Treecreeper in Brampton Wood

A good day, but very busy. It was really hard to drag myself out of bed at 6am - thank goodness I only have to do it once more before the Easter break!! Alex and I left the house in good time, but after we'd been driving for about five minutes I realised that I'd left my camera battery in the charger, and we had to turn round and go back to collect it, as I was planning to do some fieldwork straight after dropping him off.

Luckily the rest of the journey was smooth, and he was there in good time to catch the coach. I then headed off to spend the morning surveying Brampton Wood, the largest ancient woodland in Huntingdonshire. I've only been asked to look at the eastern end, but even so it took me over five hours to walk every ride, though this did include quite a few stops for note-taking and photography. When I started off the temperature was 2C and there was frost on the rides, but by the time I got back to the car it was 20C!!

The warm weather has really brought on the woodland flowers, and there were plenty of primroses, violets and barren strawberry in bloom, together with a scatter of wood anemones and the first few bluebells. Brimstone and peacock buterflies were patrolling the rides, accompanied by the weak fluttering of orange underwing moths. The white blackthorn flowers were attracting furry black hoverflies with golden rumps, who go by the name of Criorhina ranunculi.

There was a good selection of woodland birds, though many stayed high in the tree tops and could only be detected by their call. Among the more interesting were buzzard, nuthatch and bullfinch - but my favourite bird of the day was this treecreeper. I first noticed some sort of argument between it and some blue tits, but they promptly flew off and it stayed. It was totally unafraid of me, and I watched it for ages, creeping up the ash trunks, occasionally making its characteristic repeated call, and occasionally finding some tasty morsel on the bark. Unfortunately it spent most of its time either in the shade, or obscured by branches, but I managed to get a few clear shots.

I arrived home at 1.30 and had some badly needed lunch while Ben treated our wooden trellises with preservative. We then lay on the grass and finished off homeostasis - after teaching it three times I think I might finally have got the hang of kidney structure and function (at least at GCSE level!) We then baked scones and I prepared dinner and processed and labelled the days photographs. I'm feeling pretty shattered now, so I suspect it's another evening without time to make any comments :(