Dawlish Warren

I have a made a couple of visits to Dawlish Warren recently mainly looking for birds, the first visit involving mostly lingering over-wintering waders and wildfowl out in the Exe estuary including a flock of brent geese that included an individual of the pale-bellied race.

 

(Pale-bellied brent goose)

Later on I saw more newly arrived migrants including a mixture of common warblers, sandwich terns, several flocks of whimbrel, common scoter and buzzard coming off the sea.

I also timed my visit to see the nationally rare sand crocus which usually blooms in the first two weeks of April. The sand crocus (Romulea columnae) which is known locally as the warren crocus is only known to occur at one other site in Britain in Cornwall. It is a native species right on the very northern edge of its range. The mild winters, warm summer climate, poor nutrient levels and freely draining soil at the warren make it suitable outpost for a small population of the species to thrive. At 7mm in diameter they are pretty tiny and surprisingly easy to miss, but still bigger than some of the other specialities of the site I found.

(Sand crocus)

There was plenty of early-forget-me-not in flower too which was nice to see and with some advice from the warden I finally tracked down petalwort. Petalwort (Petalophyllum ralfslii) is a small green liverwort found in damp hollows within sand dune slacks and is only known from 26 sites in the UK. It was a real hands and kness job to find one, but one you find it is was surprisingly conspicuous but was still restricted to just  maybe 2 or 3 square metres within the dune slacks that I could find. Very much a niche existence!

(Early forget-me-not)

(Petalwort)

On the way home from work with my colleague a couple of days later, we had an osprey fly low directly over the car, which was a nice surprise. (no pictures unfortunately) We suspect it was following the River Dart to head north initially.