Studland
Image from Southampton Geology
I'm pretty familiar with Studland as it was my main research site for my dissertation! I spent about 3 months looking at wood ant nests (very closely, getting covered in ants a lot)... which is what half of this post is about! It was quite a warm day today, which meant that some of my favourite residents of Studland were active- which actually was quite surprising for me, as although the sun was out, I didn't think it would be quite warm enough for the insane numbers of Formica rufa we saw about their nests.
Ant swarms! This actually makes sense for the time of year- it's the warmest it's been for a couple of weeks today, so they've all come out to swarm and make new nests. Interestingly, on the first active nest we found, there were only ants in a select few places on the actual nest material, clustered mainly in a south easterly direction, where the sun was at that point in time! You can sort of see this in the picture above, with air holes as well where ventilation of the nest was taking place due to the massive numbers of ants clustered in one part.
Glorious microfauna
Moving on from this first nest, which was a teeming mass (to put it lightly), we moved on to one of the hides on Studland to have a quick look around to see what birds were on the lake. On the walk down to the hide, we came across this monster of a nest- not only is the nest the very dark mass of ants (literally, that's just ants!), but to the right as well, the huge flattish pine needle area. You can actually only see half of it, and there were trails all over the place as well- I'm balancing on the log there because it was the only place I could stand for more than a second and not get absolutely coated all over my legs with interested foragers and upset soldiers!
The best animals to pet
Eventually we moved on from this spectacle to take a wander down to the hide. It's tucked quite away from the road, so not many people really know about it, which makes it a pretty nice spot. There isn't a whole lot to see a lot of the time, unless you sit there for ages with a pair of strong binoculars, but there is a diary that people write their sightings in, so if you're lucky you can see marsh harrier and some nice ducks like pintail and little grebe (or dabchick). We saw a couple of great crested grebe and a couple of cormorants- and then hit the jackpot.
One of the lesser known residents of Little Sea are otters. We've been going out to this hide for the past 18 months or so (basically since we first heard about it being a good spot to otter watch), and have never seen even a tail, only the records in the aforementioned diary that there had been sightings. The last one was January 30th, so we didn't really think we'd spot one. But then, just as we were about to pack up and head off, black ripples in the water! Not just one otter, but a whole family of them swimming across the lake!
The picture's not fantastic, but there they are! Will definitely have to be heading back again in the future to see if we can spot them again, and actually remember to take binoculars next time...
