Week ending Friday June 16 - A week of frustration and annoyance

 The week got off to a dodgy start when on Monday evening I saw a Tweet by someone called Pip referring to a recent visit to Heart of England Forest land by Coughton Court. She (I'm guessing) had deployed the Merlin app on her phone which assured her she had just heard a Nightingale.  Understandably there were replies pointing out that the app was not completely reliable, and I would have endorsed the sentiment if it hadn't been for a visit I'd made to the same area about three weeks ago. 

Now I must point out that the notes I had heard, though they had stopped me in my tracks and caused me to hurry, heart pounding, towards the sound, ended inconclusively. I wasn't sure, but they had reminded me of Nightingale. Once I'd reached the spot all I could hear was Blackcaps, so I wrote the matter off as an odd piece of Blackcap song. They do sometimes mimic other birds. However, I was concerned enough to return that evening after dark. I heard nothing at all, so concluded I was indeed mistaken. The incident never even made it to a blog post....until now.

So on Tuesday morning I amended my plans and went back to Coughton Court. I listened once more to Blackcaps and nothing more. This unexpected development made me late for my planned visit to Umberslade Park Farm where last year I had found a singing Black Redstart. Could it have come back?

No it hadn't. The visit this year had almost nothing to recommend it except perhaps that House Martins were nest building, allowing me to plug a gap in Jon Bowley's Tetrad Atlas data.

House Martin

As far as insects are concerned, the mixture of sheep pasture and crops (with one area of a large field set aside for long grass) produced tiny numbers of Meadow Browns and Speckled Woods, reinforcing my suspicion that the wider British countryside is in big trouble this year.

On Friday I tried walking from Lye Bridge to Shortwood Roughs in north-east Worcestershire. It was warm and sunny again, but once again butterflies were in short supply. I was relieved to see no sign of the Tundra Bean Goose, although the field it was in is now full of crops. There were no birding highlights beyond stuff like Whitethroats, a Lesser Whitethroat, and a party of about 10 Swallows including three or four recently fledged juveniles.

Juvenile Swallow

It fell to moths to brighten the morning. I found a party of six to ten Chimney Sweeper moths at Lye Bridge, but their perpetual motion meant I couldn't get a photo. However, a Brown Silver-line was more obliging.

Brown Silver-line

This common moth has never made it to my garden, and I don't think I've seen one at Morton Bagot.

Speaking of the garden, I deployed the moth trap last night and was expecting a bumper crop this morning. Instead, the night was disrupted by a power cut which set off all the neighbours' house alarms and woke me up at midnight. An hour later I decided that most of the moths in the trap would have gone so I clumped downstairs and removed the lid of the trap. A Peppered Moth in my torchlight was almost the only moth left to escape.

I'm going right off moth-trapping.