Are all babies beautiful?

As part of the salute to the Rolls-Royce legacy some of Britain’s most famous wartime aircraft powered by the famous Rolls-Royce Merlin engine performed a display over Dover harbour, and of course St Margaret's. There was also a solo return flight to France by a Spitfire.

I think that this is a Spitfire, but I'm not 100% as I even worse on old planes than I am on birds.

I suspect that this group is two Hurricanes and one Spitfire, (back right)

.(I'm wrong here, the top two are Spitfires, the left one being an early model and the right hand one a later one, the bottom one is a Hurricane).

After a visit to the garage I took a walk at Kearsney Abbey. Coots nests are quite variable, but this one is one of the largest I've seen, perhaps it's a traditional site.

Assuming that it is the female on the nest, the male visited about every five minutes with various offerings.

At this time she would shuffle a bit and a youngster appeared from under her wing. It would be unkind to suggest that she kept it hidden under there because it's such an ugly baby, but pretty it isn't.

Near by there was a pair of Mute Swans with a single cygnet. There were definitely no others around and as it is usual to see families with six or more youngsters I wondered what had happened to this pair. Was it the weather, well it hasn't been good, but surely not that bad, or had some the had some calamity.

The only child was certainly getting a lot of attention from the parents and despite Hans Christian Anderson's evolutionarily challenged fairy story.there was nothing of the ugly duckling about this baby.

Open Wide!

I had trouble uploading this last night, so it's a bit late. I was watching the garden when two Great Spotted Woodpeckers arrived at the same feeder. Normally this means a bit of aggravation followed by a lot of posing and a noisy dispute.

This time it all was peace and for a while both birds seemed to be feeding independently, but I soon realised that the youngster on top wasn't doing very much.

After a short while the adult moved up and stretched up towards the young bird. The beak on the juvenile is noticeably smaller than the parents beak.

The young bird leaned down to received the food that was being offered by the adult bird, a male thith a bit of red on the nape.

Despite the fact the the young bird is pretty well fully grown the adult still ensures that the food is pushed well down the throat of it's off-spring.

This is the first time that I've seen this behaviour. It is really only this year that the Great Spotted Woodpeckers have switched from peanuts to sunflower seed hearts.

A Damsel in distress?

Today was the first day that there have been Damselflies round the ponds in the garden. I don't think that I checked yesterday, and the ones I watched today look as if they've been out for a little while.

The Azure Blue Damselfly is the fist out here and there were several around at each of the ponds. The distinguishing character is the U mark on segment two.

They haven't wasted a lot of time, and the males were already paying the females a lot of attention. In this case they're mating in the characteristic "mating wheel position", and a second male was in close attendance.

The mating system of dragonflies and Damselflies is unique among insects. The males primary genitalia are near the end of the abdomen, but he also has secondary genitalia under segment two of the abdomen. While the female is at rest he clasps her thorax with his legs and then bends his abdomen and transfers sperm from the primary to the secondary genitalia. When they mate, he uses the anal appendages to clasp the female round the thorax and she moves her abdomen to the right position to receive the sperm. This seems a very complex system compared to the wham bam thank you mam of many mammals!

While I was photgraphing the Azure Damselflies I noticed a second species resting on a reed.

As far as I can remember it is the first time that I've recorded Large Red Damselflies in the garden. I will have to have a look round the vegetation tomorrow to see if I can find any excuvia (the case left when the adult Damselfly emerges from the final stage of the larva.

Monkey Business

One of the gems in the Kent countryside is the beautiful chalk grassland at Park Gate Down.

Not a huge nature reserve but a wonderful wildflower meadow. At this time of year the star attraction is the Monkey Orchid colony.

Monkey Orchid (Orchis simia)

I was probably a few days late than I should have been when I visited them today, although many of the individual flowers are still in good nick, they have lost the overall freshness that was probably evident earlier.

The individual flowers show the long arms, legs and tail that give it the name Monkey orchid. The Monkey Orchid was once far more common but many were lost to ploughing of downland. The colony at Park Gate was established in the 1960's after seed from one of the last remaining colonies, at Faversham, had been scattered. The first flowers appeared in 1965, seven years after the seed was sown, but then not again until 1976. Now they are hundreds of plants, and providing that there is no calamitous climate changes the colony should continue to expand.

I have to say that the description of a tail does seem to miss the anatomical mark to me!

A much less spectacular Orchid in the reserve is the Common Twayblade, named after the pair of leaves at the base of the stem.

Common Twayblade (Neottia ovata)

The spikes can have as many as 100 individual flowers. I watched an ichneumon fly going round one plant and I think that it is one of the pollinators, along with some Sawflies. The seeds take 15 years to produce matures plants so vegetative reproduction is probably the the most important method of maintaining a succession of plants.

Centenary Transmissions

Most people now about the first crossing of the Channel by Louis Bleriot on July 25th 1909. He won a £1000 prize from the Daily Mail (I'll clean the keyboard having typed that). Who'd have thought they'd pay a prize to an immigrant!! How many people know about the Englishman who made the first non stop return channel crossing on June 2nd 1910. You can find out all about it here.

As part of the celebration of Charles Stewart Rolls feat the Dover Amateur Radio Club are holding an event by the Monument. The Ariel the one of the radios in high above on a kite, and the call sign is GB1CR in honour of the aviator.

Charles Rolls was also the joint founder of Rolls Royce, but unfortunately he didn't live long enough to see the huge success his company had made. On July 12th he was killed during a flying display at Hengistbury Airfield, Bournemouth. He was the first Briton to be killed in a flying accident and the 11th internationally.

When I was there they were receiving calls from France, Germany and Holland, but later, when the sun went down, they would have been in touch with countries as distant as Japan.

I don't think the police visit was official, just a bit of curiosity. It was interesting to see the constable on the left carefully shielding his cigarette in his right hand, rather like a surreptitious drag by a schoolboy in the playground.

I've noticed this week that Dunnocks are feeding a lot on the hanging feeders. This isn't something that I've noticed before, I don't know how widespread this is. Notice the screw used as a perch, a post squirrel repair job.