Work parties are held on the last Sunday of every month from approximately 10am – 1pm. Ifyou would like to be put on the volunteer waiting list please contact info@watercresslnr.org.uk with your contact details.
Author Archive
Thanks to active member Phil, we have a Flickr group which is populated with loads of fantastic pictures of the insect and bird life that eager photographers have catalogued on their visits to the site, including Firecrests and Lesser redpoll. It’s setup as an open group so you can contribute your own pictures and videos to share with everybody. Please do! You’ll find a permanent link in the sidebar to the right.
At the summer event back in June, the pond dipping was great fun as always. My favourite find was this bullhead lurking in the mud. It’s perhaps 7cm long and quite chunky with a great big head, hence the name bullhead, and the alternative name miller’s thumb.
They tend to live at the bottom of fast flowing stony rivers, feeding on invertebrates at dusk. They are very well camouflaged – unless you stick them in a white tray of course.
A kindly male kingfisher was in the mood for posing and I got possibly the best shots I ever have done. He spent a while over the pool in the middle of the site but then moved to the river at the back where he fished for a while and I got these pictures.
Interestingly he caught a fish then somehow attached it to the branch he was perching on. Perhaps it was tucked in a crook or impaled on a twig, and I really can’t be sure whether he meant it or not. He left it there.
The pictures have come out with a slightly other-worldly almost flash-lit look to them as he was perched in a shaft of sunlight above the shady river. Also I messed up a bit with the camera and had to rescue it in post-production, which contributes to the look in a funny sort of way!
Please leave a comment on this post with your sightings and be sure to include the following details if at all possible.
- What you saw – species (sex, numbers or other details are useful but not essential)
- When you saw it – i.e. the date
- Name of observer
- Where you saw it within the site, e.g. bird was overhead, in the Mere, on alders
This is a trial of a new approach to recording sightings on the reserve, so everyone can join in and see what others have to say.
Please leave a comment on this post with your sightings and be sure to include the following details if at all possible.
- What you saw – species (sex, numbers or other details are useful but not essential)
- When you saw it – i.e. the date
- Name of observer
- Where you saw it within the site, e.g. bird was overhead, in the Mere, on alders
Welcome to the new WWA website, which replaces the original sightings blog and website. It incorporates a blog as the core of the site so we can put new and interesting content front and centre, and to make it easy to keep the site fresh and vibrant. It also contains pages of non-blog material which will be added to over time. As of this writing there’s just the about page, but expect to see pages with all the newsletters, a map of the site and other good stuff.
Note that we have a new URL for this new site so change your bookmarks: https://www.watercresslnr.org.uk, which you must have found already as you’re reading this! A copy of the old website has been incorporated into this new system and is available from a link in the right-hand menu so it will still be here and accessible for ever more.
If you have comments or suggestions, you can add them as comments to this post.