Our first visit of the year in January included a session of planting wild flowers to try and attract moths and butterflies in the summer, in particular the Swallow Tail.
The Swallow Tail butterfly is only found in Norfolk in the UK and only in one spot on the Hickling Broad, which is less than a mile from Halcyon. It depends on Milk Parsley, so this is one of the plants we are trying to raise in the hope that some of them may visit us. This was my 11 year old son Alex's project, so he was sent out in his wellies to plant the seeds in the wet area near the waters edge. We also planted Ragged Robin and Devils Scabious, which are butterfly favourites.
On the last day, my youngest son, Theo, 6, had been playing football on the strip of grass that separates us from the drainage ditch behind the river. He came in to tell us he could see a strange bird. We all came out to look, and there, walking along in the grass with a couple of ducks was a dark coloured bird with a long upright neck and a long beak that curved down. It looked a bit like a curlew but was the wrong colour. We took a couple of photos with our phones, but it was to far away to really record its features.
Back home in Hampshire, I sent an email to my uncle, an ecologist , and asked Steven, a colleague at work, both keen naturalists. Steven suggested that it could be a Glossy Ibis. Searching on Google, this seemed a good match for what we had seen. Searching further, adding our location, Martham, gave a link to a video of a pair of Glossy Ibis at Martham ferry. Watching the video, the location seemed strangely familiar. It was of the piece of grass behind Halcyon. It turned out that a couple of days after we left, quite a few avid bird watchers had descended on the strip of grass behind Halcyon to see this relatively rare bird.
