{"id":12238,"date":"2025-06-07T22:20:05","date_gmt":"2025-06-07T21:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=12238"},"modified":"2025-06-07T22:20:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-07T21:20:06","slug":"ben-rhydding-gravel-pits-7-june-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/ben-rhydding-gravel-pits-7-june-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Rhydding Gravel Pits. 7 June 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Between the rain today, Saturday 7 June 2025, I went along to Ben Rhydding Gravel Pits Local Nature Reserve<\/a> with my camera. Whenever I go there, as I do at Denso Marston Nature Reserve, I keep half an eye on the river looking for Otter. No such luck yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The header image is of a Little Egret seen on the other side of the river, sticking its nose in its own armpit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 <\/em>buttons at the bottom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Fur and Feather<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

One reason for specialising in one particular area of nature is that when you are looking for it you it can make it difficult to see other things because they see you first. Looking at the plants, butterflies and insects a shape would move and go out of view. Today those shapes turned out to be Pheasant chicks and Rabbits. So I decided to switch to looking for them, and had some success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pheasant & Rabbit<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Rabbit<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Pheasant<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Fur<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Grey Heron<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Sand Martin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Little Egret<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Grey Heron, Sand Martin and Little Egret were a little easier to spot. The Heron squawked as it flew over and the Little Egret was too busy catching tiny fish and scratching its wingpit\/armpit. Several of the Drake Mallard around are now looking as though they are changing colours, are they already going into eclipse?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Plants<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A lot of effort has gone into cataloguing the plants at Ben Rhydding Gravel Pits and there is a wide variety. These are just a few that were showing themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dog-Rose<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Bird’s Foot Trefoil<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Ragged Robin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Speedwell<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Bramble<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Daisy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Marsh Orchid<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Crosswort<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Silverweed<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Buttercup<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Another plant that was growing was the Teasel. The area near the entrance still has a lot of last year’s Teasels and this year’s are growing strong. Sorry, no photo.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Fluttery Things<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Fluttery things and creepy things and buzzy things. Probably due to the rain and lack of warming sun I didn’t see many Damselflies, just a couple of Azure Blues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The black Aphids were packed nice and tight which I guess makes it easy for the couple of ants that can be seen to milk them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The flies were very keen on getting to something on the ground. They were several deep. When I moved closer they all flew away to reveal what they had been interested in, and I wish they hadn’t, it looked very squishy and rotten. It was not a dead animal but looked very unpleasant, just the sort of thing to attract flies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cardinal Beetle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Azure Damselfly<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Aphids<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Flies<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Meadow Brown<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Weevil<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Speckled Wood<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Meadow Brown is the first I have seen this year and has a big chunk missing from its right wing. The Speckled Wood, on the other hand, looked quite fresh.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can also leave comments or subscribe to the site \u2013 leave your email address and you will get notified when I publish something new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Birds, plants and insects at Ben Rhydding Gravel Pits Nature Reserve. Pheasant, Rabbit, Little Egret etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12246,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Birds, plants and insects at Ben Rhydding Gravel Pits Nature Reserve. Pheasant, Rabbit, Little Egret etc.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[159,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ben-rhydding-gravel-pits","category-paul"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/R7_C8328_07.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3kGoX-3bo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12238"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12266,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12238\/revisions\/12266"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}