On Wednesday evening, 18 June 2025, I went on a walk around Ben Rhydding Gravel Pits local nature reserve with people from Bradford Urban Wildlife Group, Wharfedale Naturalists, Bradford Botany Group and BRGP. The idea was to do a plant survey, and copies of the previous surveys done by Bradford Botany Group were available. It was impressive listening to some of the discussion about what was seen.
One of the things I try to do on my walks with the camera is to record my location using an app on my phone. The one I have been using is GPS Logger by BasicAirData. After recording my tracks I then save a .gpx file and use that in darktable, my image file developer, to add geo-location data to the image. It uses the time of the image and finds the location details from the track for that time. The app also allows me to add waypoints e.g. Southern Marsh x Common Spotted so that I know that at that point I was taking a photo of that plant. However I have struggled to translate that into information that is easy to link to individual images. More practice is needed.
On the photos the caption is kept short, for many of them there is a longer description if you click on the image to view it in the gallery and click on the i for more information.
As usual you can tap/touch/click on an image, not its caption, to see it in better quality in the gallery. And if you like what you see please click on one or more of the Share buttons at the bottom.
Birds
Birds are my main interest so I will start with the photos of birds seen during the visit. Quite early on in the visit several Buzzard and Red Kite flew over. A Redshank was on the rocks on the other side of the river.
We then saw a group of Goosander thrashing about near the shallow water. In fact most of the river is shallow with there having been so little rain. It looked like a family, a female and decent sized youngsters. Several times they seemed to work as a team and head against the current with their heads under the water. With all the splashing it was difficult to see what they were achieving. After watching them for a little while it was possible to get reasonable photos of them with the small fish they were catching. The Goosander were almost certainly heading into the shoals of hundreds of fish that I have seen an several occasions recently.
A bit later, on my way back that way a Common Sandpiper was across on the rocks with a couple of Grey Wagtails near.
Other Creatures
I was a little surprised at how few butterflies were seen but then I am not often visiting these places in the evening. The second moth is Common Marble Moth, Celypha lacunana, I believe.
The Azure Damselflies are a female, the green one, and a male, the blue one.
It is likely that the grasshopper is a Common Green (Omocestus viridulus) or a Meadow Grasshopper ( Pseudochorthippus parallelus) but Grasshopper is good enough.
Before getting into my car for the journey home I crossed the road to see if anything was in the field next to the water treatment plant. It has now been planted up and looks as though the issue that caused part of the field to be flooded has been sorted. A Rabbit ran across the field as I watched.
Plants
One thing I learnt on this visit was that the spotted of a spotted orchid comes from the fact that they have spots on their leaves. They may also have spots on their flowers.
I quite like the artiness some of the photos I took. The macro lens meant that a very small part of the flower was sharp and the rest was a mass of dappled green. I know that for a proper ID of many plants it is essential to have photos of leaves and stems, and possibly other parts of the plant, including something to give a good idea of size. Location, surroundings and soil no doubt can also help with an ID. In the same way many things are taken into account when deciding on the ID of a bird.
I think I will admit to myself that I will never be good at identifying things except for those I have an interest in – Birds and the like. One of the problems is knowing how to group things. Unfortunately the varied names of plants does not help me. It seems that plants with very similar names are totally unrelated, and plants that are related have totally different names. A grasshopper is a Grasshopper and I think an orchid is an Orchid. Progress.
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 to open the gallery. I am hoping to change that for the site.
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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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