Lake View wildlife report for September 2010

This is written in mid-October, so a bit late with my summary of last month. September saw the end of summer and the beginning of an Autumn bumper fruit harvest. Like everyone, we've got plenty of apples, damsons and plums; come and get some cooking apples and damsons if you wish, both picked and pick-your-own. Some red admiral butterflies found some fallen plums and I took a photo of them eating the sugar.

Caz id'd a Chiffchaff for the first time here by call; it looked slightly different to the normal Willow warblers which would have already gone south. I took a photo of a bathing juvenile robin. The swallows gathered, like notes on a music stave, on our power lines. A swallow or two roosted in our shed, with the last overnight stay on 18th September.

Below is our smallish crop of onions and the remains of our broad bean patch. Our kale goes to seed each year and we string it through the field gate so we can see the birds feeding on them. As an experiment, I made a small haystack after a first late summer cut of the 'meadow' on the 12th. Our three compost heaps are still being used in rotation, with occasional replacement of the front boards; we seem to have stopped bothering to cover them up - my corrugated iron covers are a bit lethal.

We were given 3 more young trees by Wendy, which we managed to squeeze into our already pretty full patch. In shed I found an interesting bit of ironmongery, possibly a chimney access door, or an oven door?

We've helped out at the RSPB Haweswater, both taking down the battle-weary hide shed for the winter, and weeding in the tree nursery.

I took a turn round Swindale and Mosedale. If you look very closely at the photo of Mosedale cottage you can see tree guards along the top of the quarry containing junipers planted by the RSPB:

At the end of the month I bought a copy of Mosses and Liverworts of Britain and Ireland: a field guide - quite a thick book with 848 pages which I've yet to get to grips with properly, £24.95. I'm not sure if the binding will last though it is in plastic cover. I'd like an English names index. There's a brief introduction but I'd probably prefer that to be bigger to help the boggled aspirant.
Moths on 3/9/10: Antler 4, Common marbled carpet 2, Flame carpet 1, Lesser Broad-bordered Yello underwing 2, * Phoenix (f) 1, Rosy rustic 1, Large yellow underwing 1, Centre barred sallow 1, Dark sword grass 1.

The linked table below shows the maximum count of each bird species seen, along with best breeding code, primarily in our back garden near Bampton Cumbria in NY51 VC69 (and in our surrounding 1km square) in the period from November 2007 until September 2010, with a total count of 54 species, 24 this month.
Full Lake View Monthly Max Bird Count Seen table

Species	Sept-10
Blackbird	3
Blue tit	10
Brambling
Bullfinch
Buzzard	2
Carrion crow
Chaffinch	10
Chiffchaff	1 S
Coal tit	3
Collared dove
Curlew
Dunnock	2
Fieldfare
Garden Warbler
Goldcrest
Goldfinch	5
Great spotted woodpecker	4
Great tit	3
Greenfinch	2
Grey heron
House martin	2
Jackdaw	8
Jay
Kestrel
Lapwing
Linnet
Long-tailed tit	10
Magpie
Meadow pipit
Mistle thrush
Nuthatch
Peregrine
Pheasant	7
Pied flycatcher
Pied wagtail	1
Raven
Redstart
Redwing
Reed bunting
Robin	2
Siskin
Skylark
Song thrush	1
Sparrowhawk
Spotted flycatcher	1
Starling	1
Stock dove
Swallow	70
Swift
Tawny owl
Willow warbler	2
Woodpigeon	1
Wren	1
Yellowhammer
Total: 54	24