A wander around Ben Rhydding Gravel Pits Local Nature Reserve with my camera. The river is higher than it had been on some of my recent visits. The rocks that had been uncovered on previous visits were now under water. The header image is of a Common Sandpiper in the trees.
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Birds
This looks like a recent brood of Mandarin Ducks, not long out of the egg. The adult jumped up a couple of times to pull Raspberries down to eat while the youngsters were scooting around feeding themselves. When they got their legs going it was only their feet that touched the water. The youngsters of the Goosander family were much larger, but no photo of them on this visit because it decided to chuck it down when they were visible. I did a post that included the Goosander youngsters from the visit with BUWG that you can see here Ben Rhydding Gravel Pits with BUWG, WN, BBG & BRGP.
With the water being higher there was no rocks for the Common Sandpipers to walk amongst. Instead of going off elsewhere they were in the trees and calling quite loudly. The calls seemed to be coming from at least three locations, perhaps there were chicks?
I think the photos of the Common Sandpiper are not too bad considering that it was under the trees and it was quite dark in there.
Butterflies and Bugs
Even though there were a couple of heavy showers it wasn’t long before Large Skipper, Meadow Brown, Red Admiral, and Ringlet were showing themselves in reasonable numbers.
The Mirid bug on the Thistle with the Tree Bumblebee is a Grypocoris stysi AKA Orange-spotted Plant Bug.
Is that a Toad or a Frog? I reckon Toad. As you can see it is tiny. I put the pound coin down near it for size comparison and it kindly hopped on to it.
Plants
There is a good number of different plant species at BRGPLNR and I try to check my photos against the list created by Bradford Botany Group from their survey of Wednesday 22nd July 2015. The list has 160 entries. Blackthorn, or Sloes, was not on the list so I am wrong with my ID or the plant arrived after 2015.
Having now reviewed this post I have noticed that all the images are 1080 pixels on their long edge. It looks like I used the wrong preset when I exported them – the long edge should be 2048. Doh!
If you are using a phone the caption can take up most of the space of the thumbnail so you might find it easier to turn your phone to landscape so it is easier to open the gallery. Hopefully the change in layout has allowed the image size to be relatively larger so that it is easier to click on the image instead of the caption..
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The images are published under the Creative Commons, BY-NC-SA license. Feel free to share them, edit them, but please keep my name in the credits. And if I have got the ID of anything wrong please let me know, I don’t consider myself an expert but I have write something. It is often a best guess and it would take up too much room to say It could be this, or it could be… or perhaps.
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