At 3 am these last few nights, the streets round here have echoed to a series of brief, hoarse barks. You might think it some kind of dog, and you’d be right: it is a fox, or rather a vixen*, barking, either to advertise her presence to males, or it seems to hurry her cubs along.
What the urban foxes live on is easy enough to discover: anyone who incautiously leaves out a bin bag for collection overnight, finds it ripped to shreds in the morning, the inedible wrappers scattered about the street, any juicy bits of meaty leftovers or chicken carcases devoured.
Fox footprints on a car bonnet
The foxy ladies aren’t averse to a bit of motoring, either, or at least to clambering all over cars to have a good look at something. As to whether the vixens are fashionable or chic, I’ll leave that to the dog foxes to decide.
* I suppose this odd-seeming word for a female fox has some connection to German Füchse(n), vixen, via Old English.
The mediaeval universe as drawn by Peter Apian in his Cosmographia, 1524
In the Middle Ages, nature – understood as the world of change and decay – stopped at the orbit of the moon; all else above the moon lay in the orbits of the crystalline spheres, culminating in the Empyrean Heavens, the Dwelling Place of God and All the Elect: definitely not ‘nature’ then. The revolution in cosmology and physics brought about by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton swept all that away, so today I can happily talk about events in the heavens as natural.
It was spectacular. At 9pm, cloudless night sky was dominated by a brilliant full moon in the southeast, with a brilliant planet – brightly orangey-red in binoculars – just above it. The pundits say the Moon and Mars were just 3 degrees 19 minutes apart. With Mars about as close to Earth as it ever gets, and the moon almost dazzling in the binoculars (it would have been painful through the telescope), it was a fine sight. The ‘planets’ (as they would have said in the Middle Ages) were in the constellation of Virgo, but the moon’s brightness made the background of stars all but impossible to see.
The orbit of Mars is outside the Earth’s, so the planet can appear anywhere around the sky on the ecliptic. The two orbits are both nearly circular, but the planets rotate around the sun at different speeds, so it isn’t often for the two to be close to each other as they are at the moment. And it’s more interesting visually when the Moon is full, its whole disk lit up by the Sun, which means it is opposite the Sun. In other words then, the Sun, Earth, Moon, and Mars are all nearly in a straight line to bring Mars close to Earth, and the Moon to the full position. It doesn’t happen every day.
A high pressure zone is bringing bright and mainly sunny weather to Britain, but as it’s not overhead it is also bringing quite a cold breeze. Down at Wraysbury Lakes, all the winter ducks have left, with just Tufted, Mallard and a pair of Gadwall remaining. Two Great Crested Grebes wandered around each other, not quite getting into a courtship dance.
Things were more exciting on the birdsong front. Blackcaps and Chiffchaffs sang sweetly all over. A Cetti’s sang very loud, very close by the lakeside as always, first in front … I stalked up very quietly … and then behind me. Invisible, the skulker. In the thicker scrub, several Whitethroats sang their scratchy short song, the first this year; and at least three Willow Warblers sang their descending scales, also the first of the year. And, briefly, one Garden Warbler gave me a burst of his even, musical tunefulness. There’s often a Sedge Warbler near the river but not apparently today. More song came from the Robins, a Song Thrush, and a Chaffinch or two.
Overhead, a Grey Heron circled upwards towards a Boeing 747-400 and did its best to resemble a soaring stork or crane, quite impressive really with broad, downcurved wings rather like one of those air-filled kites made only of light cloth.
St George’s Mushroom
A small patch of St George’s Mushrooms nestled among the Potentilla leaves by the path; it’s about the only edible mushroom at this time of year, but I don’t pick them, both for conservation reasons and because I’m not keen on their rather mealy taste.
The first Speckled Wood butterflies of the year are in evidence; they are fiercely territorial already, chasing off numerous Peacock butterflies. A few Green-Veined Whites settled, frail and shy, on the thicker herbs.
Ground Ivy
Great patches, almost carpets of Ground Ivy, which sounds a lowly herb, but looks glorious among the low-cropped grass, shining in the sunshine. It’s in the Labiate or Mint family, and has pretty rather short toothed leaves, purple-tinged, with attractive blue lipped flowers that are really quite orchid-like if you ignore their long tubes.
Wakehurst Place is Kew Gardens in the countryside of Sussex, glowing on a cool but very sunny April day with spring all around: cowslips, primroses (pin and thrum, some antique school botany coming back to mind), bluebells, dog’s mercury, wood anemone; and a fine chorus of birds, with chiffchaff, blackcap, song thrush, blackbird and an assortment of noisy pheasants and wood pigeons for good measure.
New Oak leaves and flowers
Everything was coming into new leaf or into bloom: some plants like this Oak tree were doing both at once.
Wollemia nobilis, Australia’s Wollemi Pine, in full fruit
Being Kew, there are some very special plants about, not least the one-step-from-extinct Wollemi Pine from Australia, here growing happily with odd-shaped cones of both sexes in the English countryside.
Garden Bumblebee pollinating Purple Toothwort
In the attached Loder Valley nature reserve, a special treat: the Purple Toothwort, a parasitic plant in the Broomrape family, scarce in Britain and a new plant for me. It wasn’t present as a lone stalk: there were good big clusters of it on a steep clayey bank. I’m not sure what it was parasitising, though at this time of year it must surely be a woody plant, and brambles were close by.
Lords and Ladies, new spathe and spadix
By a gatepost, a large and fresh wild arum seemed to deserve its country name Lords and Ladies, standing gracefully fresh.
Blue Sky, White Birches, Bluebells
Back in the park, the silver birches perfectly set off the sea of bluebells.
long trailing beards of Usnea lichen on oak trunk
Great trailing beards of lichen draggled down an oak trunk: it’s a rare sight in Europe, and all the more surprising in Sussex, not far from the pollution of Gatwick airport. Perhaps the prevailing winds keep the air clean, but in that case why are lichens so few in Hampshire and the southeast generally?
Coco de Mer or Double Coconut
The park contains the extraordinary Millennium Seed Bank, complete with windows onto the world of toiling botanists, drying seeds and elegant specialised equipment – a gadget for pouring agar into stacks of Petri dishes, among others, and a dramatic selection of the world’s most bizarre seeds, like the very large and remarkably bottom-like Coco de Mer. It’s not one of the seeds in the seed bank just yet, as it is ‘recalcitrant’, refusing to be dried out so it can survive for centuries – it just dies instead. Love stronger than death, or something.
Yes, the Queen Bee is back, or rather, she’s probably been bumbling about the garden all along. She is as you can see certainly buff-tailed, unlike any workers of her species who, confusingly, have white tails. She constantly clambers about the grass, climbs up obstacles and then climbs down out of them, rather slowly. If something comes close she does not buzz, but raises a leg in warning, and carries on doing … whatever it is she is doing. I tried showing her a convenient hole for her nest under a stone slab: she was not at all interested. Wondering if she was low on energy, I offered a drop of watered-down honey: nothing doing there either. Since she must have been around since last autumn, she may well have enough energy to get through several days of searching, though not taking food when available does seem surprising. I left her still stumbling slowly around, within a couple of yards of where she was yesterday.
The compost heap, the pile of logs I left for stag beetles, and the garden shed with the undisturbed space underneath it are all nearby, so there would seem to be excellent freehold properties immediately available, no chain, immediate inspection recommended. But then, each bumblebee species has its own Lilliputian requirements, which are hard to guess from my Brobdingnagian proportions.
Birding on a Bike without Binos, how is that possible? My mind fogged by editing, I took an hour off and cycled down to the river to get some air, space, sunshine and nature. It was a lovely bright spring day. A holly blue butterfly flew about the garden, and a buff-tailed queen bumblebee crawled about the grass looking for a hole to nest in – she was certainly a queen as she was very large, and she’s the only form of her species that is actually buff tailed, the rest are white tailed.
Coots, 3 cootlings and an egg in Chiswick Park
In Chiswick Park, a pair of mallard had at least six ducklings: the adults sat on the bank, with probably one more duckling (no binoculars today) while the six adventurous ones paddled nimbly about in circles not too far away. In the midst of William Kent’s carefully landscaped ‘river’ (a long narrow pond) was a coot’s floating nest; the sitting parent got up while I was watching, revealing three cootlings and one unhatched egg in the nest. A blackcap sang sweetly from the trees.
Down by the river, a solitary great crested grebe swam against the tide, glinting white in the sun. Goldcrests squeaked from the cypresses by the boathouse; allotment owners worked their patches of ground. A small tortoiseshell butterfly flew swiftly past the barbecues which were grilling kebabs. It did feel like spring.
London has a chain of not-quite-secret nature reserves stretching down its western side along the line of the Grand Union Canal and the valleys of the River Colne, River Frays, and the Yeading brook all the way to the River Crane, where there are more reserves; they are in the green strip you may briefly glimpse as you leave town on the M4 or M40. Many of them are rather tricky to reach because, almost by definition, the places that haven’t been built over are off the beaten track, round the back of airfields or industrial estates, past the housing estates and into the surprisingly green and quiet areas that have not yet been cut up by HS2 or other developments.
Burning Brash at Ten Acre Wood, with a blackthorn in full bloom
A Land-Rover full of London Wildlife Trust volunteers wriggled through the Hillingdon suburbs to Ten Acre Wood and what used to be the Ten Acre Wood Meadows. These have seen little management as agriculture has declined. The Trust’s chainsaw team had cut a fine crop of small trees – blackthorn, hawthorn, even oak, the climax plant in the succession from bare ground to full-blown forest – and left the branches neatly stacked in enormous rows across what should be meadow. The Yeading brook made the ground squelchy; six mallard flew in looking for somewhere suitably wet. Chiffchaffs and a blackcap sang merrily. We started two bonfires, admirably fanned by the cool breeze, and dragged branches on to them for hours until a sandwich and a welcome cup of tea intervened. With a bit more bramble clearance, and preferably some grazing, the meadows will again be a fine place for meadow flowers. Even now, it was amazing to realize that the city was all around, with nothing but greenery and blue sky in sight.
It’s one thing to be used to seeing signs of wild boar in France, quite another to realize these fine animals have returned without any bureaucracy about release licences and experimental sites and suchlike. Whatever happened, whether they just escaped or were released by animal rights protesters or some other story, they are now out in the wild, and exuberantly breeding.
Wild Boar Prints of Different Sizes
The many diggings beside the trails in the Forest of Dean show the presence of numerous family groups, while the splayed prints of different sizes leave no doubt about the families of pigs with all ages represented.
Stained Glass Window in the Forest: Sculpture Trail
Casting pearls before swine … or at least, dangling stained glass over them. The forest is enlivened with a wide range of sculptures in the now very well established trail. The famous giant chair is becoming a bit wonky, and has been repaired with cement. The magnificent stained glass window adds glowing colour whatever the weather.
Orange and White Lichens on Birch in Forest of Dean
A lone birch in a clearing shines out with brilliant orange and white patches. The orange is not the common orange lichen (Xanthoria) which shows a leafy thallus: the orange patches here seem to consist almost wholly of fruiting bodies which are not circular apothecia with clear rims, but fuzzy tufts, presumably of spores. And the white circular patches are also lichens, not just areas of bare bark: their fruiting bodies show up dark within the white circles.
Having by good fortune been able to get away for a few days, we drove down to Monmouthshire and had a fine walk from the mediaeval stone bridge at Llangynidr along the beautiful River Usk.
Primroses Celandines Wood Anemones by River Usk
The path had been damaged by the floods, but now the waters have receded the path is surrounded by primroses, celandines and wood anemones in delightful combination: specially good to see near a path, as so many wild primroses have vanished into thoughtless people’s gardens in England.
Tolkienesque Oak and rapids on River Usk
The River Usk – the Welsh name is from the same root as Whisky (Uisge), meaning simply ‘water’ – swirled over little rapids, a pied wagtail hawking for flies from the midstream rocks. Apparently the river names Exe and Wye share this origin; while Avon also just means ‘river’. In the days when people lived by just one river and rarely walked further than the nearest market town, ‘the river’ must have been a sufficient name. As well as these etymologies, Tolkien would have liked the gnarled Old Forest oak trees beside the river, very mossy at the base, gripping the sandstone rocks with their roots.
Common Cup Lichen
Lichens grew to good size in the clean air. A piece of beard lichen (Usnea) had fallen from a branch on to the path; common cup lichen Cladonia conoiocraea grew on a mossy wall.
Ewe with twin lambs
On the return walk through the fields we saw this ewe feeding her twin lambs.
A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson. Jonathan Cape, 2013
OK, it’s time to sort out the old book review website. I intend to write all new book reviews here, if the experiment works that is, and then – phase 2 – to move all the old nature book reviews from the static web pages to here as well, so they’re all searchable and suchlike. Of course if it’s less convenient..
So, A Sting in the Tale. It’s fairly clear from the dust jacket that Goulson is going to write about bumblebees. I admit I went ‘hmm’, wondering how exactly bees were going to fill a book – my heart goes out to all publishers, literary agents and magazine editors who have to leaf through wads of badly-written stuff in the faint hope of finding something exciting to read, for once.
But by the second page of the Prologue I was captivated, and I’m happy to report the feeling of pleasurable excitement, recognition of shared enthusiasm for nature, and admiration for terrific natural history knowledge (and jolly good writing and editing) stayed with me until the end of the book. In fact it left me wanting more, a sure sign of success, something rarer than hen’s teeth on the bookshelves.
What grabbed my attention in the Prologue was that the seven-year-old Goulson was totally, absolutely, delightfully nature-mad. How many boys train honeysuckle up the shed to feed moths, plant pussy willow to give bees early spring food, or actually dig a pond and stock it with newts, sticklebacks and other beasts from the canal? It sounds marvellous fun. Mind you, we did build dams across the stream and … I think children back then were allowed out a lot more than they are today. But I digress.
What is fantastic about this book is that every chapter tells something new – I guarantee you haven’t heard of the sort of facts that Goulson has at his fingertips. He even dares to explain the “very complicated” genetics of bee sex – believe me, it really is worse than you remember. Goulson lectures on it every year, and he notes that half the students doze off every time. Somehow, he’s made it fun, because I read that chapter straight through, and believed I understood it all by the end. In other words, Goulson has the rare gift of being able to explain anything. As you go, you do dimly realize you’ve just understood something that most of the human race doesn’t have a clue about, which is rather fun. Along the way, too, you discover just how fascinating bumblebees are, and how vital they are for healthy ecosystems, and for our food supply. You also find out how much trouble they are in, and even better, what Goulson and others are doing to save them.
