It was a glorious day at Yew View, with the warm sunshine encouraging insects to make the mot of the last nectar sources. The Southern Aeshna dragonflies were patrolling the wildlife pond, battling with surprising ferocity, their delicate wings clashing and crackling on impact. These insects are one of my most favourite and their manoeuvrability and skill in the air is phenomenal. I was setting up the Bushnell trail camera on the wildlife pond kingfisher post, as we have had some fantastic visitors there this week. Last time, I filmed the Sparrowhawk with the bat and this week, we had a new visitor…. a young green woodpecker! There are numerous green woodpeckers on site and you can often hear them calling. These woodpeckers are much more elusive and you rarely get a really good views of them, so it was a treat to be able to film this one…
This is one of this year’s youngsters, distinctive by its highly spotted and speckled plumage. You can just see the adult plumage starting to emerge.
It is good to compare this species with one of our other Uk woodpecker species; the Great spotted woodpecker. Again, this is a juvenile, identified by its red cap, which will be lost as it moults into its adult plumage. The size difference between these two species is clear in these images and videos…
There is a third woodpecker species found here in the UK; the Lesser spotted woodpecker. This is much rarer and more elusive and I have never seen one!
A couple of other species were also seen on the post this week..
Of course, the kingfishers are still visiting and we have some great hunting sequences..
The Green woodpecker footage was not the only excitement this week. Our otter cam turned up a fantastic clip of our stunning male, dog otter with a fish. After putting the stills out on Twitter, we think this flat fish is probably a Flounder, as it is much paler on the underside. This particularly interesting as this site is pretty from from the estuary and Flounder generally live in sea waters. Thanks to Jack Perks for his help on this identification!
We also captured, what I think is, the female with one of the grown up cubs…
It is good to see this family are still visiting. I also captured clips of two other mustelids at this site… a stoat…
… and mink…
The badgers have been busy and we filmed one individual bringing more straw into the camera sett…
A rabbit has also made a few appearances…
There are three youngsters who are living in the other artificial sett on site. They have been pretty active this week..
This clip shows one individual bringing a windfall apple back to the sett…
Finally, maybe this squirrel knows something we don’t…. he seems to be preparing a very large and cosy bed in our kestrel box! Maybe the weather is about to change!