Bewick's Swans and Bean Geese, Longham Lakes, Dorset, 25/1/13 (Dominic Couzens)

Yeah, I know this isn’t a great picture. The light was poor and these birds were almost on the moon’s surface, they were so distant. But take a look at it and it doesn’t half show up the difference between Bewick’s Swans (left two) and Mute Swans (right three). Notice how much smaller the Bewick’s Swans are in direct comparison, see how they hold their neck straight when the Mutes usually hold theirs in an S-shape, and see how the breasts of the Mute Swans tends to bulge, while those of Bewick’s don’t. And by the way, see how both species, even the Bewick’s are very much larger than the birds in the middle, which happen to be Tundra Bean Geese.

The swans were found by Chris Parnell, stalwart of Longham Lakes.

Bewick's Swans and Bean Geese, Longham Lakes, Dorset, 25/1/2013

After seeing two species of bats on Sunday, I’m feeling sorely tempted to have a go at seeing 40 species of mammals in Dorset this year, just for fun. Today I took a quick lunchbreak and drove towards Blandford, where a large field close to Tarrant

Roe Deer, Tarrant Keyneston, Dorset, 17/1/2013 (Dominic Couzens)

Keyneston looked suitable for Brown Hares. The hunch was right, and I soon spotted two animals keeping very low and statuesque in a field of winter wheat. It’s extraordinary that they don’t live in burrows, but simply hunker down into vegetation or make a scrape (“form”) for shelter and rely on their speed to escape from predators. If a fox shows up, they simply get up on their hind legs, as if assuming a “ready, steady, go” posture to show the predator that they are alert and too fast to chase.

Apart from the Hares, a small group of Roe Deer does appeared on the horizon (above). With the 2 bats, plus Red Fox, Rabbit and Grey Squirrel close to home in 2013, that’s SEVEN species so far.

Lesser Horseshoe Bat (Library picture)

Britain’s bats are in the middle of hibernation right now, but that doesn’t mean that they need be out of mind, or out of sight. In fact, if you know the right people you can join up with monitoring hibernation sites, which allows you a glimpse into a little known aspect of the bats’ lives – their long winter sleep. Thanks to Pete Banfield, of the Dorset Bat Group, the kids and I travelled to North Dorset yesterday to see slumbering Lesser Horseshoe Bats. At the first site we crawled through an excitingly narrow gap to check a blocked railway tunnel. Happily, there were 10 Lesser Horseshoes and 1 Brown Long-eared Bat there. The Horseshoes were hanging from the ceiling in their customary

Lesser Horseshoe Bat (Library picture)

manner, with wings folded around the body – a posture peculiar to Britain’s two Horseshoe Bat species. They were also hanging freely, while the Long-eared Bat was inside a box, its ears folded and tucked under the wings. At a gorgeous rural church, its lawns studded by snowdrops, there were a further 20 or so Lesser Horseshoes hanging from the roof of an ancient cellar reached for us by slippery, uneven, moss-covered steps. Bats don’t have unbroken stints of hibernation, but will have recently been encouraged by the mild weather to go out and feed on and off, filling their tummies before bedding down again, often switching hibernation sites afterwards. If you think a bat flying around on a mild winter’s night is somehow confused or disturbed, that isn’t actually the case. It’s routine for the bat, but a surprise for us.

Today was a good day for Starlings. In the sunshine they looked magnificent, all trim and

Starling, Lytchett Matravers, Dorset, 11/1/12 (Dominic Couzens)

iridescent, shining like that new gadget you received on Christmas day before your grubby hands got hold of it. Starlings are effervescent characters, undoubtedly Myers-Briggs extroverts, spending much time squabbling and socialising. Today they were also singing, an early sign of spring. You might well have read that male Starlings have a blue base to the bill, and that females, appropriately enough, have a pink base – and just perhaps you scoffed at such a distinction. Well if you check the top left bird carefully in this blog post, and then compare it with the bird down in the bottom right, you will see that it happens to be true. Maybe all this boy blue and girl pink

Starling, Lytchett Matravers, Dorset, 11/1/12 (Dominic Couzens)

stuff actually started when our ancestors looked at Starlings. Or maybe not.

Despite the fact that it is early(ish) January, there are a lot of birds singing at the moment. I have already heard Song Thrush, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Robin, Dunnock, Nuthatch, Collared Dove and Woodpigeon, and there are plenty of others starting up. Funny as though it might seem, it’s actually one of the best times of the year to learn bird songs.

Incidentally, on my sojourn to Lytchett Matravers in Dorset to photograph Starlings, I also came across a flock of these funny-looking birds (below). I wonder what they are…  Happy New(ish) Year, everyone.

Waxwings, Lytchett Matravers, Dorset, 11/1/12 (Dominic Couzens)

Merry Christmas and a Happy, Bird-filled New Year

18th October 2012
The penultimate blog from my recent trip to Australia, courtesy of the South Australian and Tasmanian tourist boards.

Our driver Simon Stubbs, Rob and Mike (plus Common Wombats, left) at Narawntapu NP, Tasmania, 18/10/12 (Dominic Couzens)

“Please miss, could we see a Platypus?” We didn’t exactly say that, but it wasn’t far off. Up to now on this astonishing trip we had seen pretty much everything we could possibly have wanted, from Echidnas to Devils and from Emus to Emu-wrens. However, as far as Australian icons go, the Platypus is hard to beat and at least three members of the party, Rob, Mike and Ray, were itching to see one before they went home (Tim and I had both encountered this wondrous animal before). Hence the plaintive requests to Tonia, who, having secured all Tasmanian endemic birds and plenty more besides, now set Plan Platypus into action.

Platypuses are mainly crepuscular, meaning they are most active at dawn and dusk, and this effectively scuppered our first attempt to see these aquatic mammals, at Fernglade Reserve, near Burnie on the northern coast of Tasmania, where we had lunch. The habitat looked perfect, but all we could find here was birds, wretched things. We found enough Pink Robins for a flower arrangement, and enough Scrubtits to scrub their “tricky to find” status. It was as if Tasmania was telling us: “I thought you guys were birders?”

Well we were birders, and the schedule moved us on towards a promised nest of Grey Goshawks. In order to get the precise location, we called in on a lady who must have owned the finest garden in Tassie. For a start it was dripping with birds (including Yellow-throated Honeyeaters) and secondly, it overlooked the ocean from the top of a cliff. While we were watching the inevitable fly-bys and rafts of Short-tailed Shearwaters (being birders, as we were and are), something unexpected happened - half a mile offshore there was a mighty splash, visible to the naked eye. The yell of “WHALE!” went up, and after what amounted to a somewhat tense wait (in a complete stranger’s garden, with the schedule going up in flames), everybody managed to get a glimpse of it: a Humpback, breaching at agonisingly long intervals. Was the day switching towards mammals?

The town of Latrobe calls itself the Platypus Capital of the World. If you miss that less than subtle clue, there is a great big plastic model of a Platypus outside the Visitor Centre, just to ensure that the possibility is spelled out clearly. Tonia got out of the minibus and said: “There’s one!” And we laughed.

But she meant it. She had seen a real, wild Platypus, which prompty disappeared downriver. Cue another gut-wrenching wait; fingernails were pretty much falling

Platypus, Latrobe, Tasmania, 18/10/12 (Dominic Couzens)

to the ground like snow before the animal appeared. Anyhow eventually, having made the Poms suffer a little, the Platypus swam unconcernedly up and down the Mersey River, giving us the best views that it possibly could, with its flat tail, webbed feet, upwardly-placed eyes and duck-like bill all duly noted and admired. It came to within just a few feet of us at times,

Platypus (and stick), Latrobe, Tasmania, 18/10/12 (Dominic Couzens)

evidently quite used to the many people who walk up and down the riverside walk here. It’s easy to forget what extraordinary animals these are: egg-laying, with ankle spurs that hold venom (in the male), a body temperature lower than other mammals, the sensory bill and the ability to detect electric fields. The venom of a platypus can kill a small dog and is very painful even to humans. Thus this animal is a survivor as well as being very, very odd.

“We’ve got to get to Poo Park,” announced Tonia at length, after we had paid homage for well over an hour. The park to which she was referring is actually called Narawntapu National Park, recently changed from Asbestos Ranges NP for reasons of attracting tourists who don’t wish to be poisoned. I was looking forward to this section of the trip because Poo Park is sometimes described as “The Serengeti of Tasmania”, owing to the large numbers of large grazing mammals that can be seen there, even in the middle of the day. And sure enough, although it isn’t the Serengeti, we had no trouble seeing a lot of

Common Wombats, Narawntapu NP, Tasmania, 18/10/12 (Dominic Couzens)

stuff. The most unusual sight here is the astonishing number of Common Wombats that graze the open spaces and virtually wander around at your feet. Normally these animals are nocturnal, but not here, and it isn’t difficult to see up to ten or more in a single scan: in most of Australia you would be fortunate to see one as you drove along rural

Mike Unwin photographing Common Wombat, Narawntapu NP, Tasmania, 18/10/12 (Dominic Couzens)

roads at night, and that would be scuttling away in its bottom-heavy way. Not surprisingly, with so many Wombats about, they left plenty of field signs – their large burrows (single, not in warrens as in the Hairy-nosed Wombats, see earlier posts) and their droppings which, famously, happen to be cube-shaped. The point of this shape is that Common Wombats are territorial and mark their ground, as do many animals, by

Common Wombat, Narawntapu NP, Tasmania, 18/10/12 (Dominic Couzens)

defaecating in prominent places. Cuboidal scats, unlike spherical scats, don’t roll out of position – or so the theory goes. So now you know about the poo of Pu Park.

Besides the Wombats, this area was full of other animals, including the Tasmanian race of the Eastern Grey Kangaroo (locally called the Forester), Bennett’s Wallabies and plenty of Tasmanian Pademelons.

By now, as you can gather, we were seriously on a mammal roll, and things only got better after supper, when we went spotlighting near our ornate hotel at Hawley Beach. Visiting the nearby Little Penguin colony in the company of Nick Mooney, possibly Tasmania’s best known wildlife expert and one of the world authorites on the Tasmanian Devil, we came across dozens more Pademelons, and also had a quick glimpse of a Southern Brown Bandicoot. Later on Nick kindly took Mike, Rob and I spotlighting into the nearby town of Port Sorell, where he had suggested that, if we were very fortunate, we might find the highly localised Eastern Barred Bandicoot. In contrast to  the much commoner Southern Browns, these animals, now almost extinct on the mainland of Australia, can be found on well cropped lawns and roadsides. As it happened, we did come across one (record shot below), as well as lots  of Rabbits, Brush-tailed Possum, a Long-nosed Potoroo, a close Southern Brown Bandicoot and a mother and baby Ring-tailed Possum. That made it, remarkably, 12 species on mammal on this single day.

Eastern Barred Bandicoot, Port Sorell, Tasmania, 18/10/12 (Mike Unwin)

Bandicoots, by the way, are small, roughly rabbit-sized marsupials that specialise in digging. They are omnivorous, taking insects and their larvae, spiders, seeds, fruit and fungi, using their long snouts to smell them out. They have the shortest gestation periods of any mammal in the world – as little as 12.5 days, faster than that of a mouse.

Southern Brown Bandicoot, Hawley Beach, Tasmania, 18/10/12 (Mike Unwin)