These are a few photos from a quick visit to the River Aire and Denso Marston Nature Reserve, a wonder through the scrape by the river behind Sapper Jordan Rossi Way and then up to the Leeds Liver pool Canal.
Ladybirds, Butterflies, Damselflies, Dragonfly, Sawfly, Goosander, Grey Wagtail, Grey Heron and other things. The header photo is of an Emperor Dragonfly ovipositing on the Canal.
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DMNR
Most of this year’s ducklings are a decent size now, and many are looking fully grown. The Mandarin Duck is a juvenile I think. If it was a female adult I think the eye stripe would have been more noticeable. The male, when in eclipse, has an eye stripe that is not as noticeable as the female’s but I would have expected it to show a bit more colour in its cheeks and also for its beak to be more red. The Goosander chicks are still fluffy, not like the family spotted on the River Wharfe during the visit to Ben Rhydding Gravel Pits with BUWG, WN, BBG & BRGP.
I spent a few minutes watching the Ladybird Pupa. Every few minutes it arched up and I wondered whether a ladybird was going to emerge, it then curled back down again. I continued on my way, seeing Ladybird Larvae, Pupae and Ladybirds on many plants. Forty minutes later I came back to the same spot, still no Ladybird but the Pupa looked darker and you could see that the insides had been developing in that time. Even with the numbers of Ladybirds and Larvae there are still many plants where their stalks are, from a distance, looking diseased but on closer inspection it is a thick covering of unpleasant coloured Aphids.
Again I took a photo of the car wheel in the river. I still don’t have a very selection to show the different levels of water in the river. I am a bit disappointed that I didn’t think of taking a photo of it on each of my many visits.
The Scrape
The scrape is being looked after by the Aire Rivers Trust volunteers and it looks as though a nice selection of plants are growing on it.
With a bit of luck and good management there should a good selection of butterflies using it. I will keep my eyes on it. I wonder if anyone is doing some proper surveys of the area. Does anyone know?
River & Canal
The photos of the Grey Wagtail, Grey Heron, Fish, and Carrion Crow were taken from the footbridge over the river. It can be fashionable to use a slow shutter speed to blur water flowing over rocks but I’m not convinced that it makes a better photo. The first of these was taken with a shutter speed of 1/500s. Viewing this in the gallery without the fuzzy caption band should look as though the water motion is frozen. The other was taken with a shutter speed of 1/20s and the water is much more blurred. I don’t think the Heron moved but it is likely that movement of the bridge, coupled with an 800mm lens, meant that the Heron has lost a lot of its sharpness too. Any movement by the bird itself would have been very noticeable.
The photo of the fish shoal is an example of where a polarising filter would have been good. It would have removed some of the grey reflection of the sky.
There were two Carrion Crows in the water at the far end of the bridge. They were turning over stones and then eating things that this uncovered. Blackbirds and Dunnocks do the same with leaf litter, they lift it out of the way and then eat anything edible that was uncovered/disturbed. The Crows could shift decent sized pebbles, this would take a lot more effort than flicking a few leaves around.
Up on the canal I spotted an Emperor Dragonfly flitting back and forth. I then saw it stop and dip its tail in the water, ovipositing. It flew around a few times stopping to lay eggs at several places.
In the area near the canal and bridge I often hear Song Thrush but they are very good at keeping out of sight. This one did keep hiding what it could of itself behind the branches but forgot about that when it started singing.
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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