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Nature Notes – December 2018

By December 7, 2018December 19th, 2018Wildlife

This month, we’re asking you for your nature notes. What are you seeing on the meadow now?

Send us your nature sightings and photos and we’ll share them. It could be a plant that’s still flowering, a winter bird arrival or a butterfly venturing out in some sun. Whatever you’re finding interesting out on the squelchy meadow… I’ll update this post over the month with any more sightings.

From Facebook, we’ve so far had sightings of salmon swimming up the weir at French Weir, a Kingfisher perching on a branch over the river and lots of tiny goldcrests in the brambles (the pictures are from further down the river but still Taunton).

Twitter is letting the side down.

Here’s my sighting, from right in the middle of the willow cathedral. I thought I was going to get a picture of a magpie, but I quickly realised the pair of magpies were shouting at this tiny creature, running from column to column over open ground right in front of me. A very lucky encounter.

Weasel!

Now of course, we all know how to tell the difference between a weasel and a stoat. Weasels are weasily recognised, but stoats are stoatally different. (Urgh. Sorry. Very small animal and a short tail with no black tip makes this a weasel rather than a stoat in my book.)

If you’re not on social media and you’d like us to share your photo or sighting you can email them to me* (or send a link to where your picture is published elsewhere, for example flickr or instagram): hester.stanwood@gmail.com

– Hester

*Please only send pictures you took yourself and are happy for us to publish on this website and share over our social media channels.