Bugs Day at Gunnersbury Triangle

31 May 2014 Ian Alexander

Saturday 31 May was Bugs Day at Gunnersbury Triangle. The team arrived early to set out home-made cakes, lemonade, a face-painting stall, tables for children to paint butterfly cut-outs, signs advertising the day, and a wall-sized display of the Tree of Life, or rather a Tree of Invertebrate Phylogeny.

Throughout the day a succession of families with small children came and had fun decorating the butterflies.

The Tree of Life occupied a whole wall of the tool shed.

For the first time, we carried out a worm survey, organised nationally by Riverford organic farms (there’s a free identification guide to print out) – bizarrely, there is no map of the distribution of our native earthworms, so perhaps in a year or two there will be one now. We found no ordinary Lumbricus terrestris (Lob worms), the big ones that burrow deep under lawns (, maybe we needed to dig deeper), but good numbers of Black-headed worms (Aporrectodea longa, dark head, brown body, long and thin), a few smallish Green worms (Allolobophora chlorotica), and a Grey worm (Aporrectodea caliginosa, grey with a pink head and a pale saddle). It was surprising how many individual worms there were in a spadeful of earth, and the number of species. Darwin showed how important the earthworm was, but they seem to have been quite thoroughly neglected ever since.

An entomologist from the Natural History Museum led a guided walk on the bugs to be found in the reserve.

We gingerly plucked banded land snails from some tall stinging nettles, finding a good range of colour varieties from clear yellow to heavily striped with dark brown and black.

Woodland bug hunt - slugs, centipedes — Woodland bug hunt – slugs, centipedes.

In the woodland, the entomologist boldly ventured outside his special area (Diptera) to familiarise visitors with the range of local slugs, centipedes, millipedes and woodlice: bugs in the very broad sense. We did have some true bugs too: shield bugs that give off a warning stink when held between finger and thumb. And in between, ‘bugs’ often means insects in general.

The sawflies and ichneumon flies are difficult for non-experts as there are hundreds of similar species and no popular books. However, the sawflies have thick cylindrical bodies, whereas the ichneumons, like the social wasps, have a very narrow ‘waist’. The Hogweed flowerheads (very large white umbels of dozens of small flowers) played host to plenty of good big sawflies with yellow legs and waspish black-and-yellow stripes.

Nice side/tail view of Cuckoo Bee on Hogweed

A keen amateur entomologist (who recalled visiting the Triangle before it became a reserve 31 years ago) found this Cuckoo Bee. It parasitises and resembles ordinary bumblebees such as Bombus hortorum, but it never makes a nest or raises young. Instead, the females enter a bumblebee nest that already has a good number of worker bees, displace their queen, and lay their own eggs. Their brood is then brought up by the host workers. It’s a nasty way of life. The adults have a rather distinctive ‘tail’ with less ‘fur’ than usual.

The Hogweed was also feeding plenty of Tree Bumblebees, a smallish species with a bright orange-brown furry thorax and a black abdomen tipped with white, so they are distinctive and easy to recognise. Only ten years ago or so they were unknown in England, but common just across the channel. They seem to have arrived all by themselves – bumblebee expert Dave Goulson (see Book Reviews) found them by chance in the New Forest – and now they are common here. Perhaps their northward spread is part of a global drift of species and habitats towards the poles as the climate warms.

Micro-moth Nemophora degeerella - longest antennae of any UK moth — Micro-moth Nemophora degeerella – longest antennae of any UK moth

The entomologist found this beautiful micro-moth, giving the lie to any idea that they are all small and brown. Nemophora has a bold yellow-orange stripe across its forewings, making it instantly recognisable, but even more impressive are its antennae, which are over 4 times as long as its body (fw: 10mm): the longest antennae of any British moth. Quite a surprise.

Conservation, Environment, Gardening

London Orchard Project’s 5th Birthday Party, in City Hall

30 May 2014 Ian Alexander

In the evening I went down to Tower Hill and walked across Tower Bridge to City Hall, where the London Orchard Project was celebrating its 5th Birthday.

The City and The Tower of London: 1000 years of growth

The amount of new development is a shock after the relative quiet of west London, but I had a strong feeling (presumably the City Hall architect’s intention) of being right at the centre of a great and bustling city. Across the river is the quiet symmetry and antique military splendour of the Tower of London: it’s even beautiful in its stern way. But right next to it is the bulging, up-thrusting, grey glass, steel and concrete disharmony of the City, former giants like the NatWest tower and the Gherkin already dwarfed by newer demonstrations of financial might, brazenly shoving their manhood up into the sky. It’s jarring.

But then, I reflected, there are Roman walls near the Tower and at the Barbican: this city is 2000 years old. It was already ancient when the Normans came and rudely shoved the White Tower with its four-square pinnacles and Might Makes Right foreign invaders’ pennants to fly high over a thoroughly defeated, despondent and disgusted Anglo-Saxon (i.e. English) nation.

Little Red Riding Hood (symbol of Idunn, goddess of Apples and fertility) would have been proud of the baskets of bright red donated fruit (image not enhanced)

Once inside City Hall, after the brisk initiation with airport-style security (at least I didn’t have to remove shoes and belt), it was down and round the ridiculously long spiral ramp – what a grotesque waste of space compared to stairs and lifts, but how distinctive also (presumably city politics takes you round and round and never seems to get anywhere, hmm), I stumbled into a meeting room decked out with fruity bunting, maps, photographs, fruit juice, cider, apples, apple cake and bowls of dried fruit and nuts.

Some of the Project's Apple Juice to try — Some of the Project’s Apple Juice to try

I learnt that London Orchard Project had been founded by two friends, Carina and Rowena, who had just realized that our parks didn’t have to consist of nothing but inedible London Plane trees and grass. They emailed a lot of people and within four days had 120 groups who wanted to join in! Since then, 12 old overgrown orchards have been saved and restored, and an extraordinary 83 new orchards have been planted all over our city: soon there will be 100. Even after 2000 years of urban growth and development, I reflected, there is still space and energy and enthusiasm and collegiality for a hundred beautiful spaces full of healthy, vigorous, productive fruit trees.

Carina, Rowena, Lewis and Amber cutting the cake ... with a fiercely serrated pruning saw — Rowena, Kath, Carina, Merrin, Lewis and Amber cutting the cake … with a fiercely serrated pruning saw

All the talks were remarkably interesting. Lewis McNeill gave practical tips for healthy fruit trees, from pruning to fertilising, and gave away root cuttings of Comfrey, a herb which grows vigorously and gathers minerals in its leaves, making it ideal as a mulch for Apple trees. London Glider cider-makers described their first few years, going from newbies to experts: unlike beer, which you make, sell, and then do the next batch, cider is made in the autumn, sold in the spring so you need a lot of storage: they do 7,000 litres a year, the limit before paying excise duty on every litre.

Amber Alferoff, a project manager (she’s on the right of the photo) spoke on the folklore of apples – all those fertility goddesses like Astarte/Ishtar, Aphrodite, Freya, Idunn and the Roman goddess Pomona (that was an easy one) have names that mean Apple, apparently, while Adam and Eve are offered the Apple by the Snake/Dragon, a combination that goes right back to ancient Babylon long before the bible, apparently.

London Orchard Project founders Rowena and Carina cut the birthday cake — London Orchard Project founders Carina and Rowena cut the birthday cake

Carina and Rowena joined the celebrations by cutting the cake with a viciously sharp doubly-serrated 70-cm pruning saw (and the obligatory hard hat for tree work). There are 1200 volunteers; hundreds of Orchard Leaders; 50 public events; 3 tons of apples; a new apple variety, “Core Blimey”; and they even met the Queen. They worked fulltime for the project for a while but have now taken a well-deserved back seat as trustees.

In the driving seat now is Kath Rosen, Chief Executive, who spoke energetically about progress and the future, which most immediately is to start work in other cities including Manchester. That means the project has to be renamed to the Urban Orchard Project, as it’s no longer just London: growth indeed.

And Rich Sylvester, wearing quite a hat, told stories and made us sing an adapted version of ‘I’ve been a Wild Rover / For many a year’ only it was all about orchards.

But for me the most inspiring talk of the evening was given by the community team from the Orchard Estate in West Greenwich. The photographs told the story: a bleak estate of tall ugly brick-and-concrete towers surrounded by blank areas of grey concrete and dustbins. The residents never spoke to each other. Then in 2012 with the Olympics, money was on offer for a dozen projects, just a proposal was needed. They had a go and won: now there’s an outdoor gym area, popular with all ages; a large square of grass dotted with neatly mulched circles around handsome apple trees; and a veggie polytunnel and a dozen allotment plots, where neighbours come out to sit, chat and enjoy working together. The effect on wellbeing and genuine community (what an overused word that is) was immediate. Now the London Orchard Project has got them to act as tree nursery for the whole project, as they have enough land for it, and willing people too. When they said that now they were extending the orchard with more trees every year in a new area of the estate, there was cheerful and rightly appreciative applause. We learnt, too, that visits to other orchards were always enjoyable, always a time to learn more. The name “Orchard Estate” had come, by the way, from a real orchard that the concrete had destroyed, the architect soullessly naming each hideous tower after a kind of apple – Worcester Pearmain, Egremont Russet and so on. Now, full circle, a tree of each of those varieties has been planted: all but one, now uncommon, which is being sought. Life goes on, and together, if we work as a community, we really can be in harmony with nature and each other.

Natural History, Nature Reserves

More a Bug than a Butterfly Transect

29 May 2014 Ian Alexander

I had a go at the ‘regular’ butterfly transect down at the reserve. It was warm and humid but overcast and it didn’t look promising. A large willow covered in Gypsy Moth caterpillars had been loosened by all the rain, and had fallen across the path. I lopped off the crown branches and carted them down to a dead hedge to fill in a gap someone had been climbing through.

The sun peeped out and the cloud cover reduced to maybe 60%, making it warm and pleasant. A single Small White appeared over the ramp and made it onto the transect. I wandered around the reserve, but there was nothing until I found a solitary Speckled Wood in the large meadow.

However, there was plenty to notice all around. The building site looks a lot better now the ‘Costa Concordia’ white horizontal balcony cladding on ‘Chiswick Point’ (well, it’s in Acton Green and on Bollo Lane, but I guess Bollo Block didn’t quite have the same cachet) has been completed: it will be nice when the noise of cranes and drilling stops.

Handsome iridescent green male Oedemera nobilis on Catsear

Many ichneumon flies were out on the Hogweed, some mating; almost every Catsear flowerhead had one or two handsomely iridescent green Oedemera nobilis, the “thick-kneed flower beetle” – only the males have the swollen hind femurs, but both sexes have a gap between the slender wing-cases. The males were of noticeably varying sizes, presumably the large ones having the best chances of mating.

Tent of Comma? caterpillars on Stinging Nettle — Tent of Peacock butterfly caterpillars on Stinging Nettle

A fine bustling mass of hairy black early-instar caterpillars of the Peacock butterfly, wriggled on their silk tent atop a Stinging Nettle.

Laburnum leaf beetle larva doing an impressive amount of leaf damage

The Laburnum by the main path is being eaten full of holes, probably a good thing for a non-native shrub in the reserve, by spotted and striped larvae of the Laburnum Leaf Beetle. Never seen it before.

The wild rose in the car park hedge was host to a mating pair of Rose Sawfly, a serious pest for gardeners but an attractive insect with a bright yellow abdomen.

Large Red Damselflies in cop over a lot of healthy Starwort in the pond

As if all these treats weren’t enough, there were Large Red Damselflies mating and egg-laying on the pond, Common Blue Damselflies, lots of Hoverflies, Click Beetles (seemingly Athous haemorrhoidalis), large brown frog tadpoles and small black toadpoles, singing Blackcaps, a Song Thrush, a Jay, and plenty more. Maybe it’s not just Bugs Day on Saturday, but Bugs Week.

Conservation, Natural History, Nature Reserves

Swifts Screaming High Over the Cow Parsley at Gunnersbury Triangle

27 May 2014 Ian Alexander

On a grey rainy day, I put on my waterproofs and go down to the Gunnersbury Triangle reserve. A newly-fledged Green Woodpecker flies off. The cow parsley has taken over the whole of the meadow by the approach ramp; last year there really wasn’t very much of it, but now the tall white umbels are quickly turning to seed-heads across the whole area: they need to be pulled up quickly before they ripen. They are accompanied by quite a lot of cleavers (sticky-grass), nettles, hogweed, even hops twining their tall fibrous way over the other plants. And a few brambles are coming up again: we had a blitz a year or two ago, pulling out most of them, and the meadow is much improved, but that hasn’t saved the rather nice garlic mustard (good for orange tip butterflies) from the cow parsley invasion.

I loosen one bunch of roots after another with a fork, and pull up the cow parsley roots – much like carrots, they’re in the same family. When the soil is shaken off they are a pale brown, some straight and carroty, some branched into five smaller swollen roots. When I have a big armful, I carry them down to the dead-hedge.

Digging again, a nettle manages to sting me lightly through the leather-and-cloth gardening gloves. I hear a screaming sound and look up: eleven swifts are wheeling together high overhead, the most I’ve seen over this part of town this year, indeed for many a long while. Sixty or more sometimes gather over the lakes at the London Wetland Centre, pausing to feed before moving on up north on their spring migration.

I gather another armful of cow parsley. The meadow is starting to look a little better. I pull a six-foot stick out of the herbage; half-a-dozen diversely coloured white-lipped land snails, some plain yellow, some striped with black, fall out on to the path. The polymorphism has been argued over by ecologists: it might be camouflage adapted to different backgrounds, some lighter, some darker; or more interestingly, it might be a way of defeating predators like Song Thrushes which could be searching for snails of a particular pattern, so if a bird had learnt that snails were striped and had that ‘search image’, that bird might not spot plain snails, perhaps.

It comes on to rain. I help out in the hut, making preparations for Bug Day when we hope the reserve will be buzzing with excited children and their parents. They will be welcomed by a smiling ‘GunnersBee’, who is a black-and-yellow cutout on a huge blue card with yellow cutout flowers. Even in the drizzle, several species of real bumblebees are busy gathering pollen and nectar.

Gardening, Natural History

Delicious Ornamental Cherries!

25 May 2014 Ian Alexander

Yes, it’s ornamental cherry time again. Sitting at the breakfast table with a coffee, I watch two male Blackbirds perch on the garden table and chairs under the tree. One flies up, hovers for an instant, lands, and can be seen to have a small black cherry in its propped-open beak. It swallows, looks up, repeats the cycle.

There is a Blackbird nest exactly in the middle of the ornamental cherry, atop the end of a cut branch; it is not very well hidden from anyone walking in the garden, nor very far from night-prowling cats.

Less welcome are the Wood Pigeons that noisily flap into the tree’s slim branches, finding a wobbly perch before greedily guzzling the tiny cherries, the first fruits of the year. If they become numerous they will threaten to devastate the crop of real edible cherries from my ‘Stella’ tree. Stella is a good deep red variety, not as dark and bitter as Morello (but a great deal sweeter), though rather on the late side. The pigeons, of course, find it delicious. I always had to cover the tree with nets, until last year when there was hardly a pigeon or even Blackbird to be seen near the tree: I suspect a bird-killer cat used to lurk on the shed roof at night and stalk its avian prey.

Out the front, another bird-only cherry grows in the pavement. It is risky to park the car beneath it, the birds – mainly starlings – spotting roof and windows with rich purple-red stains made gritty and corrosive with white powdery uric acid.

Conservation, Environment, Love of Nature, Philosophy

Love of Nature? Man vs Nature? How Very Odd

24 May 2014 Ian Alexander

There is something distinctly odd about the British love of nature. I mentioned the subject at a book launch the other day, and the person I was chatting to said, between sips of the very nice white wine and a nibble of the focaccia, that he thought the British were not really in love with nature any more as a personal activity, but were just consumers, passively and vicariously absorbing what is offered up as a commodity. I said that was ‘interesting’.

The ‘in love’ view of the British perhaps blends several different stereotypes. One is the obsolete stiff upper lip, the naturalist out in some far outpost of forgotten empire, enthusiastically carrying on studying phasmids like James Wood-Mason, writing obscure papers in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for the benefit of anyone of similar inclination.

Another is the hugely enthusiastic amateur naturalist – the keen birdwatcher, entomologist or botanist with telescope, moth-trap or vasculum always to hand, hoping to add a species or two to a county list.

Yet another is the happy gardener, always outside – rain or shine – pruning, digging, composting, planting, watering, weeding.

The stereotype that my wine-sipping acquaintance had in mind was presumably rather different: couch potatoes, relaxing with a remote in the sitting-room, allowing an hour of television gardening with Monty Don or a year in the life of some wildlife area – the Canadian Rockies or the Great Barrier Reef, the Patagonian plains or the last surviving bit of the Sundarbans, or worse, all of the above, cut together by an editorial team with a high concept of Surviving Against All the Odds or something – to wash over their minds, leaving no particular trace other than a feeling of having seen a lot of colourful flickering images.

Personally, I doubt that picture is fair, though like all stereotypes it must make some contact with reality somewhere. People are all different, and everyone needs to relax sometimes.

A truth, though, that everyone who likes some kind of experience of nature, live or through book, film, photograph or website, is that if we’re studying or watching nature without doing something to help protect it, we are ignoring a very large existential threat indeed. Assuming we manage not to destroy ourselves in a nuclear war, we are going to have to work out how to survive an ecological disaster of our own making. Its epic proportions are becoming clear: the last time anything like this happened was at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago. Whether Luis Alvarez was right that an asteroid or comet crashed into the Earth to form the Chicxulub crater, the debris thrown into the atmosphere causing something like a nuclear winter, it is certainly the case that huge numbers of species became extinct very quickly, including all the world’s large dinosaurs (yes, I know we have the birds still with us, and they’re in the dinosaur clade) along with perhaps three quarters of all other kinds of living thing.

You may perhaps feel somewhat untroubled by the idea that the world of your grandchildren might have no tigers or rhinoceroses in it; or even that there would be no areas of rainforest outside national parks – the Amazon and the forests of Sumatra and Borneo are well on the way there already.

You might be slightly less thrilled at the news that many of the world’s hotspots for variety of animals and plants will be gone completely: as South Africa becomes warmer and drier, the whole Cape region as understood by botanists will move southwards – into the ocean – and disappear forever, that incredible wealth of flowers, all those extraordinary Proteas, will remain only as a memory.

Perhaps even that isn’t too worrying, just news from a far country? Well, the sea level will rise by several metres when the Antarctic ice-cap melts, flooding coastal plains and threatening to drown many cities.

Not a problem? Global warming, whatever may have caused it, is already making deserts expand. Droughts will become year-long from California to southern Spain, Sahel to Australia. Food prices will rise drastically; wars will be fought over water and other critical resources.

Still not your problem? Farmland all across America and Europe is already denuded of crop pollinators, especially honeybees and bumblebees. Grasses like wheat and rice are not affected, but much of your food, and vital fodder crops for farm animals – from alfalfa to zucchini – is utterly dependent on pollination, and it’s in free fall.

What is all this about? How have we got into the crazy situation that half of us – some of us anyway – love the idea of nature, love to look at it (at least the pretty bits), while the rest (ok, possibly nearly everyone, whether we like nature or not) see themselves as separate from it? How separate can we be when we depend on it absolutely for the air we breathe – all the oxygen produced by green plants – and the food we eat – all our food coming from animals and plants? What are all those student notes in English literature about ‘man v nature’? We are part of nature. It isn’t even that nature is our survival blanket. We, like all other living things, are part of an ecosystem. The mosquitoes that bite you on holiday are in no doubt that you are edible. You eat chickens or carrots, beef or beans. Billions of bacteria in your gut share that food with you, consuming some, helping you absorb the rest. Eventually, bacteria will consume you, if you don’t get yourself cremated first. You are part of nature, no doubt about it.

So, how are you going to change what you do, to help keep this system working? Right now, it’s already badly broken, and getting worse each year. We haven’t got long to fix it.

Gardening, Natural History

Insect Pests and Predators on Spinach (and Gooseberry)

21 May 2014 Ian Alexander

Leaf miners in Spinach Beet leaf. A strip of the leaf's upper epidermis has been torn back. — Leaf miners in Spinach Beet leaf. A strip of the leaf’s upper epidermis has been torn back.

Well, I usually try to take a pretty picture to start off a posting, but this one certainly doesn’t qualify. These leaf miners grow entirely inside a leaf, in this case of Spinach Beet. As you can see, as they grow they tunnel around below the leaf’s upper epidermis, which is a translucent layer of cells, leaving it intact to provide themselves with a ready-made cover.

Underneath that sheet, a healthy leaf contains a thick green set of palisade cells in one or several layers. These are the leaf’s (and the plant’s) factory, as they are full of chloroplasts, coloured green to absorb light: they synthesize the sugars on which life depends.

Not many people would want to eat this leaf, once the leaf miner larvae – mostly moths – have been at work. The palisade layers are entirely and efficiently destroyed wherever the insects have been. All that remains is an air-space and some dark frass: all, that is, but for the plump whitish cylindrical bodies of the larvae themselves.

Ladybird larvae and eggs on Spinach leaf

Also nesting on the spinach are some ladybirds. These have incomplete metamorphosis, the young being able to walk as well as eat from their first stage or instar. Each time they moult they change in appearance as well as in size. They mainly eat aphids, troublesome pests of many crops, so they are useful to gardeners and to any farmers who don’t want to use insecticides.

This shield bug, seen here in close-up, may look conspicuous enough, but that is the camera’s view. The insect is actually rather well camouflaged, and it generally hides under a leaf where it is in some shadow. The camouflage consists first of a general colour resemblance to its background, with its overall grass-green coloration; and as seen here, it is also disruptively patterned, with the reddish brown of its wings tending to break up its outline. Perhaps it is also somewhat countershaded, with dots stippling its back. Bugs suck plant juices, and their larvae can be quite destructive, but they never seem to do much harm to the spinach.

There are also some green caterpillars, excellently camouflaged with a pale cream stripe all along their sides. (It might be the Hebrew Character moth.) You might expect this to be conspicuous, but it seems to be a classic piece of disruptive coloration: the stripe appears like a sun-glint specular highlight on the shiny crumpled surface of the spinach leaf, rather than part of a solid, round-bodied animal.

A Sawfly ... not on Gooseberry — A Sawfly … not on Gooseberry

A pest I know is there is the Gooseberry Sawfly. There are numerous sawflies in the garden right now, but they are all flying around the Nasturtiums, nowhere near the gooseberry bush. However… plenty of the lower leaves of the gooseberry are badly damaged by sawfly larvae, some eaten right down to the petiole, pathetic little stumps with a few short branching veins all that remains of once green foliage. What to do about it? This isn’t a how-to-garden site, but inspect your gooseberry bush(es) regularly, looking especially at the lower leaves to see if they’re being eaten. If some are, check the edges for caterpillars. If you find any, spray the bush after sunset on a dry still evening (to avoid killing the bees that are pollinating your fruit) with a garden insecticide.

Five minutes of careful searching of half-eaten gooseberry leaves failed to reveal a single larva. The cause in this case is not so much camouflage as the incredibly intense predation by Blue Tits (and Great Tits). I estimate these little birds are a hundred times better at finding caterpillars than I am. They have the advantage of getting in close – they must be able to focus down to a few centimetres, their small eyes acting as short-focus wide-angle lenses – and of being able to perch anywhere in a bush. They also get up very early, and know instinctively exactly what food looks like: small well-camouflaged caterpillars on the undersides and edges of leaves.

Zoologists suppose that birds have a ‘search image’ of the prey they are hunting: perhaps this is much the same idea as the training images that computer scientists use to teach their neural nets to recognise patterns such as faces. Once you have such an image in your brain, you almost instantly recognise your target when it appears. To give a small illustration, I remember when I had a small motorbike, I always saw bike shops everywhere; now I never notice them. My eye was attuned, like a Blue Tit’s to a caterpillar.

Product Review

Product Review: Nikon Coolpix S9400

20 May 2014 Ian Alexander

Nikon Coolpix S9400: a really good pocket camera

I’m reviewing this excellent pocket-sized camera for just one reason: it’s ideal if you want something small, effective and reliable in your bag or pocket while you are mainly getting on with the rest of your life, such as enjoying nature. I take mine with me whenever I go out. It’s no trouble to carry, and its powerful zoom lens, anti-shake, high quality and simple but controllable operation make it extremely useful for everything from landscapes to close-ups of insects.

Large Red Damselfly, Pyrrhosoma nymphula — Getting in Close: Large Red Damselfly, using the closeup setting of the S9400

The camera starts up quickly – very helpful if you are trying to get a shot of an animal before it vanishes, and focuses quickly and reliably in a wide range of situations. It comes with automatic reduction of camera shake, specially helpful if you are using the zoom. I’d still recommend you try to find something to rest the camera on – I use a screw-on monopod as it’s lighter and quicker to use than a tripod, and is helpful for everything from photographing flowers and insects to steadying the camera for a long shot.

The good-sized sensor is much larger than that on earlier models, and it shows: the camera collects much more light, giving sharper and less grainy images, specially in poor lighting conditions.

The screen is much larger, too, and in general it works well, even in bright sunlight; if you are using full zoom with the sun shining on the screen, you need to turn up the brightness using the ‘Monitor’ menu. The only other setting I touched was to make ‘Closeup’ the chosen ‘Scene’, so as soon as I turn the dial to Scene, I’m ready to shoot closeups: very convenient.

With smartphones able to do everything from the shopping to baking bread, you may be wondering why you need a camera at all. There are several good answers to this (tick all that apply):

if you’re going to drop it in the mud/pond etc, better have something cheaper than a high-end smartphone
for steady handheld shots, this is far better
since it has a flat base, and takes a tripod or monopod, you can get much steadier shots
the optical zoom (4.5 to 81 mm, equivalent to an extraordinary 25-450 mm range on a traditional SLR camera) and the large lens (F3.4 at its best) are far better than anything a phone’s camera lens can manage (and there’s digital zoom and crop too)
the video is HD if you need it.

But the simple truth is that this is a very handy small camera that takes just the shots you need to record your experiences with wildlife and scenery large and small. It isn’t the same as having a high-end SLR with a suitcase full of heavy expensive lenses to hand, but it is much more portable, a great deal cheaper, and it takes great pictures.

Buy it from Amazon.com
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk

You’ll need to get an SDHC memory card for it, and a carry case too. A 16 Gigabyte card will store well over 3000 images. It comes with a USB cable and a Mains-to-USB plug so you can charge the battery without removing it from the camera. If you want to charge it faster (not very necessary, probably) or to charge a spare battery then you’ll need a separate charger too.

Nikon has newer / more expensive cameras. These will be excellent too; I chose this model for its current low price (I don’t mind if something happens to it, so I feel relaxed about carrying it everywhere) and high quality.

Natural History, Nature Reserves

Thursley Common: a Special Place

19 May 2014 Ian Alexander

Heath landscape at Thursley with birch scrub, scattered pines

Thursley Common is one of those few, special places where the quiet visitor is almost guaranteed a beautiful experience of nature, at least if busy weekends are avoided. The area of a few hundred hectares offers several habitats, all acid: pine forest; dry sandy heath with heather, gorse and birch scrub, ideal for Whitethroats and Stonechats; acid bog with sphagnum, bog-cotton, marsh orchid, round-leaved sundew; bog pools buzzing with dragonflies; open water with teal and tufted duck.

Marsh Orchid, Round-Leaved Sundew at its foot, Thursley Common

Dragonfly habitat: bog pools at Thursley; in the background, white of bog cotton, birch scrub and pine forest

Over the pools were half-a-dozen swallows in a loose flock, mostly flying high, keeping a wary eye out for hobbies. Two hobbies at least flew across the heath on their long grey wings, diving at speed to snatch dragonflies low over the water. A cuckoo called from the pines; another replied cuck-uck-oo from the other side; one flew hawklike across the heath, its wings remaining almost entirely below its body, an odd and very distinctive flight pattern.

Female Four-Spotted Chaser basking over a bog pool, Thursley

Four-Spotted Chasers have a distinctive jizz, being generally brown, flying fast, and indeed the males aggressively chase off rivals. Today there were several pairs mating in flight; unlike many other dragonflies, they do not settle to form a “wheel”, but soon separate, the female at once starting to lay eggs, darting down to the water to dab her abdomen repeatedly.

Large Red Damselflies were hardly in evidence near the water, but were around in small numbers on the heather, or basking on the boardwalk. Nearby, a pair of Reed Buntings blundered in and out of the bushes, the male handsome with his black head and white collar, singing his slow brief song. A Goldcrest squeaked its unbelievably high notes from the tops of the pine trees. A Tree Pipit’s repetitive but slightly random riff rang out again and again from somewhere in the same trees; the species, still marked by the book as ‘abundant’ (that’s a 2 not a 1, however), ‘breeds locally’ in places like this.

It is always a pleasure, too, to see the fluffy white seed-heads of Bog-Cotton. The thin fibres are too brittle to spin, so our native ‘cotton’ remains a symbol of wild and lonely places, from the mountains of Snowdonia to the Pennines. It’s a reminder of just how extensive the heathlands of Southern England once were, Cobbett’s “rascally heaths” famously extending all the way from the Marlborough Downs to the fringes of London. His opinion, loudly voiced in his Rural Rides, was that these unimproved lands were wasted, a sign of lack of proper agriculture. The Dig for Victory! campaign in the Second World War caused many areas of marginal land to be ploughed up, including acid heaths, alkaline chalk grassland, and neutral flowery meadows: all were lost by the thousands of acres in a desperate attempt to increase Britain’s arable production. That led, of course, to the surplus production of the Common Market years, the destruction of farmland wildlife accelerated by grants to grub out hedges, while the use of pesticides of all kinds created marvellously clean crops that even that old badger of a critical farmer, Cobbett himself, would have heartily approved of. The one small problem was that the crops were so clean that there were no wild flowers to support the bees that used to pollinate the fruit trees, the clover, beans and alfalfa, the cabbages and turnips and oilseed rape, the potatoes and vegetables that feed the nation. The cereals themselves need no bees, their grass pollen blowing in the wind: but the rest of the crops are tied to a more balanced ecology. Thus I meditated, even as I enjoyed a nostalgic glimpse of Molinia, the Bog-Cotton; and so it is that delight in nature’s beauty is tinged with sadness at the mess we’re in.

Tiny yellow clubs of Bog Beacon fungus, Mitrula paludosa, in marsh — Tiny yellow clubs of Bog Beacon fungus, Mitrula paludosa, by bog pool at Thursley

I was delighted to see the small but bright yellow Bog Beacon fungus. It appears as small clubs with white stalks, and it only grows on dead vegetation in acid bogs. Its specific name ‘paludosa’ means ‘of the marsh’. A single Broad-Bodied Chaser dragonfly scooted swiftly across a small pond.

Stonechat on fencepost of training area near Thursley — Stonechat on fencepost of Hankley Common training area near Thursley

Stonechat males displayed atop gorse bushes or fence posts, or dived into the bushes for cover, appearing nearly all black from above, with a bold white flash on each wing. Several young ones perched lower down in the gorse, much browner and more streaky than their fathers. They are rather few and far between on the Common itself; more on the training ground just across the road at Hankley Common. Like Thursley Common, the land has remained wild because the army needed it for training; so the Second World War both destroyed much of the wildlife value of our farmland, and saved some places from the general destruction.

Natural History

Bracken Fiddleheads as Food

18 May 2014 Ian Alexander

Today I watched as a young East Asian family with a small child wandered carefully, heads bowed, through the bracken (Pteridium aquilinum), picking young not-yet-unrolled shoots known as fiddleheads — they do look rather like the curled ends of violins — for use as a vegetable. It is commonly eaten in Japan, China and Korea.

Bracken, including young shoots, is carcinogenic in animals, and herbivores like horses generally avoid it if they can. The main toxin is ptaquiloside. Richard Mabey’s Food for Free mentions bracken only once, to say that it is carcinogenic, and omits it from the main text. Some scientists suspect that the high incidence of stomach cancer in Japan is connected to the consumption of bracken.

It was chilling, on a fine hot day, to consider the danger that family were putting themselves in. On the other hand, if they select only young shoots, the dose is as low as possible — the plants have not had time to accumulate toxins in newly-grown parts. And all of us consume substances — sugar, salt, nitrates in ham and sausages, … — not to mention alcohol, which are certainly not good for us. Can you have a natural history of human beings? I can’t see why not.

ObsessedByNature

Monthly Archives: May 2014