January 2017

Fieldfare (In this case in Northern Europe in Sweden)

The holly and the ivy when they are both full grown – provide many species with food and shelter.  Well I think I got the first part of the carol right.  At this time of year as the weather and the countryside become increasingly grey, evergreens like holly and ivy leave a welcome splash of colour.  This is particularly true of holly with its bright red berries.  The berries provide an obvious food source for wildlife and in January song-thrushes and blackbirds will gorge themselves on them at a time when other food sources are scarce.  There may well be an influx of their less well known cousins the fieldfares and redwings from northern Europe also taking advantage of the berries.  Ivy berries, though less conspicuous than holly (They are a rather attractive velvety black colour and smaller than holly berries) also provide a welcome energy source for many birds.  Ivy flowers quite late in the season and the small easily overlooked flower clusters provide nectar and pollen for many insects, not least the ivy bee* (Colletes hedera) which emerges late in the autumn to take advantage of these flowers.

Ivy Flower - 

In terms of providing shelter, ivy provides plenty of nesting sites for birds like the robin, dunnock and wren.  It provides a good tangle of stems with plenty of leaf cover and is usually growing over a good solid wall or fence that offers a bit of insulation and protection from the wind.  The holly too provides nesting sites for many birds.  The prickly leaves make it very difficult for ground-based predators to climb into.  I recommend that you don’t clear up dead holly leaves from beneath the tree as cats won’t go anywhere near it.  The fact that holly and ivy don’t lose their leaves in winter means that birds can build nests in early spring that would be otherwise exposed in a deciduous tree before its leaves have sprouted.

 Of course, there are animals other than birds that feed and take shelter in holly and ivy, not least of which is the holly leaf miner.  This is a species of fly that lays its eggs in the leaf.  When the eggs hatch the larva (maggot) eats the inside of the leaf between the tough outer layers.  This eventually pupates and emerges from the leaf as an adult fly – if all goes well, that is.  There are a couple of species of parasitic wasp that lay their eggs inside the larva which hatch and eat the larva from the inside.  It’s gruesome but the holly has indirectly provided food and shelter for yet more species.  And it doesn’t end there because birds like blue tits and great tits can get at the larvae before they emerge, to add yet more species to the list provided for by the tree.  Even though the holly bears the crown, the ivy isn’t left out as regards leaf miners.  The ivy leaf miner is a micro-moth larva which starts eating inside the leaf but when it is big enough to moult, it leaves the leaf and spins a cocoon outside.  The micro-moth is the small grey tortrix (Cnephasia incertana) which is a common species that we often find in the moth trap.  (It isn’t restricted to ivy; it mines several other plant species.)   The holly and the ivy each support only one species of leaf miner which, considering the large number of leaf miners, makes them quite a selective host.

Though the bark of most trees carries mosses and lichens, I don’t remember seeing lichens on the smooth bark of holly – hmmm,  more research required.

* The ivy bee was described as new to science as late as 1993 from specimens found in southern Europe.  It was first found in the UK in 2001.

December 2016

As I write this it is cold and windy and wet outside and it will be getting dark at about 4 o’clock.  My annual anger at putting the clocks back has subsided into mild irritability that is probably not far from my normal state.  So the question is, what happens to the natural world when it gets cold, wet and windy and the clocks go back?  Clearly the natural world has no interest in the clocks going back, and even if it could be explained to them, any animal would instantly see the logical flaws and think we were mad.  They are already aware, much more so than us, that the day length has dramatically changed, and for many the shorter days means less time foraging for food or prey.  For some, that will lead to starvation, especially for warm-blooded creatures with their high energy demands.  So in order to avoid starvation they must have a strategy.  There are three basic strategies that an animal can adopt – migrate, hibernate, or stay put.

Migration is a fairly obvious strategy – when you can’t get enough food in one place, move to somewhere that you can find food.  Such a strategy is not without its costs though.  Exhaustion, and adverse weather can make the trip hazardous, especially for young animals, even without the Mediterranean macho men and their shotguns.  Migratory birds may find that their predators also migrate – hobbies, the small hawks that prey on swallows and martins migrate at the same time. (The hobby – Falco subbuteo, had the table football game named after it.) But for those that make it, they can enjoy warm sunny days and plentiful food.  Migration is mostly for flying animals like birds and butterflies, and unlike the huge wildebeest migrations in Africa, the UK doesn’t have any land animals that migrate as far as I know, except for a relatively short upland to lowland movement.  One group of flying animals that don’t migrate are bats, which brings us to the next strategy.

Hibernation.  This involves finding somewhere sheltered, well insulated and dry, and then to go into a deep sleep, or state of torpor so that energy demands are kept to the absolute minimum.  For warm blooded animals this means slowing their breathing and heart rates and reducing body temperature and the exposed surface area of their bodies to a minimum.  The dormouse epitomizes this – curled up into a ball in a warm nest and looking unbearably cute.  Bats do the same, but they do it as a group so that only the ones outside the group are exposed to the cold.  Clearly some swapping of positions is required; otherwise the outside ones would die and leave the next layer exposed.  Hibernation also has its dangers, the torpid state means that should a predator discover the hibernaculum (posh word for cosy winter nest) there’s no chance to react. Hibernating insects are also prone to parasitic and fungal infections.

With all the risks involved in migration and hibernation, maybe staying put and braving the weather is a better option.  It’s an option that usually needs a bit of forward thinking.  During the autumn, nuts, seeds, and berries are usually plentiful and animals that are going to stay active during the winter tend to feed themselves up and build up an extra layer of fat, both as insulation and as an energy reserve when the available food gets scarce.  Yet another strategy would be to have a back-up plan.  Grey squirrels and jays can be seen collecting acorns in autumn, which they bury and mostly remember where they are buried so they can be dug up later.

Of course, each of these strategies is not available to every species, and the ‘chosen’ strategy has been honed over hundreds, if not thousands, of generations on the whetstone of evolution.  Swallows didn’t discover sub-Saharan Africa on a random day trip, their route and destination will have gradually changed as the landscape has changed and food resources and predators have become more or less plentiful.

Maybe as we spend our winter in centrally heated well-lit homes it is worth considering the wildlife outside day and night in all weathers, and maybe topping up the bird feeders, because it really does make a difference.

November 2016

Crows.  Wherever you go in the world (except Antarctica!) you are almost certain to see a member of the crow family.  They are mostly large, raucous and black, though that last adjective couldn’t be applied to the jay, one of the more colourful of our native corvids.  (Corvid is the posh name ornithologists use instead of ‘member of the crow family’.)  On a recent trip to Aberdaron in North Wales, I was privileged to see two of the least common members of the crow family – the raven and the chough.  The chough is our rarest crow and there are only about 250 to 350 breeding pairs in the UK.  They are confined to the far west of the country and nest on the west coasts of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.  In 2002, a small population re-established itself in Cornwall, a former chough stronghold.  Of course, farmers were to blame for their decline and eventual extinction in Cornwall, but in this case not for destroying habitat but for leaving it alone.  Choughs feed mainly on invertebrates, especially ants, and nest on cliffs, and the Cornish farmers stopped allowing their stock to graze around the cliffs where they were difficult to manage and moved them inland.  This allowed scrub to grow up and stopped the choughs getting at the food they were used to.  The RSPB has done a lot of work in Cornwall to restore grazing there and choughs have successfully bred there ever since.

Carrion Crow - Corvus corone corone

The other member of the crow family that I saw in Wales was the raven.  There were three of them enjoying a stiff easterly breeze around a rocky outcrop that I suspect was their nesting site.  It turns out that had I known about it, I wouldn’t have had to travel to Wales to see them because there have been a pair nesting on the East Hill in Hastings this year.  If you are down that way, it is worth looking out for them.  They are bigger than a carrion crow and just as black, so you’ll need to look for the very thick beak and the diamond-shaped tail.  The tail comes to a point in the middle, unlike the crow which has a flat or slightly rounded tail.

Rook - Corvus frugilegus (with a slightly malformed beak)

Jackdaw - Corvus monedula

There is no shortage of members of the crow family around Pett village.  There is at least one noisy rookery (the rook is slightly smaller than a crow with a whitish grey base to its beak), and plenty of jackdaws.  I admit to having a soft spot for jackdaws.  They are a slightly comic bird with their upright stance, swaggering walk and those striking white eyes.  I guess I can identify with the grey head as well.

The more colourful members of the crow family, the magpie and the jay are regularly seen in the village.  Jays are as common as magpies but less often seen as they stay hidden in trees and bushes most of the time.  Late autumn is a good time to see them as they come out to collect acorns which they stash away to eat when the weather gets cold and food gets scarce.

You can’t avoid seeing magpies with their flamboyant metallic blue wings and their boisterous habits.  I was recently told of a magpie with a deformed leg which despite that handicap was getting about and apparently feeding well.  Magpies, along with all other members of the crow family are intelligent and resourceful birds so it stands a good chance of survival.

Recently, nature has suffered a great loss in the death of Trevor Buttle.  His knowledge and cheerful enthusiasm for the natural world will be greatly missed.

Pied Crow. Madagascar

Australian Raven, Australia

It seems that I don't have any other photos of UK corvids - perhaps they are too commonplace, a situation I will have to try and rectify.  Meanwhile here are some from other countries...

Azure-winged Magpie, China (Note this is the same as those you will see in Southern Spain but the jury's out on whether or not they are the same species

Red-billed Magpie, China

Jackdaw - Corvus monedula, Sweden

October 16

One of our neighbours in the village recently found a bat roosting on their window-frame.  Unfortunately, it was roosting on the inside of the frame.  It’s not clear how it got there, but it’s likely that it chased an insect into an open window and then couldn’t find its way out.  Calling the author of nature notes didn’t resolve the situation as he only took photographs and made sympathetic noises.  Calling Karen Hammond of the Sussex Bat Group was a much better idea as she had the appropriate gloves and knows a lot more about bats.  She captured the bat and identified as a male brown long-eared bat before releasing it away from the house.

Brown long-eared bat - Plecotus auritus

Karen is the Volunteer Manager at Bodiam Castle and deals with all bat-related issues there.  She is also a registered bat-carer.  That last fact is important as all bats are protected species and anybody who handles them must have enough knowledge and an appropriate licence.  (There is also the slight risk that bats can carry a rabies-like virus – hence the gloves.) Karen also gives very interesting talks at Bodiam Castle occasionally and I can highly recommend attending one. 

In spring bats make a roost where the females can give birth and suckle their young until they are weaned.  Unsurprisingly these are called maternity roosts.  Normally, for most bat species, the males are not welcome in these roosts, but in the case of long-eared bats males are tolerated there.  Autumn is the time when bats mate, something that must be accomplished before hibernation, so maybe this lone long-eared bat had other things on its mind.

Bats are remarkable creatures, they are very agile as they dart about catching insects on the wing.  We often see a couple of bats flying round the garden at dusk and it is always a pleasure to watch them swooping about.  Apparently the brown long-eared bat is even more agile than most other species and it can hover and take insects from vegetation.

The long ears (in this case, almost as long as its body) are mainly to help with echolocation, the means by which the bat detects its prey.  It sends out pulses of very high frequency sound which echoes off the insects and tells the bat the direction and distance of the insect.  Possibly as a result of its long ears, the long-eared bat can also hear the lower frequency sounds, which allows it to hear insect movement on leaves and branches etc.

If you find a colony of bats roosting in your house rather than just one confused individual, then it is no good calling out a bat expert as it is illegal to disturb or destroy bat roosts in the UK, or to block access to them.  This is a protection covered by both UK and international laws.  The protection is there because bats are generally in decline due to loss of suitable roosting sites as well as the decline in their insect prey due to intensive farming methods used since the end of the Second World War.

Personally, I’d be delighted to have bats roost in our house and I am considering putting up a bat box to try and attract them.  That may mean that we get fewer moths in the garden, but as long as it’s in a good cause…

Away from bats, and more towards their prey, I found a tiny, beautiful and very unusual insect in the garden recently – an Andromeda Lacebug.  These insects are associated with the shrub Pieris japonica otherwise known as Japanese Andromeda and were introduced into the UK from Asia via the plant trade. 

Andromeda Lacebug - Stephanitis takeyai 

For more details about how the bug got its name see www.pettnats.blogspot.com. 

September 2016

Evolution needs three factors – a means of reproduction, a method for change, and a struggle for life.  Remove any one of these factors, and evolution stops.  Remove the ‘struggle for life’ and you end up with species like the horseshoe crab that have no effective predators or parasites and have stayed the same for millions of years.  Quite often though, the struggle for life ends up as a sort of arms race between predator and prey, as one evolves an effective defence and the other gets round it.  Nothing exemplifies this better than the humble caterpillar.

The role of caterpillars is to eat.  Their purpose is to put on as much weight as possible because adult moths and butterflies don’t need or have the ability to eat any protein, they can only top up their energy reserves with nectar while looking for the chance to put into practice the ‘means of reproduction’.  Of course the fatter and juicier they get, the more attractive caterpillars are to predators like birds that need to feed their growing brood.  The first defence is to hide, which many species do quite effectively by burrowing into stems, under bark, or underground.  But this limits their food supply and stops them getting at most of the nutrients concentrated in the leaves of plants.  So an effective way of eating leaves without being eaten is to look like a leaf, or failing that to look like a twig.  I have long marvelled at the camouflage displayed by adult moths that appear to look like lichens or tree bark, or even broken birch twigs (buff-tip moth), but caterpillars take an equally bizarre range of colours and forms. 

Buff-tip Moth - or Birch twig

Another path that evolution has taken is to make some caterpillars unpalatable.  One of the ways this manifests itself is in the hairiness of some caterpillars.  A fine example of this is the woolly bear, the caterpillar of the garden tiger moth. 

Garden Tiger moth caterpillar - Woolly Bear

Whilst eating something hairy may be unpalatable, if the hairs themselves contain irritating chemicals, then so much the better.  One caterpillar that has such hairs is that of the brown-tail moth.  So irritating are those hairs that they can even penetrate human skin and cause rashes.  A young bird may not have come across a brown-tail caterpillar before and so the caterpillar gets eaten, or partially eaten, but part of the species success is due to the two bright orange dots on its back.  The bird may forget the hairs but the warning dots make a powerful and obvious reminder.

Brown-tail moth caterpillar

If you have fuchsia in your garden, you may well find a bright green caterpillar with what looks like large eyes near its head.  It can retract its head, which puffs out its body and displays the large eyes to warn off any potential predator.  As the caterpillar gets bigger and the leaves get eaten, the body fades to a dark grey colour, which with the mobile and retractable head gives the moth its name – the elephant hawkmoth.  If you don’t have fuchsia, then another favourite plant is rose-bay willow-herb.

In this discussion about prey and predators, I am forgetting the prey of the caterpillar – the plants that they prey upon.  Evolution has equipped these plants too with some remarkable defences.  They are not able to hide, but they do thorny and unpalatable quite well.  One plant, ragwort, is so poisonous that it reputedly kills horses and cattle, though not if their owners look after them properly (whether or not they have ragwort growing in their pastures).   If you have ragwort, you may see a very conspicuous caterpillar on it with striking black and orange stripes.  This is the cinnabar moth caterpillar which is immune to the poison, but will happily pass it on to any predator that ignores the bright warning stripes.

Elephant Hawkmoth caterpillar showing its 'eyes'

Do you know the really amazing thing about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly?  They both have the same DNA – what sort of a blueprint is that?

Cinnabar moth caterpillar on Ragwort

And just for reference, here are photos of the adult moths to show just how adaptable their DNA is.

Cinnabar Moth

Brown-tail moth

Garden Tiger moth

Elephant Hawkmoth

August 2016

If you were to drive (or walk) down Denge Marsh Road in Lydd, you would end up on a rutted track that takes you right down to the sea, not far from Dungeness Power Station.  In fact, the track runs between the power station and Lydd Firing Ranges.  As you may expect, it is a bleak and inhospitable place which is exactly the sort of place to find some of the best nature.  The flora there is unusual because the place is unusual, though much of it is familiar if you have spent any time around Rye Harbour or at the Dungeness RSPB reserve.  There are the usual shingle species like viper’s bugloss, sea beet and sea kale, and some that seem to turn up almost anywhere like scarlet pimpernel, woody nightshade, and rest harrow.

Recently however, I came across a species that I’d never seen before.  It was a very tiny plant with a low growing prostrate habit with evergreen, succulent-like leaves.  It had carpeted a large patch of ground and could easily have been overlooked and mistaken for moss.  There was a redness to it that made me look twice and it turned out to have what appeared to be bright red buds. 

Sea-heath - Frankenia laevis - with rabbit dropping for scale

Sea-heath - Frankenia laevis

Identification for me nowadays, consists of taking plenty of photos (assuming the subject stays around for long enough, which most plants do well), and then comparing them with the field guides when I get home.  So I did this with my mystery plant and chose a plant that looked the closest match, which turned out to be sea-milkwort.  Of course, to be certain it is best to get the photos looked at by an expert.  Though I know a couple of very experienced botanists I could ask, I decided that I may get a quicker answer on Facebook.

Now I know that sounds unlikely, but Facebook has grown up.  I know that a lot of people in the village use Facebook – it’s a good way to keep up with the grandkids, after all, but recently Facebook added a feature called Facebook Groups.  Groups are a way of letting like-minded people get together and share ideas and photos, and the wildlife and nature community has leapt on this as a way of helping each other identify things and to show each other what they’ve seen (as well as having the serious purpose of encouraging people to formally record their sightings).  There are groups for birds, beetles, insects, bees, wasps and ants, you name it, there’s a group for it.  I belong to the Wild Flowers of Britain group, amongst others, and so I posted the photos on there.  My suggestion of sea-milkwort didn’t last long.  The first alternative suggestion was mossy stonecrop, but this was also rejected in favour of sea-heath – Frankenia laevis.  When I looked this up, it turned out to be a rare plant that also had pale mauve flowers, which didn’t seem to fit with what I thought were bright red flower buds.  All of the Facebook groups are moderated by experts or at least enthusiastic and knowledgeable amateurs, so could they have got it wrong?

Sea-heath - Frankenia laevis

Well today, I went back to see if any of the red ‘buds’ had opened.  None of them had, and on closer inspection, they weren’t flower buds but leaves that had turned red.  I was disappointed and as I was about to leave I spotted some pale mauve flowers in a small corner of the patch, and sure enough they were attached to branches having both green and red leaves.  Sea-heath indeed.  The fingerprints on my index finger at the bottom give some idea of the size of this plant.

July 2016

Recently, I was doing a bee survey on the Rye Harbour Nature Reserve with the project leader of the short-haired bumblebee project.  Whilst there were plenty of bumblebees around, we were quite surprised to stumble across several bee orchids.  If you have never seen a bee orchid, you may wonder what it looks like, but it you have heard the name and then come across the plant, you would be in no doubt what you had found, because it looks exactly like a bumblebee drinking nectar from a pink flower.

Bee Orchid - Ophrys apifera

Bee Orchid - Ophrys apifera

The idea behind this, if you can call an evolutionary advantage an idea, is that the flower looks like a female bumblebee.  Not only does it look like a female bumblebee, but to a male bumblebee, it smells like one as well.  So the male lands on the flower and attempts to mate with the ‘female’ and in the process gets covered in pollen.  When he makes a second attempt at another flower, the pollen is rubbed onto the stigma of that flower and at least the plant is fertilized.  Hopefully, the male bumblebee will not keep making the same mistake and will eventually find a proper female to mate with.

We didn’t see any bumblebees on the bee orchids and I started wondering which species of bee actually pollinates the orchid.  When I got home I reached for my trusty copy of the internet and looked it up.  Sadly, the answer was a little disappointing – In the UK, the bee orchid is self-pollinating and it relies on the wind to brush the pollen onto the stigma.  Apparently, around the Mediterranean, there are species of bee that pollinate the plant, but my trusty copy of the internet was strangely reticent on exactly which species do so.

The bee orchid is a striking plant and well worth keeping an eye out for.  It is not a particularly rare plant and is quite widespread throughout England, though the books describe it as ‘locally common’ which means that you won’t find it everywhere, but when you do find one, you’ll probably find several.  It seems to like chalk soils and often appears on disturbed ground, though it doesn’t flower every year.  Perhaps that’s why it has suddenly appeared on the bund wall at Rye Harbour.  

June 2016

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em.  And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.  As doggerel, at least it scans and roughly rhymes, but as far as scientific accuracy goes, it leaves a lot to be desired.  Firstly fleas don’t bite other fleas, they only bite mammals, and secondly the chain of parasites stops somewhere at the level of single celled organisms, which is way short of infinity.  But having just returned from Sweden working for the bumblebee reintroduction project (www.bumblebeereintroduction.org ), I am more concerned about what is biting bumblebees, rather than fleas.

One of the first short-haired bumblebee queens caught in Sweden in 2015

When the bumblebee queens are returned to the UK, they are put in quarantine for two weeks.  The quarantine is not an import requirement, but a decision by the project to avoid as far as possible bringing new strains of bumblebee disease into the UK.  (There are no such restrictions on the import of commercial bumblebees for pollination purposes to the UK, which is crazy.)  We expect only 50% of the queens to make it through quarantine.  Mites are the largest creatures that infect bumblebees, and if you get a close look at one in your garden, you may see small pale yellow or white spots, especially at the joint between the middle bit and the end bit. (Okay, thorax and abdomen if you want to get technical.)  If you use a magnifying glass, you may see that the pale spots have eight legs.  Mites don’t do the bumblebees any harm, but a serious infestation may affect its ability to fly because of their weight.  If any mites are found on our reintroduced bumblebees, they can be removed during quarantine after a visual inspection.  (Note that though bumblebees may carry the varroa mite, it does no harm. It is only a problem for honey bees because their colony stays warm throughout the winter.) 

A short-haired bumblebee queen released at Dungeness in
 2015 feeding on periwinkle

Following the flea rhyme, the next parasite in descending order of size would be a parasitic wasp (Syntretus species) which lays her eggs in the thorax of the queen.  These eggs then develop into larvae (maggots) which collect in her abdomen and will eventually kill her.  There are a large number of parasitic wasps that prey on a variety of insects and go about their dastardly business in much the same way. 

The next smaller in size would be a nematode worm – Sphaerularia bombi – that infects the gut of many bumblebee species.  Nematode worms infect just about every animal species on earth and it has been estimated that 80% of all animals now alive are nematode worms.  They are roundworms (to distinguish them from flatworms) and yes, the roundworm that infects human guts is a nematode worm.  The horrible Loa loa worm that Sir David Attenborough uses as an argument against a benevolent creator is a nematode as well.  There are around 28,000 species of nematode worm known and some even infect plants.  When nematodes develop in the bumblebee, they alter her behaviour in such a way that instead of founding a colony after emerging, she feeds herself and then goes and finds somewhere to hibernate instead.  She then dies and the worms leave her body, mate, and then wait until another queen hibernates there in the autumn.

Last, and probably least, as far as we know, is a single-celled organism called a trypanosome.  This is Crithidia bombi which infects the gut of the bumblebee.  Though this may weaken the bee, it doesn’t kill it and the queen may still go on to found a colony.  So if we find a bumblebee with Crithidia while we are collecting them, she will be released again near to where she was found.  In order to find out if the bees have Crithidia, the project has a bee poo specialist (@BombusJones) who looks at a poo sample under a microscope to see if there is any there.  She spends much of her day waiting for the bees to poo, and the rest of it peering at bee poo through a microscope, and curiously, she seems to thoroughly enjoy doing it.

Yet another threat to bumblebees - a cuckoo bumblebee Bombus rupestris that will kill or eject a red-tailed bumblebee from her colony, and then, after killing or eating any eggs or larvae in the colony, will lay her own eggs and induce the workers from the original colony to raise her brood.

May 2016

I vaguely remember mentioning at about this time last year that the wildflowers down Rosemary Lane were fantastic, though I can’t find any record of doing it.  However, they are fantastic again this year and if it’s not too late by the time you read this, I would heartily recommend walking down the lane and having a look.  There were plenty of daffodils around when I went down there which sort of spoils the effect because they stick up so far above the natural carpet of wildflowers.  And what a carpet it is – there are stitchwort, primroses, bluebells (proper English ones too, none of your Spanish invaders!), wood anemones, lesser celandines, and probably many more though these formed the most striking part of the display.

Primrose - Primula vulgaris

Two less conspicuous plants also caught my eye – the arum lily, and dog’s mercury.

The arum lily has the botanical name of Arum maculatum which refers to the black spots that often occur on its leaves.  The plant has an understated beauty with its pale green hood and dark spadix.  It is the spadix (the correct name for the bit that sticks up in the middle) that gives rise to its many other common names – cuckoo pint, lords and ladies, cuckoo flower, Jack in the pulpit, devils and angels, red-hot poker, willy lily, snake’s meat, and cows and bulls.  It may not be immediately obvious how some of these names relate to the spadix, though the name willy lily leaves little doubt.  But once you know that cuckoo pint is pronounced to rhyme with mint, and that pint is short for pintle – a slang term for the male member, then all becomes clear.  A subtle change to the punctuation of lords and ladies – i.e. lord’s and lady’s should make that clear as well.  I thought I did quite well there to explain all that without using the word penis – oops!  I’ve never seen it myself, but I believe that soon after dusk the spadix has a faint glow which leads to the less ribald names of fairy lamps, or shiners.

Bluebells - Hyacinthoides non-scripta

Dog’s mercury (Mercurialis perennis) has no such bawdy associations, and has only one other common name – the boggard posy.  The boggard or boggart is an old term for a malevolent or mischievous domestic spirit who was supposed to live in the same sort of damp dark places where the plant is found to grow.  The fact that the plant is highly poisonous probably lent some weight to this belief.  It is called dog’s mercury to distinguish it from true mercury – the word dog in this context meaning bad or false.  True mercury refers to the plant ‘good king henry’ which has the botanical name Chenopodium bonus-henricus (now more correctly Blitum bonus-henricus) and the alternative common name of English mercury.  (I find it curious that the ‘false’ mercury has the botanical name Mercurialis whereas the true mercury has no such association.  But taxonomy – the science of naming species - is full of such contradictions, the scientific name Puffinus puffinus isn’t the puffin, it’s actually the manx shearwater.  The puffin has the name Fratercula arctica should you ever need to address one formally.)  But to get back to Rosemary Lane, dog’s mercury is an inconspicuous plant with short spikes of very small green flowers, and it is just possible that they could be confused with the small pale green flowers of good king henry, but one look at the leaves would easily distinguish between the two.  The difference between the leaves of the two plants is not just in appearance – the leaves of good king henry are edible, even palatable if a little bland, whereas eating the leaves of dog’s mercury would result in a visit to the Conquest.  Such poisonings are rare because the plants are so different, but one case in the 1600’s resulted in a family with 5 children becoming very ill and the death of one of the children.  Another case in the late 1800’s was caused by a couple mistaking dog’s mercury for brooklime (Veronica beccabunga), though both survived after a couple of days of medical attention.

So it’s probably best to appreciate the flowers in Rosemary Lane with your eyes and maybe your nose, but to save your taste buds for plants you are sure about, like cabbage or spinach.

A small part of a big display

Wood Anemone - Anemone nemorosa

Primroses, bluebells and Lesser Celandine (the yellow ones)

April 2016

A couple of times recently I have seen pairs of herring gulls (Larus argentatus) paddling.  By paddling I don’t mean that they were cooling their toes in the surf, but rather stamping on the ground in the middle of a field.  Perhaps a better word would have been charming.  I can hear the howls of protest now from people who consider herring gulls a confounded nuisance, especially those who have to put up with gulls nesting nearby, their raucous calls, smelly droppings, and their habit of ripping rubbish bags and strewing the contents all over the place.  In using the word charming, I wasn’t describing their character, but what they were doing – worm charming.  At this time of year when winter food sources have run out and the spring bounty has yet to kick in, herring gulls fall back on earthworms as a large part of their diet.  So the word charming was used in the same context as snake charming.  They are trying to convince worms that it is raining in order to lure them to the surface, or so the theory goes anyway.  I guess that you’d need to ask an earthworm whether or not that’s what actually happens.

Although large groups of herring gulls can be seen charming worms, I have only seen them in pairs over the last week or so.  I suspect that as well as finding a meal, this activity may have something to do with pair bonding.   As well as building or reinforcing bonds, this has the practical purpose of assessing how good the potential mate is at finding food during hard times.  As yet I haven’t seen any ritual bin-bag ripping, but you never know…

Although herring gull numbers are declining, they are not declining as fast as other seabirds are.  The reasons for the decline are the usual ones – over-fishing, destruction of seabed habitat, and to some extent persecution (In 2010, Natural England removed the herring gull from the list of species landowners and occupiers could be licenced to kill without further authorization.  Since 2009 it has been on the RSPB’s Red List of threatened species.)  But the herring gull has a couple of advantages over other seabirds in the survival stakes – firstly it is adaptable and able to eat a variety of food.  It is able to catch slow moving prey such as crabs or starfish, but it is also a very able scavenger, hence the flocks that haunt rubbish tips and the bin-bag ripping.  They will also be found amongst other gulls following the plough to pick up worms and other invertebrates.

The second advantage is their intelligence.  They are well able to cope with most measures designed to stop them roosting or nesting on rooftops.  Model birds of prey are largely ignored once the gulls notice their lack of movement.  Also spikes and netting are coped with due to their large leathery feet. 

Their third weapon is fear, or rather, lack of it (otherwise this would be a Monty Python sketch!).  They will fiercely defend their nest sites from anybody they consider a threat by dive-bombing and pecking, often accompanied by fishy vomit or faeces. 

All three of the attributes mentioned above – their varied diet, their intelligence and their lack of fear can be easily demonstrated by anyone walking down Hastings seafront with a tray of burger and chips.

Sadly, I have been unable to find any photos of herring gulls.  I will rectify that as soon as I can, but meanwhile here are a couple of handsome specimens from Tasmania.

Silver Gull

Pacific Gull

March 2016

I am writing this column on St. Valentine’s day.  Traditionally, this is the day that birds find a mate for the forthcoming breeding season.  Of course, the birds know nothing of a Roman martyr who died 18 centuries ago, nor of his influence over the greetings card industry or floristry, nor even of the concept of February let alone what 14 means.  So they have been happily going about the business of pairing off for many days now.   Our bird feeders and the surrounding undergrowth have been host to much wing shaking and tail flicking by the local avian community.  Dunnocks in particular are very obvious in their courtship rituals, though at the moment we have three dunnocks going round displaying to each other, so there’s still a decision to be made there.  It was nice to see a pair of long-tailed tits on the feeders this week.  At this time of year long-tailed tits leave the noisy mobs they are usually part of and just go round as pairs.  I am told that the long-tailed tit’s nest is a remarkable flexible construction made from spiders’ webs and moss, but sadly I have never seen one.  We seem to have had a lot more birds on the feeders generally, which perhaps reflects the scarcity of more natural food sources at this time of year. 

One relatively rare visitor this week was a male blackcap.  Blackcaps are normally regarded as summer visitors, arriving in April a little ahead of other warblers, but it has been found that winter sightings reach a peak about mid-December.  It’s tempting to blame global warming for this phenomenon by which milder winters allow summer visitors to stay here all the time.  Though global warming may play its part, this turns out not to be the case.  Our summer visiting blackcaps arrive in about April from their wintering grounds in Africa or Southern Spain, where they return to in late August.  The population that we see in the winter arrive in September or October from Central Europe to which they return in spring, arriving a couple of weeks ahead of the returning African migrants.  It is thought that this gives them an advantage for food and nesting resources over those returning from the South.

I don't have a photo of an Arctic Tern,
this moody shot of a Common Term will have to do

This change in migration habits adds even more mystery to the subject of migration.  How does a bird the size of a blackcap decide that it will be better off flying west rather than south?  And how does it know that Sussex will be better than Hungary or Romania?  Another migration that defies explanation cropped up on television recently – that of the arctic tern.  This elegant bird spends our summer breeding in the Arctic, (its southern breeding limit in Britain is around North Wales) and then another southern hemisphere summer feeding in the Antarctic!  (10,000 miles or so, as the crow flies!)  Recent studies have shown that populations breeding in the Netherlands fly 56,000 miles on their annual migrations – more than twice the distance round the world.  Clearly they don’t take the direct route.

One migration mystery that has been cleared up recently is that of the European robin.  Yes, it does migrate – some robins don’t migrate at all, but some UK robins fly south to Spain, and some Scandinavian robins fly south to the UK.  The mystery that has been cleared up is how they navigate.  It turns out that they can detect the angle that the earth’s magnetic field makes with the ground.  This doesn’t give them an idea of north or south, but rather how far they are from the pole or the equator.  (Something we could detect with an inclination compass.)  How it does this is to do with a protein called cryptochrome found in the robin’s eye, quantum entanglement and superposition and there is not space here to explain it even if I fully understood it.  But if you are interested it is all properly explained in a fascinating book about quantum biology – well I found it interesting, anyway.  (Life on the Edge by Jim Al-Khalili and Joe McFadden, published by Black Swan)

February 2016

What remarkable weather!  By the time you read this, we may well have had a fortnight of cold frosty weather.  On the other hand, we may well have had a continuation of the mild wet and windy weather that we’ve enjoyed since the end of autumn – if there has been an end to autumn that is.  The effect of this long spell of balmy (barmy?) weather has also been remarkable.  There were daffodils out in Hastings before Christmas; grass, which needs a ground temperature of less than 6 degrees C to arrest its growth, is still growing almost as fast as in summer; we have flowers on our comfrey and lesser celandine; last week I found a dandelion clock growing in the lawn – on one of the rare days that the wind didn’t blow it away instantly – dandelions, in January!  So is this just remarkable, or amazing – a freak event that happens every hundred years or so, or is it something more worrying?

Global warming is treated differently by different people.  Some choose to ignore it in the hope that it will go away, others deny that it is happening and point to natural cycles, etc., and many people are so passionate about the danger it poses to humanity that it appears to be almost a religion.  It isn’t a religion of course, no belief is required.  The science is there if you choose to look at it.  The science tells us that global temperatures are rising, and that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising at an ever faster rate.  It also tells us that there is no link between global warming and individual weather events, though it does tell us that extreme weather will become more common.  Warmer sea temperatures mean higher evaporation rates, more water vapour (a greenhouse gas in itself) in the atmosphere, and consequently more rain.  More rain is something the people of Cumbria and Yorkshire know something about this year.  (And Somerset a couple of years ago, and Yorkshire again before that.)

But apart from the weather, why should a few flowers opening earlier than usual be worrying?  It is worrying because everything in nature is connected.  If daffodils flower in December when most bumblebees are hibernating, they will not flower in spring, which means less forage for the bumblebees, as well as honeybees and all the other insects that depend on nectar and pollen.  That means less insects for the birds to eat, less insects to pollinate our vegetables, and ultimately less food for us to eat.  That may sound extreme and perhaps the only noticeable effect will be higher prices of vegetables in the shops, but it’s not a trend that can be sustained forever.  We live in a rich country where nobody needs to starve, and where insurance companies can pick up the tab for flood damage (albeit at a price), but in poorer countries people are literally being washed away.

Successive governments have proved unable to act or even to understand the problem, so it’s up to us – something to think about when your car or television needs replacing, or you want to turn the heating up.  Solar panels and wind turbines may not be to everyone’s taste, but they are so much better than the alternatives.