My 200th blog post - an afternoon spent looking for the invisible Little Owls at Cranford Park

Happy 200th post dear blog of mine.

 

I spent a couple of hours mooching around Cranford Park this afternoon after spending an enjoyable lengthy chat with Angie Mayo from the Friends of Cranford Park Facebook page. It's great to put a face to a name.

 

The River Crane was looking very swollen after all the rain we had during the night and this morning. As mentioned in my post two days ago, I feared the Little Grebes may disappear again if the water levels rose too high, and it looks as if I wasn't wrong. No matter how hard I looked there was no sign of either of the Grebes. The overhanging vegetation they liked to hide under was underwater. In face many of the Mallards that were around on Wednesday had also gone, leaving behind just one pair plus two Moorhen.

 

View from the iron bridge looking down the river to the stone bridge

View from the bank, with the iron bridge on the right

After spending some time looking for the Grebes and hoping for a Kingfisher fly-by, I walked away from the river with no sign of either. There were plenty of Grey Squirrels around though. At least they are reliable enough to pose for a half decent photo.

 

 

and there were large numbers of Magpies on the ground too, either looking for some juicy worms bought to the surface by the rain, or maybe looking for nuts hidden by the squirrels.

 

I was watching this male Great Spotted Woodpecker enjoying the sun when I first heard a Little Owl calling from somewhere behind me..

 

 

It called again and I was able to narrow the area down to the copse next to the Ice House copse. A third call and I had the area down to four trees.

 

But could I find the Little Owl ? Nope. Despite it calling twice again, I still couldn't locate it. I stood under every tree, scanned every branch, stood back silently and waited, but the Little Owl didn't call again.

However, by going through this particular copse, which admittedly I don't often do, I found some more new species of fungi. I'm waiting for confirmation of the id's for these, and when I get them I will be putting up a 'fungi album' on the new Wino Wendy's Wildlife World Facebook page (copy to the page here)

 

Just this week alone I've found and photographed at least 15 different species. Here are todays finds....

 

 

To end my 200th blog post, this is a photo of my most favourite tree at Cranford Park. It's a huge Sweet Chestnut estimated to be up to 490 years old. Yes, that isn't a typo, the tree is approximately 490 years old. You can only imagine what history that tree has seen !

 

 

Happy 200th posting Blog. Here's to many many more posts. Clink clink cheers......