Beautiful Staffordshire

I would like to apologise for the delay, I've been a little under the weather these past few days and have been slow to update. But here goes.

Staffordshire is beautiful. I might be biased because a particular lovely young lady lives there, but the woodland wildlife I met there last week was something else. It’s the beginning of summer and as such the migrants are properly starting to arrive and get on with their business. The resident wildlife is on the go too, butterflies are on the wing,  and birds are singing, proclaiming territories and gathering food for nestlings. So it was at Coombes Valley on Wednesday, when I made a return visit.  No sooner had I arrived than I had encountered my first Small Copper butterfly of the year, a very handsome little creature indeed, with deep orange on his forewings, his brown hindwings flushed with an iridescent orange sheen. He sunned himself breifly on the dandelion infested meadow.

Coombes Valley is a woodland nature reserve, a mixture of young and ancient woodland, clinging to the walls of a steep sided valley, with a flood meadow set at the bottom, lying beside a small, fast flowing river. Where the river bends, sits a bench overlooked by a pair of nest boxes, and it was here that we saw our first Pied Flycatchers. We’d been sitting a moment or  two, fretting about our forgotten lunch, when a very smart little bird landed on a twig just a couple of metres away. It was black and white, with a bright white underside. A male Pied Flycatcher! It took off and appeared to perform a little aerial dance in front of us, in pursuit of flies. It was there for a few seconds and then disappeared among the branches of a hawthorn.

We waited a little longer, and saw, to our surprise, peering out of a hole in a tree, an adult Great Spotted woodpecker. He, and he was a male by the red patch on the back of his head, slowly, cautiously left his hole, and clung to the side of the tree which he had made his home. Waiting for a few minutes, he appeared to change his mind and disappeared back into his hole. Perhaps he was incubating a clutch of eggs and waiting for his mate to return from foraging, so it could be his turn. A Grey Wagtail, all flicking tail and smart yellow, darted about over the babbling brook, and a chaffinch sang its brief, repeated song in a tree above us.  A few moments later the Pied Flycatcher returned, with the female, browner but no less smart and charming, following behind. The male let me take a couple of record photos from a distance. It was, as the RSPB is fond of saying, a “moment.”

After we waited a bit longer in the hope of getting a better photo of the pied fly, we decided to head up into the woods. In the canopy birds sang, robins, pied flycatchers, great tits and willow warblers. A bird with a reddish tail, probably a female redstart, shot up into the canopy and out of sight as we rounded a corner on the muddy woodland trail. We stood and waited for it for ages. We only caught brief glimpses of Coombes Valley’s other resident passerine attraction, unfortunately, but we seemed to encounter a pied flycatcher every couple of hundred yards. The second was in a clearing when I seemed to startle a male and saw his striking black and orange underside as he flew away at speed, again into the canopy.

Among the whole host of woodland birds we saw at Coombes Valley were Nuthatch, Blue, Great and Coal tits, and a very obliging treecreeper. A treecreeper is an odd little brown bird, both adorable and reminiscent of an ageing woodland wizard at once. It has a greyish white underside and a dark, streaked back, and clings close to trees, creeping up the bark against which it is remarkably camouflaged.  This one broke all the rules, and almost posed for a photo, his curved beak full of grubs and spiders, clinging to a tree just metres away. We watched him for several minutes, and even as we walked towards him he barely flinched, just moving up the tree and around the trunk out of view.

As we left the woods and joined the flood meadow at the valley bottom, where whitethroats and blackcaps sang, replacing the true woodland species, a dark shape flew over, and it was distinct from all the other crows. It was bigger, and it had a diamond shaped tail. I’ve not seen many of my favourite Corvid and avian Goth in England, having met most of them in Scotland and Greece, but this was a raven, and a beautiful example at that. It crossed the valley and disappeared over the trees, slowly. There is something about the shape of a raven, its long wings, its slightly back facing primary feathers, that big tail, which just places it in a league of beauty above other crows, imposing and splendid.
Natty brought my attention to what appeared to be an owl pellet on the ground, which was attended by at least four beetles. Some of these had a striking pattern of orange markings, around a shape a bit like a cross on their wing cases.  I recalled the Sexton Beetle, which buries dead animals for its larvae to feed on, and wondered if this was it, confused by the animal remains in the owl pellet. Another beetle was round, with a flattened body, matt black wing cases and an orange thorax. I have no idea. If any of my readers can help I would be interested to hear from them.  

To conclude a day of wonderful wildlife encounters, Natty and I walked back to the nearby town of Leek through the grassland and copses, the beautiful rolling Staffordshire countryside, down a barely signposted footpath, taking us through fields of cows, and pigs,over a disused railway line, into the smart pleasant town, just as the night fell, and in time to find the fish and chip shop closed! The following day, we would head out into the Staffordshire Moorlands again, to the amusingly named Tittesworth Reservoir, to meet some more unexpected wildlife.