Starling foraging by reedbed … why do they think they’re waders?
One of the abiding mysteries of London’s natural history is why Starlings act as if they believe they are wading birds. At the Wetland Centre, the flock of Lapwings is constantly accompanied by Starlings, whether in the air or on small muddy islands.
Today, a few starlings were rootling about in front of a reedbed, their handsomely starry plumage giving back the warm sunshiine with green iridescence that for once the camera has managed to catch. They really are beautiful birds in fresh plumage; quite unlike their ‘worn’ plumage, where they just look dark grey-brown and scruffy.
Six warblers today – an early Sedge Warbler squeaking and rasping out its complex rhythms with funky discordant notes a few feet away from the path; some invisible Cetti’s as usual; Blackcaps and surprisingly Whitethroats all about, singing away; a Chiffchaff or two; and a Garden Warbler too.
Out in the pools and on the grazing marsh, a good number of Redshank with their graceful calls, and plenty of activity from Lapwings and Common Terns – these being harassed by Black-Headed Gulls; and overhead an early Hobby, circling like a small dark Peregrine with long wings, high in the sky.
Not many butterflies about – Orange Tip, a very worn Peacock, Brimstone, Small White; and several Bee Flies, like a miniature hummingbird moth with a furry body and a long straight proboscis; but while they keep up the wing action in front of a flower, actually 4 out of 6 legs perch on it! One of the bee flies was hovering over some low vegetation with no flowers, darting down rapidly and repeatedly, at once coming back up, like a damselfly laying eggs: that might be what it was doing.
I did wonder, before I began writing a nature journal here, whether half the entries wouldn’t be ‘nothing much to report today’. Well, so far I haven’t been there.
I went down to Wraysbury again in the hope of finding the Lesser Whitethroat. I arrived rather early, driving out of town only to see a gigantic queue of cars crawling in the other way, trying vainly to beat the Tube strike. No-one was about as I wrapped up in an extra pullover and listened intently to the morning chorus.
My day was already made when I actually SAW a Cetti’s Warbler – for about a second, before the rich brown bird with the rounded tail dived for cover. A Cormorant flapped heavily, taking off from the lake like a lumbering military transport, showing glossy blue-black plumage like a giant crow, circling three times to gain height. Two pairs of Gadwall (only one pair last time) swam shyly near the far side of the lake; Green Woodpeckers laughed their loud ringing call.
Comfrey flowerhead just starting
Blackcaps were singing all over; Song Thrushes too, at least three of them; a considerable flock of Long-Tailed Tits made their extraordinary “Tsrrrrrp” noise (try it); Chiffchaffs spoke their name, and (Common) Whitethroats sang their rasping songs or chattered from inside their thornbushes. Great clumps of Comfrey, the medicinal herb used in mediaeval times to knit bones, have suddenly sprung up with their dark, foxglove-like leaves and clusters of flowers in a range of anthocyanin colours – reds and violets.
There were more Willow Warblers and Garden Warblers, too, making them easier to find; more must be arriving each day now.
Whitethroat habitat: Hawthorn bushes in damp open scrubland
I made my way over the bridge and out into the dry scrubland. Whitethroats were all around now, singing competitively; a few Blackcaps joined in. Then, yes, I heard the simple, flat trill of a Lesser Whitethroat. I sat down and listened, heard it a few more times to make sure: it was a Seven Warbler Walk, I think actually my first, at least when I’ve taken the trouble to count them and write them down. I took a swig of water; an Orange Tip and a Brimstone butterfly flickered past.
Roe Deer slots (with penny for scale)
Looking about the bushes carefully, I noticed a trail of Roe Deer prints, medium and small. Their numbers have been increasing steadily, certainly since 2007, and they are close to becoming a nuisance. About 350,000 are culled each year; another 74,000 or so are killed on the roads, without limiting their growth. Clearly we need some predators, though what our farmers would say to having Lynx back, let alone Wolverines, is easy to imagine. Where they are most numerous, woodland shrub vegetation and bird numbers are suffering.
On the way out, some Goldfinches sang near the road, and a Swallow flew overhead by the river Colne. I felt I’d had a good day, and braced myself for a tricky drive home. On a whim, I went via the airport road. It’s a bit slow but not uninteresting, and there’s a nice tunnel. Waiting at one of the sets of lights, I opened the window, and at once heard a Skylark singing its rippling song. I looked up, and there it was for a moment, a little flickering dark shape against the bright sky, pouring out its aerial music. The lights changed, and a jet growled in to land, the air whistling over its fully-extended flaps.
Fancy, a Skylark at Heathrow, seen and heard from a car, the highlight of a seven-warbler walk, Lesser Whitethroat and all.
A reader of the RSPB’s members’ magazine, Nature’s Home, wrote in a letter to the editor that “If I had my time again I would try and be an all-round naturalist, instead of just a birdwatcher.” [Mike Strickland, Summer 2014 issue, ‘Your view’ page 13.] Well, good on you, Mr Strickland. He went on to praise “such ‘all-round giants’ as Gilbert White and Charles Darwin.” White wrote the Natural History of Selborne, covering topics such as the swallows that flew round his nice house, how to get a garden growing (buy several cartloads of manure – literally – and use it to build a raised veggie bed), the doings of a hibernating tortoise, and whether swallows spend the winter underwater or in holes somewhere. Darwin wrote about everything from Galapagos Finches to earthworms and human emotions, with a lot of time on dogs, pigeons, barnacles and natural selection.
Clearly Mr Strickland had a point. If we’re going to be rounded naturalists, we need to observe whatever is around us – slime moulds and lichens, aphids and fireblight, hoglice and cuckoospit, not just the elegant courtship dances of Great Crested Grebes.
The editor assured Mr Strickland that “The study of other forms of wildlife has definitely become more mainstream with more and more birdwatchers also taking a keen interest in dragonflies, butterflies and moths. While other wildlife has been a feature of the RSPB magazine for quite some time, birds will definitely remain at its heart.”
The other forms of wildlife that, we learn, birdwatchers bother to look at are apparently dragonflies, butterflies and moths. That’s just two groups really – Odonata and Lepidoptera; both are large, day-flying, colourful, and conspicuous – just like birds, but without the feathers – differing only in being insects. Forgivable, I guess. They are, basically, the next best thing: easy to notice, out there when you want ’em (shame they don’t fly all year), and best of all, not too numerous.
I mean, suppose the average birder wanted to get into the beetles, the Coleoptera. They can be found all over the world, are quite often big and spectacular, don’t fly much, are generally black or brown, and are mostly so small you need a hand-lens or microscope, and are so numerous in species that you need to take them to the museum expert to get identified for you. Not terribly convenient, but definitely important.
The biologist J.B.S. Haldane is supposed once to have said, in response to a natural theologian who wondered what one could conclude about God from the study of nature: “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” Since there are about 400,000 species of beetle, one species in every four is a beetle, and a rational Martian visiting Earth would conclude that the planet’s ecosystem designer must have had six legs and a hard waterproof exoskeleton, presumably the joke that Haldane had in mind.
Shepherd’s Purse in my street … almost finished reproducing for the year
If we are going to be less species-ist than Haldane’s Coleopteran Creator, we need to cast our net wider than Aves, Odonata and Lepidoptera. The streets round here are planted with cherries, mainly; there are a few whitebeams, a rowan or two, a line of ash trees, and a few foreign hazels, they could be the American hazel, must check when they fruit. Under the cherries, the observant naturalist can note that Shepherd’s purse, the delightfully named Capsella bursa-pastoris (guess the poor man had so little money, it could fit in those tiny capsules) is already in fruit, soon to scatter its miniature seeds, and April isn’t even over: weeds have to be quick to survive on dry ground, perhaps. The ash trees support a lichen flora which is far more diverse than the basic Lecanora conizaeoides (low grey scaly lichen, no English name) that survived the pollution of the twentieth century; the trees have circles of Common Orange Lichen (Xanthoria parietina) and little patches of a grey leafy Parmelia lichen. And it doesn’t just consist of birds and other conspicuous day-flying objects, either. If that’s all we know to look at, we’re definitely amateur dilettante nature-lovers. Amateur is the French for lover, by the way, and dilettante is the Italian for someone that takes (idle) pleasure in something, the word is related to ‘delight’. Curious that both words should mean “ignorant dabbler” in English. But curiously appropriate, perhaps.
Down at Wraysbury, I wondered what I might see now the spring migration is well and truly under way. Last year there was a single Cuckoo, a rare treat. And perhaps there would be a good number of warblers already.
The winter ducks had all vanished from the lakes, all bar a pair of shy Gadwall right at the back. There were indeed quite a few warblers about – Chiffchaffs, Blackcaps, Cetti’s, Whitethroats, Garden Warblers and one or two Willow Warblers, all singing lustily. I listened out for a Sedge Warbler to make it Seven but couldn’t find one. Still, not bad going.
But over the lake there was a high call: Pik! Cheer! Cheeri-Cheeri-Cheeri-Cheer! A pair of Common Terns, the first of the year: graceful white ‘sea swallows’, marvellously buoyant in flight. But no – there were two pairs .. no, five birds … no, seven in all. They wheeled and shrieked high above, swooped and delicately took insects from the water surface. Comically, one or two of the Black-Headed Gulls tried to do the same: they looked like tubby Sunday footballers trying gamely to keep up with their mates, flapping heavily, looking rotund and clumsy – yet, these are the same birds that gracefully wheel about the tourists at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, skilfully catching pieces of bread tossed into the air at any speed, any angle, any distance. It’s just that the terns are seven times more agile. Their forked tails divide into streamers as long as the rest of the tail; their wings almost pure white below, smooth ash-grey above. Do they make a summer? Almost.
Also swooping over the water was one Swallow, the first of the year for me; and about eight House Martins were hunting above the treetops. Some Alder Flies flew past; perhaps they are emerging from the water, providing a feast for the terns.
One green female Banded Demoiselle perched on some nettles; she too is the first of her kind – indeed, the first dragonfly of any kind – for me this year. And a solitary Greylag goose stood in the shallows, an unusual sight here.
Horses and Jackdaws at Wraysbury
Around the horses on the green grassy hill that used to be the dump, a flock of Jackdaws with some Carrion Crows, benefiting from the insects around the horses; and a second flock, more of a surprise, of Stock Doves. They are notoriously under-reported, people just assuming they are Feral Pigeons or Wood Pigeons without looking to check. They all had the same pattern, and none of them had white wing flashes.
Walking down to the road, the narrow path was carpeted with small teardrop-shaped white petals: Hawthorn flowers, May blossom.
Free Talk: Gunnersbury Triangle, Sunday 8 June 2014 at 2pm
In this short and I hope lively talk, illustrated with models and photographs, I will try to show that camouflage is a lot more than spotty coats.
Animals use many different tricks to hide themselves. Even when there is no cover to hide behind, animals find ingenious ways to make themselves invisible. And if they don’t need to hide, they use the same tricks in reverse to make themselves as obvious as possible.
“Suitable for ages 8 – 80”. Roughly.
OK, you want more technical detail. Hmm. Well, I shall not be talking about military camouflage, though it is (or should be) based on the same principles as in zoology. The title already promises no spots, more or less, so I shall obviously mostly be avoiding what my hero Hugh Cott called disruptive patterns. Yes, you can see that I’ve spent far too much time trying to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of camouflage. If you nose about in there you’ll discover that I’ll have plenty of spotless methods to talk about. To whet your appetite, here’s Hugh Cott’s beautiful drawing of a Potoo, which makes itself as good as invisible by perching, stone-still, atop a broken branch. I’ll leave it up to you to work out how the trick works. Even better, come along to my talk.
An extremely slim-winged Plume Moth landed on the kitchen window and has rested there for some hours, in broad daylight. I was familiar with the distinctive White Plume Moth, Pterophorus pentadactyla, a ghostly little moth with thin, branched, feathery wings – never understood the ‘penta-dactyla’, (‘five-fingered’) as I’d make it many, or perhaps two, but certainly the wings are oddly subdivided. This moth was obviously something in the same family (Pterophoridae) but another species, and given its brownish colour, it must be very inconspicuous among vegetation or on bark.
Plume Moth cf Stenoptilia bipunctidactyla
The excellent British Moths and Butterflies: A Photographic Guide by Chris Manley 2008, reprinted 2011 by Bloomsbury ( Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk), quickly pointed to a species of Stenoptilia: there are several similar and hard-to-tell species, so I wouldn’t presume to say which one it is, but it is most like Stenoptilia bipunctidactyla. The photo shows the family’s distinctive T-shape, and the long thin whitish legs with spines. The back is dotted, and the wingtips lack white, which is why I’m guessing it’s something like this species. It’s said to be common throughout Britain, eating Scabious.
Jim Crace’s novel Harvest was longlisted for the Booker Prize of 2013. Crace is an amazingly taut writer – he does the ‘digested reads‘ in The Guardian, condensing whole books down to a few short but extraordinarily clear paragraphs, which miraculously give you exactly the feel for the kind of writing the book contains. He’s a man who can capture a ‘voice’, if anyone can.
Crace wanted to write about the English landscape, something that we all feel we know but which consists in large part of dark secrets. People have heard, probably, of the Highland Clearances, and dimly understand why the bonny banks and braes are empty of folk. They may be less aware that much the same happened here in England. Actually it’s a complex history – splendidly told in Francis Pryor’s 2010 The Making of the British Landscape (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk) – but Crace wanted to ground it in a single imagined place, to bring it to life for the reader.
I’m a reluctant reader of novels – on the whole I find there’s more than enough serious non-fiction to be going on with – but I was intrigued, no least because I’m fascinated by the way we Brits claim to love the ‘English Countryside’, regardless of whether it’s a strip of wire-fenced mud bordering a vast foul-smelling field of oilseed rape, devoid of insects, wild flowers, birds, or any other redeeming feature. I didn’t doubt that Crace would go straight for the jugular.
An English harvesting scene from Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1577.
The book begins, ironically, with some sweet lines from Alexander Pope’s Ode on Solitude: Happy the man, whose wish and care / A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air / In his own ground. What could be finer? The first chapter begins at once with a fire, or rather two fires, intruding into the quiet laborious rhythm of Early Modern (it could almost be Mediaeval) village life. One fire is the campfire of some ‘new neighbours’, staking their claim to be allowed to stay (‘We’ll see.’); the other, still more sinister, is of ‘ancient wood. Long felled. … We fear it is the manor house that burns…’, plunging us into the turmoil that, step by step, takes us from order to chaos, settlement to exile.
I read Harvest from cover to cover in as few sittings as I could, hating to be interrupted. I won’t spoil the plot for you any further, but will say that I was delighted by the attitudes to the landscape. The villagers live all their lives within their parish bounds. Outside the shared feudal strip-fields are a patch of forest and a marsh. The forest is home to deer, which the hungry villagers see purely as food. The marsh, lovely with wild flowers, is known simply as ‘turd and turf’, a place to cut turves for the fire, and to leave something else behind. Nature’s beauty is not for the poor to appreciate, plainly, though they all know the names of all the plants they see, and what they are good for in folk medicine. This rustic view of nature is contrasted with that of an outsider, a surveyor, who finds the marsh – no-one has the heart to tell him what they call it – quite beautiful, and makes a list of the flowers he finds: listing is knowing, note the villagers. Another man, the book’s narrator, is a bridge between the village and the world outside: he is literate, but has lived for 12 years in the village, and can see things from both sides.
As the book closes in on its climax, a compelling sense of dread seizes the reader, and a shout of unfairness. There’s no foot wrong here, no word out of place. If you love nature and haven’t tried Crace before, read this book. Some critics have compared him to William Golding, not a bad idea, but while he’s as terse and direct, he’s also very much his own pair of eyes. If like me you normally only read non-fiction, I can tell you that Crace must have done a lot of research to get the details of Harvest just right: think of it as a lot of facts arranged with a narrative, if you like. It’s terrific.
The recent East winds and warmer weather have brought plenty of spring migrants to southern Britain. Today at the London Wetland Centre a twitch was in full swing at the Peacock Tower, the object of the lovers’ attention being a Common Sandpiper peacefully browsing along the muddy shore, happily unaware of the excitement it was causing. The breeding Redshanks, too, stalked about the shallows probing for food; the Lapwings as always alert, chasing off Carrion Crows and anything else that might have been interpreted as threatening. Around the paths, three or four early Sand Martin arrivals wheel and swoop like the small brown swallows that they are; their nest-cliff is still empty.
Around the reserve, quite a few Brimstone and Small White butterflies, and an Orange Tip gave movement and colour. I heard the first Sedge Warbler of the year, and despite being right next to the willow bush from which a Cetti’s Warbler was giving out its explosively phrased song, I couldn’t see the songster. A Blackcap however could be glimpsed behind the Sheltered Lagoon, chattering its alarm call. A Song Thrush sang at intervals, and a Dabchick gave its beautiful trill and some small squeaks from the Lagoon, in between spending a lot of time under water.
Back at home, a queen Wasp was nosing about some Ivy-Leaved Toadflax, and a red Mason Bee dug for earth in a seedbed, flying off with a little load for her nest.
We had the enormous pleasure of a spring day at Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, the six acres of superbly beautiful English garden deep in the Weald of Kent, complete with mellow red brick and oast houses. It’s a celebration of nature as perfect as any botanical garden.
Whatever the structure of their curious marriage, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson collaborated perfectly on the Sissinghurst gardens, Harold working with ‘bits of paper and rulers’ to create the garden’s design, or in today’s inflated language its architecture, while Vita got to work on the actual planting, and continued to work in the garden – as well as writing a gardening column and numerous books from her study in the castle tower – for the rest of her life.
Sissinghurst tower and yellow garden
Harold by no means always agreed with Vita on the planting – but being Vita, and on the ground, she generally got her way with that – but they completely agreed on the contradictory principle of the garden, ‘the strictest formality of design with the maximum informality in planting’. This can be seen to be the reason why the gardens seem so fresh, and so English, today. The lines of the garden are razor sharp: crisp hedges, straight or circular paths, walls, arches, there is no ambiguity about the formality of Sissinghurst’s design. But Vita’s blazing colours and wealth of flower forms riot joyfully, insistently, triumphantly in and out of Harold’s ruled lines.
Here in Britain we are by now very familiar with the idea of wildness and rebellion in gardens; Lord Burlington introduced the daring approach by bringing William Kent back from ten years of study in Italy – along with knowledge of strictly formal Palladian architecture – to make Chiswick House and its gardens something for everyone to envy. To appreciate how revolutionary this was, think of a traditional French garden like Villandry, all stiff little hedges and formally planted flowers. Gardens used to be places of order and control, with wild nature outside the castle grounds. England was different: by the eighteenth century, the home counties were visibly tame, all straight hedges, parklike Oaks and Elms dotted about, and short well-controlled grass for the peacefully grazing animals. If the countryside looked like a park, then the aristocrat’s garden needed to look like a wilderness, and William Kent’s ingenious ‘river’ – complete with bridge and waterfall – along with Chiswick park’s bushy woods and wild-seeming vistas, gave just the right impression of rampant nature.
A Sissinghurst vista
Sissinghurst does something different. Outside the garden, the Kentish woods are properly wild, if coppiced for centuries, so the garden has no need to pretend to be a wilderness. Instead, it celebrates the interplay of the natural and the man-made; there are vistas with brick walls and regular buttresses; cottages; the castle tower; pleached lime trees; paths and ‘doors’ between what Gertrude Jekyll called garden ‘rooms’. But in and around this structure, Vita’s plants climb the walls, draggle down them, or burst out above them in every shape and colour. Each view is carefully contrived, but a surprise for each visitor, fresh on each spring day, glowing with blossom, healthy with new leaf. As Harold Nicolson said, they had created a work of art. With nature, of course.
Down to Aston Rowant on a fine clear sunny day with a cold East wind that brought spring migrants like the Ring Ousel, a rare blackbird of mountain and moorland. I saw a probable one diving into a juniper bush; they like to stop off on the scarp of the Chiltern Hills as the next best thing to their favoured moors, before flying on to Wales or wherever.
Anthills dotting Aston Rowant chalk grassland
The scarp slope of the relatively hard Chalk falls steeply to the broad plain of the soft Oxford Clay below, to the West. Much of the grassland has been destroyed for agriculture, either falling under the plough or simply being ‘improved’ as pasture with fertiliser, encouraging long grasses at the expense of the wealth of flowers that once covered the English countryside. Happily, here in the reserve and in quite a few places on the Chilterns, the steepness of the land has discouraged improvement. The chalk grassland is dotted with hundreds of anthills, the tiny yellow ants living all their lives below ground, tempting green woodpeckers to come out and hunt for them.
Whitebeam coming into leaf
The trees and flowers are visibly weeks behind those of London. The Whitebeam is just coming into its fair white leaves, which look almost like Magnolia flowers in their little clusters newly burst from the bud. But the tree’s name comes from its white wood, not its leaves.
Witch’s Brooms
At the bottom of the scarp, a field away from the Ridgeway which follows the line of hills for many miles, Hornbeams and Birches marked a change in the soil, which must be neutral or acid down here, compared to the strictly alkaline rendzinas and brown earths of the chalk. One of the Hornbeams looked as if it was oddly full of Mistletoe, but up close it proved to be a mass of Witch’s Brooms, growths of the tree itself caused by an infection.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
