Life after the floods

View of the flooded garden

As you can see from the picture above, the river flooded the entire garden and stopped just short of the door to the therapy room.  We had to use a series of planks, ladders and supports to get off our boat and out through the car port which was also under water. Fortunately the water level stopped just short of our electricity box at the top of the car port.  The gas meter toppled over and was completely submerged but continued to supply us with gas for the central heating and cooker so we were very lucky!

A thriving clematis 

In spite of being under water for weeks the garden plants have shown amazing resilience.  My mimosa is in full flower and the citrus trees have all survived, despite the fact that the greenhouse was blown apart in the December gales. Luckily I had covered them with fleece. The clematis (above) is in full bloom and forms a fabulous scented canopy over the entire boundary between us and our neighbour.

We have spent the last couple of days clearing as much as possible of the silt and debris from the garden and Dave pressure hosed the patio so it looks a lot better!  At least the weather has been dry and sunny which makes a welcome change and there's a promise of more dry weather to come.

The ducks have been chasing each other far more frequently today, at least three pairs investigated the nest boxes and one female mallard checked out our garden deck box, too.

Dave set up the bird box camera yesterday and this morning we saw a Blue Tit enter the box twice. We hadn't realised that the camera recorded sound, too, so we were surprised to hear the bird's high pitched call as it entered the box.

Today I held a Blue Tit

Injured Blue Tit

Today I found a Blue Tit in our carport on the ground.  It appeared to be stunned and, as I approached, it made no attempt to fly off.  I was able to pick it up and hold it.  From what I could tell, it seemed to be blind in one eye so it may have flown into something and hurt itself. I held it and stroked it for several minutes and then took it to a nearby fig tree so that I could encourage it to fly to safety. It was so calm and chirpy in the palm of my hand but I felt very relieved when it took off. I really hope that, in spite of a damaged eye, it will survive.

After the trauma

Fortunately, the bird seemed none the worse for its accident and, after resting for a few more minutes it flew to the bird table for a sunflower heart.

Female mallard checking out nest box

The ducks have shown a great deal of interest in the two riverside nest boxes and the rivalry is intense. At the moment the main contenders are the mallard with a hybrid male and this female (pictured above) and her pure mallard mate.  A duck we've nicknamed Lonely is also a contender whereas the one we call Ringneck seems to have been driven off.  The female (above) spent much of the morning investigating both boxes and was back again this afternoon.

The dominant drake

It would seem that this drake has the edge over the hybrid male and his mate. They have spent much of the morning and some of the late afternoon at the nest boxes. 

Today has been a lovely, sunny day which makes a change from most of the previous days.  The forecast tonight is for settled and warm weather for a while - what a welcome prospect!

I've started clearing the debris in the garden - there's a lot of work to do, but I keep reminding myself of what the people in the Somerset Levels and elsewhere are still suffering because of the floods.  At least the flood water has 'fertilised' our garden and we can now get on with life!

Spring sunshine, dark clouds, huge hailstones and ice at night!

Blue Tit in early morning sunshine

Spring is definitely in the air and a pair of Blue Tits are regularly looking at the nesting box Dave prepared at the weekend.  The early morning and late afternoon birdsong is delightful and the garden is full of Blue Tits, Great Tits and Long Tailed Tits using the feeders. There are plenty of Dunnocks, too, a pair of Robins, a pair of Greater Spotted Woodpeckers, too many Wood Pigeons and far too many Parakeets!

A Mallard and her hybrid mate lay claim to one of the nest boxes

Four pairs of mallards are showing great interest in the two riverside nesting boxes and this pair appear to be the dominant pair.  We have two other boxes on the top deck and hope that a pair will nest there too as it is safe from both foxes and mink.  

For the first time in ages, a pair of Mandarin Ducks flew in from the park yesterday to check out the area again.  Usually, from Spring through to late Autumn we have at least 5 pairs visiting the garden.

Storm clouds lift just before sunset

Yesterday's weather was pretty dramatic yet again.  When the sun shone it was warm but the rain was torrential and the hailstones thundered off our roof, boat cover and the ducks' backs!  When will we return to a more normal and typical weather pattern?  The intensity of the rain when it falls these days is far greater than it used to be and all too regular.  Let's hope that we finally get some settled, gentle and warm Spring weather very soon.

More rain!

I only have one image  for today as a record of the floods during February 2014, though not showing them at their worst!

The view from our home across Hurst Meadows in mid February

For the record, today is yet another day with exceptionally strong winds from the afternoon onwards with very heavy cloudbursts this evening.  The ground is already soaked since the floods and it has rained all too regularly since the river returned to normal levels.

This picture shows how the river flooded Hurst Park and Hurst Meadows but doesn't show just how far the river actually spread across both sides of our island.

Today started with fine weather and we watched a fourth Mallard pair investigate our duck nesting boxes.  Dave checked out the garden bird nest boxes as there has been some tentative activity in our carport with some Blue Tits are already showing signs of checking out their territory.  It won't be too long before some Blue Tits and maybe a Robin decide to start nest building.

We've had a pair of Pigeons (not Wood Pigeons)  raiding our feeders recently and the Wood Pigeons aren't impressed with the newcomers.  Nor am I as they are rapacious feeders and not scared of humans.

Today we saw three boats on the river which is a sign that the flow must be a little less dangerous.  After today's heavy downpours I wonder whether conditions will change again as we have to cope with what falls upstream of us, and that was more significant rainfall.  It's unusual to have so very little river traffic at this time of year. 

It's been a while!

It's been seven months since I posted the last Thames Nature Notes because of family matters. I had intended to start again in the new year but, since mid December the weather in South East England has been atrocious.

We have had the wettest winter since records began with extreme flooding.  Others, in South West England have suffered even more for months now, so we cannot complain, but we're glad that the river has now returned to normal levels and at last our garden is no longer under water.  In fact, the river engulfed our end of the island and there was river from the A308 bank as far as, and right across Hurst Meadows.  It was an unusual sight to see swans swimming down through our carport and around the garden before being swept across the river into the meadows way beyond.

They say that every cloud has a silver lining and, as far as we were concerned, in spite of some extremely worrying times, we had the joy of watching a Kingfisher take advantage of our underwater garden to catch breakfast, lunch and dinner!

 The Kingfisher waited patiently for signs of fish

Because the river was flowing so fast the Kingfisher found our submerged garden a perfect haven.  It spent hours on most days diving for fish, taking advantage of the many convenient perches around the garden.  My husband took this picture of the bird posing on the top of a ladder.  The river had risen higher than 4 ft and we had had to put in place a series of ladders and planks to enable us to get off our boat and out through the garden and carport.  Even beyond the carport the water was still deep enough to require us to wear wellies! 

 Fishing is a tiring business

While I was out one day, Dave was able to grab this shot through our kitchen window.  The Kingfisher had spent ages diving for little fish, with considerable success, and had just finished quite a sizeable one.  After preening his feathers he had a lovely stretch before heading home for the evening.

Our beautiful bird arrives for its morning snack

I was also able to spend a fair bit of time watching this magnificent bird.  The weather was too bad to do much else!  I was lucky enough to get this shot as he arrived for for his first meal of the day. Unfortunately, as the weather was dire for much of the time, we could only get grab shots through the kitchen window most of the time but there were a couple of days when the sun shone and we managed to take some pictures through an open upstairs window without distracting the Kingfisher.

Today is the first day of Spring and we have enjoyed sunshine, bird song, and watched a number of female mallards checking out the duck nesting boxes.  Tomorrow rain is forecast again but tomorrow is another day!

Headless ducklings!

It’s been a traumatic time recently for the ducks and ducklings.  A female mallard nested in the box that the coots had vacated but her chosen nest box was also favoured by a tufted duck.  We can’t be sure but we think the 'tuftie' laid some eggs in the mallard’s box.  After what seemed like a very long incubation period, so long, in fact, that we thought the eggs might be infertile, our nest box camera showed signs of some ducklings hatching and we had the pleasure of watching some of the ducklings emerge from their shells.  Watch a very brief clip (below) from our nest cam and spot the baby mallards towards the end of the video.

Twenty four hours later, the mallard we had nicknamed ‘Punk’ because of the rather cropped appearance of her head feathers was still waiting for one duckling to hatch but the others had already hit the water!  Fortunately most of them remained very close to the nest box but one drifted off and was never seen again.

When eventually Punk led her ducklings away from the nest box there were only two pure mallards and the rest looked suspiciously like tufted ducks as they had no tell tale yellow chests and were too brown to have been fathered by one of the hybrid males that had been hanging around.

Punk swims away with six ducklings

One of the brown ducklings headed back on its own and, although I tried to catch it and return it to Punk it disappeared before I could do so.  The following day Punk returned with only five ducklings and took them into the neighbouring nest box that was clean and lined with fresh straw.  We were relieved to know that they were pretty safe there, or so we thought. When we didn’t see them the following day we were concerned and something prompted me to look inside the box. I was deeply upset to see three headless ducklings, all turned over in the straw and one with its foot dismembered too.  There was no sign of Punk and the remaining two ducklings.  To our knowledge only a mink would have done this.  A fox would have taken the mother or grabbed the ducklings as a convenient ‘take-away’ and would not have beheaded the babies, whereas mink always seem to go for the throats of water birds.

The gruesome discovery

We had to assume that Punk and the other ducklings had died too but we looked out for her upstream, just in case, when we were out on our boat.  We didn’t really expect to find her so, to our amazement the following day Punk turned up with the two surviving ducklings, one a mallard and the other (possibly) a tufted duckling.  After grabbing a quick snack of wheat she took them upstream but then returned and spent ages quacking urgently in the vicinity of the nest boxes and I wondered whether she had lost the remaining two or was calling in the hope of finding the other three.  We saw her with two the next day so we’re hoping that she’ll keep them safe

Close up of the headless ducklings

Punk came for a spot of lunch today and seemed in a hurry so we think she still has at least one duckling somewhere safer than here.  It does seem that ducklings disappear far too quickly on this stretch whereas they fare better up around Platts Eyot and beyond.  The Herring Gull has been patrolling the river again and I’ve also seen a heron on the hunt for tasty young ducklings.  No doubt the pike, too, are adding to the high mortality rate of ducklings here.  Every ‘mum’ I’ve seen on this stretch has lost all her ducklings and that includes tufted ducks and a Pochard.  The only survivor so far has been one baby mandarin duck – the Bengal cat killed at least two of the other three mandarin ducklings.

We’re hoping that Punk will keep her two safe and that, if we’re lucky, we’ll get to see whether the brown duckling was a mallard after all or whether Punk unwittingly hatched a young tufted duck.

Strange happenings in the duck and coot world

 Before we went on holiday in May a mallard was sitting on 11 eggs in one of our riverside nesting boxes.  When we returned there were only 7 eggs in the box and eggs continued to disappear, one by one.  Eventually she was down to three eggs which were due to hatch two days later.  A fox would have had difficulty removing any eggs, a mink would probably have taken the eggs and the mallard, and there was no sign of any breakages so we wondered whether a grass snake might be raiding the box.  Matters took a turn for the worse for our mallard when another mallard with two ducklings took over the box.  Our female was forced to sit on our boat and wait for the intruders to leave the box for short feeding forays.

Our mallard drinking at the pond 

She only managed to sit on the remaining eggs for short periods of time and it became obvious that the eggs weren't going to hatch.  On the day the ducklings should have been due she abandoned the nest.  We felt so sorry for her.  She had invested almost a month of her time and energy with no results.  During that time she had been regularly attacked by a rogue drake, at least four or five times a day and, although her partner had been great at driving off the male he wasn't always around to do so.  

We had installed a camera in the box so I was able to monitor what was happening and I would suddenly notice on our TV screen that the rogue drake was marching up the plank and entering the box to attack our female.  I managed to drag him out a couple of times but, on one occasion, I didn't reach the box in time and the struggle was so robust that the drake actually knocked the lid (complete with camera) off the box.  I just had time to rescue both as they floated downstream and then disconnect the leads.  At long last the camera has dried out and is working again!

A very hacked off mallard waiting to get back on her eggs

While all this was happening a female tufted duck was also showing signs of wanting to nest in the same box and she would often waddle up the plank and stand at the entrance to the box looking at the sitting mallard.  There is another box close by so we weren't sure why the tufted duck didn't just use that box.  

The sorry ending to this tale is that the intruder mallard lost one of her ducklings the next day and the other one two days later so she, too, abandoned the box.  This particular box seems to be jinxed!

The partner of our mallard on the rill of the pond

We thought all this was unusual but what happened next was stranger still.  Coots don't nest in boxes, they normally build big untidy open nests with twigs, flowers, iris leaves, sweet paper wrappings and whatever else floats by and takes their fancy.  Every year a pair of coots tries to nest on our wooden feeding raft, which is doomed to failure as the wash from passing boats always removes everything from the surface of the raft. This year, after several failed attempts on the raft, I noticed a coot at the entrance to the other riverside nest box and it was behaving oddly.  The box in question has a plastic mallard on its lid put there by my husband for fun, and the coot was attacking the decoy duck with its beak.  It was very funny to watch but I didn't think anything more of it until the same thing happened on the following day.  I started to take notice and saw the coot attack the decoy and then enter the nest box.  Later, when the coot had left the box, I looked inside and discovered two eggs so I put some more straw in the box to cover the eggs.  We had decided that the mallard's eggs must have been taken by a cheeky magpie so I put plenty of straw in the box so that the coot could cover its eggs.

Coots take it in turns to sit on their eggs and while one sits, the other tirelessly brings more and more nesting material.  A typical nest gets bigger and higher every day but the box limited any grand designs the coots may have had for their nest.  As the entrance is narrow the coots were unable to drag large twigs up the plank, in spite of many heroic efforts.  What amazed me was that they soon learned to only bring smaller leaves and contented themselves with my offerings of additional straw.  

They are usually excellent parents and fierce in the defense of their territory so there was always one of them in the vicinity of the nest and none of the eggs disappeared as a consequence.  They now have five healthy kids and no longer use the box.  When I emptied it out there were three unhatched eggs inside that had been abandoned once the five youngsters had hatched.  I put them on the deck, intending to throw them in the river, but someone came to the door and when I returned to deal with the eggs I was just in time to see the crow making off with the last one!

 Coot on the defensive

Since then the same nest box has attracted renewed interest from a pair of mallards and a pair of tufted ducks so I filled it with fresh straw.  The mallard started laying almost a week ago and when she had four eggs I noticed that the box seemed to have been raided as there was straw down the plank and floating off downstream.  The next day I caught the culprit in the act, a large crow at the nest entrance, tearing at the surface straw to get at the eggs!  Fortunately it didn't succeed but we didn't know what to do to stop it another time until Dave remembered that we had been given a mini scarecrow.  He placed it next to the nest entrance and we waited with baited breath to see whether it would also scare off the mallard.  She did hesitate and turn away several times but finally went into the nest and now totally ignores the scarecrow even though it sometimes flaps in the breeze right next to her.  It seems to be doing its job though because no eggs have been stolen and I haven't seen the crow attempting to approach the box.  The only problem now is that the rogue male that attacked our original female mallard in the other box is now up to his old tricks again.  Also, a female tufted duck seems to want to use the same box!  There's no peace for nesting mallards.

Sadly, we've seen no surviving ducklings near us but there were 7 'teenage' ducklings further downstream so a few have beaten the odds!  A tufted duck, that had eight youngsters, is now down to two, and the swans have four remaining cygnets after two disappeared.  The herring gulls have been patrolling the river in search of food for their youngsters, and the herons and crows have been swooping down on unsuspecting baby water birds so the attrition rate is disappointingly high.  I watched a heron attempt to take a duckling three times but its mother spotted the heron in time, spread out her wings and almost rose out of the river in defense of her young.  She succeeded in forcing it to swerve and saved the youngsters that time but lost them several days later.

 

Peacock butterfly on garden flowers

It's been another deeply disappointing Spring (and early summer) but during the week that we had fine weather the bees and butterflies made the most of the sunshine and the plant pollen and nectar.

Shaggy peacock butterfly on our marsh marigolds

Flaretail in the garden

Flaretail is a fine looking mallard and she knows it.  She has a habit of flaring her tail, far more than the other mallards, hence the nickname.  Her partner is a brown hybrid duck, one of the 'waiters' as we call them because of their white chests.  Flaretail always flies onto my therapy room roof and waits for me to put food in a container in the garden near the pond.  Unlike the other ducks she rarely feeds from the plank in the river.  For a while she seemed to be looking for a nest on the top deck but, again this year, the two nest boxes up there have been ignored.  Gone are the days when 'Golden Eye' and her mate used to take over the garden deck and hatch three families of ducklings from one of the boxes each year.  The upper deck nest boxes are no longer in demand and our hanging basket duck has also deserted us this year.