While inveighing against all things Brussels, the English gentleman was able to take the fullest advantage of the Common Agricultural Policy, developing the agribusiness of the seventies and eighties, expanding subsidized yields by grubbing up hedges and copses, ploughing up verges and making vast stretches of monoculture kept sterile by aerial doses of pesticide. As a result, millions who grew up before this onslaught mourn the loss of grasshoppers, skylarks, the songthrush, even the common [house] sparrow, and many unseen others, which their children will never know. The countryside of Shakespeare and his successors in all the arts, Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’, for instance, no longer has a true point of reference.
— Maureen Duffy. England. The Making of the Myth from Stonehenge to Albert Square. Fourth Estate, 2001. Page 250.
I generally only review books that I would recommend. However, all rules are made to be broken. You’ll see why.
As the author of a book on some of the odd habits of the English over the centuries, I’m naturally professionally curious about anybody else’s take on the same theme. Duffy is a poet as well as a novelist, and not surprisingly is strong on the influence of poetry on the English idea of themselves. She covers an enormous range of history (from before the English arrived to the present) in a small, novel-sized book. She brings undoubted skills to her ambitious task, as well as an informed outsider’s eye (she’s a radical campaigner with an Irish father, but has lived all her life in England) and a liberal leftist point of view.
The book is not without interest, and some enjoyably wry observations:
“Our gardens involve us in no embarrassing intellectual or artistic decisions. With nature, even our version of stylized nature, we can’t go wrong. Our plots are little stages on which we are the only players, making three-dimensional installation art as the stage designer does with a maquette and the final set.” (p. 149)
But it’s a bumpy ride. If you’re going to talk about myths you need the olympian detachment of a Greek god (not that Zeus and co. were particularly objective): or else you need to be aware that you’re taking sides, and be witty and elegant about it; not something that Duffy manages. And if you’re going to gallop through history, you had better avoid sounding (as Sean O’Brien spikily remarks in The Guardian‘s review) like 1066 and All That. The pace, too, is noticeably uneven: after galloping through a period’s history in a paragraph, Duffy will devote a whole page to a lengthy extract from a poem and comments on it. The book, in short, falls down in several ways at once.
On gardening, for example – one area where Englishness and Nature intersect – she wrongly supposes that the ‘wild garden’ is an early 20th century invention, ignoring its 18th century roots in the influential show-off aristocratic grounds of Chiswick House and Stowe. If you’re going to give instant thumbnail sketches of a thousand complicated stories, you do rather need to get to the bottom of each story before you try to summarize it.
On this beautiful winter’s day we went for a stroll in Gunnersbury Park. The park and its mansions have won the lottery in the shape of a sizeable grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The golf course will be relocated from its present (ridiculous) position right in the middle of Lord Rothschild’s garden (at least, it would have been if he had lived to visit his house here), and many improvements will be made to the beautiful but dilapidated buildings, the museum, and the park. The house’s position was chosen to get the maximum possible sunshine and the best imaginable view: when built, it sat at the top of the hill on the north bank of the Thames, the green meadows stretching below it all the way down to the river to the south.
Flaky paint: the dilapidated state of the Large Mansion
Against the glorious cloudless sky in the clear dry air, I noticed a handsome natural graft forming a large eye on a high branch of the now leafless Beech tree near the mansion.
Natural graft in Beech, Gunnersbury ParkFamous view: the boating lake and (folly) temple
On Tuesday (9 December 2014) I joined the RSPB and The Wildlife Trusts on their joint ‘Rally for Nature’, in other words a briefing in Church House, a short march to the Houses of Parliament, and a meeting with my MP, Angie Bray (Conservative) in the Central Lobby.
RSPB-TWT Rally for Nature panel in Church House. From left: Mark Avery (RSPB), Joe Dudworth (LACS), Stephen Trotter (TWT), Mike Clarke (RSPB), Kerry McCarthy MP (Lab), Caroline Lucas MP (Green)
The briefings gave those hoping to see their MP something to say and a bit of guidance about how to say it. Joe Duckworth of LACS hosted the morning panel in a very jolly way.
A cheerful Caroline Lucas, MP
Caroline Lucas spoke clearly and passionately on key campaign causes, fitting a great deal into her 5 minutes: the goals of a Nature and Wellbeing bill, especially to reconnect children with nature; a long-term government commitment to nature; a mechanism for national and local action, including mandatory plans at these levels; and proper coverage in school curricula. She then spoke on the need to control Wildlife Crime, with consistent application of existing laws; need to act on illegal carbofurans used to poison birds of prey; sentencing guidelines; training of prosecutors; and action on trafficking of endangered species. She emphasized the role of the European Union Birds and Habitats Directives, the backbone of our wildlife laws (she noted that the UK did support these, once), and that they are now in danger, even though they are not in any way a block to development. She told us gently that Natural England now has to “consider economic growth” in every decision: an outrageous imposition on an important conservation body, itself in peril of being merged into nothingness. She spoke of the value of nature in people’s mental wellbeing, and that we needed to challenge the idea of growth as the be-all and end-all of government policy. She decried vague talk of “the environment” and told us to focus on the local and real, such as allotments.
Rally assembled at Church House
Kerry McCarthy told us she was one of 3 vegan MPs; said people thought it “a bit mad” talking about “bees, bats, badgers”; but that when the public in marginal seats send in over a thousand emails about such a topic, it makes a difference. She reminded us that deprived people were much (10x) less likely to live in green areas, and instead suffered from smoking, drinking, fat, diabetes, unemployment, loneliness and depression. These can all be ameliorated by contact with nature. She said that bees and other pollinators were declining, and that in Bristol the urban pollinators project showed children what bees did, and provided free vegetables to all and sundry. She mentioned Fracking in Chew Valley, and opposed the wasteful practice of subsidising grouse shooting. I asked her what Labour’s biodiversity policy was; she said there wasn’t one yet as the Manifesto wasn’t ready, that it wasn’t a “doorstep issue” (one that voters asked her about), and that a long-term view was needed. I think I heard a polite intake of breath from the audience as they realized Labour really hadn’t got its act together on nature at all.
Badger on the March
Julian Huppert MP (Lib. Dem.) said airily “We can destroy our viability on this planet.” but said little, to my mind, on what Parliament might do to prevent this. He did say that MPs were impressed by anyone who bothered to come to parliament as it showed commitment. He advised us to make our case, given that “people” (I think he meant MPs) fell into one of 3 categories: those who care about the world (I assume he meant nature); those who care for the local environment (their constituency); and those who just care for how they are perceived, i.e. could be embarrassed into some kind of action if it were seen to be popular. He claimed that the coalition government had doubled renewables and increased green energy. It didn’t seem to be much to do with nature or biodiversity really.
Joe Duckworth, Bill Oddie at Houses of Parliament
Sir John Randall MP (Con.) told us to be nice to our MP as they assume people will be confrontational, and are far more receptive when we’re not! He had seen peregrines over Parliament and grey wagtails and kingfishers in St James’s Park: wildlife was here, with us, even if there were fewer birds in the countryside, and despite “the scandal that’s going on in Malta” (illegal mass shooting of migrating birds). He came across a lot better than Huppert did.
I was astonished to find no queue at Security, so I had to wait in the Central Lobby for the time I had allowed for queuing! It gave me a chance to go over my carefully-prepared notes, not a bad thing.
A beautiful handmade placard
Angie Bray MP told me she was an RSPB member, and that she had written an article for the Ealing Gazette on bees, but (she volunteered) wasn’t convinced by the dire claims on neonicotinoids; it wasn’t something on my list, as it happens. We agreed totally on the need for children to get outside to play, to be in nature, and that parents were needlessly fearful of paedophiles in the park (most child molesters are, unhappily, within the extended family or otherwise known to the children concerned). She mentioned in passing that LACS were basically too wild to be taken seriously. She agreed that poisoning and the use of illegal lead shot were not good, and we parted all smiles.
Finally, right at the end of November, autumn is starting to look something like winter. Even now, and even with a light easterly wind, it is mild, almost too warm for any sort of winter coat.
Pochard, here for the winter
But winter flocks of birds have at last arrived: 45 Pochard on the lake, handsome with their reddish heads contrasting with pale grey backs; dozens of Goldfinch in the nearly leafless trees, twittering ceaselessly; a dozen or more Fieldfare in the thorn bushes in the horse field; a few Redwing in another thorn bush.
My first flock of Redwing this winter
The low sun made the dried flowerheads of the Teasels beautiful. A single Pleated Inkcap gleamed among the short grass and muddy hoofprints.
Gamekeeper Allen Lambert has been sentenced to 10 weeks of imprisonment, suspended for a year, for intentionally poisoning 10 buzzards and one sparrowhawk with pesticide. The judge commented, unarguably, that the offences had crossed the custody threshold. That a gamekeeper old enough to know much better – Lambert is 65 – should do such a thing is pretty shocking. That the law should do so little given what the RSPB called “truly dreadful” and the worst bird of prey poisoning case it had ever seen in England, is disappointing in the extreme. If this isn’t enough to see a perpetrator behind bars, then what is? For of course, nobody is going to imagine that these were the first raptors that Lambert ever poisoned.
The owner of Lambert’s workplace, the famous Stody Estate in Norfolk is Charles MacNicol. We don’t know what he knew of what his gamekeeper of long standing was up to, nor what orders may have been given. What we do know is that MacNicol “wouldn’t tell BBC News whether he knew, or whether he condemned the killings.” Why not? If MacNicol was innocent, why didn’t he just say straight out that he thought the killings of protected birds of prey shocking and illegal, and that the Stody Estate would not condone them? Why not? It would have cost MacNicol nothing. His head-down-and-keep-shtum response immediately suggests his attitude to be entirely reprehensible, and leaves open the question of his knowledge, involvement in and responsibility for the actions taken.
In Scotland, the law on wildlife crime was changed by the Wildlife and Natural Environment (Scotland) Bill in 2011. This introduced ‘Vicarious Liability’ for Scottish landowners: in other words, they are automatically assumed to be responsible for criminal activities like poisoning wild birds on their land. This excellent piece of legislation makes wildlife crime clear-cut. If they knew or gave orders, they are liable. If they didn’t know, they should have, and they are still liable. The result? Wildlife crime in Scotland has suddenly and rapidly fallen from 10 poisoning incidents (killing 16 birds of prey) in 2011 to just 3 (killing 3 birds of prey) in 2012.
But in England, a country that loves nature, landowners aren’t liable for crimes committed by their gamekeepers. If a landowner were to buy some pesticides for lawful pest control, and give a quiet nod and a wink to a gamekeeper to poison off some buzzards and sparrowhawks, the landowner is more or less immune from prosecution. The RSPB wants England to have a similar law to Scotland’s. It’s about time we had one.
It was too sunny and warm to sit at a desk writing, so I took bicycle and binoculars and went along the Thames path to the Wetland Centre. Even in a T-shirt it was warm work, feeling more like an English July (ok, that’s not saying much) than the last day of November .
Afternoon sunbeams on a very warm Halloween at the Wetland Centre
Inside the Centre I passed some diminutive witches and warlocks: they seemed to be sweating uncomfortably inside their costumes. I took a swig of water and cooled off in a hide; two rare migrants, Green Sandpipers, bobbed daintily at the end of one of the little islands, dwarfed by a Black-Headed Gull and a Moorhen, neither of them particularly large birds. Their habit is not unlike that of the Common Sandpiper, but they lack the white streak that rises in front of the wing. One of them took flight, its slender dark wings and white belly giving it something of the look of a rather large and clunky House Martin. It felt very odd to be watching autumn migrants on such a summery day.
Over at the wader scrape, a Little Egret strutted and once fluttered across the shallow water; it is an uncommon visitor here, though becoming more usual along the south coast marshes and estuaries.
A Green Woodpecker bounded over the grazing marsh in its distinctive undulating flight, its red cap and green body showing beautifully in the hot sunshine, with a loud laughing call in case anybody was in any doubt what it was.
A Cetti’s Warbler sang its bold short song, Chwit-i-pit-i-pit, Chwit-i-pit-i-pit, as usual invisible deep in a reedbed.
Out on the open water, numbers of winter ducks are (oddly, given the summery weather) building up; several Shovelers dabbled; some dozens of Wigeon grazed; a few Teal, the drakes in glorious colour, swam nimbly about with some Gadwall.
Even on the way home, I had no need of a pullover. The BBC weather report confirmed what everyone instinctively knew: it was the warmest 31st of October ever recorded in Britain, with an astonishing 23.6 Celsius in London. Of course, a cold front is forecast.
P.S. The next morning was grey and rainy, autumn on the way. Two large grey Mistle Thrushes flew overhead, rasping out their wintry calls, like a boy blowing over a comb covered in tracing paper.
P.P.S. Four days later, after a clear starry night, the sun rose over a chilly town on a fine November morning. It was winter.
Well, despite the extraordinary warmth of both September and October – I was still working in a T-shirt down at the Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve today, anything more being too hot – the fungi have finally come out in earnest. This small speckly Dapperling seems to be Lepiota hystrix, a rare species.
Birch Log fungi
Several fungi were on show on a pile of birch logs, including a large Birch Polypore and some elegant smaller Turkeytail brackets as well as Orange Curtain Crust.
Turkeytail, Trametes (Coriolis) versicolor
These handsome Common Cavaliers were growing beside the path.
Common Cavalier Melanoleuca polioleuca (aka M. melaleuca)
Many damp rotting sticks and stumps had Stagshorn or Candlesnuff fungus growing out of them, Xylaria hypoxylon. These were thin and stick-like early in November, well-developed by 20 November.
Stagshorn Fungus, Xylaria hypoxylon, well developed
In the anthill meadow were plenty of puffballs, Lycoperdon perlatum. They certainly looked pearly, as their specific name suggests.
Good big Common Puffballs, Lycoperdon perlatum
In the picnic meadow was a tall slender yellow Inkcap, Coprinus auricomus.
The delicate, lemon-yellow Coprinus auricomus
A long-bodied wasp, surely a queen, was trapped in the surface film of the pond by the parish boundary stones. We rescued her with a stick to get a closer look.
Queen Wasp
Two days later: the weather has turned more autumnal and showery. More fungi have popped up, including quite a few Clouded Funnels, Clitocybe nebularis, behind the anthill meadow. The display of Puffballs is fine, the large clean specimens having an obviously grainy, almost pearly surface.
Clouded Funnel, Clitocybe nebularis
Some Sulphur Knights, Tricholoma sulphureum, have grown up behind the loggery at the base of the mound by the pond. They are deep orange-yellow, quite thick-stemmed, with an flattened or dished cap and widely-spaced gills that barely touch the stem.
Sulphur Knight, Tricholoma sulphureum
I found a broken Blusher mushroom, Amanita rubescens, in the anthill meadow. In this family of poisonous fungi, some deadly, it is edible when properly cooked, though the water it is cooked in must be thrown away.
The Blusher, Amanita rubescens (broken)
And a single small Slippery Jack, a suitably slimy bolete. It was yellower than the photograph shows, the cap appearing a shining light brown, the pore surface underneath rather yellow.
Slippery Jack, Suillus luteus
By the 6th of November it was far colder, and there were fewer species on show, with Fly Agaric, Clouded Funnel, quite a few Butter Caps, and this small gelatinous fungus on dead willow, Tremella mesenterica. I also found a small fragment of an brown Amanita with a white stem, probably A. pantherina, the poisonous Panther Cap.
There were several Pale Brittlestem at the edge of the Anthill meadow under Birches, bordering the strip of acid grassland where the railway used to be.
Pale Brittlestem, Psathyrella candolleana
By the 9th of November, things were visibly more autumnal; the Clouded Funnels were still about, now large and more clearly funnel-shaped; a few Butter Caps persisted, along with the Puffballs. The small fungus Phoma hedericola (‘hedera’=Ivy)was by now making large obvious spots on ivy leaves.
The Ivy Spot fungus, Phoma hedericola
These little toadstools with a cream-coloured, slimy cap and whitish fleecy stems were growing out of a loggery, the dead wood half-buried in the soil. They may be the Sticky Scalycap, Pholiota gummosa.
? Sticky Scalycap Pholiota gummosa on 9 November Same group of ? Sticky Scalycap, Pholiota gummosa on 19 November
Finally, no collection of fungi is complete without The Deceiver, Laccaria laccata, which comes in a variety of sizes, shapes and colours. It’s typically rather russet-brownish and the stem is quite thin, often a bit flattened and twisted. The cap can be round or wrinkled; it begins rather globular and flattens out. It’s rather well-named. Mind you there are several similar species: this could easily be L. fraterna, given its smooth brown stalk and rather rufous cap.
The Deceiver Laccaria laccata
Fungi are continuing to appear as late as the 11th of November. The magnificent Collared Earthstar, Geastrum triplex, was growing under birches, willows and oaks behind the anthill meadow.
Collared Earthstar Geastrum triplex
On the 12th of November:
A yellow Russula, perhaps R. claroflava (Yellow Swamp Brittlegill)A Bonnet, Mycena sp.
On 18th November, a troop of smallish, tall, pale Coprinus that don’t really turn to the usual black ink, growing on woodchip beside the path. Seems close to Coprinus impatiens.
Emmylou Harris sang of sunshine in December and roses in the snow. It’s only the 28th of October, so not that late in the year yet, but the mercury climbed to an improbable 18 Celsius – that’s T-shirts and sunhats for work down at the nature reserve – and there were indeed roses blooming in the garden.
For the record, also in flower today were Alpine Pink, Tayberry, Squash, Strawberry, Primula, Nasturtius, Hydrangea, the little New Zealand Sorrel that manages to grow between the paving stones, and Daisy.
Down at the reserve, Beaked Hawksbeard has come back into flower (for the second time this year) on the picnic meadow. It seems that the warm weather has coaxed the plants to try flowering. They’ll get a bit of a shock with the change coming in the weather tomorrow, probably. It certainly feels like an odd bit of Phenology, but of course we won’t know for many years whether this is part of a long-term trend to do with global warming, especially as the global average temperature has been taking a holiday from its inexorable rise for some years now. When the temperature does take off, it will be too late to stop, and very costly to mitigate.
Judging by the feeble global co-operation on the far more obvious and immediate threat of Ebola virus, it’s hard to be optimistic about our ability to collaborate as a species on anything as large as global warming. The Drake equation, the one that predicts the number of intelligent civilisations in our galaxy, has a term for the lifetime of a civilisation, as Prof. Brian Cox recently explained in his TV series Human Universe. If it’s only a few centuries, that would neatly explain why – despite the profusion of suitable-looking planets – we haven’t been contacted by any other civilisation. That would imply that “intelligent” life never lasts very long on any planet. However hard it tries to be sensible, selfishness – which must always be favoured by evolution for short-term gain – always takes over, and people use up the resources of their home planet until – pof! – they wipe themselves out. Just clever enough to be really stupid. What a cheerful thought.
perhaps Noble false widow spider, Steatoda nobilis on Henry Moore statue
Well, it was certainly a large and striking spider with a distinctive crescent mark on the forward slope of its abdomen, so “False Widow Spider?” sprang into my mind. It was, amusingly, making itself conspicuous on the noble bronze surface of the Henry Moore statue in Kew Gardens: there’s just one now, reminding old-timers of the ‘one behind every bush’ feeling we had in 2006 when the gardens were full of Henry Moores, and I confess I pretty much ‘understood’ what they were about for the first time, seeing them against a natural (well, you know what I mean) background as massive, handsomely curved figures. One was near a splendidly branchy conifer, its huge curved branches setting off the sculpture.
But I digress. The spider had a finely moulded cephalothorax and a large, nearly globular abdomen, marked with a sandy crescent and a dotted area. Its legs were distinctively reddish. Back at home, I looked up images of false widows. It certainly wasn’t the large native False Widow, Steatoda bipunctata. It looked much like the introduced Steatoda nobilis; perhaps the dotted area on the abdomen was not typical, but it seems close enough. The species, according to the Natural History Museum, arrived here in the 1870s — not quite such a new arrival as the ebola-panicky tabloid newspapers seem to think, then. It most likely arrived among bananas from Madeira and the Canary Islands, so it really is a subtropical scary. It can “live comfortably in our homes all year round”, says the museum cheerily, and is now common and widespread. And yes, it does bite; but the effect is not much worse than a wasp sting. I suspect a bit of hydrocortisone cream would sort it out nicely. Or a swift tap with a shoe, of course.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
— Maureen Duffy. England. The Making of the Myth from Stonehenge to Albert Square. Fourth Estate, 2001. Page 250.
