Wolves Wild

Butterbur in a Devon lane, already turning to seed after flowering soon after the turn of the year.

The RSPB reserve at Bowling Green Marsh, Topsham, has an open access hide with scrapes right below the viewing windows. It’s often possible to get good views of ducks or waders in this part of the marsh, and reasonable pictures even with a medium powered telephoto lens. That was what I had for these pintails.

Mimosas are tropical trees. They can be grown outside in Britain in places with particularly mild winters. But even there they are vulnerable to untypical cold spells.

These trees can be seen while wandering the streets of Topsham. They looked very unhappy in the aftermath of the heavy snows of the “beast from the east”, which came in about this time of year a few years ago, but now look like they have fully recovered.

Turnstones get their name from their habit of turning over large pebbles in the inter-tidal zone in search of crabs and other invertebrates underneath. Low tide, off the Goatwalk at Topsham doesn’t have such loose stones. So this small group of turnstones (four or five altogether) were exploring clumps of seaweed, presumably in search of the same prey.

Hogweed plants flowering mid-February in Devon. One near the south coast of the county, at Topsham on the Exe estuary. The other on the north coast, at Ilfracombe.

Large numbers of Brent geese spend the winter on the Exe estuary, a temperate refuge from their breeding grounds in Siberia. They can be seen in their hundreds at high tide gathering in the marshes which run along the estuary, such as Exminster Marsh.

This smaller group had gone elsewhere, and were on rocks just off the beach at Exmouth, where some of them seemed to be eating the seaweed.