Archaeology: Human Natural History

11 January 2015 Ian Alexander

One of the delights of living near the River Thames is a winter walk at low tide. The sides of the river – many feet deep at high water – are exposed as wide, gently shelving slopes of mud, sand, and grit. On closer inspection, much of the gritty material is anthropogenic. The implied natural history is full of interest.

There are mutton bones, rabbit bones, chicken or larger bird bones, probably swan or goose: these must usually be the remains of meals, or perhaps butchers’ or poulterers’ waste. Sometimes a bone is cleanly sawn or hacked across (there’s one in the picture).

Also of animal origin are the shells: the commonest are sea-shells – oysters, cockles, scallops, mussels. All of these were widely eaten and cheap throughout the Middle Ages, up to the 18th or 19th century. As the river here is not saline enough for these species, they must, like the animal bones, represent the remains of meals, most likely thrown out into the river by servants doing the washing-up.

Most of the remaining pieces are ceramic: thee are thick chunks of earthenware, from massive flowerpots to handsomely decorated glazed household pots. There are mass-produced pots such as Victorian marmalade jars of MALING ware from NEWCASTLE. There are glimpses of writing on fragments of fine bone china, some of it delicately moulded with leafy patterns. There are shards of blue-and-white Willow Pattern, in imitation of real but costly “China” from China. Thee are neat pieces of plates, cups, saucers. There are circular bases of bottles, jars or jugs. There are handles of teacups, carefully shaped to a standard pattern. And there are stems and bowls of unglazed clay (tobacco) pipes, sometimes plain, sometimes fancifully moulded, and thrown away when they broke, which was often.

On this evidence, the natural history of Man in London included eating meat and shellfish; storing assorted solids and liquids; and smoking a great deal of tobacco. Unlike all other species, however, Man shaped a great many artefacts; and wrote symbols on to them, apparently conveying meaning, such as the names of the artefacts’ makers. Man in London thus seems to have been both a typical species with a varied diet; and a unique, symbol-using one.

Environment, Natural History

Lichens in London’s Streets: Local Pollution Down

10 January 2015 Ian Alexander

Crustose and Foliose lichens on a street tree in West London

Amidst the grim news of habitat loss and species in retreat or going extinct, it is pleasant to be able to observe a small conservation success story. Lichens, which had almost disappeared from Britain’s cities by 1970 – I was there, and I remember looking about in Hyde Park with some disappointment – are creeping back into London’s streets, and (I don’t doubt) streets all over Britain.

Back in 1970, if you wanted to see a lichen in Britain, you basically had to travel westwards, to Cornwall, Wales, the Lake District, or the Highlands and Islands. Those places had what lichens need: good rocky habitat, or old forest trees; and one special ingredient: clean air. For, we had unintentionally discovered, lichens are sensitive indicators of air quality.

Or, to put it bluntly, air pollution. Tiny concentrations of sulphur dioxide gas are enough to kill all the lichens in an area. Britain today has rather few volcanoes belching out clouds of dangerous sulphurous gases. The sulphur came from fossil fuels, mainly coal. When it was burnt, the sulphur was oxidised to sulphur dioxide (SO₂) , and when mixed with rainwater, it fell as sulphurous acid (H₂SO₃). Where did it fall? Initially it just trickled out of small chimneys, of homes and factories, polluting the cities and creating “London fog” – in reality, a poisonous yellow photochemical smog, a witches’ brew of sulphur and nitrogen oxides.

This problem was interestingly addressed by the Tall Chimneys policy. The smoke was carried up much higher than before, so Britain’s prevailing Westerlies blew the stuff much further afield. The concentration of noxious gases around our factories fell satisfactorily; London’s romantic Dickensian “fogs” disappeared. The gases travelled across the North Sea, causing acid rain in Scandinavia, and depriving Stockholm and the beautiful clean-looking pine forests and islands of its Archipelago of their lichens. I know, I looked for them in 1986, and I remember finding one small colony in a morning’s walk.

Back to here and now. Nearly all our coal mines have closed, and with them most of the shipyards and steelmakers too. Houses are heated by clean natural gas – nearly pure methane. Houses are no longer blackened by smoke; a shirt worn in the city for a day does not have a black collar in the evening. And lichens are creeping back into the streets.

In the photograph, you can see at least four species of lichen. There are the large rounded colonies of crustose lichens in the centre, with olive-disked apothecia (fruiting bodies containing masses of spores) rimmed with white. There are small grey foliose (leafy) lichens of the kind I still call “Parmelia“. There is a much larger, greyer “Parmelia”. And there are many small colonies of an orange foliose lichen, probably the Common Orange Lichen, Xanthoria parietina. Perhaps there are more. (If you are a lichen expert, I’d love to know what they all are. Do contact me.)

Apparently there are now 17 urban lichens, up from, well, one rather tough species – Lecanora conizaeoides. It’s a tiny, rather flat grey species, and it alone can tolerate a moderate dose of sulphur dioxide; at least, it could be found in sheltered places even in London, even in 1970, away from the worst of the smog.

Is this a conservation success? The Tall Chimneys were a health measure; the death of Coal was mainly an economic matter. Still, it’s nice to see the lichens coming back. Perhaps in a few decades’ time (lichens are rather slow-growing) we may see big yellow splashes of lichen on roofs, walls and trees in every street. Let’s hope so.

Conservation, Environment, Natural History, Philosophy, Politics

What I’d like to know from every political party before the General Election

7 January 2015 Ian Alexander

On the PM programme on Radio 4, the presenter Eddie Mair regretted the long, long wait until polling day, given the inevitable length of the campaign with a fixed-term parliament. He sympathized with listeners at having to endure the same old party political ding-dong as the rivals seek to batter each other into submission. He suggested that we listeners tell him what we would like to know about the next general election.

What politicians want to talk about

The parties seem to want to tell us about the NHS (Labour) and the Economy (Conservative) and Immigration (all of them), so I’d like to hear about, well, anything else: especially nature.

Politicians don’t even call nature by its name any more.

They burble about “Sustainability“, but making our cities larger every year is not sustainable: that would mean a steady state. Think about it. Sustainable living is imaginable, but it would be nothing like how we live now. Everything – I mean everything – would be recycled. We’d use glass not china, so it could be melted down and reused when it broke. We’d burn no coal, oil, or gas. We’d design every product to be broken down into its components for recycling, as they’ve started to do in Germany. In short, current politico-talk about sustainability is just waffle, greenwash. You may have a ruder word for it.
They mumble about the “Environment“, as if nature impinged on our lives solely through dirt or noise in the places where we live. But our impact on the natural world is far, far greater than that. We have ravaged every habitat, every ecosystem on the planet. The African bush, home to elephants, rhinos, gazelles? It’s in free fall. Grasslands and meadows? We’ve lost 98% of ours. Wetlands, marshes, reedbeds? Disappearing everywhere. Mangroves and coral reefs? In crisis wherever they (used to) occur. Rainforest? You know the answer.
They waffle about “Biodiversity“, as if the word were a charm or mantra, calling for impact assessments for each major building project, which the planners then immediately ignore. But the diversity of life in England, like that of the whole world, is in crisis. Many people alive today will witness the mass extinction of perhaps a third of all the species now alive; man-made global warming and the resulting changes to the climate; the catastrophe being visited on all the oceans through overfishing; pollution, overpopulation, deforestation: the worldwide destruction of nature.
They ramble on about “Conservation“, as if nature would be fine if limited to a few nature reserves here and there, and try to change the conversation to the economy/the NHS/immigration (delete according to taste) as soon as possible. But nature is the whole of our planet (including us, if you prefer, but that’s another story). We depend on plants and algae for the oxygen we breathe. We depend on plants and animals for the food we eat. We depend on bees and other insects to pollinate many of our crops. We depend on bacteria to detoxify our sewage and rubbish. We depend on plant genomes for our medicines and our crops’ resistance to disease. We depend completely on nature.

What I’d like the politicians to tell me

I’d like to know what they will actually do for Nature, for everyone’s benefit:

what each party’s policy on nature really is
how they will prioritize nature
how children, NHS patients, and old people will be given access to nature for education, rehabilitation, wellbeing
how fisheries will be protected
how the decline of wildlife on farms will be reversed

Direct answers, please.

Well, I’d like to know a whole lot more, given the global disaster I’ve outlined, but that should be enough to start with. What would you ask?

Conservation, Philosophy, Quotation

Extinction is forever (probably)

6 January 2015 Ian Alexander

The Apollo butterfly, Parnassius apollo, extinct in Britain

One of the odd things about British attitudes to nature is that the right-wing [Daily] Telegraph newspaper has such good graphic coverage of many issues, such as the ongoing extinction of species in England over the past two centuries. The gallery of beautiful photographs is shocking for its immediacy: there are species I’ve seen, and others I feel I should have, like the Red-Backed Shrike (1988). The Scottish Wildcat is not quite extinct in Scotland — I’ve been lucky enough to glimpse one, as far from anywhere with domestic cats as is now possible in Britain — but has gone from England. Here are birds and butterflies, weevils and the handsome Blue Stag Beetle (1839). The lovely Apollo butterfly is one of 421 species we have already lost.

Of course it’s part of a campaign, the Lost Life Project launched by the Species Recovery Trust.

Local extinction isn’t quite as bad as the ‘real thing’ — extinction from the planet, the fate of the unhappily flightless Great Auk (1820s), hunted until it was gone. It was simply too easy for anyone with a boat to collect a bird or two for their dinner, and this magnificent bird was gone for ever.

That’s the point, really: the reasons for each extinction are banal, stupid. The Red-Backed Shrike was wiped out by three things.

Red-Backed Shrike (Robert Zappaterra/Species Recovery Trust)

First was the steady nibbling away of its heathland habitat for farmland and housing.
Alongside this was the intensification of agriculture — destroying “useless” and “waste” corners of scrubland, “improving” grazing with fertilizer and so (unintentionally or not) allowing taller grasses to outcompete all the flowers of the meadow; and in turn that did away with many of the insects on which Shrikes prey, if they had not been destroyed by insecticides applied to nearby arable crops.
Finally, the illegal collection of eggs, of what was towards the end a very rare and therefore perversely tempting target, helped to eliminate what conservationists, nature-lovers and egg-collectors all presumably agreed was a beautiful and exciting species.

In short, progress or development (call it what you like), greed and stupidity — in equal measure — threw away something we all loved.

A handsome Soldier Beetle like Trichodes alvearius, for instance, is common enough in continental Europe. When I photographed it in France, I knew I’d never seen it in Britain, but supposed it had never lived here. Discovering that it went extinct in the 19th century — that my great-grandfather might well have seen it as he strode about the countryside as a boy — is poignant.

In fact another species of Trichodes, T. apiarius (if this reminds you of bees, you are right: the name means ‘of bee-hives’, as does ‘alvearius’: both species frequent hives, their larvae growing there, feeding on bee larvae), was also driven to extinction here (1830).

The corncrake (1990s), the chequered skipper (1976), the Mazarine blue (1903), the large copper (1864), the large tortoiseshell (about 1953), the Norfolk damselfly (1958), the Burbot (1900s), the greater mouse-eared bat, mosses, moths, sawflies, shrimps, spiders, snails, flowers, grasses, ferns, solitary wasps, the roll-call of doom drones on and on.

If we do nothing there is no doubt at all what will happen, not only in Britain but across the planet. In the plain words of the Lost Life Project:

The world is currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction event, caused largely by human activities that continue to damage and destroy biodiversity across the globe.

But the point is, there is hope. If we press for help for our rarest species, we may yet save them. Some species like the corncrake have with help come back from the brink, and can be found in a few lucky places.

How to press? Lobby your local MP. Speak to the other candidates. Ask them what they will do for nature. Will they ensure that all the schoolchildren in their constituency get a chance to see a nature reserve, go pond-dipping, hear birdsong? Will they insist on gardens for hospitals, hospices, and old people’s homes to assist with healing and wellbeing? Discuss it on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, with your friends. Join a conservation group, a pressure group. Give some money. If you can’t think of anything better, sign a petition! There are plenty more sharp questions you can ask (feel free to ask me for some more suggestions).

Love of Nature, Natural Patterns, Nature Reserves

Wetland Centre: Winter Colours

2 January 2015 Ian Alexander

2 January may not seem like a good time for mushrooms, but even now there are interesting and beautiful species to be seen. The Variable Oysterling, Crepidotus variabilis, is as its name implies able to take on different appearances. Here its small cap is distinctly fluffy with tufts of hyphae. The gills are fairly widely spaced, and extra ones are inserted (ok, intercalated) towards the edges.

Crepidotus variabilis - small fluffy white fungi clustered on log — Crepidotus variabilis – small fluffy white fungi clustered on log

The Osiers – long thin whippy poles of willows ideal for basket-making – are seen at their most colourful in midwinter.

A flock of sixty or more grass-eating Wigeon, the males handsome with rufous heads complete with yellowish Mohican centre-stripe, grazed hungrily on the lush grass of the marsh. It must be a lot more welcoming than the frozen wastes of Scandinavia or Arctic Russia, where these birds have probably flown in from.

Love of Nature, Natural Patterns

Sparkling fresh in the winter sun at Kew

1 January 2015 Ian Alexander

The period between Christmas and New Year can easily feel flat, but a walk in brilliant winter sunshine, with the low slanting light making everything glisten or glow in beauty, is exactly the opposite. Kew Gardens is famous for its marvellous Witch Hazels. Today, Hamamelis x intermedia was in full ‘bloom’, its extraordinary flower structures in deep yellows and oranges contrasting crisply with the cloudless sky. The photo is unretouched.

The Corsican Pine near the Queen Elizabeth gate is always beautiful. Today in the slanting light the soft colours and subtle shapes of its jigsaw-flaked bark were shown off to perfection.

ObsessedByNature

Monthly Archives: January 2015