A family flotilla of Canada Geese passes by a pair of resting grebes on Tatton Park’s lake. Springtime!
The bypass lasted only a few seconds, as the flotilla was steaming along, so I had to be quick with the shot.
Goslings and Grebes
Tag: Tatton Park
Banded Demoiselle
Last week’s hot spell gave me the gift of quite a few minutes spent watching and photographing these magical banded demoiselle damselflies, by the lake outflow stream in Tatton Park. These are larger than the average damselfly, almost of a size more typical of dragonflies.
Click to see closer.
Their colours are startling blues and greens in bright sunlight. According to the British Dragonfly Society, the two genders are distinguished as follows:
- Male: metallic blue body with broad dark blue-black spots across outer parts of wings.
- Female: metallic green body with translucent pale green wings. (Wikipedia suggests there may also be a white patch near the tip of the female’s wings).
Most of these are pobably males, or maybe not?
Blue Green Algae
When we first move to Knutsford in 1986 there was no generally recognised problem of blue green algae or cyanobacteria. There was a small sandy beach by the lake in Tatton Park, where people would go to picnic and bathe in the lakewater. Dogs swam in the lake without problem; even daughter’s Westie put his toes in.
Then, in the early nineties, notices began to appear about blooms of blue green algae in the water; dogs should not go in and people should definitely not bathe. They appeared with increasing frequency, and are now a permanent feature. The sandy beach is long gone.
Almost everywhere you go in Britain these algae seem to have got a hold, with a detrimental effect on other wildlife. Last year we witnessed dead Canada geese being removed from Shakerley Mere because of poisoning, suspected to be the very evident blue green algae.
Close up the resulting scum can appear ugly, but can sometimes give almost beautiful effects, as in the following picture.
So what causes these algal blooms and what changed?
Read More »
Coming into velvet
The red deer at Tatton Park are just now coming into velvet, starting to grow their antlers ready for the battles of autumn. On a hot June afternoon they’re content to rest in the long grass, awaiting the cool of evening.
Fresh oak
It’s Maytime and everything is bursting into life, notably Tatton Park’s oak trees.
Beech tree avenue
Tatton Park’s avenue of majestic venerable beech trees, before the leave come out, as they soon will.
The lower branches grow almost sideways, but not downward as is their wont, as Tatton’s red deer are efficient pruners.
You can still see brown leaves retained throughout the winter, typical of beech (marcescence).
Magpies in the spring
Magpies are common in UK, and can be a bit of a pest, thieving food intended for other birds. But catch them in the right light and they can be rather beautiful, like the above recent shot from Tatton Park.
They are particularly active in spring, with spells of amorous behaviour interspersed with avid feeding from what they can find in the ground.
Melchett Mere
The county of Cheshire contains a number of smallish lakes, or meres. Many date back to the glacial period of the last ice age, ‘occupying hollows in the glacial drift surface of the Cheshire Plain’ (see itemised list). The lake in Tatton Park, known as Tatton Mere, is one of these meres of glacial origin.
Just north west of the top of Tatton Mere lies a smaller lake, named Melchett Mere, but at a noticeably lower elevation. Is this another glacial lake? It seems not. Cheshire also has a history of salt extraction and mining, notably in the area around nearby Northwich and Wincham from the 17th century. Uncontrolled mining activity led to great subsidences of ground and the formation of lakes, such as the notorious Ashton’s and Neumann’s flashes near Wincham.
Effects of the salt mining activites, and particularly wild brine pumping, were often felt many miles away. According to the National Trust, Melchett Mere in Tatton Park was formed by a sudden collapse in 1922. The resulting lake was named by Lord Egerton after the then chairman of the extractive company he believed to have been responsible (presumably Henry Mond, 2nd Baron Melchett, who became deputy chairman of ICI in the 1940s).
Subsidence due to brine pumping activities is serious business in Cheshire, as evidence by the existence of the Brine Subsidence Compensation Board. Some of the land in this area is still subsiding. Notably this lies on the proposed route for the HS2 high speed train. I hope those guys know what they’re getting into!
A dead tree
Thank God the days are gone when dead trees were removed from the landscape, part of an obsession with tidiness that took little account of the web of life in which we are embedded. The dead tree is an ecosystem containing countless organisms and fungi, all about the miraculous job of reducing solid wood back to the soil it came from.
Our National Trust now usually leaves trees where they fall in the landscape. This one at Tatton Park was probably once a spectacular oak tree, now gracefully yet vulnerably declining back to its origins.
Thus individual life emerges from the collective, lives and flourishes, and eventually dies and returns home.
Fallow deer at Tatton
Tatton Park is home to two species of free-ranging deer. Most easily seen are the spectacular red deer, which often congregate near to the Knutsford entrance. More numerous are the smaller fallow deer. These are much more timid, so tend to stay away from the areas popular with people.
Recently, this grazing group presented a pretty picture, with one sentinel alert and standing guard – probably checking our dog was on his lead.
There’s a comparison of antlers for male red and fallow deer in this post.
Tatton in the rain
It rained all day today, never stopping as I walked around Tatton Park. It was still worth carrying the little camera in my pocket for this chance picture of pooled water on the grass, with trees, lake and grey sky in the background.
The scene was actually a bit duller than the picture looks, due to clever camera and adjustment with Paint Shop Pro.
The prominent trees are mostly oaks.
New Year’s Eve, Tatton
Towards sundown in winter Tatton Park becomes a place of magic, with wonderful images of sky, silhouettes of trees and the lakes. The recent snow and ice on the lake gave an added bonus this New Year’s Eve.
I couldn’t decide which of two similar images to include, so here they are both.
Egyptian goose
What was this unusual pair of ducks or geese with eye patches, a ring around the neck and attractive variegated wing colouring, an unusual sight on the lake in Tatton Park?
It seems that they are Egyptian geese, related to the more common shelduck. Egyptian geese were originally introduced into the UK as an ornamental species and now established in the wild.
Striking birds!
In velvet
The antlers of the red deer in Tatton Park have been growing for quite a while, as they do every spring; they are ‘in velvet‘. Their texture really do look like soft velvet. They can grow up to an inch a day.
As with most photography, the lighting makes all the difference.Read More »
Devil’s Coach Horse Beetle
This long (more than an inch) black beetle was all but invisible on the stony path I was walking on in Tatton Park. I had no great hopes for the photograph, but the image comes up reasonably well with a bit of brightening up.
I think this is a Devil’s Coach Horse Beetle. Apparently, this is one of 46000 species of the rove beetle family, a fast and ferocious night time predator. And it has a nasty bite and can emit a foul smelling odour. I had sort of intuited that it was an unsavoury character!
The segmented abdomen allows it to curl the tail up, like a scorpion. Neither the Wildlife Trusts (above link) nor Wikipedia explains why – I’d guess it’s for balance.
Small Skipper 2
This small skipper butterfly was sunbathing in Tatton Park, a fine picture on the thistle flower.
A close look shows what a furry creature this is, and what a big eye it has!
Dancing Grebes
Sometimes you get lucky. In the unseasonably warm February afternoon on Tatton Park’s lake, we suddenly spotted two great crested grebes courting. What an amazing dance they performed. The light was still good, so some sort of reasonable pictures were possible with my Panasonic Lumix TZ200 on maximum zoom, although the show only lasted a minute or two. Here’s a selection:
Click on individual images for more detail.
Grebes and swans
As the sun goes down on Melchett Mere (previous post), the grebes use the last of the light to carry on fishing, frequently disappearing under water.
And the mute swans begin to settle for the night.
Low sun on Melchett Mere
On a clear January afternoon the sun slowly settles down behind the trees. The effects on the water of Tatton Park’s Melchett Mere are quite striking.
Boxing Day in Tatton
Many people were out to walk off the Christmas food in Cheshire’s Tatton Park. A clear sky, sun going down, still water on the lake, trees, gathering mist over the grass – promising ingredients for photographs, despite the reducing light level. How about these trees?
I can't believe it! 