July 2014

The house martins have finally settled down and there are two pairs apparently raising two broods of chicks in our eaves.  I say apparently because until the youngsters are big enough to poke their heads out of the nest, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on.  But we’ve found several eggshells below the nests and the adults are busy ferrying food into the nests.  Sadly this year, the swallows haven’t nested in the carport.  In fact, the number of swallows seems to be down this year.  I read an article by Bill Oddie in the BBC Wildlife magazine where he recounts his experience of a holiday in Cyprus in the 1980’s when he thought war had broken out due to the number of shotguns being fired.  It turns out that his holiday coincided with the start of the bird shooting season.  He visited again recently hoping that things had improved now that shooting birds was illegal.  It hadn’t.  It seems that people’s liking for ‘sport’ is stronger than the will to enforce the law.  I can’t understand people killing things for pleasure, especially if they are not going to eat their kill afterwards.  I hope that our swallows haven’t suffered that fate, but the evidence seems against it.

In our garden we have Water Figwort (Scrophularia auriculata).  I don’t know why we have Water Figwort as there is certainly no water there and it is in a particularly dry flowerbed.  Part of the reason that we have so much figwort now is that last year I let one Water Figwort flower and set seed.  The figwort has a very strange flower that looks more like something out of a Mickey Mouse cartoon than part of a plant.  In order to set seed, of course, the flower has to be pollinated, and unlike most flowers that get pollinated by bees or hoverflies, the figwort has developed a relationship with wasps.  One species of wasp in particular, the Tree Wasp (Dolichovespula sylvestris), seems to be the main pollinator of the figwort.  Tree Wasps, like many social wasps have a sweet tooth and will take sugar from many sources, from the jam in your picnic, through honeydew from aphids or their own larvae, to nectar from flowers.  However, wasps have very short tongues, probably because they have such large and strong jaws which they use to mash up their meatier prey.  This means that they can only take nectar from flowers that have very short pollen tubes such as figwort, gooseberry or ivy.

Flowers that have ‘wort’ at the end of their name usually had a medicinal use in the days before large pharmaceutical companies thought they could do better.  Of course some of the cures were less effective than others, and one thing that ancient herbalists used to determine which plant to use for which ailment was the Doctrine of Signatures.  Basically, the Doctrine of Signatures meant that plants that had features that resembled parts of the body were used to treat that part of the body, so that for example, Eyebright whose flowers were thought to resemble eyes, was used to treat eye infections.  The only other thing you need to know about Figwort is that fig is an ancient word for piles.  It was thought that the red flower buds and tubercles on the roots of Figwort resembled piles as well as the tubercles on the necks of sufferers of scrofula.  Scrofula was also thought to be cured by the touch of a king or queen, and became known as the King’s Evil as a result.  Scrofula also gives Figwort its scientific name – Scrophularia – as well as to the large family of plants in which it resides, the Scrophulariaceae, which also includes many diverse plants such as mulleins and toadflaxes.

Don’t forget that July 3-5 sees the celebration of National Moth Night (actually 3 nights) organized by Atropos and Butterfly Conservation.  Trevor Buttle and I will be running our moth traps on at least one of the nights, so if you want to see some interesting moths and don’t mind an early start, why not join us to examine the catch.  Send me an email (alan.kenworthy@virgin.net) or contact me through the editor, if you want to know more.

Water Figwort - Scrophularia auriculata

House Martin - Delichon urbica

Tree Wasp - Dolichovespula sylvestris