Ladies day

Highlights from a morning's trawl around the patch this orning included the following:

Freeman's Pools: Pretty quiet, 12 coot, 2 mallard, 1 oystercatcher, 3 moorhen, 1 grey heron, 2 little grebe attending the new nest and another on the upper pools.
Unsurprisingly there have been no little ringed plovers present since the nest was predated.
A few hirundines were around (all species present), plus a handful of swifts.
The most notable thing was the number of immaculate newly emerged painted ladies, hardly a surprise given the huge numbers here in spring and the ensuing caterpillar-fest. Shame about the crappy forecast really as there will be a lot more to come.

Darter Pool: Moorhen pair with 2 young, 1 grey heron. 1 Emperor dragonfly and a common darter here as well as the numerous commoner damselflies.

Wildfowlers' Pools: 4 green sandpiper present. Absolutely naff all else, bar a brown hawker.

River Lune: 6 common sandpiper, 2 whimbrel, 1 little egret. Approximately 250 greylag now on the marsh. Still no Med gulls amongst the hundreds of BH's! A peregrine and a sparrowhawk were freaking out the large starling flocks.

Of note: at home later, Jenny called me into the back yard where she'd discovered some weird insect making a racket in a carrier bag full of garden waste... it turned out to be a startlingly huge woodwasp with a deadly looking ovipositer! Never seen one of those in urban Lancaster before, and we're miles away from any significant conifers. Is this a fairly common sighting?