southward bound

Getting ready to head south, to Highland Perthshire, after a great week in Caithness, where after last week's snow and hail we have seen some wonderful sunny and warm weather.  It has been very busy, with a well-attended public talk in Castletown during the week - thanks to Gordon for the organisation!  Also a very warm welcome from the Olrig and District Beekeepers.  The main foucs of the week has been farm visits, especially linked to the project we are running in partnership with the Caithness Biodiversity Group, providing flower-rich seed mixes to sow in corners of arable fields.  It was great to meet up with Phyllida Sayles and some of her volunteer recorders again.

I have also been looking at a few grassland sites, especially interested to see where there are good amounts of the flowers that the great yellow bumblebee uses, such as yellow rattle and common knapweed, even if they're mostly only a centimetre or two high at the moment.  There is also quite a bit of meadow vetchling coming through already and one of the sites appears to be an old, but neglected hay meadow, that is no longer part of a farm.  However, there seems scope to restore it with a bit of TLC.

As everywhere else this year, the flowers and the bees are about two weeks late, though this morning I see that the white-tailed queens are homing in on sycamore blossom.  Any bumblebee searching has been along road verges where dandelions are flowering abundantly.  Gypsy cuckoo bumblebees are very common just now, mooching away and getting stained by dandelion pollen.  I counted 13 along one stretch.  At one point I stopped and was halted in my tracks by the rasping call of a corncrake, which I think was in one of the ditches.  Not wanting to disturb it, I phoned Dave Jones of RSPB, based in Caithness, and we met up in the evening. The bird was still calling away as the landowner arrived, waiting on a grass seed delivery, and said he thought he had heard one the previous evening.

The same day I was delighted to catch a queen moss carder bee.  I then took photos of what I suspect to be a second individual - the dilemma of 'to catch or not to catch'!  Later on I took photos of a common carder bee that looked very like moss carder (side view).  Both pictures included here.

 

And finally, the sparrows around the livestock farms in Caithness seem to be doing well.  No problems of insect shortages for them and have seen a couple of broods out being fed by attentive parents.  We ended up buying live mealworms at home for ours, which were instantly collected by the female sparrows, with a first fledgeling seen last weekend, a couple of weeks later than the first one last year.

 

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