These photos are from a couple of walks along the river at Denso Marston Nature Reserve, along the Leeds Liverpool Canal and a look at the Wildlife Meadow next to DMNR. I particularly like the photos of the male Common Blue butterfly.
As usual you can tap/touch/click on an image to see it in better quality in the carousel gallery with an i for more information. And if you like what you see please click on one or more of the Share buttons at the bottom.
River & DMNR
Across from the entrance to DMNR were four Mandarin ducks. Looking at them it is noticeable that two have a definite red tint to their beaks. This suggests that they are males. How soon do male Mandarin ducks get this red tint? It is possible that they are two mature males that are in eclipse, i.e. have lost there breeding plumage and flight feathers and look the same as females but retaining the red beak.
Further up river there are several decent sized trees that have fallen into the river. Some look as though they are reasonably tethered still but some look as though they are just waiting for the river to fill up for them to be carried down river to block a bridge archway.
The pond at DMNR has some juvenile Moorhen paddling around and when you see the size of the legs and feet you can see how they manage to walk on Lily pads and reeds and other plants that are at or below the surface of the water.
Leeds Liverpool Canal
Due to the water shortage there has been very little movement on the canal, lock gates have not been cycled and there is very little flow. As a result the vegetation is taking over and with the heat there is a growth of Green Algae.
Lots of Arrowhead, Sagittaria sagittifolia, with its arrowhead leaves and white flowers is creeping towards the middle of the canal. In lots of places it is surrounded by Green Algae some of which looks like astronomic nebula, apart from the colour and in other areas it looks like a horrible scum.
A couple of Canada Geese looked as though they were coping with it OK.
During the walk along the canal a Common Darter came and landed near my and let me get a photo of it.
In the places you could get a decent view of the water surface you could see decent numbers of fish – the decent sized ones were Perch and Roach I think, I don’t know what kind the smaller ones were.
Wildlife Meadow
In the Wildlife Meadow I spent some time watching and photographing male Common Blue butterflies, beautiful little things. One of them spent some time on a grass seed-head that looked as though it had the Ergot fungus, Claviceps.
The Small Copper is a similarly small butterfly, this one was on Yarrow, as was the Nettle Tap moth.
There is a reasonable amount of Bird’s Foot Trefoil in the meadow. Hopefully the management of the area that Aire Rivers Trust is doing will encourage more to grow. It is the preferred food for the caterpillars of the Common Blue.
Tracks
The squiggles show where I wandered when taking the photos. Select a date.
Please click on the images to take you to better quality images in the carousel gallery where the i will let you see the title, and caption, and some photography info.
You can also leave comments or subscribe to the site – leave your email address and you will get notified when I publish something new.
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.
Leave a Reply