Wildlife Notes
Dr Phil Smith is a retired biology lecturer who was a Trustee of the Lancashire Wildlife Trust from 1970 to 2010. He has wide natural history interests, being especially enthusiastic about the flora and fauna of sand-dunes and salt-marshes. Spending much of his time on biological surveys to promote the understanding and conservation of Northwest wildlife, Phil is also a keen photographer.
In 2002, he was awarded an MBE for services to nature conservation. Phil has written over 300 scientific reports, articles and papers and two books, including The Sands of Time Revisited (2009) describing the history and natural history of the Sefton Coast sand-dunes.
In the series of monthly articles Phil describes some of the highlights of a life spent amongst nature in Merseyside.
With the Latest Wildlife Notes and Wildlife Notes 2012 onwards it is possible to click or tap on a thumbnail image in the document and view an enlarged image in stunning close up detail. Best viewed on a larger screen
To view previous monthly wildlife notes please click HERE
“The History of Human Influence on the Sefton Coast”
Dr. Phil Smith has provided an updated and fascinating (44 page) report
supported with a wide variety of fascinating images for our Civic Society pages.
To view please click here (pdf opens in a new tab)
Latest Wildlife Notes
Dr Phil Smith’s Wildlife Notes
SEPTEMBER 2026
Continuing a familiar theme, September was the joint fourth warmest for the UK. Although rainfall in Formby, as measured in her garden by Rachael Parks, was about average it wasn’t enough to reverse the water deficit caused by a dry spring and the record hot summer. Thus, the sand-dune water-table hardly changed during the month, falling by about 2 cm at my Devil’s Hole measuring point.
As usual, September was enlivened by birds migrating along the coast. As soon as the wind changed towards the northwest Pink-footed Geese began to arrive from Iceland and Greenland, my first being a small flock of 20 over Southport on 14th. The same wind direction forced a local speciality, Leach’s Petrels, into the mouth of the Mersey, Pete Kinsella counting 48 from Crosby beach on 20th. These small iconic seabirds have an estimated breeding population of 48,000, mainly on remote northern isles but are thought to be declining. Most of them winter in tropical seas. Perhaps the most unexpected September bird was a juvenile Pallid Harrier hunting the saltmarsh at Marshside from 27th to the end of the month. This is an extremely rare vagrant from breeding grounds in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. I tried to see it but only managed a dot about a mile away. “You should have been here yesterday.”
Plantlife in the sand-dunes still showed the effect of the spring and summer drought, with the Range Lane Black Poplars shedding most of their leaves by the end of the month. Late-flowering Grass-of-Parnassus sprinkled the dune-slacks but much more unusual was a single plant in the Devil’s Hole with pale yellow, rather than startlingly white blooms. In over 55 years of recording on the Sefton Coast, I have seen this colour-form only once before, in September 2012. Local botanists confirmed they had never recorded one, while a search of the scientific literature found no reference to colour varieties in this species.
During the month, I completed my 15th annual survey of the nationally rare hybrid willow Salix x friesiana in the Devil’s Hole. It took 13 visits to locate and measure 131 labelled bushes. That’s a lot when the plant occurs in only about a dozen places in the British Isles and mostly as one or two individuals. It’s so rare that it doesn’t even have an English name! While searching for hybrid willows, I spotted an even rarer one – a new bush of Don’s Willow, a cross between Creeping and Purple Willow. This is one of Britain’s rarest plants, with only about 44 bushes known in the country, 40 of them on the Sefton dunes.
Another botanical highlight involved a brief visit to Marshside saltmarsh on 20th where, back in 2015, the late Patricia Lockwood and I counted a new population of Common and Lax-flowered Sea Lavenders, with their rare hybrid. Then, there were 163 individuals, now there are uncountable thousands, mainly of young plants; an impressive sight.
Probably due to the earlier drought, there were fewer insects than usual to find and photograph in the dunes. An exception, however, was the Ivy Bee, which emerged in spectacular numbers. Females of this distinctive ‘solitary’ bee collect pollen and nectar almost exclusively from flowering Ivy, often in gardens. I led a ‘Bee-walk’ for Green Sefton at Crosby Marine Gardens on 27th. Although the weather was inclement – cloudy with occasional showers – the enthusiastic participants saw around 50 Ivy Bees and a few common hoverflies in little more than an hour. Elsewhere, several Red Admirals, Painted Ladies and Holly Blues also graced the Ivy. The latter butterfly seems to have had a particularly good year. Other welcome visitors to Ivy were our largest hoverflies,the Hornet and Wasp Plumehorns,and my second ever Locust Blowfly. The latter is well known in Africa, where its maggots are important predators of Desert Locust eggs. It is increasingly turning up as a migrant in Britain and may be using the eggs of grasshoppers for breeding. I was also impressed by the number of White-zoned Furrow Bees,nectaring on Common Fleabane in several places. Although widespread in the south, this bee only gets as far north as Morecambe Bay in western Britain. A speciality of Hightown dunes is the tiny native Tawny Cockroach, first found here in 2020 by Tony Hunter and largely restricted to England south of the Thames. I have seen it twice and decided to check whether it was still at Hightown. Remarkably, with two sweeps of my net, I had an adult and a nymph to confirm its continuing presence. How it got to Hightown is a mystery.
A visit to a friend’s enormous garden pond in Hillside revealed only two kinds of dragonfly, the Common Darter and Migrant Hawker but the owner lifted a board in his garden to reveal an impressive ten adult Great Crested Newts. A similar number was said to be in a nearby rockery. Not many gardens can claim such a large population of this specially protected amphibian.