This weekend I have had my eyes to the sky looking for the last of our regular summer visitors that always fill the skies of East Anglia, I had already seen my first Swallow and House martin on the 11th of April now I am waiting for my first Swift.

There have already been sightings of a few birds this last weekend but I still have to see one myself, last year I saw my first one on May 5th the previous year April 27th so I am due my first sighting any time now, whilst the blackbirds in the garden are already feeding their first broods the Swallows, martins and Swifts have yet to mate, make nests and raise their young before the long journey back to Africa.

The swifts will be the last to arrive and the first to depart, studies have found that some young will be on the wing for nearly two years before landing and breeding , they ‘power nap’ in the air. soon our warm summer days will be filled with the sound of Screaming swifts around the roofs of houses along with the martins, and swallows skimming low over the surface of ponds and rivers, but before then they need to rest and feed up after the long journey to our shores.

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

Sometimes it is hard to explain in words why I as a person born in Suffolk and still living in East Anglia enjoys the East Anglian landscape so much, I know places in this small island can be dramatic and can make the heart sing in appreciation on the beauty of the mountains, lakes and dales not to mention the coastline, but it is here I feel most content traveling the Fens of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, the Coast of Suffolk and Norfolk, breckland and broads we have it all.

It is a landscape that has changed many times over the years, but still has its magic as I hope these few images I took yesterday morning will show.

Meteorologists would tell us that March 1st is the beginning of Spring but we would define Spring in the northern hemisphere as starting at the March equinox in astronomical terms, usually around March 19th to 21st, but already in my garden pond the frogs are stirring already I have seen four today and at least three are mating, I saw two males clasping a female holding tightly to her she was a crimson colour and I feared they may have been killing her, however I did notice later one had let go and she was mating with one male.

The Common frog is average size of 50 – 111mm and varies in colour from light brown to olive-green, the young males usually overwinter in water, so you can sometimes hear the males croaking to attract a female who would have spent the winter under cover in a log pile or under a paving slab in the garden anywhere she could get shelter from the winter elements.

Frogs normally breed about mid April, but you may find frogspawn in your garden pond any time after the New Year depending on how mild the winter has been, I shall keeps an eye out this next week to see if any appears in the pond, but we could still have a cold snap and any ice may make any frogspawn there is sink to the bottom of the pond.

But for now I will just keep counting the frogs and think we are only a couple of weeks  away from saying it is really Spring.

 

Today I returned to my home village of Carlton Colville near Lowestoft in Suffolk, I have wanted to write about this incident that happened over 100 years ago, I had seen the graves in the local churchyard that even then was known as the ‘New Churchyard’ it is not next to the church not a few yards up the road just up from what was the old school-house, in the centre surrounded by now tall yew trees is a large grave with a towering stone cross.

You are drawn to the large cross as you enter the Churchyard, and it was here I first saw the names and the ages beneath at the time I was younger and they seemed so much older and mature to me then but when I visited today they are all so young.

On Whit Monday June 1st 1914 Six members of the 1st Carlton (St Marks) Troop of Sea Scouts drowned on the River Waveney beneath Somerleyton bridge after their boat capsized, I have found quite a detailed account here Broadland Memories that goes in to more detail of the event.

Unknown to me then I was later to find there was a family connection as my Great Uncle Billy Hall was the son of a boat builder in Norfolk. Uncle Bill’s Father and Grandfather had their Boatyard in Reedham Norfolk and the main trade for ‘Halls’ boatyard was to build the Norfolk Wherry, a trading barge used on the Norfolk Broads, he told me he remembered his Father and Grandfather having to make the coffins for the scouts and their leaders, he believed the bodies may have been brought to the yard, at the time he may have been around the same age so this would have had an impact on him.

The Scouts and their leaders were buried on June the 5th 1914, the Bishop of Norwich conducted the funeral and thousands of people including 300 scouts lined the route from Oulton Broad to Carlton Colville and there were forty’ mourning coaches’

The victims were:

And maybe there is one more sad footnote to this Tragic event, there was one scout Stanley Wood who was saved in the disaster, he must have been racked with guilt that he had survived as in the book ‘Carlton Colville Chronicles’ Canon Bignold describes Stanley Woods ‘as a bright, clever boy, respected and popular with everybody’, Canon Bignold had told Stanley that God had reserved him for greater things, Stanley was killed in the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, aged 19.

A sad story that seems so sad even now.