will eventually take over, and then I’ll have to wait till next season all over again.

I gave up on my Nightjars too early this year as I’ve been told in parts of England, 3rd clutches were recorded. If I could predict the weather we had in August, I probably would have continued to record them. Partly my decision to leave them though, was made due to having to send my recording gear off to Sweden for a service. Jon Strandberg at Telinga Microphones has always been very good with customer care and has offered to upgrade my microphone to the version 3 which I’m quite excited about. For my birthday in July I also upgraded my sound recorder, which I ended up having to send back due to a fault.. After quite some time emailing back and forth America and Germany, it was finally decided that a replacement unit was needed, which ended up being perfect timing for me, as the new version of the recorder was released this week so I get to have the new one (Or so I’m told)… time will tell. The reason I’m telling you this is because the new device has a feature that will drastically help me collect ‘nature data’ in that it can record a much wider dynamic range, which is hugely beneficial when recording nature as you don’t always know how loud, or quiet your subject is going to be and sometimes you end up recording things by accident but didn’t have the right levels to compensate. This ability is made possibly via 32bit Float recording which Sound Devices has just added to their Mixpre version 2 line of recorders. Time will tell if it’s as good as they make it sound on paper but it’s got many sound recordists quite excited as it lends itself to many different applications.

A Rare Day

The Canyon - Terpentwys

A sunny day and I aimed to have a ‘dragonfly’ day at a place called The Canyon, which has a number of cool species like Keeled Skimmer and Black Darter that I like to find each year. Having got there however, the wind was so high, I wasn’t even seeing any butterflies on the wing, so on the way back down the mountain, I picked up good friend Craig Constance and we headed to Llandegfedd to salvage the day. We didn’t have much to report on the bird front but Craig spotted his regular Yellow Legged Gull which was good for me as I could finally get a decent view of a full adult bird right next to both Lesser Black-backed and Herring Gull for reference. I must admit, I’ve always shied away from identifying Gulls like Yellow-legged in the field as I’ve not been confident with the features but I certainly feel more confident now. Our last stop before heading home and we popped into Green Pool hide, which in all fairness, we never do these days as it’s usually overgrown but Welsh Water has cleared a nice channel through the reeds and just as well! as the Dragonfly we had been watching for a while in-front of the hide, ended up being a mega!

We had a male Emperor Dragonfly and quite a few Common Darters on the water but we had two Hawkers coming in close but there was so much blue on the one, it honestly looked like a small emperor at first glance. I said to craig at this point, “you know, there is a really rare dragonfly called the ‘blue eyed’ or ‘Southern Migrant Hawker’… from which seconds later the hawker landed right in-front of the hide and I went completely red in the face in shock. As soon as I saw the thin black lines in the thorax and those bright blue eyes, I went into complete panic mode, trying to get a photograph and my battery died!!! Spares of which were in my car! #schoolboyerror. Craig instantly called Lee Gregory who is an all-round naturalist with great species knowledge and he arrived shortly after I got back to the hide with some spare batteries. At this point I still hadn’t got a picture to confirm the ID! Thankfully it returned right in-front of the hide as Lee got there and the first picture had me dancing like a little kid. Lee Gregory instantly knew that this could be a first record for Wales and today it was confirmed that this is the first confirmed sighting for Gwent and Wales, so this would be my second ‘1st’ for Wales this year. This doesn’t happen very often, not for me anyway.

The Southern Migrant Hawker is a vagrant that’s apparently trying to colonise the Uk from southern Europe and more Mediterranean habitats. It’s been spotted mostly in southern and eastern parts of England but sightings in Wales have been very minimal. To have the first confirmed sighting is nice but honestly I was just glad that I knew what it was as we both could have quite easily walked away without giving it a second glance. The first four pics below are of the Southern Migrant Hawker, showing vibrant blue eyes, blue on the thorax with those thin black lines through the yellow which you wouldn’t see on an Emperor which is of similar colours. It is quite a bit smaller than an emperor but in flight, sizer can be difficult to judge.

I’ve started a project to record as many species of Grasshopper as I can, and in a high sample rate so that I can lower the pitch and slow the recording down so that everyone can appreciate the quality. I thought it was probably wise that I make the most of my ability to actually hear them as one day I’m sure I’ll lose that end of the frequency spectrum and I won’t even know where to point the mic! In lowering the pitch, I hope that everyone can enjoy the variety of sounds we have in our countryside. I used to be able to hear some species of Bats when I was a kid. If I knew how much i’d miss that when I was older, I would have done it more often.