January 2016

No doubt many of the Christmas cards that you sent or received this year featured a robin.  Just why it should be associated with Christmas is probably something to do with its prominence in the winter.  Evergreen Christmas card subjects like holly, ivy and mistletoe are also more noticeable when the deciduous trees have shed their leaves.  Snow also features because more than anything else, it makes the red breast of the robin really stand out.

Robin - Erithacus rubecula

Christmas cards that show robins as cute friendly creatures (often wearing a red fur-trimmed hat!) have, of course, got it completely wrong.  It is certainly a bold bird and if you walk through woods and see a small bird hopping about within a few yards of you, you can be almost certain it’s a robin.  The same will happen if you dig over your vegetable patch, and in both cases the bird is being bold because you are providing it with food – walking through woods disturbs the leaf litter and exposes insects and other invertebrates as much as digging does.  The robin will also aggressively defend a good source of food and will chase off other birds from a bird table until it has had its fill.

It is not only food that prompts aggressive behaviour either.  The robin is highly territorial and will firmly chase off any rival males that invade what he considers to be his patch (unless the other male happens to be more aggressive, in which case he will have to find another patch).  Curiously though, he will also chase off female robins.   To our eyes, male and female robins are identical, so maybe the male robin can’t tell the difference either.  Somehow I doubt that and suspect it is more to do with selecting a more determined mate.  She will have to approach him several times and do some determined flirting before he finally accepts her.  Having established his territory, he will advertise it with his familiar song that warns off other males and attracts prospective mates – well you didn’t think it was for our benefit did you?  He will sing when you put food out because the patch needs to be defended more, not out of gratitude.

Redpoll - Carduelis flammea

Bullfinch - Pyrrhula pyrrhula

If it was only the robin’s red breast that made the association with Christmas, then there are plenty more candidates.  The breasts of the chaffinch and brambling are perhaps a little dull, and that of the redpoll less often seen, but the beautiful male bullfinch would win any red breast competition hands down (or maybe primary feathers down).  Perhaps another reason for the robin’s association with Christmas is that they start their breeding season much earlier, and last year there was a news item about a robin nesting in a Christmas wreath on a front door.  The owners were happy to use the back door until the chicks fledged.

And finally some Christmas card candidates from Australia.

Eastern Yellow Robin 

Scarlet Rosella - they don't come redder than that!

December 2015

This is the last Nature Notes for 2015, and soon the television will be full of those dreadful ‘review of the year’ shows.  But there’s no need to worry, this won’t be a review of the natural year.  Nature is very much a ‘happening now’ subject and there’s usually too much going on right now to worry about what happened last month.  Besides, I have enough trouble remembering what happened last week anyway.  One thing that happened this week, however, was very memorable – I saw a badger!  Nothing remarkable about that you may say, but running across the lawn in the middle of the day, hours away from dusk?  It made me wonder why it was out in daylight and what had disturbed it.  Perhaps it was confused by this long drawn out autumn we are having – we’ve had the warmest October, and November also looks like setting records with a high of 22 deg. C in Wales on November the 1^st and two weeks of warm humid weather since then.  As I write this in mid-November there are still plenty of leaves left on the trees and we have Verbena, Fuchsia and ‘Bowles Mauve’ still in flower in the garden.  We even have a confused apple tree that put out a tentative bit of blossom a couple of weeks ago.

Eyed Hawkmoth

Hopefully, it will get colder soon and we’ll get some frost to slow down the garlic and ensure a good crop for next year.  Cold weather isn’t good for everything though, but most of the animals in your garden won’t experience that as they will have died weeks or even months ago.  Perhaps I should qualify that – by most, I mean numbers, and the largest number of visible animals in your garden are probably insects.  Most solitary insects like flies, midges, solitary bees and wasps, dragonflies and butterflies, have a very short life as an adult and may last only a few days or a few weeks at most.  These insects will have invested their future in eggs or larvae that will hopefully be in a safe place until spring warms enough to accelerate their growth process to become adults.  Not all insects do this though and there are some notable exceptions, especially larger insects like the winter damselfly and Peacock and Brimstone butterflies.  You would expect some of our larger moths like the hawkmoths to overwinter as well, but mostly this does not happen.  For many, like the convolvulus hawkmoth and pine hawkmoth, which are immigrant species, the UK moth book gives the stark message – unable to overwinter.  (For some, like the lime hawkmoth, the message is even more stark – does not feed.)  Most overwinter as a chrysalis – the privet hawkmoth sometimes twice.  The only hawkmoth I could find that overwinters as an adult is one of the smaller ones – the delightful humming-bird hawkmoth, which can cope with mild winters in the south west.

Convolvulus Hawkmoth

The social insects like bumblebees and wasps all die out in winter with the exception of mated queens that will carry the next generation as a packet of sperm in their abdomens.  Exceptions to this are the remarkable honey bee, that stores honey to keep the workers going over winter, and ants that are just basically tough and resourceful (and carnivorous) and stay underground.

One thing that prompted me to write about overwintering animals was curiosity about spiders and what happens to them at this time of year.   Sadly the answer is fairly boring – some overwinter as adults, and some don’t.  But while I was looking I found a very remarkable fact about spiders – they can fly!  And these are not just some exotic species shown to us by David Attenbrough from some jungle in South America, but things like our own British money spiders.  The spiderlings squirt enough silk from their spinnerets to form a sort of kite which is directed into the air in the hope of catching an up draught.  If successful, they let go of their perch and drift to wherever the wind takes them.  This is, of course, a risky strategy – they may end up in another spider’s web, or as a snack for swallows, or frozen at 30,000 feet, or even in the sea.  So why adopt such a strategy?  Well simply because staying around hundreds of other cannibalistic spiderlings is even more risky.

Humming-bird Hawkmoth

This picture of the humming-bird hawkmoth is a bit of a cheat in that I took the photo in Sicily.  In my defence I can confirm that I saw several this year from the kitchen window feeding on the verbena, but they had always gone by the time I got out with the camera.

Tree Bumblebee

November 2015

You may have seen in last month’s magazine, that a red squirrel was seen bounding along the sea wall at Pett Level.  The immediate question that comes to mind is ‘Are you sure?’  Well, at least two people saw the squirrel, and one even went so far as to describe the white front, which only the red squirrel has.  The front of a grey squirrel is pale but not as distinctively marked as the red.  So assuming that both witnesses saw the same animal, then it is very unlikely that both mistook a reddish grey squirrel (which does happen) for a red squirrel, then we have to ask what it was doing there.

The nearest natural colony of red squirrels is probably on the Isle of Wight and even though red squirrels can swim, it is unlikely that they would manage to swim across the Solent, and then take on the 100 miles or so between there and Pett.  One of the reasons that red squirrels are still living on the Isle of Wight is that the Solent provides a natural barrier against grey squirrels.  There are of course nearer red squirrels in France, where they are much more common than here in the UK, but again it would have needed to have travelled here as a stowaway. 

The obvious difference between the red and grey squirrels is in their colouring, but it is by no means clear cut.  When red squirrels go through their pre-winter moult, they temporarily have a grey coat.  They also lose the ear tufts that can normally be used to distinguish reds from greys.  Also, continental red squirrels have a much greyer coat than the UK population.  Add to this the fact that some grey squirrels have a reddish tinge to the fur on their back and legs.  The only reliable colour difference is in the tail.  The fur of a red squirrel’s tail is always a single colour – grey or red, but the tail of a grey squirrel has three different shades – a base of reddish brown surrounded by black hairs with a halo of white ends.  Another way of telling greys from reds is size – red squirrels are quite a bit smaller than grey squirrels, but of course young greys could easily be the same size as a fully grown red.  Despite these confusions there is little chance of mistaking one for the other in the UK in September if you get a good look.

Aside from physical differences, there are differences in their habits.  Though both species eat the same diet of seeds and nuts – and also therefore compete for food, red squirrels live at much lower densities than greys – about 1 red per hectare compared to up to 10 greys per hectare.  They manage this largely because greys can digest the tannins in acorns.  Reds will eat a few acorns but they can’t cope with many.  One of the most interesting wildlife spectacles is to watch grey squirrels burying acorns. At this time of year they spend hours running back and forth from tree to stash, and even though they only bury one in each place, research has shown that they manage to remember where a high proportion of them were buried.  The ones they don’t remember or need also have a fair chance of producing a crop for future generations.

It is interesting to note that though red squirrel numbers have been declining since the 1880’s when grey squirrels were introduced from North America, their numbers are currently rising.  This is due in a large part to conservation efforts that reduce grey squirrel populations.  This allows red squirrels to expand into their former territories.  Grey squirrels not only out-compete the reds for food, but they carry a squirrel-pox virus which is deadly to reds, and has no impact on the greys.  There are many projects in place to protect red squirrels – greys have been eradicated from Anglesey, are being excluded from the Isle of Wight, and are even being culled in Cornwall.  Perhaps sadly though, it is not always being done for the best reasons – a population of red squirrels is a sure guarantee of an increase in tourism!  And I can understand that – I’ve seen red squirrels in Scotland and at Formby in Lancashire, and they never fail to enchant.  I only wish I’d seen the one at Pett Level and I hope that however it got here; it manages to find a safe place for the winter.

Here are the only other pictures of squirrels that I have.  Both taken in Canada where they also compete with the North American grey squirrel, apparently successfully.

Black Squirrel

Douglas Squirrel

October 2015

We had a couple of interesting visitors to our garden this week – the first was a smooth newt.  Though this may well be a common occurrence in many gardens, it is the first time I have ever seen one in our garden.  My first thought was that it was on its way downhill to the nearest standing water, but it turns out that at this time of year it was more likely to be looking for a damp sheltered place to spend the winter in and ambush insects from.  It was a very small, and therefore very young newt (less than 2 inches head to tail), so I hope it wasn’t too put off in its quest by being picked up and photographed.  It would have been easy to mistake the newt for a lizard – they are very much the same shape after all – but if you can get close enough then the lack of scales on the skin, and the head that looks more like a frog’s than a snake’s are all the clues you would need.  I’d have been equally pleased to see a lizard though, as we’ve never had one of those in the garden either – so far!

Smooth Newt - Lissotriton vulgaris

The other visitors of note that we had this week were three female Dark bush-crickets (Pholidoptera griseoaptera).  These are a quite chunky dark brown insect with long back legs and long antennae.  They are a common insect but I thought it unusual to see 3 in the garden at the same time.   It is easy to tell the females from the males as the females have a long curved prong sticking out of their back end.  (I could have re-phrased that in entomology-speak as ‘a long curved ovipositor projecting from the posterior abdominal segment’, but that would have been silly.)  It is an ovipositor, however, which she uses to inject her eggs into damp earth or rotting wood.  The ovipositor is a common feature of many insects, but the queen of them all is a species of ichneumon wasp where the ovipositor is longer than the rest of the insect – and she uses it for the dastardly purpose of injecting her eggs into other insect larvae deep inside tree branches or flower buds.  The other interesting ovipositor fact is that the sting of a bee is actually a modified ovipositor which she uses both for egg-laying and defence, and it is also why you will never get stung by a male bee or wasp.

Dark Bush-cricket - Pholidoptera griseoaptera

But back to bush-crickets – while I was researching dark bush-crickets for this column (yes, it does happen!) I came across the following statement - ‘once the eggs are laid it is 18 months before the insects emerge, which means that odd-year bush-crickets never meet even-year bush-crickets.’  I found that extremely puzzling and I’m still not sure I understand it.  Let’s say that our 3 bush-crickets lay their eggs this autumn.  That means that the nymphs will emerge in the spring of 2017.  They then spend 2 years as a nymph and will become adults in the summer of 2019, mate and lay eggs in the September of 2019.  But the adults that laid their eggs last year in 2014, will have offspring that mature in the summer of 2018.  This would mean not only that the two groups never mate with each other, but that they are presumably genetically different, and it makes me wonder how and when it all started, and why we don’t have bush-crickets one year and then none the next?  I can only assume that such insects evolved when Britain was part of Pangaea with a tropical climate and blurred seasons, so that the breeding cycle was more flexible.  It may be however, that some late emerging adults are able to survive the winter and mate with next year’s generation, but I haven’t been able to find out.  There is precious little information on the internet so I’ll just have to widen the search and see if I can find a bush-cricket expert.

(I did find an expert and he tells me that the adults don't survive the winter, but the eggs don't stick to a strict 18 month timetable and may emerge earlier or later.  This may then affect how long the nymphs take to reach adulthood.  This means that the gene pool leaks a little and gets a little mixing between the even-year and odd-year insects.)

Swallow Chicks

We also said goodbye to our summer visitors this week.  The swallows that nested in the carport left as soon as the chicks fledged a few weeks ago, but the house martins seemed to come and visit their old nest as part of a big flock that gathered on the roofs of nearby houses before starting their long migration.  Of course, it may not have been ‘our’ house martins at all, it may have just been part of the flock investigating potential nesting sites for next year, but it’s very easy to get possessive about birds that have nested with you, even though all you’ve done is to leave them alone.  But we’ll wish them Bon Voyage anyway and hope to welcome them back next spring.

House Martin Chicks

September 2015

Cockchafer

Feelers, or more correctly antennae, are yet another thing that set the insects apart from other creatures (though crabs and lobsters make good use of them too).  They are antennae rather than feelers because they do more than provide the insect with a sense of touch.  In most insects they are primarily used to provide a sense of smell, though insects with poor eyesight that forage at night like cockroaches may also use them to avoid running into things.  They can also detect vibration and sound, as well as electrical charges, and heat, to name but a few.  Most insect antennae are of one basic pattern, that is, they are composed of a number of segments.  The first segment is attached to the head and is a moveable joint controlled by muscles so that the insect has control of which direction they point.  The second segment contains something called a Johnston’s organ.  This essentially contains movement sensors that allow it to detect motion or vibrations of various frequencies.  Some are tuned to the frequency of a mate’s wing beats, or to the stridulation of a potential mate.  (Stridulation is a fine word, but it just means the sort of noise made by a grasshopper or cricket.)  In hawkmoths, movement detected in the second segment corresponds to angular changes in flight which helps the moth make complex manoeuvres.  The waggle dance performed by honey-bees to communicate to other workers the location of good forage creates a varying electric field that alternately repels and attracts the antennae.  This allows workers out of immediate sight or ‘earshot’ to still read the waggle dance.  Depending on the type of insect each antenna can have one or many more segments beyond the second segment and in the main these contain sensors that detect smell.  These are called sensilla and are tiny hair-like protrusions on the cuticle that collect the smell molecules.

Short-winged Conehead

Antennae come in a bewildering array of shapes or sizes that have developed according to how the insect uses its antenna.  Many male moths have large feathery antennae and their prime purpose is to detect pheromones emitted by the females.  They do that very well and the feathered nature of the antennae increases the surface area available for sensilla so that they only need one or two molecules of the pheromone to indicate that a receptive female is nearby.  It has been estimated that a male sat on a goal post at one end of a football field can detect the presence of a female sat on the goal at the other end (though nobody said whether there was a match on at the time or not).  Other insects such as the bush-crickets use the length of their antennae as a means of increasing the surface area, and in some the antennae may be 4 or 5 times the length of the insect itself.  Hoverflies have only 3 segments to their antennae, but the third segment is shaped a bit like a table-tennis bat to receive sound better.  It also has a hair-like projection on the third segment called an arista that presumably is for detecting different tones.

Muslin Moth

Antennae can be useful to entomologists as well.  Firstly they can be used to indicate insect groups.  For example many hoverflies mimic bees or wasps, but a quick look at their 3 segment table-tennis bats easily separates them from the 12 segment antennaed wasps and bees.  Another use can be to separate male and females.  The cockchafer male pictured above has 7 ‘leaves’ on the end of his antennae, whereas the female has only 6.  All the better to detect her pheromones with no doubt.  Male wasps and bees have 13 segments in their antennae, females only 12 – though the chance of getting a wasp to keep still while you examine it with a hand lens and count the segments is small indeed, but if it jumps up and stings you you’ll know it’s a female as males can’t sting.

The insect world is dominated by chemical signals for various reasons such as defence mechanisms or to lay trails as ants do.  In order to understand what the signals are and how the animals use them research entomologists use a technique called electroantennography that allows them to pick up the electrical signals generated by the antennae when exposed to certain chemicals. Nature is wonderful, but the people who find this stuff out are pretty special too.

August 2015

‘How did you spot that?’ is a question I’m often asked when I see something interesting in the undergrowth.  Indeed, it is a question I’ve often asked others when they have found something I didn’t see.  The simple answer ‘Well, I was looking for it.’ - is rarely true.  Most of the time when you spot something, it is because you saw some movement that attracted your attention.  Walking round Rye Harbour reserve, out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a bird flying into a tree, and heard a familiar call. I scanned the tree for a while before I saw the barred breast of a cuckoo.  The cuckoo rarely sings on an open perch and often tucks itself in amongst leafy branches, which explains why many more people have heard a cuckoo than have ever seen one.  So when I pointed it out to my companion, they said – ‘How did you spot that?’

When it comes to the insect world, you may well spot some movement – a butterfly opening its wings, for example.  But insects are very wary of predators which may also spot movement, so they tend to keep still as far as possible.  If you are interested in insects then there is a tendency to walk slowly and scan bushes or the ground, and quite often you may not be aware of how you saw one.  It may have been a shadow on a leaf, or a tiny splash of a colour other than green.  (Or it may be green like the tortoise beetle that looks just like a flat blister on the surface of the leaf!)

Tortoise Beetle

Just recently I saw my first woundwort shieldbug -

 Eysarcoris venustissimus.  Now, before you congratulate me, you’ll probably want to know what a woundwort shieldbug is.  It is a bit like the common green shieldbug that you’ll find on your runner beans sucking the juices from them.  It is smaller though, in fact it is only about 6 millimetres long. (That’s quarter of an inch in old money.)  It also has exquisite purpley bronze colouring on its back and shoulders, and a black and white connexivum.  (Entomologists like to give posh names to various bits of their chosen group of insects and connexivum is shorter than saying the pie-crust edging round the back and sides of the abdomen of a shieldbug, and I wish I’d never mentioned it now!)

Woundwort Shieldbug

It’s a beautiful insect though, and I certainly can’t say I was looking for it, because before I saw it I didn’t even know that they existed, and it was just the magnification provided by the camera’s viewfinder that allowed me to identify it as a shieldbug.  It was only when I got the photos back home, and looked it up in the field guides that I knew exactly what it was.  It is called the woundwort shieldbug because it lays its eggs on hedge woundwort and the nymphs feed on the leaves.    Hedge woundwort is an attractive plant with spikes of purple flowers and horrible smelling leaves.  Plants that have …wort in their name were once used medicinally, so woundwort was probably once used to heal wounds.   The woundwort shieldbug also lays its eggs on white dead-nettle which is closely related to woundwort.

The eggs hatch out into nymphs, which is a shieldbug’s way of getting round all that dangerous caterpillar and chrysalis stuff that many other insects go through.  The nymphs are mobile and more or less similar to the adult insect, but smaller and they can’t fly or reproduce.  To grow they have to shed their old exoskeleton and puff themselves up to expand the soft skeleton underneath, which then hardens again.  They will go through several of these instars, as each stage is called, before they emerge from the last stage as an adult with wings and reproductive bits.

So how did I spot it? – I haven’t a clue.  I was looking for bumblebees at the time.  Maybe I just knew that there was something beautiful and interesting down there, because I find that if you keep your eyes open, there usually is.

July 2015

On Springwatch the other night, Chris Packham, referring to the blue plumage of something like a swallow, came out with the statement ‘There are no blues in nature’.   A considered response to that statement may be ‘OK Blue-eyes, come out from behind those delphiniums and bluebells and explain yourself!’   What he was referring to, of course, is that there are no natural blue pigments in nature – or are there?  In fact, blue is a relatively uncommon hue in nature, with less than 10% of all flowering plants showing any shade of blue.  Nature is very good at reds and yellows, greens and browns, but nature has almost never evolved a true blue pigment.  Blue pigment, chemically speaking, is actually a fairly recent discovery.  When John Constable painted ‘The Hay Wain’ in 1821, he painted a cloudy sky – not because he was good at clouds, which he clearly was – but because blue pigment was fiercely expensive in those days.  It was made by grinding up the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli.

Salvia - 'Deep Blue'

Chris Packham was wrong regarding plants though, because there is at least one blue pigment in nature – indigo.  Though it is now produced synthetically, indigo dye was originally produced by extracting it from the leaves of the tropical American plant añil (Indigofera suffruticosa).  Indigo dye is most famously used to dye the cotton woven into blue jeans.  Most plants, like bluebells, etc. make their colour using anthocyanins, which though normally red will go blue in a suitably alkaline environment.

But when it comes to the blues in animals, Chris Packham is right.  That doesn’t mean that the bluetit, the swallow, the peacock’s tail, and the common blue butterfly are all suddenly going monochrome, because they have a different trick up their sleeves.  They use what is called structural colour.  Normally when you see blue colour, the blue object has reflected blue light back at you and absorbed light of other colours, and that’s all done at the atomic level with photons of light being absorbed by electrons or not as the case may be. 

Australian Fairy Wren

But a bird’s feather is made mostly of keratin which is mainly a pale brown colour at the atomic scale.  At nanoscale, however, things are different.  (Nanoscale just means things measured in nanometres which are very small – one millionth of a millimetre in fact.)  Nanoscale is way bigger than atomic scale, but still way smaller than you can see with the best optical microscope.  The reason that things are different at nanoscale is that the wavelength of light is also measured in nanometres.  With structural colour there are surface features on the feather that correspond to the wavelength of blue light so that only blue light reflects back.  In the peacocks tail and in the scales on some butterfly’s wings there is a slightly different thing going on, and the surface features are transparent and only half the wavelength of light thick so that when blue light is reflected from both the front and back surface, it effectively doubles the intensity of the light and produces iridescence.  The surface features are normally parallel ridges and this means that the iridescence can only be seen at certain angles.   This is best seen in the blue morph butterfly which is a tropical species not normally seen in Pett, but if you take a close look at the ‘eyes’ on the wings of a peacock butterfly, or the ‘eyes’ on an eyed hawkmoth, you can see a flash of that iridescence.

Eyed Hawkmoth

Peacock Butterfly

So when the baby bluetits have all hatched and they’ve grown their adult plumage, just think how much physics they needed to know to produce it.  Or better still, just marvel at how lucky we are to have such beautiful creatures so commonplace.

June 2015

I am a long way from Pett as I write this; in fact I am about a 14 hour drive and a ferry crossing away as I am in Sweden collecting bumblebees.   As many of you may know, I volunteer for the short-haired bumblebee reintroduction project.  The aim of the project is to reintroduce a bumblebee that became extinct in the UK in 2000, and we are here in Sweden collecting queen bumblebees for release at Dungeness in the hope of swelling the population that resulted from previous years' releases.  The collection has proved more difficult this year as the spring has been delayed by cold winds and rain.  Normally the queens will emerge from hibernation when the temperature reaches 18 degrees C for three days in succession.  So far that hasn’t happened in Sweden as they have had the same cold winds as Pett has this year.  Of course, it is possible that temperatures won’t reach 18 degrees for many weeks to come and there are limits to how long the bees can stay in hibernation before their fat reserves are used up.  So it appears that they have a back-up plan, and that they are able to detect changes in day length like many other hibernating or migratory animals do.  Just how they do that is not clear as they are underground in the dark, but it is possible that growing plants make subtle changes to soil chemistry that can be detected by the bees.  However they do it, they are emerging, though their emergence seems to be staggered over a longer period, which means that we won’t be able to collect as many this year as we have in previous years. 

One of the queens from the 2012 release on Yellow Flag Iris

It is interesting to note the differences in nature between Pett and Sweden.  Sweden is further North than the UK so they have a shorter summer, but longer day lengths.  Despite the cooler temperatures, their nature seems more abundant and healthier than ours.  For example, last night I saw a hedgehog running past our campsite – I can’t remember when I last saw a hedgehog in the UK, but it is many years ago.  Today while I was out looking for bees, I saw a group of 8 hares gather together and then run off in two separate parties.  I've seen many hares in the UK but never more than two together.  I think part of the reason for this is less intensive farming.  Though it’s hard to tell from a 10-day visit there seems to be evidence of crop rotation, and we have seen several large fields sown with clover, presumably as nitrogen-fixing green manure – a much ‘greener’ idea than chemical fertilizers.  Swedish farmers may, like their UK counterparts, take advantage of subsidies for land set aside and managed for wildlife.  In addition to that, field edges and roadside verges are left uncut in most places which allows a diverse mix of wildflowers and grasses to grow.

And now up to her haunches for her first UK nectar

One of the wildflower species that thrives and is essential forage for the bumblebees is white dead-nettle.  This is the preferred pollen and nectar source for the short-haired bumblebee and we spend our days here searching for patches of white dead-nettle and searching each patch for bumblebees.  This can get quite monotonous and you can end up dreaming about endless patches of white dead-nettle.  By the end of the collection none of us will want to look at another white dead-nettle for a long, long time.

Short-haired bumblebee on White Dead-nettle

If you are wondering how gentle these creatures are, then after being caught, cooped up and transported far from home, this one could be forgiven for being a bit tetchy.
But here she is happily sitting on Maya's hand, cleaning herself and taking advantage of warm skin and sunshine - and not a sting in sight.  They can sting, and they do, but you have to really handle them roughly to provoke a sting.

May 2015

The early spring flowers are well out now, and in common with most other places our garden is showing mostly yellow ones.  There are lots of daffodils, lesser celandines, some Forsythia, and some dandelions.  They all look wonderful until you look a bit closer and see that almost every flower has got tiny blue-black beetles inside.  They are pollen beetles and they are doing what comes naturally, eating pollen.

Pollen Beetles in Daffodil

Pollen is amazing stuff.  First of all, it is very, very small.  The smallest pollen belongs to the forget-me-not and it is only six microns in diameter – that is 6 thousandths of a millimetre.  (The largest, maize, is about 100 microns across and more easily seen.)  You would need a good microscope just to see the rough shape of the pollen grains of any plant.  If you wanted to see each grain in detail, then it would be handy to have a scanning electron microscope in your potting shed.  Pollen grains are the equivalent of sperm in the animal kingdom, and are what transports the male genes to the seeds of the plant.  As in the animal kingdom, each plant species wants to fertilize, or be fertilized by plants of its own species, and plants achieve this by making the pollen grains unique.  So each plant produces pollen grains that have a certain size, shape, and surface texture.  Only when a matching pollen grain lands on the female stigma does the stigma accept the pollen and allow fertilization to occur.

Pollen Beetles in Lesser Celandine

Different plants also produce pollen of different colours.  Yellow flowers, like the ones that the pollen beetles are so fond of, tend to have yellow pollen, and that is the sort of default colour.  But if you examine the pollen baskets of bumblebees as I am in the habit of doing you find many different colours – comfrey has pale straw-coloured pollen; red clover has dark grey, almost black pollen.  One of the most startling colours is that of Viper’s Bugloss which has very dark blue pollen.  Just occasionally, I have seen bumblebees with bright red pollen on their legs, but so far I have yet to see which plant they have collected it from.

Brown-banded Carder Bee on Viper's Bugloss

The equivalent to ‘man cannot live by bread alone’ in the insect world would be ‘insect cannot live by nectar alone’ and one feature of pollen is that it is rich in protein.  For most insects that eat pollen, it is their only source of protein.    There are three main groups of insects that feed on pollen – the bees, of course, including the bumblebees and the solitary bees I wrote about last month.  Then there are the beetles – not only pollen beetles, but there are a range of other beetles like the thick-kneed flower beetle and some of the longhorn beetles as well.  Another group – the second largest group after the beetles – are the flies (Diptera), though only a few of them are pollen feeders, the most conspicuous of these being the hover flies and the soldier flies.  But what about the moths and butterflies I hear you ask?  Well, in the main, the adult insects don’t feed on pollen, they only take nectar (and some of the moths don’t feed at all as adults).  Whilst their caterpillars may take a bit of pollen, they are probably more interested in your brassica leaves.

Peacock Butterfly on Buddleia

The plant and pollinator relationship is a neat one, they each get something from it, but the interesting thing about the relationship is that the four groups of insects mentioned above all evolved before the plants developed their showy flowers.  They developed flowers when the primary disadvantage of having their pollen eaten was outweighed by the advantage of having their pollen moved from flower to flower and plant to plant.  This happened about 140 million years ago when plants started to become more attractive to insects by evolving their colourful and scented flowers.  So without the pollinators, there wouldn't be such flowers – what a dull thought.

April 2015

On sunny days you may have noticed a few bumblebees foraging on the early spring flowers.  They are most likely to be the fairly large buff-tailed bumblebee, or the tree bumblebee that are well known for emerging early from hibernation.  Most other bumblebee species emerge a bit later.  However, this column is not about bumblebees, but about their lesser known cousins, the solitary bees. 

There are about 250 species of bee native to the UK – The honey bee, 24 bumblebee species, and 225 solitary bee species.  Probably the reason that many people don’t know about solitary bees is that many of them are very small – only a few millimetres long and look more like wasps.  The larger ones may also be overlooked, but for a different reason; they are furry and look like small bumblebees.   So this raises a couple of questions – how do you tell the difference between solitary bees, wasps, and bumblebees.

Yellow-legged Mining Bee - Andrena flavipes

The really telling difference between solitary bees and wasps is their diet.  Wasps get their protein from other insect species, whereas solitary bees are vegetarian and only eat pollen.  Sadly, however, both are partial to a quick slurp of nectar, so if you see one visiting a flower, you can’t be sure whether it is taking nectar, pollen, or both.  Fortunately, the female solitary bees tend to keep the pollen conspicuously around their bodies, some species on their legs and some species under their abdomen, and provided the pollen is yellow enough, it should be easy to spot. 

Tawny Mining Bee (female)

Telling solitary bees from bumblebees is a bit trickier, and the only positive way of doing it is to be familiar with a few species and their habits so that you can learn which is which.  If you have a flowering currant in your garden, it will almost certainly be visited by the Hairy-footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes).  This looks like a small black bumblebee with yellow hairs on its hind legs where it collects its pollen.  Another one to look out for is the Tawny Mining Bee (Andrena fulva).  The females emerge in early spring and you will often see them cruising an inch or two above your neatly clipped lawn (yes, me neither!).  They are an unmistakable rich tawny gingery colour and they are looking for somewhere to nest.  The nest will be a neat straight hole between tufts of grass and it will be surrounded by a small volcano of excavated earth.

(Hairy-footed) Flower Bee - Anthophora plumipes

It is the habits of the solitary bees that set them apart from other bees.  Honey bees and bumblebees are social bees.  They found a colony of worker bees that will help to gather nectar and pollen to feed the growing brood.  Honey bees put aside nectar in the form of honey to see them through to spring because most of the colony survives the winter in the hive.  It’s a habit that beekeepers and the rest of us are grateful for.  Bumblebee colonies don’t live through the winter and once the workers have helped the queen to raise the male and female bees that will found the next generation, the colony dies off.  Only the newly mated queens survive the winter.  Solitary bees have no workers to help them.  When the female is fertilized in spring, she digs a hole – in wood, soft mortar, or earth, depending on the species – and then lays an egg at the bottom.   Alongside the egg she deposits a pile of pollen, and then closes off the cell before laying another egg, piling in more pollen, and sealing off the cell.  She will carry on doing this until the hole is full.  That year’s males and females then die off.  The following spring, the egg nearest the end starts to get warm, the egg hatches into a larva which eats the pollen, turns into a chrysalis, then the adult male or female emerges from the chrysalis, bites through the seal, and goes off in search of a mate.  Then the next egg hatches, and so on.  The material used to seal off the cells varies from species to species.  Many use mud, but if you see small semicircles cut out of your lily leaves then it is probably a leafcutter bee that uses the lily leaves to seal off each cell.

Red Mason Bee - Osmia bicornis

One way to attract solitary bees to your garden is to put up a bee hotel.  You are probably familiar with these which have bunches of short lengths of bamboo built into a wooden box.  These are ideal for solitary bees and if you put them less than six feet from the ground on a south or west facing wall, you are almost guaranteed to see the cells filling up.  This time of year is an ideal time to put them up as well.

The reason that you may want to put one up is that solitary bees are great pollinators.  If you look at your fruit trees or bushes when they are in flower you will see that they are being pollinated almost exclusively by solitary bees. So put up a bee hotel, enjoy watching the bees visiting it, and enjoy a bumper crop of apples.  Isn’t nature brilliant?!

For links to fact sheets about the species pictured visit -

http://hymettus.org.uk/information_sheets.htm

March 2015

Feeding birds at this time of year can make the difference between starvation and survival.  Many birds are in their full breeding plumage now and will soon be trying to go beyond survival to fatten themselves in time for the rigours of egg-laying and nestling feeding.

But feeding the birds doesn't just benefit the birds as they can be entertaining to watch and you never know when you will see something unusual.  Just recently we have had more than the usual number of species visiting our feeders – something that alone indicates how much they rely on us feeding them.  We haven’t seen any unusual species but we have noticed behaviour we haven’t seen before and each species has its own style of feeding.

Greenfinches

The blue-tit will visit several feeders and flit from one to another, feeding for a while at each one, sometimes taking a large seed which it will hold with its foot against a branch while it breaks it into smaller pieces.  The coal tit on the other hand, hardly ever stays on the feeder, but takes one seed and flies off to a safer place.  Perhaps it’s a measure of the cold weather and the low energy reserves that we have recently seen one staying on the feeder while it ate several seeds.

We have also seen long-tailed tits on the feeders.  This is unusual because long-tailed tits hardly ever go on the feeders.  Long-tailed tits usually fly around in a noisy mob for most of the year and will sweep through the garden mopping up insects before moving on to the next feast.  During the breeding season, however, they abandon the mob and pair off ready for nesting and when the chicks have fledged will join up into mobs again.  At first we saw one that was on its own, but the other half of the pair joined it a few days later.

Juvenile Goldfinch

Birds are split into two halves when it comes to feeders – maybe three halves if you count the ones that never feed in gardens.  There are the species that seem happy on the feeders – blue-tits and great tits, goldfinches, greenfinches and house sparrows, and then there are those that feed on the ground, picking up scraps underneath the feeders, like dunnocks and wood pigeons.   There are also others (a fourth half maybe?) that are at home either on the ground or on the feeders, like starlings or chaffinches.  There are also a few species that would really like to use the seed  feeders but are not agile enough to be able to balance on the small perch.  (That doesn’t include wood pigeons that are just too darned big!)

We have robins visiting the garden but in the past they have been amongst those that can’t perch but just try to hover long enough to grab a seed or two in passing.  We have one robin however, that seems to have taught himself (or herself) to perch comfortably like other birds and to eat his fill.  We don’t know if it’s just one individual that does this or if there are a few.  There are two robins that claim our garden as their territory, so if they have both learned the trick it will be interesting to see whether they pass the skill onto their chicks.  We just need some warmer weather now so they can get on with it.

Great Spotted Woodpecker

February 2015

Having thoroughly explored one tiny patch of Australia, we moved on to another patch called Tasmania. Tasmania has quite similar wildlife to the mainland, but there are significant differences, and judging by the amount of road-kill, considerably greater abundance.  Though birds are mobile and can get across large stretches of water easily, Tasmania does have its own endemic species.  One of the loudest and most common of these is the black currawong. 

Black Currawong

These are large raucous birds, superficially like crows, but with a wickedly large beak and a wide range of calls.  Like crows, they also hang around human habitations and will greedily consume any scraps of food left lying around.  One bird that they don’t have in Tasmania is the emu – which means that the one we saw in a field as we drove past, was on a farm and destined for the table!

Pademelon

Tasmania also has its own unique mammalian fauna.  They don’t have the large red or grey kangaroos, but they do have a rather cute wallaby called a pademelon (pronounced paddy-melon, and also known as the rufous wallaby).  It has shorter legs and tail than other species and is more suited to the dense forests of Tasmania.  It used to occur on mainland Australia but was wiped out by introduced foxes.  Foxes were, of course, introduced to Australia by the unspeakable red-coated lot in pursuit of ‘sport’.  Interestingly, they were introduced to Tasmania first, but are now extinct there, and it is thought that they were out-competed by the indigenous Tasmanian devil.

We were privileged to be able to see Tasmanian devils.  These animals are about the size of a fox, but shorter and stockier, and they are in serious danger of extinction and for once, not because of the stupidity or thoughtlessness of man, but because of a virulent cancer that has spread through the population like wildfire.  In one part of the north of the state, it is estimated that 98% of the population was wiped out in about 18 months.  Prior to 1996 when the disease was first discovered, the population of devils was thriving.  It was thriving largely because of the activities of man.  Settlers cleared the forest and created grassland for grazing animals. 

Tasmanian Devil

Wallabies are also grazing animals and so thrived, and of course wallabies are prey animals for Tasmanian devils.  Since the disease struck, the government has introduced a program to create areas where disease free devils can be separated or that can be kept disease-free, and 3 such areas have so far been created.  We went on a trip to see one of these areas and witness their ‘natural’ behaviour.  Had this been a zoo, where animals are kept in captivity just for show, we wouldn’t have gone, but this was better than a zoo in several ways.  The animals are necessarily in captivity to quarantine them from the diseased population but they are also in a large area – 10 hectares (about 25 acres in English), and are kept away from human contact to keep them as wild as possible.  Proceeds from the trip go to support and expand the programme, and one of the conditions placed on the trip operators is that the visit had to be educational, with a view to spreading the facts about the disease and to prevent persecution of the animals.  This message is largely getting through with many farmers realizing that they don’t take lambs, but will clear away carrion that could spread disease through the flock.  Some idiots never listen though, one of whom has tried to illegally introduce foxes to Tasmania as recently as 2001.  If foxes gain a foothold because of the weakened state of the devils, who knows what will happen to the ecology there.
Devils are, like many of Australia’s mammals, marsupials, which mean that their young are born very soon after conception and complete their development in a pouch.  Australia has another branch of the mammals, the monotremes, or the egg-laying mammals.  There are two notable species – the platypus, which needs more time and patience to see than is allowed on a whistle-stop tour – and the echidna, or spiny ant-eater.  We saw several on our trip, mostly grubbing about at the side of the road. 

Echidna - Spiny Anteater

They are a charming creature with a long snout and small eyes, somewhere in size about halfway between a hedgehog and a badger.  They are relatively unconcerned by people screeching to a halt and leaping out of the car with cameras, but they will either curl up like a hedgehog or shuffle off, and if further threatened will dig straight down and bury themselves leaving only their spines visible.

January 2015

The Nature Notes author is on holiday this month, so he is not able to see what is going on in Pett.  Instead, he’ll try and send a little warmth from the Southern hemisphere and tell you a little about the natural world from an Australian point of view.

Getting to grips with the wildlife in a strange place can be daunting at first because nearly everything is new.  Birds are the obvious place to start because other things like small mammals are shy and hard to spot, insects are small and easily hidden, and many species of both are nocturnal.  Birds being able to fly away are more inclined to show themselves.  Another reason for starting with birds is that wherever you go, there’s an appropriate field guide to refer to.

The first bird I saw on the drive from the airport was, appropriately, the welcome swallow.  It is slightly smaller than our own swallow, but still unmistakeable.  Next, picking up road-kill insects from the side of the road were myna birds.  These are found all over Asia, and have been introduced to many Pacific countries where they seem to thrive and have a more or less detrimental impact on the local ecology.  In one infamous example they were introduced to Fiji to control insects that were destroying the local bean crops.  They were successful in wiping out the insects, but having done that, they went on to eat the beans.  Australia though, has its own endemic myna bird as well as the introduced one.

If I had to choose two adjectives that describe the bird life in Australia, they would be colourful, and vocal.  Many people complain about being woken early in the spring by the dawn chorus.  In Australia, it goes on all day, and at times can seem deafening.  The kookaburra is one example, with its almost demonic laughing call.  It took me a while to identify one bird that had a loud, sharp, ‘ping’ call.  Though quite secretive, I managed to get some photographs, and with the help of a field guide, identified it as a bell miner bird.  The sound is more like a sledge hammer striking a chisel than a bell, but much louder and more piercing.   It’s a small bird with olive green plumage and the most amazing orange legs. 

Bell Miner

Another bird that has a loud call is the sulphur-crested cockatoo.  This has a loud and jarring squawking call, played at a volume to make a noise abatement officer long for retirement.

Amongst all the noise, it can be quite surprising to hear the familiar call of a blackbird. (And can be likened to finding a quaint Spanish village with an English pub in it.) It is the same species of blackbird that may be found in Pett.  There are several species that have been introduced to Australia, such as the greenfinch and goldfinch.  These have probably been introduced for no other reason than to make early settlers feel at home.  Whether they have an impact on the local ecology or not, they certainly don’t make it any less colourful or quieter.

One of the most colourful groups of birds is, of course, the parrots.  I've only been here a few days, but I've already seen 6 different species, from the pure white (almost) sulphur-crested cockatoo, to the unbelievable, but aptly named rainbow lorikeet.

Rainbow Lorikeet

There is plenty of other wildlife here, of course, but it all seems to follow the same pattern of louder and more colourful than the wildlife at home.  I've seen butterflies the size of birds, a startling yellow-headed fly, and one black red-bellied snake – described as poisonous, but rarely fatal.  Well that’s a comfort, at least.

If you would like to see some of the photos, I've started an Australia blog that can be seen at www.akaust14.blogspot.co.uk.