Sika Deer on Lundy

Lundy's sheltered east coast from above the little harbour

Exotic residents of a remote island


The wonderful island of Lundy, a granite bastion three miles long and up to half a mile wide, lies nine miles off the coast of north Devon at the boundary of the Bristol channel and the Atlantic ocean. From here due westward it is open ocean until the east coast of the USA; in fact, sticking to the same latitude, you would reach the cold north tip of Newfoundland, ice bound for half the year. Lundy's stunningly beautiful and heavily sculpted west coast is testimony to the erosive power of those relentless Atlantic breakers.

In striking contrast, the island's east coast is more sheltered from wind and waves and consequently has much richer and taller vegetation and it's here that a small colony of shy and elusive Sika deer can, with luck, be found.

Sika deer (Cervus nippon) are native to eastern Asia and were first brought to England in the 1860's. Seven Japanese Sika were released on Lundy in 1927 and a small herd, periodically subdued by culling, has lived on its sheltered eastern cliffs ever since.

We stayed on the island for three days in September and saw the deer on a walk along the bottom path that skirts the steep slopes of East Sidelands.

Sika are able to forage amongst dense vegetation and eat a wide variety of plants. The bracken of late summer provides cover for the deer, which are wary of humans, their only predator on the island and often rest under cover during the day, feeding in the early morning, evening and at night.

As it was late morning when we came across this small herd of perhaps a dozen hinds, calves and prickets (year old males) high above us on the cliff slope, we considered ourselves very lucky.

There is a strong bond between hinds and their calves

Unlike most other deer species, Sika often retain their spots into adulthood, although there is much variation in colour and some individuals, particularly stags, are a rather dark, plain brown. There was no stag amongst this group, just a couple of prickets, or one year old stags, which have single pronged antlers.

Sika hind on the boulder strewn cliffs

The Lundy Sika are reported to run away and hide when disturbed but this herd seemed to tolerate our presence quite happily, inspecting us from a safe distance at first before carrying on feeding.

As with most wildlife encounters, keeping quiet and staying still or moving very slowly often pays off with some enjoyable behavioural observation and rewarding photographs.

Hind and her calf taking a good look at the photographer

Two Big Dippers to Feed!

Dippers and the relentless search for food for two demanding offspring

The Nedd Fechan river in the Brecons is famous for its succession of lovely waterfalls, tumbling through steep wooded gorges of the Neath valley. The clean, fast flowing rivers here also provide ideal conditions for dippers, who hunt among the mossy stones and underwater, for caddis fly larvae and other invertebrate food. In late May I came across a parent bird working the river in an attempt to satisfy the hunger of its two fully fledged chicks.

The well-fed ever-hungry dipper chicks

Dippers are thrush size birds with chestnut brown back and distinctive white bib. They are often seen flying just above the river surface from one stony perch to another, bobbing vigorously as they land.

Dippers are one of the few birds that use their wings to effectively fly underwater but they also dive and walk along the river bed in search of prey.

Caddis fly larvae are a favourite source of food and great numbers need to be caught and prepared in the breeding season when the dipper parents have hungry mouths to feed.

Caddis fly larvae live under stones on the river bed and protect their soft bodies with a sheath of armour formed from small stones or pieces of twig and this protective coating needs to be removed to make the larva palatable to the chicks.

The dipper flicks the larva against a stone to deftly strip off the covering .....

......  and reveal the soft bodied insect within.

But despite just having been fed, the chick persists in demanding more food and receives a disapproving look from its exhausted parent who must dive straight back into the river. A look many human parents will empathise with!

Adonis the King of the Blues

Adonis blues at Rough Bank Butterfly Conservation reserve in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds

Adonis males on black knapweed flowers

I went to Rough Bank reserve near Stroud in mid July to look for its fabled Adonis, chalkhill and small blues and although it was a hot, sunny day, I must have been too early in the season and saw no blues at all, common, Adonis or otherwise. Rough Bank is called Nottingham Scrubs on the OS map, though it must be eighty miles from Nottingham, my old home town.

It is a beautiful area of steeply sloping flowery grassland in a deep Cotswold valley on calcareous oolitic limestone and was purchased by Butterfly Conservation, along with a few acres of unimproved pastureland, a few years ago. It will now be managed with butterflies in mind. Although it was disappointing to see no blues that day, there were plenty of  commoner browns, vanessids and whites on the site (see 'A Summer Meadow' in my video section),  so I resolved to come back later in the season when Adonis might have emerged.

There were plenty of second flight Adonis around when I revisited the site in mid August. I had only seen one or two fleeting glimpses of this stunningly coloured butterfly before, so I was thrilled there were so many around, perhaps twenty of thirty seen over a two hour visit.

The flash of heavenly blue, enhanced by a slight iridescence which gives the wings a luminous quality, is a breathtaking sight.

Common blue males are sometimes mistaken for Adonis but their lovely blue wings have a violet tinge and this is complicated by the fact that occasional Adonis males have a somewhat violet hue.

The diagnostic feature is in the white fringes of the wing, which are crossed by black markings in Adonis but are plain white in the common blue.

Two Adonis and a chalk hill blue 

The black and white fringes are also present in females, which greatly aids their identification.

Female Adonises are similar to other blue females but also have punctuated wing fringes

By the 1980's, the once common Adonis blue was rapidly dying out from most of its known localities. The irresistible beauty of the male's wings made this insect highly desirable to butterfly collectors from Victorian until recent times and vast numbers were taken in this way. The absence of rabbits due to the myxomatosis epidemic of the late twentieth century induced changes in the short grasslands essential to this butterfly's lifecycle and many of its habitats were being 'improved' i.e. disappearing, in the name of agriculture.

Adonis warming up at ground level

It was thought that Adonis might go extinct in Britain by the turn of the millennium, which would have been a tragedy and a disgrace. Conservation efforts since then and a better understanding of its ecological requirements, along with the return of rabbits, have seen a gradual improvement in the butterfly's fortunes and it seems to be making a comeback in many of its old haunts, though there are no grounds for complacency.

Magpie Riders

Taken close to home in Ashton Court just outside Bristol, red deer hinds were scouring the dry grassland for green shoots during the hot July weather of 2018. A couple of magpies were hitching rides on the deers' backs, looking out for insects kicked up by the hinds.

The does were being pestered by flies round their eyes and noses, which the magpies scared off, at least for a while. In fact you can see a small swarm of disturbed flies in this photograph and this is may explain why the deer tolerate these noisy birds hitching a ride.

Feisty Fritillaries

Fragile Ecological Bubbles - the Heath Fritillaries of Exmoor

The remote, wild valleys known as combes, high on the moorlands of Exmoor in the UK's West Country are the unlikely sanctuary of the rare little heath fritillary Mellicta athalia. This butterfly is now only found in a few valleys on Exmoor and woodland clearings in localised areas of Devon, Cornwall and Kent and has been in serious decline for decades. Better news is that this rather feisty butterfly seems to be making a comeback today, thanks to a better understanding of its life cycle and concerted conservation efforts over recent years.

Female heath fritillary sunning on bracken at Bin Combe

I say feisty because, on a June visit to Bin Combe, which begins its descent just a hundred and fifty feet below Dunkery Beacon, the highest point on Exmoor, I not only saw heath fritillaries but shared my lunch with one and gained first hand experience of another!

I remember a boiled ham bagel was in my lunchbox that day and it seemed to prove irresistible to this handsome male. I was sure he would fly off as soon as I moved the slightest bit but, after quietly admiring his beautifully chequered underwings, hardly daring to breathe in fact, I decided to risk trying a couple of one-handed frames and slowly picked up my camera.

Operating a heavy pro Canon camera with one hand whilst holding a bagel eating butterfly in a sandwich box with the other is less than easy. The key to a successful shot was to focus by moving the butterfly rather than the lens, which I managed to do while the butterfly was enthusiastically tucking into my lunch.

After this unplanned dinner for two, I carried on butterfly hunting and found reassuringly good numbers of heath fritillaries and other more common species in the deep valley, along with dragonflies, damselflies and other insects.

And when I stopped to rest later on, I was delighted when another male landed on my hand, dabbing at the salt and moisture with his proboscis!

I would have preferred him to sit on my left hand to pose for a photo but I could hardly ask him to swap hands, though I can tell you that operating a heavy pro Canon camera with your left hand when you are right handed is even more difficult than the other way round!

Under the circumstances I was happy to get these photographs, which may not be great butterfly in habitat shots but they do show why it often pays to let wildlife come to you rather than chasing around after it.

They also remind us how fortunate we are to have this endearing and attractive little butterfly back from the brink of extinction in the UK.

Red deer stags resting after heavy rain at Ashton Court Bristol

Ashton Court is very close to my home in Bristol and has two separate deer parks with large herds of red and fallow deer. Roe deer come into the unenclosed sections to the park, so all three native British species can be seen here.

Walking back home after a wet morning walk in the park, I came upon the older males of the red herd sitting out the rain. For most of the summer the stags hang out in a male creche, growing their antlers ready for the autumn rut. These are old nine, ten and eleven pointer alpha males with massive antlers, so the photographic intention was to show those magnificent antlers to best effect against the grey skies. An unmissable opportunity as they usually have their heads down feeding or are standing and quite unapproachable.

After a slow and cautious approach on foot, they seemed not to be worried by my intrusion, so I lay in the wet grass and inched forward, commando style, until their antlers were silhouetted against the sky, perhaps ten feet from the closest male. Even when I stood up to leave, cautiously I must admit, they remained calm and rested.

Red deer are not normally aggressive but the thought of the lethal damage those antlers could inflict made this a thrilling and quite humbling experience.

Amazing Acetabularia - the limits of unicellular life?

Acetabularia mediterranea in shallow water along the fringes of Jezero Malo on Mljet

Acetabularia acetabulum

What comes to mind when you think of a single-celled organism? Something microscopically small like an amoeba or an alga perhaps, with a single nucleus surrounded by cytoplasm and a cell wall? 

How about a complex structure with a stem and a shallow bowl-shaped cap in a delicate eau-de-nil, from one to ten centimetres tall? 

It seems incredible but that's acetabularia, a marine alga which has a single nucleus controlling a gigantic cell with a base rhizoid or root section, a long stem and an umbrella of branches fused into a cap. 

The nucleus sits in the rhizoid section of the cell and if the cap is removed, the cell regenerates a replacement. Furthermore, if the caps of two acetabularia of different species are exchanged, each transplanted cap changes its form to that typical of its new host.

Jezero Malo - the smaller of the two sea lakes

We discovered acetabularia in June, on a visit to Mljet, a beautiful island off the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia (I discovered the charms of Mljet forty-seven years ago in 1970!). 

The western tip of the island has two large turquoise sea lakes, cradled by Karst limestone hills, cloaked in forests of Aleppo pine and linked to the Adriatic by a narrow tidal channel. The warm, sheltered fringes of these lakes provide ideal condition for a morning swim and the growth of these pretty and delicate pioneers of the plant kingdom.