This weekend I decided to take a walk over Wicken fen, Saturday afternoon was windy but bright parking at Upware I walked along Burwell Lode where swallows were feeding along with Common terns over the footbridge we turned left to walk along Wicken Lode where Reed buntings and Reed warblers were calling half way along Wicken Lode we saw our first Hobby of the year as we stood and watched we soon discovered there were four hunting, catching large flying insects and feeding on the wing.

I am guessing the hobby’s had followed the house martins from Africa  as there appeared to be a lot of house martins flying high above us as well.

As we walked around on our loop of Wicken fen we also heard cetti’s and willow warblers some of the willow warblers we saw but the cetti’s warbler is hard to see but it’s song is unmistakable  as it is a long short burst of repetitive notes.

We were also lucky to see a Great White Egret on Baker’s fen almost double the size of the little egrets that were also there, but further along we heard in the distance our first cuckoo calling, had this like the hobby and house martins just arrived from Africa?.

As we made our way back along Wicken Lode I heard the unmistakable call of a nightingale very loud and very close, this bird will be low in the vegetation but very hard to see, we scanned the thickets as it sang its tropical like song, but we could not see it, we picked up other birds that we did not know were there, male blackcap, chaffinch but no nightingale was showing, reluctantly we left after 20 minutes to leave the song of the nightingale to any other person who may walk by.

Sunday Morning although dawned grey the wind had dropped so maybe this was a chance to go back to Wicken Fen and see if I could locate or at least record the Nightingale.

Parking at Upware again I noticed there were more Swallows, feeding around the sluice gates and recovering on the overhead wires after their long migration to the UK

As I approached Wicken Load I could hear two cuckoo’s calling, one male and a female replying, soon I saw them chasing one another around the trees, then all around there seemed to be at least four calling maybe these had arrived since yesterday, then they were joined by the nightingale which seemed further away that yesterday but in the same area  all around I could hear cetti’s warbler, chiffchaff, sedge warbler and reed bunting.

The reed bunting was calling from a hawthorn and below him the sedge warblers called from the reeds and as they seemed to get louder looked for a higher perch at the top of the reeds or in the lower branch of a thicket.

I managed to work out how to use my new digital recorder and tried to capture some of the sounds of Wicken fen. All I need to do now is work out how I can share my recordings but for now here is what a nightingale song sounds like,

Nightingale song

and for the record I think it was a robin that was singing in Berkley Square not a nightingale.

A few days ago I noticed a queen bumblebee was going in to my compost heap, she would have spent the winter hibernating in an old mouse hole and would have emerged in early Spring to start collecting nectar and pollen from the first flowers she could find.

Once she has found a suitable nest site she will start laying eggs and collecting nectar and to feed the larve the first of which will become workers. these will take over the task of collecting the nectar and pollen whilst the Queen remains in the nest and basically becomes an egg laying machine to expand the colony.

All of these first workers are females but will be infertile, later in the season she will start to lay male worker larve and fertile females which will become future queens which mate with these male workers.

The infertile female and the male workers will all die in this first year but the new queen bees will carry on the cycle to hibernate and emerge the following Spring to lay the fertile eggs they have had since this Summer so completing the cycle, it is these Queens that will only live for two years.

This is the time of year I get my Bee books out as I have to remind myself on the identification features of each bumblebee, as there are 24 species of Bumblebee in the UK, add to that the difference between the females and males then it can get quite tricky. first of all the Large bees are going to be queens, the smaller ones the workers, so this time of year the workers are going to be females also being early in the season there are going to be some bees that have not yet emerged, so I can safely say that today I have seen a aptly named ‘Red-tailed bumblebee’ worker as it was small with an orange bottom and completely black body being a female (the other red bottomed one is the Early bumblebee but this has yellow stripes on the body). The bumblebee I saw in the garden was the Buff-tailed this time a queen as it was large, can be confused with the White-tailed bumblebee but the tail on the Buff-tailed can be anything from a dirty white to buff and sometimes can be an orange red.

So all in all it can be very confusing so I would say get yourself a good book or maybe even join the BBCT as you will get some very good information to help.

The easy bumblebee to Identify is the Tree Bumblebee the only one that is ‘Ginger, black white’. I will not mention the Bee fly