Sarah West
A bird that sounds like rocks, and more...
Last Wednesday it felt more like December than May, but a group of 10 people braved the icy wind and we went for a walk along the Pocklington Canal, East Yorkshire, for an OPAL course called "Look Listen and Learn". This course was led by bird expert John Wint from the Yorkshire Naturalists Union and he made sure that we did lots of listening, looking and learning. My favourite part of the course was hearing a sedge warbler. The sedge warbler call sounds like someone grinding two stones together! Have a listen on the RSPB site and let me know if you agree!
And here's a picture of one, taken from the Encyclopaedia of Life. Quite a drab looking bird compared to its song.
Other highlights were a noisy curlew mobbing a marsh harrier over nearby Wheldrake Ings.
At first, the warblers all sounded very similar to my ears, but by the end of the walk I could tell the difference between a couple of them. What I need now is some more practice. And more sunshine next time, please.
- OPAL Yorkshire and the Humber
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A novel hat used in a novel way
Yesterday I had a brilliant day at Anglers Country Park, Wakefield, helping run an OPAL Insect Identification course. The reason it was so great was that one guy on the course confessed very early on to having a spider phobia, and wasn't that sure about insects either. But, by the end of the day, he'd happily sucked all manner of minibeasts up into a pooter (a pot with two tubes, one of which you stick over the invertebrate, and the other you use to suck the insect into the pot), and was handling all sorts of creatures, including the large but harmless dor beetle www.arkive.org/dor-beetle/geotrupes-stercorarius/ which had flown into the visitor centre.
The guys developed a novel approach for looking at the beetle, one of them had a hat with a little inbuilt light, which he used to shine onto the beetle whilst it wiggled about under the little microscope!
You can just about see the light on the end of the hat in this picture. Thanks guys for all your enthusiasm, it really made my day 
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