Short Of The Record

Now that I'm back at work I don't have as much freedom to pick and choose my trips out and on my day off this week it appeared a damp forecast for most of my regular haunts. One location dodging the rain was Macclesfield and accordingly I made a morning bee-line for the Cheshire Wildlife Trust site at Danes Moss. This small-but-perfectly-formed site nestles discreetly under the gaze of the Sutton Common BT tower and hemmed in on one side by transport old and new - the Macclesfield Canal and the West Coast Mainline. The footpath onto the site is along sunken lanes between farm fields and there were some tantalising burrows large and small along the banking - the smaller ones surely voles but could the larger ones be rabbit or something even more exciting? 

A buzzard was soaring and calling over the moss as I came out onto the reserve. When I was last here in early summer the moss was white with cotton grass but today the predominant colour was the pink of rosebay willowherb. Not only was it not raining but the sun was occasionally making an appearance but in breezy conditions very few insects were on the wing and over the course of the morning the only flying insect finds of note were a single gatekeeper, some wasps munching on the wooden boardwalk, a common darter and a large red damselfly. 

Midsummer on the Moss                                        Buzzard

If the breeze was keeping the insects quiet it certainly wasn't affecting the common lizards and as I checked along the boardwalk and onto the peaty heathland they were out in abundance. Many of them were this year's youngsters, born live rather than as eggs of course as common lizards do, and the stick-thin babies looked like they were made from bits of burnt matchstick. In places they were piled up in twos and threes and they were quite rightly very wary, diving for cover as I got closer. The adults, boldly marked in browns, greens and oranges and speckled and striped - no two lizards look the same to me - were slightly bolder and I managed to get some good close-ups. I gave up counting at 50 but a gentleman I encountered later on the walk told me I was some way short of the site record of 112!

Common Lizards Young and Older

The edges of the Moss are framed by birch woodland and here were more signs of summer fading into autumn despite this still being July. Fungi were out in abundance, a fine matt bolete poking up through the moss and a range of other fruiting bodies including some well-chewed Amanita specimens (blusher?). I've definitely seen a lot more mushrooms in the last few weeks which I would normally expect to see in September and October - the heat of May and rain of June appears to have triggered an early spurt of growth. Purple was the predominant plant colour with heather, bittersweet and knapweed all in flower.

         

Rounding off the walk I spotted two examples of nature's real curiosities - galls. An oak 

sapling had a couple of fresh oak marble galls emerging. I've generally only spotted old examples of these where the wasp has already drilled its way out but these were nice and new. With an equally evocative name, the nearby birch trees had some witches' broom galls clustered in their branches - formed by any combination of mites, insects, fungi, virus or bacteria these weird mutations can absolutely festoon the branches of birch trees at times.