30 Days Wild: Day 2

Lots to see along the canal feeder!

For the second day of 30 Days Wild,  I decided we'd go for a walk to a local reservoir and back. The route would take us along a canal feeder, to the reservoir, and back along a former railway line. I'll blog about the entire day separately to this soon.

We saw lots of different wildlife on our walk, but the most exciting was the damselfly in the main photo! It's a male Banded Demoiselle (Calopteryx splendens). Although we walk this way quite regularly, we've never seen one of these!

Further along, we saw some 'cow bingo'! In the fields in this area, the farmer marks his cattle with numbers painted on the side of them. I've no idea why, but it's quite amusing and always makes us think of bingo.

Cow bingo!

We also saw a pair of humping hoverflies! There were absolutely loads of hoverflies around, but this randy pair stopped flying for long enough for me to take a photo!

Humping hoverflies

These particular two are Syrphus vitripennis. You can identify the difference between these are their counterpart Syrphus ribesii, by the black femora (the top part of the legs) on vitripennis. Their courtship was only brief (in human terms anyway) but these buzzing little creatures are obviously very successful in these parts, going on the sheer amount of them!

Today has been a great day! I'm really looking forward to day 3!

You can read all of my 30 Days Wild posts here!