Tragedy or mystery?

In June I wrote about this Mute Swan who was stoically sitting on its nest all alone despite obviously suffering badly in the blistering heat. I never saw another bird with it, and as Mute Swans take turns with looking after the nest and chicks it seemed obvious to me that this bird might be in trouble. Well sadly it appears that either its mate died shortly after the eggs were laid leaving it unable to cope and causing the eggs to fail, or it is a female who built her nest alone and laid infertile eggs, because early this month I cycled past to find this…

An abandoned nest with only two cracked eggs in it. The determined swan had sat tight on its nest for two whole months to my knowledge, which cancels out the hope that the majority of the eggs might have hatched and the family swum away – swans eggs take approximately 35 days to hatch. The bird was sitting way too long.

But then again… I certainly wasn’t able to keep watch on this nest every single day and I could be wrong -  there might have been another bird and I just never happened to see it – I could also have overestimated the time the swan was sitting. It’s not like I was taking notes. I did ask every single person I saw looking at the swan if they had ever noticed another swan or how long they thought the swan had been sitting and invariably got the replies “nope” and “ooooh, ages“, which isn’t exactly scientific.  I guess I will never know.

Whatever actually happened, the disappearance of the swan has been of benefit to its neighbours. Earlier in the year when it was building its nest, I’d watched it driving off moorhens and coots who had already started building  and were understandably loath to abandon their nests just because a bigger bird wanted them out. Of course the swan won, but the smaller birds who had been nesting in this location for years didn’t go far. While I was looking at the huge abandoned nest a peaceful family of moorhens picked over it, selecting choice twigs and branches for use in their own construction.

I don’t know if there are many Londoners local to the area reading here but I was wondering… is there anyone out there who knows what happened to the Coppermill Lane swan? So many people stopped to look at it every day, it became locally quite famous. Not sure where I mean? It was on the western end of Coppermill lane (E17) near Springfield Park. It’s a very long shot I know but is there anyone out there who can help solve the mystery?

Here be dragons!

Yesterday was fine and sunny, so I thought I’d try my luck dragonfly hunting on Coppermill Lane. I had a tiny hope that I’d find the beautiful Libellula Depressa, or Broad Bodied Chaser I had seen there not so long ago; whether I did or not I couldn’t  fail to enjoy myself on a glorious midsummer day like this.

Under the little bridges behind Springfield Marina this Mute Swan has been incubating her eggs for what seems an age. It looks nice and cool there doesn’t it? But when the sun swings westward the shade vanishes and she’s left exposed in the harsh sun; then she is forced to keep her eggs cool under her downy body.  I’ve seen her gaping dejectedly in the punishing heat, struggling to reach the water for a drink without getting up from the nest. She drove a coot off that nesting spot earlier in the spring, and I wonder if, in her small and pugnacious brain, there is ever the vaguest sense of regret.

Further along Coppermill Lane I realised I wasn’t going to see any dragonflies or damselflies. Council gardeners had been at work with strimmers and mowers and cut back the long vegetation fringing the edges of the tracks and the towpath for miles and miles. The water was spattered with shredded grass and the longer vegetation which served as territorial perches for the dragonflies had been destroyed.  I guessed the insects had dispersed into the marshes while the cutting was being done, and after a brief scout around revealed nothing I sadly got back on my bike and resolved to go up to Tottenham Marshes in search of bee orchids. I remembered the new pond and decided to enter the marshes via the pond track. That was the best thing I did all day! Nearing the water I saw a man with a camera around his neck who was clearly watching something. I asked him what he’d seen, and he pointed to this…

A male Broad Bodied Chaser, perched like an improbably beautiful mechanical toy on a stick poked into the pond mud. The photographer had placed the stick there in the hope of attracting a dragonfly and within moments this beauty had claimed the tailor made perch. I couldn’t have been more thrilled and started gabbling about how this was the only dragonfly I could recognise for sure and that I’d tried and failed to photograph one a couple of weeks before. At last, success! As I snapped away I noticed just how well…serious a camera my new friend had, and had to comment. Turns out that I’d bumped into David Cottridge, an award winning wildlife photographer who encouraged me to take my time and get the shot just right as I stood at the waters edge with my undistinguished point ‘n’ shoot. We discussed the various quirks of cheap cameras and the fabulousness of state of the art ones, and I picked up so many hints about the wonderful things to be found on the marshes, the best parts of the river and marshes in which to see dragonflies and damselflies (I didn’t realise that the River Lee which runs through the marshes is the best place in the UK for dragonflies!) and just kept on looking at that gorgeous powder blue insect.

While discussing the wildlife of the marshes it was only a matter of time before the subject of Bee Orchids came up. As I was talking to a man who knows Tottenham Marshes like the back of his hand I shouldn’t have been surprised when he casually offered to show me where they were, so I excitedly grabbed my bike and he shouldered a rucksack crammed with field guides, and off we went.

PS:- David, if by any chance you ever actually read this, thanks again for sharing your knowledge. I am sure I must have appeared slightly bonkers. I was so thrilled to find exactly what I had set out to see that day, and to have bumped into just the person who could help me was extraordinary good luck. No wonder my snake/tree identification skills, rudimentary at best, went right out of the window