Record those sightings!

Perhaps the most noticeable innovation Norfolk Wildlife Trust has made on the Commons so far is the introduction of a whiteboard at the Lower Street information point for visitors to tell everyone about the plants and wildlife they have seen. A small thing perhaps, and hardly an original idea, but it has been seized on by visitors who have already left a record of 26 species seen (or heard) in the 17 days since the board went up.

The board is being regularly photographed to capture what has been recorded, and then the records are transferred to a list and passed on to NWT. Obviously, it fills up, so the older records are rubbed off to make room for new ones - simples! Here's the latest one.

Please, please, do add your sightings whenever you visit - every record adds to the picture of the richness the Commons hold.

As well as recording what makes the Commons their home, another golden rule is "if you have a camera, take it". I have taken a lot of photographs here over the years, but I don't always feel like carrying my camera around the Commons. Inevitably, that is often a mistake, as it was today. Firstly, I had a rare good view of a reed bunting taking a beakful of food to its young. I was actually trying to spot the singing reed warbler, which was very unlikely to happen, but how I would have liked to get a photo of the bunting showing such interesting behaviour!

Further along the boardwalk a magpie (or Magenpie as Gerald Durrell used to call them) was posing at the top of a bare tree. Due no doubt to centuries of persecution they tend to be wary of people, but this one was unusually confident, and a camera with a half-decent lens would have made a good image, showing off their beautiful plumage well. In the event, my phone on maximum zoom had to suffice. Here is the result, heavily cropped and manipulated, but still very poor. Strangely, it is not a bird I have ever managed to photograph on the Commons well enough to publish on the website.

STOP PRESS!

We had been recording species for many years whilst the Commons were under the management of Southrepps Commons Trust, and made lists available on our website. The most recent of those lists, for birds, moths and most particularly plants are now available from the NWT website at https://www.norfolkwildlifetrust.org.uk/wildlife-in-norfolk/commons/southrepps-common

Thanks are due to NWT for hosting these lists and many of the photographs taken on the Commons over the years.