DEAD DEER

Had an evening walk along the park beach on Wednesday 10th and found the dead deer first reported at the weekend by Nigel Pepper. This is yet another muntjac deer that has obviously got into difficulties swimming in the river in search of new territories and ended up drowning. Muntjac are quite short and dumpy deer, about the same height as a labrador-type dog. There is a muntjac already on the Island as I saw one late at night in the car headlights about two months ago beside the East Mersea Pick Your Own field.

This latest muntjac corpse was found in the same spot at the Point pictured above, where the previous corpse was washed up about three years ago.

There is still one of the wasp spiders amongst the long grass just inside the start of the seawall. The dull evening light doesn't do the colours justice on the photo above.

When I looked for one of the large female wasp spiders last week, it was clinging to the grass beside this small papery ball which I guess is its cocoon of eggs, which she was guarding.

The tide was coming in and a few thousand black-headed and common gulls were gathered for the evening roost on the mud near the Point. The usual mix of waders were scattered across the mud too with 250 redshank the most numerous and 70 black-tailed godwits the most interesting. Also seen here were little egret and 5 common terns.

Returning along the seawall where one wheatear was seen, there was the dashing silhouette in the fading light of a hobby flying over the grazing fields and park pond. In the borrowdyke were two fledged tufted ducks.

There were lots of mallard at the park pond with about 75 seen, although more probably remained hidden in the reeds. A pair of gadwall, shoveler and teal were also present. Two sand martins flew late over the pond and may still be nesting in the nearby cliff.

Earlier in the day 6 mistle thrushes have recently discovered the rowan trees in the car park laden with ripe berries. Butterflies seen in the last few days include holly blue, red admiral, large white, small white, green-veined white and speckled wood.

On Tuesday there were a couple of sparrowhawk sightings over the park as well as a barn owl hunting over the long grass at night-fall. A common sandpiper flew along the beach at dusk, while at low tide there were about 300 golden plover resting on the mud.

There have been a few adder sightings recently including a couple of small youngsters that were about the size of a worm. One of them was under a sheet of tin on Monday while the other was stumbled upon amongst the long grass on the side of the seawall yesterday, which I thought at first glance was a large brown caterpillar!

At Coopers Beach the red-necked phalarope was seen on Tuesday morning by David Darrell-Lambert but there has been no news about it for Wednesday.