All posts by Ian Alexander

Nature Reserves, Wetlands

Ducklings at the Leg of Mutton Nature Reserve, Barnes (and House Martins)

Leg of Mutton Nature Reserve
Leg of Mutton Nature Reserve

An unexpectedly warm and sunny afternoon in May is an opportunity too good to miss, so I went out with bicycle and binoculars along the river, and spent some time in the Leg of Mutton local nature reserve at Barnes. This is a bit of a secret corner, as it’s not far from the WWT’s London Wetland Centre which is certainly far better known. It’s also quite beautiful in springtime, the paths dressed in Queen Anne’s Lace (cow parsley to you) and the lake resplendently blue with new green borders. From the woods, Blackcaps sang all over; from the reeds, both Reed Warbler and Sedge Warbler sang their cheerful repetitive songs: I had a fine view of a Reed Warbler atop the reeds shown in the photo. A Coot with five cootlings scooted about the end of the lake (to the left); a mother Mallard escorted a neat convoy of ducklings; a few Tufted duck preened; five male Pochard dabbled heads-down; more surprisingly, a pair of Gadwall paddled about on the far side. A Mute Swan sat on a nest amongst the reeds. The flowers were visited by masses of small bees. Apart from the planes overhead, the city felt far away.

House Martin Nests on Chiswick Mall
House Martin Nests on Chiswick Mall

On the other side of the river (with the help of the handsome green Barnes Bridge) I had a wonderful surprise: House Martins. Four were wheeling and chattering above Chiswick Mall, right by a house decorated with a dozen House Martin nests (many of them visible in the photo), and several in usable condition. This was news to me because the old colony a few hundred yards away was abandoned for whatever reason some years ago. But it is clear that the birds have nested repeatedly in the past few years, and it certainly looks as if they’ll nest again this year. The only small fly in the ointment can be seen on the extreme left of the photo: there is the remains of at least one nest behind some netting, so the birds must have been considered a nuisance on that side of the house, at least. Let us hope that their presence on the front doesn’t trouble anyone, as the colony may well be the only one in Chiswick, and is certainly one of not very many in West London. Being by the river, there are plenty of flies, and the house’s wide eaves with stout supports are ideal for the species.

Politics

An Absurdly British Electoral System

A million people voted Green and got one MP.

11 million people voted Conservative and got 331 MPs.

Notice anything wrong with that system? Yes, it’s grossly, absurdly, disgustingly unfair.

Perhaps you don’t care much about the Greens, favour the right of British politics? OK, try this:

Nearly 4 million people voted UKIP and got one MP. You know how many voted Conservative already. It takes 100 UKIP voters (or 30 Green voters) to balance one Tory.

The British first-past-the-post electoral system is delivering a parliament which doesn’t even pretend to be properly representative. It just does its best to dump a majority of seats in the lap of the largest party. That has given the Tories, Labour and as it happens the completely-concentrated-in-Scotland Scottish Nationalists far more seats than they deserve (the SNP got over 50, their share of the vote would give them 25), at the expense of democracy and all other parties.

During the campaign, no party other than the Greens so much as mentioned the environment in any of the voluminous “literature” that fell through my letterbox. So now, the 24 Green candidates who should have been elected are unable to transmit the British people’s declared voice to Parliament. And, yes, 82 UKIP candidates were similarly cheated of their voice.

Don’t be surprised when Nature and “the environment” barely get a mention for the next five years. You million Greens, be happy you’ve given Cameron’s Tories a new “mandate”. You’ve even got an MP, what more could you want?

Love of Nature, Natural History, Talks

Free Public Event: Book Launch at Gunnersbury Triangle 17 May 2015

LWT reading by the author 17 May 2015
LWT reading by the author 17 May 2015

London Wildlife Trust have kindly put on a book launch event for my new book ‘The English Love Affair with Nature‘. The event is free and open to all; though small children may prefer to eat the cakes and go pond-dipping, which will be available on the reserve! Attractions will include me, reading from the book; a chance to buy a signed copy, if that’s your sort of thing; nice things to eat and drink; and the beauty of a nature reserve in May, complete with birds, butterflies, bees, bugs, flowers and trees in new leaf, not to mention mini-beasts, newts and everything that wriggles in pond water! I hope to see you there.

Natural History

Making Wooden Pegs (whatever next) … and a Congregation of Newts

Making Pegs (with a billhook)
Making Pegs (with a billhook)

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
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.

Natural History, Natural Patterns

Snail Egg Pattern

Snail Eggs in Pond
Snail Eggs in Pond

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.

Natural History, Nature Reserves

Moths and Warblers at Gunnersbury Triangle

Early Grey Moth
Early Grey Moth

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
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
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.

Natural History

Anthribid beetle, Platystomos albinus, male

Anthribid beetle Platystomos albinus male
Anthribid beetle Platystomos albinus male

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.

Conservation, Environment, Natural History

Sussex Coastal Geography in the Spring

Cuckmere Haven with bar, lagoon, and wave-cut platform
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
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.

Conservation, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Digging a ditch

Image
Digging a ditch on the reserve
Digging a ditch on the reserve
Newly dug ditches
Newly 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.