| Date: | 29th. April 2007 | |
| County: | CORNWALL | |
| Location: | Tehidy | |
| Type: | Scenic Area (Woods) | |
| Sub-Type: | Lakes, Stream, Birds, Wildlife | |
| Viewed by: | WALK from car park | |
| Car Park: | Free parking. | |
| Difficulty: | Mostly easy. Fairly flat. Can get muddy. | |
| Distance: | xKM. | |
| Season: | Spring | |
| Weather: | ? | |
| Time Of Day: | Mid-Late Afternoon | |
| Camera: | Casio Exilim EX-Z850 Pocket Zoom (JPG) | |
| Scene Rating: | ••••• |
I mentioned in my first post about Tehidy Country Park that we planned to visit again during May, when the rhododendrons are usually in bloom.
As it happened, it was sunny on the 29th. April and we had a few hours free, so we made another quick trip "To the woods!".
This time, instead of going to the North Cliff car-park, we turned left at the crest of the hill out of Portreath and drove via the hamlet of South Tehidy to the South Drive car-park - Tehidy Country Park's access point, which even has a small cafeteria!
The shortest of the colour-coded walks (dark purple on the map) starts at this point. It's the "Lakes Circular Walk" and it takes you past two small duck-ponds (where one mallard female already had a small brood of ducklings - eyed wolfishly from the bank by a number of hungry crows,) then around a larger lake populated by a variety of ducks, swans - and seagulls!
Gulls are so common along the Cornish Coast that you tend to ignore them after a while - only paying attention when they are particularly raucous, argumentative, thieving or belligerent. But looking at them floating quietly on the lake, we could see that they are actually an attractive bird, with pure white heads, yellow bills, clean lines and well defined soft grey wings shielding a black tail.
The gulls on the lake were probably all Herring Gulls, although there might have been some Lesser Black-Backed Gulls among them - I find it very hard to tell the two apart. (I can say that there weren't any of the larger Greater Black-Backed Gulls.)
The gulls and the crows wait on or around the lake for people to give bread to the swans and ducks. Then as soon as the visitors move away, there's a free-for-all as the bandits pile in, stealing as much as they can quickly pack into their gullet!
Of course, the most noble birds on the lake were the Mute Swans. There were probably 7 or 8 of them - all adults. In Britain, swans are a protected species. In fact, they are all taken as belonging to the reigning monarch!
It's also very clear that they are smugly aware of their privileged status! While the ducks skitter away from people, the swans will just walk along and expect them to move out of the way. When I was photographing this one, it decided to hop out on the bank where I was standing. They're not shy! It was me that had to retreat!
Xue learned about "swan's rights" during our first trip to England in 2001. The train we were travelling on (through either Devon or Somerset - I can't remember which) was going very slowly and the conductor made an apology over the loudspeakers, saying that the train had needed to slow down because it had been reported that there might be a swan near the track! We thought that this was "very British!"
Adult swans can grow to 170cm (5ft 6in) long, with a 240cm (almost 8ft) wingspan and standing over 120cm (4ft) tall on land. Males are larger than females and have a larger knob on their bill.
The Mute Swan is one of the heaviest of all flying birds with males averaging about 12kg (27 lbs.) Large adults are reputed to be srong enough to drown a large swimming dog or break a child's arm.
But, of course, the swan's most obvious attribute is its graceful arching neck, which has the flexibility of an elephant's trunk and can look like a writhing tree-snake when it's grooming.
As the birds raise their heads from the water during feeding, the water drips delectably off the tips of their beaks, causing radiating ripples which are deflected by their streamlined body-shapes, until the water around them is full of rippled intersecting in all directions.
Both swans and ducks feed on submerged vegetation. Ducks like to congregate with the swans, because the swans' long necks allow them to reach deep below the surface and bring weeds up close enough for the ducks to poach!
The ducks can only reach acquatic weed by "dabbling" - upending their tails and paddling their webbed feet to keep their heads submerged. It's an endlessly humorous pursuit, celebrated in a rhyme in "Wind In The Willows":
All along the backwater
Through the rushes tall
Ducks are a-dabbling
Up tails all!
Duck's tails, drake's tails
Yellow feet a-quiver
Yellow bills all out of sight
Busy in the river!
The swans seem mostly to tolerate the dabbling ducks, but they can be strongly territorial when meeting their own species - often adopting a threat display (neck curved back and wings half raised) before chasing off the offending neighbours.
Mallard drakes as as beautiful as swans in their own way. The irridescent blue-green of their head-plumage is probably only matched in its vivid brightness by the blue, green or purple glare of interference patterns found on some tropical insects.
They were also really difficult to photograph when they were on the water. Mallards are quite shy anyway, but when they are feeding they only bring their heads up very briefly to check for predators before dabbling again. Frequently, the time it took for the camera to auto-focus and calculate the exposure meant that I was just too slow to catch the brief moment when they had their heads out of the water!
Even the shot of these two drakes sailing in tandem is quite heavily cropped - they'd already started moving out of frame when the shutter finally triggered...
It's just possible that the two drakes were a gay couple! Wikipedia states that "Mallards also have rates of male-male sexual activity that are unusually high for birds. In some cases, as many as 19% of pairs in a Mallard population are male-male homosexual (Bagemihl 1999)".
The only way I found of getting really close to the ducks was when they were roosting and too sleepy to rush away unless you made sharp movements.
The mallard female is so different to the drake that you would take them as a different species if they weren't clearly a mating couple.
Pairs seem mostly to roost close together, which gives them a very caring and affectionate look!
Mute Swans nest on large mounds that they build in shallow water in the middle or at the edge of a lake.
Pairs usually mate for life and reuse the same nest each year, rebuilding it as needed.
We'll have to visit Tehidy again, later in the year, to see if any of the pairs have become families with young.
When the cygnets are newly hatched, the adults allow them to hitch a lift on the flat surface of their backs - like aircraft carriers about to launch an assault of "ugly ducklings!"
The ducks will probably not be allowed to approach so closely as in this photograph, when the swans have babies.
Swans in public parks are usually fairly tame, but they can be bad-tempered and unpredictable - especially when surprised or while defending their nests.
Xue was brave (or foolhardy) enough to stroke the tail of this one while it was asleep - but she was soon treated to an aggressive hiss as it woke up!
On the other hand I wouldn't be very happy to be woken up for nothing, either...
At the end of the lake the water drains into a narrow stream with the rather magniloquent name of "Tehidy River." This passes out of the lake under a stone bridge and then descends quite steeply through a young beech wood.
A number of stone steps - it would probably be too grand to call them "weirs" - makes the water cascade downwards in a series of pretty waterfalls. This is the most common view used when representing the country park in pictures.
Paths run either side of the stream, bordered by bluebells and young saplings sprouting the youthful leaves of spring.
The smaller path to the north seemed to give the better angles for photography, but the walk was sometimes impeded by smaller watercourses joining the stream...
..so we decided to retrace our route back to the stone bridge and take the main path on the southern side until we reached the Otter Bridge.
From here we followed another colour-coded track through the so-called "Oak Wood."
This was a considerable disappointment. There seemed to be no large oaks along the way - in fact most of the trees seemed to be fairly young and not oaks at all.
Taking a short-cut to curtail the loop, we then set off towards the North Cliffs Plantation. On the left the trees rose up a hill which reminded me of the chilterns and so we followed a path up to the top and then "contoured round," looking down on the main colour-coded road.
We saw some rhododendrons in bud here, but the main gash of colour came from the bluebells along the track.
These and the tendrils of ivy growing up the trunks made for a cheerful scene in the sunlight, as it dappled the floor of the beech forest through the new leaves. There was an old farm here. The house was probably still inhabited, but the outhouses and pens for livestock were deserted and had fallen into decay.
Since this route was taking us further and further from the car, we dropped down to the path (colour-coded cyan) and followed this south and then eastwards along the north side of the new luxury housing development.
The wood was open here - allowing the sun to stream on to the bushes - so this was where we started to see rhododendrons in full bloom.
I used to think that rhododendron was something to do with Cecil Rhodes, but actually the name just comes from the greek "rhodos" or "rose" and "dendron" meaning "tree."
Rhododendron is a genus with over 1000 species and most have attractive blooms. The genus includes the plants known as "azaleas" and consists of shrubs and small trees from 10-20 cm to 50 meters tall.
The ones we saw were bushes about 20 ft high and maybe 30 ft in diameter, bearing many multi-headed blooms.
Hybridisation has also created many varieties or "cultivars." In fact there are estimated to be 28,000 of these - so it's hard to say for sure which plants were growing at Tehidy!
This one could be Rhododendron Ponticum, but then again, it might not: there may be many like it..
The colours we saw ranged from hot pinks to violets. There was also a bush flowering in bright red in a garden adjoining South Drive, but the road was too narrow to be able to stop and take a photograph...
Along the same path we found the "twisted beech" which is another icon for Tehidy Country Park (there's a sketch of it on the map issued by Cornwall County Council.)
I've not been able to find any detail about the tree - it's age for example, or why it became twisted - but Euopean beeches can live up to 300 years, so it's probably of a venerable age.
The twisted trunk is more obvious in this photograph.
The writhing mass of roots, laying above the surface of the ground and forming a slight mound up to the trunk's base, is fairly typical of older beeches.
There are two broken boughs with rounded ends on the south-eastern side of the tree. The sketch on the Tehidy map still has branches growing from these, so it looks as if these were shed fairly recently.
The ends have a curious, mouth-like appearance like tubular worms, hydra, coral and pitcher plants. It was almost as if they would suddenly stretch out and consume passing birds!
Most of the heavy trunk was covered in carved initials. This is something that country children have been doing for centuries: the rural equivalent of urban graffiti...
In my youth had a competition to see who could climb every lime-tree lining the 400 meter lane to the manor house. Each conquered tree was carved with our initials, on the highest branch we could reach.
The trees caught some disease and needed to be cut down some years ago and our graffiti went with them. Sic transit gloria mundi!
In my last post I wrote a comparison of blackthorns and hawthorns - although there were only pictures of blackthorn bushes to illustrate the words.
These are hawthorn blossoms or "mayflowers" for visual comparison.
We didn't follow the path all the way along the pine walk to the East Lodge car-park, but cut down the road at the end of the housing development and made our way back to the cafeteria.
We still had some time left, so we decided take the short "Lakes Circular Walk" again, but in the opposite direction.
As we were nearing the exit, Xue saw a squirrel, then another and another. They were foraging on the ground.
I tried to get a photograph, but the squirrels had no incentive to stay around and the nearest I got was a slightly out of focus squirrel's head sticking into a largely bare frame!
Fortunately, a walker with a pocket full of peanuts was passing and very kindly presented Xue with a handful of them - along with advice on how to feed the squirrels without scaring them. So this was what she did!
Each time the squirrel would come up, take the peanut, then run away to the bottom of the trees where it would busily cache it in the leaves or long grass. It would then rush back ready for the next one!
It was an Eastern Gray Squirrel - a species introduced to the UK from America. It used to be regarded as something of a pest when I was young, since it was spreading across the country and displacing the much smaller native Red Squirrel.
But the Grey Squirrel is too lovable a species to persecute for long and the Red Squirrel is also said to be making something of a resurgence now - although I still don't think I've ever seen one in the wild.
Although it's called the "Grey" Squirrel, parts of its body are often tinged with brown or a kind of ruddy hue. You can see that the colour of the head on this one is a long way from grey. Maybe it's been using Wella...
Just as we were nearing the end of the Lakes Circular Walk and nearing the turn towards the car-park, I noticed a mallard drake nestling down to sleep in a green and yellow bower of weeds and celandines along the fringe of the woodland.
He was obviously shy of my approach, but was confident enough to let me fire off a couple of photographs before he started to take fright and I moved away to avoid driving him from his bed.
I used a fill flash to lighten the shadows under the trees and give a natural sheen to the feathers on the head. But the photograph ended up looking a little "too perfect," as if I'd stuffed the duck and posed it in the undergrowth before taking the shot! (I assure you I didn't.)
The drake's mate was about two feet away - snuggling into some dead leaves and ivy.
Unlike swans, mallards do not mate for life. They form pairs only until the female lays eggs, at which time the male deserts her. (Typical male behaviour, some might say...)
The fact that only the female sits on the eggs (unlike Emperor Penguins, for example, where the male does most of the incubation) might explain the massive difference in colouration between mallard males and females. The female needs to be camouflagued and inconspicuous during the period of incubation. A bright green-headed male would be a dead give-away to any predator!
Bird,
Bluebell,
Cornwall,
Flower,
Stream,
Tehidy,
Trees,
Walk,
Wildlife,
Woodland
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