Friday 15 August 2014

Informal Wildlifing....

Hi again!

I've had a very busy week, my brother, sister in law and nephew have been visiting from Bath so I haven't done a lot of formal wildlife watching but whilst out visiting various places I have come across some lovely things!

We spent the week reliving our childhood by visiting a lot of the places we used to go and sharing them with the newer members of our family! Our first outing was to the beach at Mundesley where we had family holidays when we were very small, not loads of wildlife there other than gulls but I did rescue a grasshopper from the sea! I plucked him out and he leapt onto my shoulder, I walked him up the beach with him still sat there and managed to get some photos of him before setting back in a more appropriate place in some grass.
 
The next day we went to Oxburgh Hall, we twice attemped to look around the Hall, the first time Arthur (my nephew) was getting hungry so we decided to eat before continuing, the second time he was just being a bit grumpy, so I took him outside for a walk around. I have to be honest and say I was quite glad of that because I wasn't very interested in the house at all. They have some lovely gardens there and the sun had come out so we saw some lovely butterflies, dragonflies and bees in a bee hive :)




 
Another place we always used to visit as kids was Holt Country Park, it's still more or less the same as when we went as kids, I was half heartedly looking for adders (I saw one there once when I went with my mum aged about 14, the only one I have ever seen) but we didn't see any, not sure if I was happy about that or not!
 
We did see loads of Silver-washed fritillary butterflies, a first for me, all over the buddleia, and they also have a lovely wildlife garden (I'm not sure how new it is but I've never seen it there before) with beautiful flowers that was full of bees and butterflies!




 
On Tuesday, we shamelessly used my one year old nephew as an excuse for the 5 of us 'bigger' kids to visit the Dinosaur Park! I've helped Matthew out at the BioBlitz there before so I knew there was quite a bit of wildlife around, we didn't see anything hugely exciting (apart from dinosaurs obviously) but loads of nice butterflies on the flowers in the Waterside Garden. We also took Arthur on the deer safari and saw Red Deer and Roe Deer, although they aren't wild it was still lovely to see them so close up!

 
Unfortunately my brother and his family went home on the Wednesday but I still had the rest of the week off so me and my dad took a trip to Strumpshaw Fen, we found a swallowtail caterpillar and the man at reception said the next batch of swallowtail butterflies are starting to emerge too. My dad also spotted an amazing elephant hawk moth caterpillar, that was definitely the highlight of my day! There were so many dragonflies flying around but as usual none of the more impressive ones landed for me but I did get a lovely photo of an emeral damselfly. As I was walking back to the car park there was a little field vole munching on a fallen apple, he was so busy eating he didn't seem to take much notice of me so I was able to get some lovely photos of him! We also saw some Ruff, an unidentified (at the moment) caterpillar, a baby rat, barn owl and found a wing from a red admiral butterfly.








 
Matthew and I have discovered a couple of new places to see wildlife as well and have been lucky enough to get good views of bats, foxes and little owls :)



 
Hopefully we will visit more over the coming weeks and try and get some better photos!
 
Thanks for reading, I will leave you with this panoramic photo of a rainbow :)







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