Report from 23 to 27 may 2022

Today I can say it without a doubt: the Night Herons are nesting at La Cassinazza. It took a great deal of patience and keen eyesight, but I was finally able to find at least five or six Night Heron nests with incubating adults among the dense vegetation. There appear to be other herons with them: one or two pairs each of Little Egret and Purple Heron. We will have to wait until the leaves fall next winter to be able to count the nests and know exactly how many there are. Small as it may be, the new rookery is one of the crowning achievements of the renaturalization project at La Cassinazza: a dream come true after twenty-five years.
Everything else faded into the background this week. Among butterflies, we saw the year’s first Large Copper (Lycaena dispar), no longer a rarity, but always worth noting.
Birdwatchers will be interested in the second-calendar-year Little Gull that put in an appearance. This is only the second record for La Cassinazza, with the first coming way back in 2001. Such a rarity deserves a photograph, even though I will admit that the quality of the image is well below our usual standards, and that the plumage of a worn immature bird is nowhere near as attractive as that of an adult.