Tarifa, Spain!

I haven't written a blog post for a million years, once again. This always happens because work gets so busy! I'm in Surrey now (new school term, new county seems to be a developing habit of mine... although I intend to stop that from now onwards), working at the Field Studies Council. 7 years on from a school trip to Juniper Hall, and I'm here teaching the students I once was!

I am entirely behind on all the topics I wanted to cover over the past month and a half, so I am going to start from the most recent set of pictures I have and work back (or up, or down, or sort-of around) that in the next few posts.
Or I might completely ignore that and take another hiatus, followed by another random post. Who even knows.

Geography stuff, so you don't have to spend the post googling places

Last week I was in Spain, travelling around Andalucia for a holiday before properly starting my new job. Andalucia is fantastic for birds; as the shortest gap from Europe to Africa, the Straits of Gibraltar attract thousands of raptors in September. Which was great for me, as we were heading down that direction for the later part of our holiday. After a quick facebook scour of the best sites to go to see the migration, I was told Tarifa was the place to go for "8000 honey buzzards"*.

Image from birdlife.at

*Which I promptly ended up calling honey badgers for the entire holiday.

Don't look it in the eyes

8000 honey buzzards sounded pretty great, so we plugged Tarifa into the SatNav and off we went!
I had actually seen a honey buzzard on the holiday already, near El Caminito del Rey (an awesome place to visit, although difficult to get booked onto with all the publicity when it opened). However, one honey buzzard cannot compare with 8000, so it was pretty exciting to be heading down the coast. We'd seen a lot of other raptors in the week we'd been in Andalucia already; the province is loaded with griffon vultures, and eagles weren't an uncommon sight in the mountainous regions around Grazalema. We spotted a golden eagle from one of the mountains (deemed "standard", by the eager-to-see-8000-honey-badgers boyfriend), and a few booted eagles, handsome birds with dark fingered wings, and pale bodies and inner feathers.

It was about an hour's drive from where we were staying to Tarifa, which is a really great spot for kite surfing. Apparently, difficult to find the prime birding spots though, as a lot of the countryside immediately outside of Tarifa is barred to cars due to being MOD land, or just plain inaccessable. Driving along the main motorway, we came across a viewpoint with a pretty good view of the straits though, Africa in the distance.

It was obviously not the spot people used for birdwatching though, with the quick turnover of tourists taking selfies with the view, and a distinct lack of binoculars and telescopes. With all my excitement to get going and catch the morning migration, I hadn't actually looked up the spot everyone went to, just flicking through a couple of pictures and hoping that it would be obvious once we got there. We turned back towards Tarifa and started to look for a different route possibly into the countryside outside of Tarifa through the town itself, rather than getting stuck on the motorway all the way to Algeciras.
Before we hit Tarifa though, ding ding ding! Spotting a coach on one side of the road, we made a quick U-turn up to a random building literally in the middle of nowhere (hello, chewed-up dirt track), and saw the expected hoard of telescopes and twitchers to go with them. The spot! It was definitely the right place...

Unfortunately it was a really windy day, so we didn't have that much luck spotting anything. The few raptors we did see whizzed past after only a few seconds, some of the smaller ones buffeted literally sideways by the strong winds. There were some nice booted eagles and a couple of cattle egrets, but definitely nowhere near as many birds as we had hoped.

No matter, even though the conditions weren't great, it was good to know that we had gotten to Tarifa. If I'm ever in the area again, we know where to head to see the migration!

A small update...

Work has been such a crazy ride over the past few months, I've had absolutely no time at all to write a blog post since March, apparently. But now it's starting to come to a bit of a quieter period, what with the summer starting for schools, so I actually have some time to do things like this! Commence incoming backlog of posts, probably in a bit of a weird order as I try and cram four months of posts into probably four weeks.

A selection of pictures of work... honestly!

I've been living on the Dorset coast again since February, working as a field studies tutor- which means I'm outdoors all the time (bliss!) There's loads of wildlife around and really awesome geography, so there'll be a bit of a mixture of blog posts coming up eventually. I shan't spoil it though, mostly because I am not sure what order I'm going to write them in...

Little Sea and Studland

It's been quiet on Dendrocopos lately because I've been really busy with lots of exciting new life changes! In short, I've just quit my old admin job, started a new field studies job, passed my driving test, and done lots of travelling up and down the country. Now I'm based down in Dorset, teaching geography in Purbeck for the next 6 months.

Studland

The most exciting adventure of this week (so far, it's only tuesday) has been a trip to Studland and Little Sea with my parents. Studland is a peninsula created over 300 years from blown sand, forming distinct dune systems with ridges and slumps. Without going into too much geological detail (mostly because I am not an expert on it!) Studland is made up from deposits of sand, silt and gravel from the sea, which has built up over years and years of deposition. Heathland has grown over the area today, creating a unique environment perfect for studying blown sand formations.

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...

The Shivering Mountain

Been on a bit of a hiatus over the holiday season, because I've been so busy travelling up and down the country and enjoying the (fairly good) weather! A large part of my holiday I was in the Peak District, so the next few posts are going to be from there.

On Boxing Day (my birthday), we headed to the Peak District from Macclesfield to Mam Tor. Mam Tor is a fairly massive steep hill near Castleton, which you can see from the top, factory belching smoke included. The path isn't the easiest climb, but it's well maintained by the National Trust, so it's not horrendous. Once you get to the top, there's an awesome view- even with cloud- and a nice long walk along the ridge of hills.

The path from Mam Tor

It gets a bit rougher further along, but even in the mucky damp weather we had, it was alright to climb, and very busy! In good weather, you can see really far, almost to Manchester, but we had low snow clouds for the whole day, so we couldn't see that far.

It took us a couple of hours to work our way along the top of the ridge and down towards Castleton, to the east of Mam Tor. The path down was a bit difficult for us to find, as our map was a little dated. There were some pretty steep bits here and there, and lots of winter mud too, but it was okay with walking boots on!
Castleton is small- we didn't go into it really as our path diverted away along the Odin Sitch river and back towards the hills, but we did find some chickens interested in stealing bits of gingerbread...

We also came across a hare bounding through the fields as we walked through the fields! Too quick to take photos of though, it was off in a flash. Heading back up the hills, we came to one of the most interesting bits of our walk; the A625 road. Now, this might not sound exciting at first mention- after all, how can just an A-road be interesting?

Backstory time! Mam Tor is also called the Shivering Mountain, because of Mam Tor's primarily shale geology. Multiple landslips have occurred over time, causing multiple smaller hills to form on the side of the peak itself. The A625 road was built in the 1800s, but closed in 1979 due to landslips distorting the road beyond safety. Once we got there, it was instantly obvious as to why!

Cross section of part of the old tarmacked road. The drop was a good 5ft down

You can see the effort put into trying to keep the road flat and open, by the multiple levels of tarmac put onto the road! It's ruined now, although a couple of cars did follow us up quite a long way along the driveable part of the road... which was concerning, when you couldn't see the drop in the previous picture until you were literally standing on it!

We didn't stick around for too long, as it was fairly late by the time we got to the road, and the snow clouds were starting to close in more and more. So, these are annoyingly the only two pictures I have! By the time we got back to the car though, it was dark. And, an extra-special birthday surprise, it started to snow when we were walking along the last (driveable) road to the National Trust car park for Mam Tor!

You can find the approximate route for the walk we did on the National Trust's page.

After an impromptu hiatus...

Whoops, I let this slip a little. Summer has been so busy though; I've been out enjoying the lovely weather, rather than being inside writing! It's not so nice today though (rather grey), so time to re-start this little project of mine.

Hopefully this will give me a few things to write about in the next few weeks though, with a stack of things I've done. Also, lots of photos.

The thing I've done most this week, on my few days off, is rock balancing. It seems like a bit of a weird thing to do, but after an afternoon wander to Peveril Point a couple of weeks ago, I had the idea when someone else had left a couple of piles of rocks. They weren't especially difficult, but looked really cool. So, when I had nothing else to do at the start of this week (and the weather was nice), what better to do than head out to the point again and give it a go myself?

As a kid, I tried this a couple of times on Chesil Bay, which is a bit of a way down the coast, and has much more prevalent rock than Swanage beach. Unfortunately, I was pretty terrible at it, so never gave it another thought after then. Turns out I am actually fairly good at it once I get started though... As I was working on some of the taller stacks (11 is my current top number of rocks balanced on one another), it struck me how similar it was to dry stone walling. You have to find the right rock to balance (just like the right rock for the hole to fill in a wall), otherwise it's not right.

I did start to get a little bit carried away with it, and ended up making quite a lot of stacks the first day. There were a lot of comments too as I was working, near the end, as some of the stacks were fairly tall, and balanced on quite precarious edges!

 There are different techniques to rock balancing apparently, as a quick google afforded me that evening when I had come back and was uploading my pictures. The technique I had been using was called 'pure balance'; each rock is in near-point balance on one another. If you take the top rock off, the rest of the stack's still okay (unless you knock it). Another techinque some of the better rock balancers use is called 'counter balance' though, which affords some impossible looking structures, with rocks balanced at crazy angles. If you take off one rock, the rest is likely to fall.

The next day I used more angular rocks, which gave me a few crazy stacks like the one above. There were more impressive stacks I made, but forgot to take pictures. By the end of the day, I had ended up with 24 of my own stacks, and 1 other that someone had made overnight, apparently inspired by my own left-over creations!

Unfortunately the next day I went to try and stack rocks, it was much too windy and every pile I tried ended up falling over only a few minutes after I'd managed to put them together. A lot of the stacks I had left the day before had gone too, so I called it a day fairly quickly. When the conditions improve a bit more though, no doubt I'll be out there again!