WEB-SIGHTS

One of those foggy starts to the morning of Sunday 14th with a very heavy dew. It wasn't long before the sun was blazing down from a blue sky and with no wind, it ended up being a wonderful autumnal day.

The still conditions at East Mersea Point made it easy for this family of mute swans to paddle across the river Colne from Brightlingsea. It's not often you get to admire the flat surface of this part of the river and even the swans will have enjoyed seeing their own reflections.

A few small birds feeding at the Point included a wheatear, pair of stonechats, 12 meadow pipits and 5 skylarks. A group of 7 avocets flew close-by with their black and white wings flickering in the sunshine as they headed back up river.
On the nearby mud there were the usual large numbers of regular waders such as dunlin, ringed plover, grey plover, golden plover, redshank, curlew, both godwits and avocets. In amongst one group of 15 brent geese were two juveniles and elsewhere around the mouth of the Colne were another 200 brent geese.

The familiar sound of pebbles being knocked together alerted me to the regular pair of stonechats in the grazing fields who seemed to be calling anxiously over the arrival of a third stonechat onto their regular patch. This brought the tally of stonechats for this morning to five. The group of fifty wigeon were crammed into the central ditch with many involved in lots of displaying and calling to each other.

In the main park were two chiffchaffs, the last of the summer migrants still present here.

The heavy dew early in the morning coated all the spiders' webs and silk threads everywhere you looked. Webs that had remained well concealed in bushes or in the long grass suddenly became very visible and quite eyecatching this morning.

The dew-drops on these near invisible lines of silk have separated out into individual droplets of varying sizes.

Even the spiders were coated with dew-droplets such as this common garden spider, showing its distinctive white cross on its back Last month these large spiders and their webs seemed to be everywhere, especially amongst the long grass.

The clearer night sky on Saturday night meant there weren't as many moths in the trap on Sunday morning as the previous evening's haul. The most colourful one seen was this green-brindled crescent with its bright metallic green markings. It should be a regular visitor to the trap in small numbers during the rest of October. There was even the dark form of the moth seen on Friday night here, where the white cresent mark stood out clearly on the dark brown wings.

Other moths seen included black rustic, large wainscot, L-album wainscot, yellow-line quaker, dark chestnut, mallow, treble lines, brindled green and the red-green carpet.