{"id":2248,"date":"2018-09-04T14:57:06","date_gmt":"2018-09-04T14:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=2248"},"modified":"2020-09-07T12:30:05","modified_gmt":"2020-09-07T12:30:05","slug":"jenny-lane-tong-park-dam-aug-2018-butterflies-little-grebe-stoat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/jenny-lane-tong-park-dam-aug-2018-butterflies-little-grebe-stoat\/","title":{"rendered":"Jenny Lane & Tong Park Dam, Aug 2018 (Butterflies, Little Grebe & Stoat)"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of August 2018 I decided to have a walk around Tong Park Dam and I was very pleased with the Butterflies, Little Grebe, Stoat and Pike I saw.<\/p>\n

\"Painted<\/a><\/p>\n

In the corner of the car park at the end of Jenny Lane was a small Valerian bush which had a surprising number of butterflies on it.<\/p>\n

Painted Lady with wings closed.<\/p>\n

\"Painted<\/a><\/p>\n

And a Painted Lady with wings open.<\/p>\n

\"Small<\/a><\/p>\n

There were probably 8 or so Small Tortoiseshell on the plant. And some on the warm stone wall behind the plant.<\/p>\n

\"Comma<\/a><\/p>\n

Walking down to Willy Wood there were quite a few Brambles with ripe berries. I sampled a good many of the ripe ones. The flavours varied from simple sweetness to quite tart. This Comma was sampling some of the over-ripe ones.<\/p>\n

\"Red<\/a><\/p>\n

Red Admirals were also feeding on the over-ripe berries.<\/p>\n

\"Speckled<\/a><\/p>\n

Speckled Wood butterflies were also flitting about in the same area.<\/p>\n

\"Blackthorn<\/a><\/p>\n

A Blackthorn in the hedgerow had bunches of Sloe berries looking nicely ready for Sloe Gin.<\/p>\n

\"Roots\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the woods it looked as though water had washed the soil away from around the roots of some of the trees. Quite a tangle.<\/p>\n

\"G_Ba,<\/a><\/p>\n

On the path around the top of Tong Park Dam I spotted one of the old, black, lemonade bottle stoppers. After scraping away the soil I managed to un-earth the neck of a bottle. The moulding on the glass looks like “G Ba…” and the stopper says “Barraclough, Bradford & Baildon”. It is most likely that the bottle was for “G Barraclough” that had a mineral water factory in Cutler Heights Lane as early as 1830, they later moved to Westgate Hill and currently have a factory off Tong Street. Did the bottles used to get mixed up and used by the different companies?<\/p>\n

\"Red-Green<\/a><\/p>\n

Coming back around the path I noticed this caterpillar for a Green and Red Carpet moth (Chloroclysta siterata)<\/p>\n

\"Thistle<\/a><\/p>\n

Many of the thistle heads were bursting with seeds but I didn’t see any flocks of Goldfinch feeding on them. I did hear a few but only in the tops of some of the trees.<\/p>\n

\"Little<\/a><\/p>\n

Getting round to where I could better see the water spread out in front of me there were Swans, Mallard, Moorhen but best of all was this Little Grebe.<\/p>\n

\"Little<\/a><\/p>\n

This adult Moorhen was rather aggressive. I couldn’t see anything it was protecting. It gently swam towards whatever was the nearest bird and then when it was within a few metres it would speed up and chase them off – as it did with the Little Grebe.<\/p>\n

\"Juvenile<\/a><\/p>\n

It also chased off this juvenile Moorhen on more than one occasion.<\/p>\n

\"Little<\/a><\/p>\n

The other birds seemed to get on well enough with each other.<\/p>\n

\"Swans\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is a shot of the two swans preening after a bit of excitement. At one stage a large dog chased the swans off one of their resting places and as they got away, flapping their wings, every bird around the dam gave off a loud alarm call. The sound was all around me and made me realise that I could only see a small proportion of the birds that were there.<\/p>\n

\"Stoat\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I then saw some movement on the eastern edge of the water. A Stoat.<\/p>\n

\"Stoat\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Stoat disappeared under a tangled mound of soil, roots and metal and then popped out of a hole at the top of the mound and looked around.<\/p>\n

\"Stoat\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After quickly looking all around the mound it scampered off around the water’s edge.<\/p>\n

\"Little<\/a><\/p>\n

It then seemed that all the Mallards and the Little Grebe turned to the North East corner as if listening to the progress of the Stoat around the edge.<\/p>\n

\"Pike\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It was about time to be heading home but I then spotted this fish, a Pike? (Edit: I am told that the fish is a Carp.) I would say it was at least 70 cm long (2 1\/2 feet) it looked massive.<\/p>\n

\"Pike\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I thought Pike tended to be long and thin but this one looks quite chunky to me. (Edit: I am told that the fish is a Carp.) It was just lazily moving around quite close to the surface.<\/p>\n

\"Teasel<\/a><\/p>\n

Around the edge of the water were several Teasels but, again, no Goldfinch feeding.<\/p>\n

\"Tong<\/a><\/p>\n

A beautiful place.<\/p>\n

As usual the image files are on flickr where, after clicking on them, you can see larger versions. There are several other photos within the same album<\/a> so it is worth having a look at them on flickr.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the end of August 2018 I decided to have a walk around Tong Park Dam and I was very pleased with the Butterflies, Little Grebe, Stoat and Pike I saw. In the corner of the car park at the end of Jenny Lane was a small Valerian bush which had a surprising number of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-paul"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/7D2_0055.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3kGoX-Ag","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248","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=2248"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6510,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248\/revisions\/6510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marfell.me.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}