Well, I’d read John Stewart Collis’ marvellous The Worm Forgives the Plough, and his description of the bill-hook as a marvellous tool, but it’s one thing to read about something and quite another to do it with a purpose.
Today, we were tasked with making edges for a stretch of path in the reserve. You can see some lengths of birch trunk lying along the path edge below my left hand. These of course had to be pegged to keep them in place, and then wired and stapled to discourage casual vandalism. The only source of wooden pegs was … more sticks. I set to work with the bill-hook, and indeed the tool is finely adapted to its job. Well-balanced, just heavy enough, and sharp, it slices through wood with a satisfying soft chopping sound. Even so, care and skill are needed, and the job takes a bit of time.
Congregation of Newts
When I had made all the pegs anyone needed, I went for a little nature walk. Down by the pond a now-scarce visitor was singing in the birch trees: a Greenfinch. In the pond, several smooth newts were flicking and darting about. The sun was glinting off the water, as you can see, but it seems two magnificently spotty males were courting a drabber female at the top.
Walking past the main pond, my eye was caught by a striking pattern reminiscent of a brain coral. Lying down on the boardwalk to get the diminutive lens of my phone camera as close to the pond surface as possible, the squiggles resolved themselves into long patterns of jelly divided mostly into hexagonal areolae like miniature cells in a honeycomb, each with a white boundary and a tiny yellow egg at its centre.
At the top left of the photo is a large Ramshorn Snail: several others were nearby, so they are the likely culprits. Generally pond snail egg masses (as laid by the large pointy-spiral pond snail Limnaea) are small, undistinguished jelly-blobs, so these large, impressive structures were a surprise.
The dawn chorus at the reserve revealed two singing Blackcaps: one was alternately feeding on newly-emerged Cherry buds, presumably eating insect larvae, and giving short bursts of song or subsong. In a few days’ time the leaves will make such easy observation much less likely. There were two singing Chiffchaffs, one of them in full view in a Birch just coming into leaf above the main pond; and a Willow Warbler which I first heard yesterday near the picnic meadow.
Identifying a Pug Moth
A party of newly-fledged Great Tits blundered about the bushes on the steps by the main pond, and a Wren gave me a fine view at the ‘mangrove swamp’, which is fast drying up. The newly-dug extension to the seasonal pond has filled with water and is in fact deeper than the rest of the pond, probably a useful variation in depth.
Inspecting the Moth Trap at Gunnersbury Triangle
Up at the hut, the moth trap was being opened after a night’s work. Inside were some Pug moths, probably Brindled Pugs, and a much larger Noctuid moth, an Early Grey.
Also seen were Jay, Magpie, Carrion Crow, Wood Pigeon, singing Dunnock, Blackbird, Robin, Mallard. A Wren was carrying food to its nest near the ramp.
Well, a rarity: this fine beetle, Platystomos albinus, is an Anthribid, a member of a family somewhere between the wood-boring Longhorns and the pointy-nosed Weevils. It has plenty of odd features, not least that it is camouflaged as a bird-dropping. It is “nationally scarce (Nb)” and an “Index of Continuity Species”. This is a male – it’s easy to tell as the species is sexually dimorphic: the males have enormous long antennae nearly the length of the body; the females have antennae about as long as head and thorax together. And this specimen seems (?) to be bleeding from the back of the thorax, possibly an instance of reflex bleeding (autohaemorrhaging) to warn off predators: perhaps the blood is toxic or irritant as it is in several families of beetle. The larvae live in dead standing wood; the adults in fungus-infested Beech or Alder – we have a very few Beech here, and no Alder, and the insect was nowhere near either species.
Cuckmere Haven with bar, lagoon, and wave-cut platform
Down in Sussex for a few days, we walked the Seven Sisters from Cuckmere Haven to the Birling Gap.
We had a taste of the scale of human interference with the world’s climate in the shape of a thick haze of pollution trapped by an anticyclone: on the Weald approaching Lewes, we could see the thick haze below the level of the South Downs, and taste the acridity on our tongues. On the coast itself, it was less noticeable in the sea breeze, but the visibility was much reduced with the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry quickly fading into the murk. The BBC warned of high local pollution (worst near Hastings) and an expert advised against strenuous exercise.
The photo of Cuckmere Haven had to be enhanced as it actually looked all washed out in the haze. The geography is interesting: the Cuckmere River emerges (as a dark horizontal line) through what looks from this viewpoint like a continuous shingle bar across the mouth of the valley. The ‘lagoon’ on the landward side of the shingle is part of a former meander of the river, now cut off as if it were an oxbow lake; the current watercourse is canalized with artificial embankments. In the background are vertical sea-cliffs of chalk, with softer (brown) sands above, eroding at a shallower angle. At the base of the cliffs is a white line of fallen chalk rubble, and a dark horizontal surface, a wave-cut platform of chalk (with dark seaweed). In the foreground is the slope of chalk grassland and (left centre) two wartime concrete pillboxes defending the haven.
Seven Sisters – coastal cliff erosion
Gingerly approaching the cliff edge at a crawl, I took this photo, showing a large cave in the chalk: the waves fracture and undercut the cliff at high tide, causing progressive and often sudden cliff falls. The coastline recedes by about 70cm per year, but this bland average conceals a very different reality: the cliff edge barely changes from one year to another, until in some specially violent winter storm, perhaps three to five metres of chalk grassland and hundreds of thousands of tons of chalk suddenly collapse all at once into a gigantic white heap on the beach. The cave in the photo has created an overhang of more than 10 metres; it will certainly collapse one day in the next few years.
The walk was constantly accompanied by the song-flights of Skylarks, and their darting duels low over the grass. A few Ravens flew about the cliffs, and many Jackdaws; a pair of Carrion Crows mobbed a Raven; a few Magpies brought the number of members of the Crow tribe up to four. Near Birling, Chiffchaffs crept about an orchard, and Blackcaps dived into gorse bushes. Hundreds of Brent Geese flew Eastwards in V-shaped skeins or long lines half a wingspan above the waves. Four or five Little Egrets darted about the Cuckmere Haven lagoon, spearing small fish: a century ago they were hunted to local extinction for their plumes, used for elegant ladies’ hats. The RSPB was founded partly as the “Fin, Fur and Feather League”, a women’s campaign against the cruel and pointless use of animals in fashion that became a major force in bird conservation. In the last thirty years or so they have quietly returned to the south coast and are increasing in numbers.
Digging a ditch on the reserveNewly dug ditches … turning into a seasonal pond
After just three short sessions of ditch-making, we have a little network of waterways, an island sporting a natural tuft of Pendulous Sedge, some impressively high banks of muddy, gravelly spoil, and a new feature for the reserve. We hope to extend the ditch down the natural line (was it a ditch before?) to the trees at the end. The existing seasonal pond certainly had a ditch-like extension to just across the path (from where the lower photo was taken), and we intend also to clear that out – it shouldn’t be difficult as, unlike the current ditchworks, there are no stones, roots or ivy entanglements to cut through.
Today (7 April) the sun shone in a cloudless spring sky, and we worked to the song of a Chiffchaff. Two Blackcaps were singing elsewhere in the reserve, along with Wrens, Dunnocks, Great Tits, Blue Tits and some non-vocal Magpies, a Jay, Wood Pigeons, a Heron and Mallard. The insects, too, have emerged to exploit the sudden warmth, with plenty of Peacock butterflies, a Brimstone or two, and a Holly Blue; I saw a Small White in my garden. There was a 7-spot and a Harlequin ladybird, and the pond was alive with a new crop of Pond Skaters.
The grass is racing up; Broom is coming into its handsome yellow pea-flowers; several tufts of garden-escape Mahonia and Daffodils are richly yellow; red deadnettles tempt several species of bumblebee including buff/white-tailed and carders, and the honeybees are active.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
