How to Tell WhoDunnit: Pigeons Killed by Sparrowhawk, Fox

23 February 2015 Ian Alexander

Pigeon plucked by Sparrowhawk — Scene of Crime in London Wildlife Trust’s Gunnersbury Triangle Local Nature Reserve

OK, you see a blizzard of feathers, the entire mortal remains of a Wood Pigeon that once proudly flew the woods, jauntily sailing away from a mere human. Who did it – Sparrowhawk or Fox? You might think it impossible, given that both eat most of their quarry, leaving little but bloodied feathers.

The Guilty Party?
Sparrowhawk in Gunnersbury Triangle

The Culprit?
Red Fox in Gunnersbury Triangle

But you’d be wrong. Each leaves distinctive clues in the debris of their dastardly deeds.

How would one tell if the brutal murder was the Butler with Carving Knife in Pantry, or Doctor with Stethoscope Hose in Library? (with apologies to Cluedo) Or rather, Sparrowhawk with Beak and Claw in Mid-air Murder, or Fox with Teeth in Ambush from Shrubbery? Here’s how to be a wildlife detective …

Sparrowhawk with Beak and Claw in Mid-air Murder

The Sparrowhawk has no teeth; and it doesn’t like to eat feathers. So, it grips each one, and boldly plucks it from the dead prey, leaving whole feathers – the shaft tapering to a point that was once inside the bird’s skin – neatly removed, each in one piece.

Fox with Teeth, Ambush in Shrubbery

The Fox, however, wastes no time on single feathers, biting off and spitting out fluffy mouthfuls as quickly as he can. They may be bloodied, as below, when the skin gets torn, but the feathers generally have broken shafts.

Pigeon feathers bitten off by Fox, detail

The overall effect is still a blizzard of feathers, all that remains of the ex-Pigeon. But, though the Pigeon is no more, its traces indicate quite clearly whodiddit.

Now you know.

Sentimentality

There is a sad little postscript to this tale. Near both murder sites was a scatter of bird-seed. Some kind, well-meaning person, perhaps lonely, perhaps seeking friendship, had put out some food for the pigeons to eat in the cold weather.

Well-meaning, but unwise. The pigeons became accustomed to feeding on the ground … in poor light … without looking about them too much … and fell victim to two keen, hungry, unsentimental predators.

Natural History, Natural Patterns, Nature Reserves

Winter Colour and Light at Thursley Common

18 February 2015 Ian Alexander

Panorama of Thursley Common bog pools (full image is 7330 x 2245)

On a gloriously sunny, still winter’s day, Thursley Common looked wonderful. There were few signs of wildlife – a Crow or two, some Stonechats hawking for flies from the tops of small bushes – but wide horizons, quiet, a sense of space and freedom.

Swirly patterns with beetle holes in dead pine

Some dead pines displayed magnificent natural patterns, the product of bare wood drilled by Longhorn Beetle larvae and exposed to the elements.

Spiralling orange patterns on softening dead pine — Turbulent orange patterns on softening dead pine

We visited Thursley’s thousand-year-old church – the north side of the choir has two small narrow Saxon windows, walled in for centuries. The church, of St Michael and All Angels, was wisely sited by the Saxons on a ridge of the Greensand, high and dry above the boggy moorland.

We enjoyed the modern glass doors engraved with a Tree of Life which turned out to be a Silver Birch. Among the animals praising God in the glasswork are a soaring, singing Woodlark; a perched Nightingale; a Lizard, a Purple Emperor butterfly, a Common Blue butterfly, and a selection of dragonflies: clearly the local fauna.

Conservation, Natural History, Nature Reserves

Quick, Fix Those Nestboxes! The Natural History of Nestbox Damage

11 February 2015 Ian Alexander

Fixing anti-squirrel plates to nestboxes

Quick! Spring is in the air, the Dunnocks are passionately singing their tuneless songs, the Great Tits are yelling Zi-Za-Zi-Za-Zi-Za endlessly, the Greenfinches are wheezing out their odd song (‘Zheee’), it’s time to fix those nestboxes. Most of those in the Gunnersbury Triangle had been “hammered” by Tits or Woodpeckers, or gnawed by squirrels. And a few had been rather roughly drilled by humans. So the warden decided that all of them should be given anti-squirrel plates; all, that is, except the Robin boxes, which have a wide rectangular opening in the front.

A few of the boxes seemed to have been attacked by squirrels. This one has what could be toothmarks and signs of extensive tearing of the wood outwards at a shallow angle, which looks like gnawing rather than hammering. It isn’t obvious why the basically herbivorous Grey Squirrel should do this.

This box, on the other hand, seems to have been hammered at a sharp angle to the surface, whether by the Tits themselves (they certainly do this sometimes) or by Greater Spotted Woodpeckers preying on nests – although they mainly eat insects and seeds, they do take eggs and chicks when the opportunity arrives.

At least 4 of the nestboxes had substantial and reasonably fresh remnants of nests inside; this older one contained two long-addled tit eggs (just one shown here; it was 16 mm long) with a mixture of moss and down as insulation.

Tegenaria, the Giant House Spider, at home in a very messy nestbox

Finally, one very old nestbox, carefully engineered with beading around the hinged lid complete with little brass hooks, contained a Giant House Spider, Tegenaria, a lot of beetle pupae, and what could be Gypsy Moth pupae as well. The box was a messy tangle of thick sticky cobweb, and the spider was distinctly reluctant to leave, seeming to want to stand and fight off any intruder.

All in all, what might have seemed a mundane bit of metalwork turned out to be a day full of interesting natural history. (But the metalwork was fun, too.)

Natural History

The Natural History of Humans and Sea Shells

9 February 2015 Ian Alexander

In an earlier post, Archaeology: Human Natural History, I wrote about some of the wonderfully rich history that can be gleaned from a walk along the bed of the River Thames at low tide. I delighted in the pottery and pipe-bowls, as I do still.

But today, on a gloriously sunny, still and almost warm day with the tide right out, and the Egyptian Geese honking stridently and flying about — three pairs, and an equally loud loner — my walk along the river produced unexpected and equally delightful results.

Along with a nice potshard of Maling ware (it says “S” “MAL” and half an “H”) , I found an enormous toe-bone of a horse, 95 mm long. It fits snugly in my hand; it’s roughly the size and shape of a pistol grip, and as heavy. It was a proximal phalanx – the sequence is distal (hoof bone) – medial – proximal as you go up the leg. Now, today, one can barely imagine throwing a horse bone into a river. But in the days before public health officers and EU safety regulations, it was nothing strange. For a start, London was full of horses, both fine beasts for gentlemen to ride, or to pull their carriages; and small, tired, sometimes broken-down nags that pulled the rag-and-bone man’s recycling cart, and everything in between. For another thing, people ate horsemeat, as they do today (in decreasing amounts) all across the continent of Europe. If you were poor in Victorian London, horse stew must have been a rich, warm, nutritious and welcome dish: even if the horse had died of old age.

In the soft light, a set of old wooden steps, the timbers worn and scoured by thousands of tides carrying currents of mud, sand, shell and even shingle, were quite beautiful in their natural simplicity, revealing the structure and fibres of the once-thick and rectangular treads.

On the sand a little way further were scatters of Oysters and Cockles, with some other kinds of clam for good measure.

Now at first sight there is nothing very surprising about finding shells in a tidal river: sea shells, sea water. But these are fully marine species: they need salt. And are they not suspiciously fresh? Indeed, they are still articulated. Someone, having enjoyed an excellent seafood dinner, has still, this year, happily thrown out their shells onto the river bed, just as their ancestors did before them through the centuries. The fresh pottery fragments indicate that broken cups, plates (and indeed also pub glasses and bottles) similarly continue to find their way into the the river’s archaeology, just as they have for centuries, if not millennia. The river of life flows on; man’s natural history, his interaction with wild-caught or farmed animals (from horses to horse mussels, perhaps) leaves behind its small detritus of bone and shell, from one generation to the next.

What will the archaeologists of 2,000 years hence make of our generation, our few varves in some long sequence of layers of lake-mud? It is a curious reflection. In the sixties we hoped that it wouldn’t be a plutonium-iridium layer for them to puzzle over. Let’s again hope that it won’t be that.

Love of Nature

Startled by Sunshine, Mouse, and Kingfisher at Wraysbury

8 February 2015 Ian Alexander

When a chilly east wind drops and the sky clears to a brilliant blue in February, it is a shame not to drop everything and rush outside to enjoy it. So I found myself down at Wraysbury Lakes, all wrapped up in my winter clothes — but my gloves never left my pockets, and my jacket and pullover were soon unzipped as the temperature climbed to 9.5 C, and in the sun with scarcely a breeze (the planes returned to their usual takeoff towards the west) it felt far warmer than that.

Some handsome white bracket fungi shone in the sun; they were triangular in section with flattened tops, slightly toothed beneath. Could be a Trametes or Tyromyces perhaps.

On the lake, half a dozen Goldeneye were all that were left of the more ‘special’ ducks; a male joined the party, and a female swam rapidly up to him, bobbing her head; he bobbed back, and threw his head over his back too. Spring is in the air. It looked as if they were already a pair, I’d say.

Also on the lake were some handsome Pochard, mostly asleep, one diving and surfacing, and a Shoveler, preening. A Heron flew slowly over, half a wingspan from the water. A Field Mouse ran right in front of me and down to the waterside by the willows, and obligingly fed in the open for a minute while I watched with binoculars on close focus: the long tail, round ears and quivering ‘whiskers’ (vibrissae) at work.

Away from the lakes, a Rabbit hopped across the path. A Mistle Thrush called harshly; another flew past; a solitary Fieldfare left over from the sizeable flock a week or two ago.

I wandered down to the confluence of the Colne with the Thames; a Kingfisher gave me a good of that always astonishing turquoise bolt of blue lightning, flashing on short triangular wings over the little river. A minute later, it flashed back upstream, as startling as before. A single green sphere of Mistletoe clung to the leafless canopy of a tree behind the industrial estate.

Love of Nature, Quotation

Time to Stand and Stare

7 February 2015 Ian Alexander

The “Georgian” Welsh poet W. H. Davies (1871-1940) wrote the much-loved lines:

What is this life, if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad day light,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

This is Leisure, a modern sonnet (in his 1911 Songs of Joy and Others), in a long tradition of poetry that reflects on nature, including Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. I’ll hardly be the first to observe that modern life is very far from tranquil, or that people rush through parks or countryside looking only at a tiny screen, or talking on the telephone. (John Fox’s My Musical World, a lifetime in music, page 252, for example.) It’s interesting that Davies anticipated this view of modern life by a century. If we were transported back to 1911, we would surely find it a slow, peaceful and carefree existence, at least if we were lucky enough to be out of poverty. It is striking that the poet’s sensitivity picked up the acceleration and lack of awareness of nature that go with Western culture, all the way back then in Edwardian times.

Conservation, Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Animal Tracks in the Snow

3 February 2015 Ian Alexander

Animal tracks: Fox, Crow, and Squirrel prints on a snowy boardwalk

Today we woke to a snow-covered city, just a light dusting; and as often with snow, the weather was appreciably warmer than before the snow arrived.

Down at the nature reserve, the paths were empty of human footprints, but thickly sprinkled with animal tracks. Here some crows had walked to and fro across the path; there, a fox had jogged along the trail. But better was to come: the boardwalk across the pond was interlaced with tracks. On the left, a fox had gone the length of the boardwalk. In the centre, a crow had walked unsteadily along, the same way as me; and it, or another, had walked more rapidly back. On the right, more birds’ footprints: and the four-feet-together group of a squirrel, the smaller front prints clearly showing the marks of the sharp claws.

On a Birch branch above the anthill meadow, a Green Woodpecker hammered in search of food. Down by the ‘mangrove swamp’, a Jay screeched harshly, either for us or for a fox. Near the picnic meadow, a Sparrowhawk flew from its high perch, wheeled above the treetops, dived rapidly out of sight.

We carried tools and a ladder to visit the nestboxes and take down all that needed repairs. While I held the ladder, a party of four Long-Tailed Tits blew by, crossing from one Birch to the next one at a time. One of the boxes contained not just a mossy nest (like three others) but two old addled eggs, probably of Great Tit. While we struggled to prise off a somewhat too well attached box for maintenance, a Robin perched nearby, in hope of eating any grubs we might have disturbed. Several boxes had had their openings enlarged by much hammering by Blue Tits or Great Tits: nobody knows why they might do this, as it increases the threat to their nests from predators. We will make aluminium plates for the fronts of all the Tit boxes (the ones with circular holes): the Robin boxes just have a wide rectangular opening, which they definitely prefer. Inside one of the boxes was a mass of woodlice in the moss; another had a plump dead Noble False Widow Spider (Steatoda nobilis) inside.

Love of Nature, Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wetlands, Wildlife

Bullfinch! Winter Walk Hits Target

2 February 2015 Ian Alexander

Winter has definitely set in. The spinach beet in my garden was all frozen, the air at -3 Celsius and the ground presumably rather colder under a clear night sky. Fearing it might all be lost, I picked some and went out to see what there might be today down at Wraysbury Lakes.

Almost the first thing I saw was a bulky little finch high in a waterside willow. It called ‘deu’ quite loudly, fidgeted about and flew before I could focus on it. Still, there was no doubt it was a Bullfinch: the call, its shape, its solitary habits, and its shyness all pointing the same way. It is never an easy bird to see, even where it is resident (it is regularly ringed at Wraysbury). Leafless trees and the rising energy of the coming breeding season provide one of the few opportunities to catch a glimpse of this less well known finch.

At first sight there seemed to be no birds out on the lake. Finding a small illicit patch cleared by a fisherman I set up the telescope and looked about. A Pochard or two; some Tufted Duck and Coot; a male Goldeneye… but the Smew and Goosander of a week or two ago were nowhere to be seen. The old truth is that you never know what you’ll see: but it’s often a delightful surprise, and almost always energizing to be out in nature.

I walked on and looked about again: some rather white ducks caught my eye in the distance. Two male Goldeneye, each with a female in tow. The males threw their heads forward a few times, pretended to preen; one threw his head back and forth, then lowered his head and stretched it out and in. His female swam after him, her head resting on her back as if she were asleep! But she was certainly watching the display, and swimming to keep up a few lengths behind.

A loud squawk betrayed a Heron; it flapped out of cover at the end of the lake and landed on the bank behind the ducks. A few Mallard panicked from the water below me; a Moorhen briefly took flight.

Away from the lake, a few Robin and Dunnock hopped in and out of the bushes. A solitary Fieldfare or two gave their chack-chack call from the hawthorns, watchful and flighty. Another Bullfinch calling, this time atop a bare hawthorn bush – or maybe the same bird, half a mile on – and again I couldn’t get binoculars on to it, despite my stealthiest movements: it had surely seen me at once, and just took a few seconds to decide when to flee.

A Kestrel hovered beyond the tall poplars: no Buzzards or Red Kites today, but really the Kestrel feels almost more special than them, its numbers declining across Britain.

A few Jackdaws, Carrion Crows and Wood Pigeons on the horses’ hill; some Fieldfares in the trees, with a single Redwing; a Stock Dove flying low.

ObsessedByNature

Monthly Archives: February 2015