June 24th – I have’t a bloody clue what’s going on here. In one of the four culverts that make up the new dam spillway bridge at Chasewater, someone has piled up the limestone rock ballast into a neat wall. It’s clearly the work of kids – but would have been serious effort, particular bare-handed. It’s oddly admirable, but will have to be removed. Makes you wonder what they could do by applying themselves to something useful…
June 24th – Pottering up to Chasewater for the vintage festival, it turned out a pleasant, warm afternoon, so I had a gentle trundle round the park. It was good to see that after weeks of complaining by concerned wildlife enthusiasts, notices have finally been put up about the Little Ringed Plovers nesting on the shoreline. The delicate, fragile little fellows are often disturbed from their ground nests by dogs and walkers who don’t know they’re there. It seems very difficult to get the park management team – still from Lichfield District Council until 2014 – to do anything much these days. A complete change from previous regimes.
Coming back along the canal, another avian issue: the swan couple, who abandoned their nest of eggs earlier in the year are back. I have no idea what’s going on here, but it’ll sure be interesting to watch…
June 17th – My deer magnet is clearly functioning well right now. These two delightful yearling hinds were grazing on the scrub adjacent to the railway track at Chasewater Heaths. Note that they’re still very young, and have the traces of their juvenile whit spots still present in their summer coats. They happily browsed the vegetation whilst keeping an eye on me, eventually wandering into the thicket nearby. A lovely sight, and one I still pinch myself in disbelief, every time I see it.
June 17th – Birdsfoot trefoil is one of the great flowers of summer for me. Often called deer vetch or eggs and bacon, it grows in sandy soils in rough grass and heathland. This example, at Anglesey Basin, near Chasewater, is in fine health. This is one of the yellow blooms that dapples verges and meadows this time of year, along with ragworts and buttercups. It’s normally a mixture of yellow and crimson blooms, but there doesn’t seem to be much of the crimson component this year. I’m wondering if there’s a climatic effect evident there…
June 15th – Chasewater was deserted as I cruised round in the early evening. I’ve noticed in recent years that the park has a burgeoning rabbit population, and when there’s few folk around, they come out of hiding and take the air. This fellow was on the dam by the Downes house. I hope the engineers are keeping an eye on the rabbits… badgers caused the collapse of a canal in Llangollen a few years ago. Mind you, knowing badgers, they could have used explosives or anything. They’re truculent little buggers…
June 10th – Grainy, and very long range, this is a red deer hind and her young fawn. The females should at the moment be with young, or preparing to give birth, for which they tend to split from the main herd and search out protective cover. This lone mother was on cuckoo bank in just such conditions, and was very nervous and twitchy for her offspring. A wonderful, summertime sight, with births occurring up until mid-July.
June 10th – Whilst at Chasewater, I played with the sweep panorama function on my trusty Panasonic TZ30 camera. It’s a great piece of kit of which I’m very fond, and a huge step on from it’s predecessor. The panorama function, however, has been a disappointment. Not as reliable as the one on Sony pocket cameras, it seems to have trouble with synchronisation, and can generate poor images. Hoping this will be fixed in a firmware update, it does work best on sunny days like this, and these results weren’t bad.
June 10th – For the second time in two days, I hit Chasewater. I was going on to ride the Sherbrook Valley on the Chase, but couldn’t resist a spin around the park in the sunshine. The weather was warm and soft, and I was in shorts and shirtsleeves. The boating pool was, as usual, a cloudy soup of mallards, canada geese, swans and coots, mingling with bird waste and discarded bread, but the waterfowl seem happy enough. Unusually, a mallard had her ducklings on the lake, including this rather fetching yellow one. A lovely thing indeed.
June 9th – Chasewater is rising. In all the rain, the only benefit is that the waterline is slowly, almost imperceptibly enlarging. A landmark occurred this week; the ‘pier pool’ left stranded from the main lake, has rejoined it once more. Curious spits and islands have developed. You can see the ecology shifting day by day. But don’t be fooled. The next meter in depth will increase the surface area of the reservoir hugely, and take a massive amount of water. That, sadly, means a very, very wet summer. A terrible dilemma…
June 5th – In virtually the same spot as the deer, I spotted a kestrel hunting. It did that thing they seem to do; floating, almost static in free air, studying it’s prey on the ground with a gimlet eye, before thinking better of it and returning to it’s pylon perch. These are lovely, graceful birds that seem increasingly populous here. Or maybe I’m just noticing them more. Either way, they’re wonderful, and like the deer, I could watch them for hours.
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