All posts by Ian Alexander

Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wetlands, Wildlife

Seven Sea Swallows Don’t Make a Summer …

26 April 2014 Ian Alexander

Down at Wraysbury, I wondered what I might see now the spring migration is well and truly under way. Last year there was a single Cuckoo, a rare treat. And perhaps there would be a good number of warblers already.

The winter ducks had all vanished from the lakes, all bar a pair of shy Gadwall right at the back. There were indeed quite a few warblers about – Chiffchaffs, Blackcaps, Cetti’s, Whitethroats, Garden Warblers and one or two Willow Warblers, all singing lustily. I listened out for a Sedge Warbler to make it Seven but couldn’t find one. Still, not bad going.

But over the lake there was a high call: Pik! Cheer! Cheeri-Cheeri-Cheeri-Cheer! A pair of Common Terns, the first of the year: graceful white ‘sea swallows’, marvellously buoyant in flight. But no – there were two pairs .. no, five birds … no, seven in all. They wheeled and shrieked high above, swooped and delicately took insects from the water surface. Comically, one or two of the Black-Headed Gulls tried to do the same: they looked like tubby Sunday footballers trying gamely to keep up with their mates, flapping heavily, looking rotund and clumsy – yet, these are the same birds that gracefully wheel about the tourists at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, skilfully catching pieces of bread tossed into the air at any speed, any angle, any distance. It’s just that the terns are seven times more agile. Their forked tails divide into streamers as long as the rest of the tail; their wings almost pure white below, smooth ash-grey above. Do they make a summer? Almost.

Also swooping over the water was one Swallow, the first of the year for me; and about eight House Martins were hunting above the treetops. Some Alder Flies flew past; perhaps they are emerging from the water, providing a feast for the terns.

One green female Banded Demoiselle perched on some nettles; she too is the first of her kind – indeed, the first dragonfly of any kind – for me this year. And a solitary Greylag goose stood in the shallows, an unusual sight here.

Around the horses on the green grassy hill that used to be the dump, a flock of Jackdaws with some Carrion Crows, benefiting from the insects around the horses; and a second flock, more of a surprise, of Stock Doves. They are notoriously under-reported, people just assuming they are Feral Pigeons or Wood Pigeons without looking to check. They all had the same pattern, and none of them had white wing flashes.

Walking down to the road, the narrow path was carpeted with small teardrop-shaped white petals: Hawthorn flowers, May blossom.

Natural History, Talks

Camouflage without Spots: Gunnersbury Triangle, Sunday 8 June 2014 at 2pm

25 April 2014 Ian Alexander

Cheetah (title image) — Camouflage without Spots: is that even possible?

Free Talk: Gunnersbury Triangle, Sunday 8 June 2014 at 2pm

In this short and I hope lively talk, illustrated with models and photographs, I will try to show that camouflage is a lot more than spotty coats.

Animals use many different tricks to hide themselves. Even when there is no cover to hide behind, animals find ingenious ways to make themselves invisible. And if they don’t need to hide, they use the same tricks in reverse to make themselves as obvious as possible.

“Suitable for ages 8 – 80”. Roughly.

OK, you want more technical detail. Hmm. Well, I shall not be talking about military camouflage, though it is (or should be) based on the same principles as in zoology. The title already promises no spots, more or less, so I shall obviously mostly be avoiding what my hero Hugh Cott called disruptive patterns. Yes, you can see that I’ve spent far too much time trying to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of camouflage. If you nose about in there you’ll discover that I’ll have plenty of spotless methods to talk about. To whet your appetite, here’s Hugh Cott’s beautiful drawing of a Potoo, which makes itself as good as invisible by perching, stone-still, atop a broken branch. I’ll leave it up to you to work out how the trick works. Even better, come along to my talk.

Hugh Cott's Invisible Potoo — Hugh Cott’s Invisible Potoo

Natural History, Wildlife

Plume Moth cf Stenoptilia bipunctidactyla

25 April 2014 Ian Alexander

An extremely slim-winged Plume Moth landed on the kitchen window and has rested there for some hours, in broad daylight. I was familiar with the distinctive White Plume Moth, Pterophorus pentadactyla, a ghostly little moth with thin, branched, feathery wings – never understood the ‘penta-dactyla’, (‘five-fingered’) as I’d make it many, or perhaps two, but certainly the wings are oddly subdivided. This moth was obviously something in the same family (Pterophoridae) but another species, and given its brownish colour, it must be very inconspicuous among vegetation or on bark.

Plume Moth cf Stenoptilia bipunctidactyla

The excellent British Moths and Butterflies: A Photographic Guide by Chris Manley 2008, reprinted 2011 by Bloomsbury ( Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk), quickly pointed to a species of Stenoptilia: there are several similar and hard-to-tell species, so I wouldn’t presume to say which one it is, but it is most like Stenoptilia bipunctidactyla. The photo shows the family’s distinctive T-shape, and the long thin whitish legs with spines. The back is dotted, and the wingtips lack white, which is why I’m guessing it’s something like this species. It’s said to be common throughout Britain, eating Scabious.

Book Review

Book Review: Harvest by Jim Crace

24 April 2014 Ian Alexander

Jim Crace’s novel Harvest was longlisted for the Booker Prize of 2013. Crace is an amazingly taut writer – he does the ‘digested reads‘ in The Guardian, condensing whole books down to a few short but extraordinarily clear paragraphs, which miraculously give you exactly the feel for the kind of writing the book contains. He’s a man who can capture a ‘voice’, if anyone can.

Crace wanted to write about the English landscape, something that we all feel we know but which consists in large part of dark secrets. People have heard, probably, of the Highland Clearances, and dimly understand why the bonny banks and braes are empty of folk. They may be less aware that much the same happened here in England. Actually it’s a complex history – splendidly told in Francis Pryor’s 2010 The Making of the British Landscape (Amazon.com,
Amazon.co.uk) – but Crace wanted to ground it in a single imagined place, to bring it to life for the reader.

I’m a reluctant reader of novels – on the whole I find there’s more than enough serious non-fiction to be going on with – but I was intrigued, no least because I’m fascinated by the way we Brits claim to love the ‘English Countryside’, regardless of whether it’s a strip of wire-fenced mud bordering a vast foul-smelling field of oilseed rape, devoid of insects, wild flowers, birds, or any other redeeming feature. I didn’t doubt that Crace would go straight for the jugular.

An English harvesting scene from Holinshed's Chronicles, 1577. — An English harvesting scene from Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1577.

The book begins, ironically, with some sweet lines from Alexander Pope’s Ode on Solitude: Happy the man, whose wish and care / A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air / In his own ground. What could be finer? The first chapter begins at once with a fire, or rather two fires, intruding into the quiet laborious rhythm of Early Modern (it could almost be Mediaeval) village life. One fire is the campfire of some ‘new neighbours’, staking their claim to be allowed to stay (‘We’ll see.’); the other, still more sinister, is of ‘ancient wood. Long felled. … We fear it is the manor house that burns…’, plunging us into the turmoil that, step by step, takes us from order to chaos, settlement to exile.

I read Harvest from cover to cover in as few sittings as I could, hating to be interrupted. I won’t spoil the plot for you any further, but will say that I was delighted by the attitudes to the landscape. The villagers live all their lives within their parish bounds. Outside the shared feudal strip-fields are a patch of forest and a marsh. The forest is home to deer, which the hungry villagers see purely as food. The marsh, lovely with wild flowers, is known simply as ‘turd and turf’, a place to cut turves for the fire, and to leave something else behind. Nature’s beauty is not for the poor to appreciate, plainly, though they all know the names of all the plants they see, and what they are good for in folk medicine. This rustic view of nature is contrasted with that of an outsider, a surveyor, who finds the marsh – no-one has the heart to tell him what they call it – quite beautiful, and makes a list of the flowers he finds: listing is knowing, note the villagers. Another man, the book’s narrator, is a bridge between the village and the world outside: he is literate, but has lived for 12 years in the village, and can see things from both sides.

As the book closes in on its climax, a compelling sense of dread seizes the reader, and a shout of unfairness. There’s no foot wrong here, no word out of place. If you love nature and haven’t tried Crace before, read this book. Some critics have compared him to William Golding, not a bad idea, but while he’s as terse and direct, he’s also very much his own pair of eyes. If like me you normally only read non-fiction, I can tell you that Crace must have done a lot of research to get the details of Harvest just right: think of it as a lot of facts arranged with a narrative, if you like. It’s terrific.

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

Natural History, Nature Reserves

Sand Martins and Sandpipers

23 April 2014 Ian Alexander

The recent East winds and warmer weather have brought plenty of spring migrants to southern Britain. Today at the London Wetland Centre a twitch was in full swing at the Peacock Tower, the object of the lovers’ attention being a Common Sandpiper peacefully browsing along the muddy shore, happily unaware of the excitement it was causing. The breeding Redshanks, too, stalked about the shallows probing for food; the Lapwings as always alert, chasing off Carrion Crows and anything else that might have been interpreted as threatening. Around the paths, three or four early Sand Martin arrivals wheel and swoop like the small brown swallows that they are; their nest-cliff is still empty.

Around the reserve, quite a few Brimstone and Small White butterflies, and an Orange Tip gave movement and colour. I heard the first Sedge Warbler of the year, and despite being right next to the willow bush from which a Cetti’s Warbler was giving out its explosively phrased song, I couldn’t see the songster. A Blackcap however could be glimpsed behind the Sheltered Lagoon, chattering its alarm call. A Song Thrush sang at intervals, and a Dabchick gave its beautiful trill and some small squeaks from the Lagoon, in between spending a lot of time under water.

Back at home, a queen Wasp was nosing about some Ivy-Leaved Toadflax, and a red Mason Bee dug for earth in a seedbed, flying off with a little load for her nest.

Gardening

Sissinghurst Castle Garden: Nature or Art?

22 April 2014 Ian Alexander

Sissinghurst's formal structure, informal planting — Sissinghurst’s formal structure, informal planting

We had the enormous pleasure of a spring day at Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, the six acres of superbly beautiful English garden deep in the Weald of Kent, complete with mellow red brick and oast houses. It’s a celebration of nature as perfect as any botanical garden.

Whatever the structure of their curious marriage, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson collaborated perfectly on the Sissinghurst gardens, Harold working with ‘bits of paper and rulers’ to create the garden’s design, or in today’s inflated language its architecture, while Vita got to work on the actual planting, and continued to work in the garden – as well as writing a gardening column and numerous books from her study in the castle tower – for the rest of her life.

Harold by no means always agreed with Vita on the planting – but being Vita, and on the ground, she generally got her way with that – but they completely agreed on the contradictory principle of the garden, ‘the strictest formality of design with the maximum informality in planting’. This can be seen to be the reason why the gardens seem so fresh, and so English, today. The lines of the garden are razor sharp: crisp hedges, straight or circular paths, walls, arches, there is no ambiguity about the formality of Sissinghurst’s design. But Vita’s blazing colours and wealth of flower forms riot joyfully, insistently, triumphantly in and out of Harold’s ruled lines.

Here in Britain we are by now very familiar with the idea of wildness and rebellion in gardens; Lord Burlington introduced the daring approach by bringing William Kent back from ten years of study in Italy – along with knowledge of strictly formal Palladian architecture – to make Chiswick House and its gardens something for everyone to envy. To appreciate how revolutionary this was, think of a traditional French garden like Villandry, all stiff little hedges and formally planted flowers. Gardens used to be places of order and control, with wild nature outside the castle grounds. England was different: by the eighteenth century, the home counties were visibly tame, all straight hedges, parklike Oaks and Elms dotted about, and short well-controlled grass for the peacefully grazing animals. If the countryside looked like a park, then the aristocrat’s garden needed to look like a wilderness, and William Kent’s ingenious ‘river’ – complete with bridge and waterfall – along with Chiswick park’s bushy woods and wild-seeming vistas, gave just the right impression of rampant nature.

Sissinghurst does something different. Outside the garden, the Kentish woods are properly wild, if coppiced for centuries, so the garden has no need to pretend to be a wilderness. Instead, it celebrates the interplay of the natural and the man-made; there are vistas with brick walls and regular buttresses; cottages; the castle tower; pleached lime trees; paths and ‘doors’ between what Gertrude Jekyll called garden ‘rooms’. But in and around this structure, Vita’s plants climb the walls, draggle down them, or burst out above them in every shape and colour. Each view is carefully contrived, but a surprise for each visitor, fresh on each spring day, glowing with blossom, healthy with new leaf. As Harold Nicolson said, they had created a work of art. With nature, of course.

Conservation, Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Of Witch’s Brooms and Anthills

21 April 2014 Ian Alexander

Down to Aston Rowant on a fine clear sunny day with a cold East wind that brought spring migrants like the Ring Ousel, a rare blackbird of mountain and moorland. I saw a probable one diving into a juniper bush; they like to stop off on the scarp of the Chiltern Hills as the next best thing to their favoured moors, before flying on to Wales or wherever.

Anthills dotting Aston Rowant chalk grassland

The scarp slope of the relatively hard Chalk falls steeply to the broad plain of the soft Oxford Clay below, to the West. Much of the grassland has been destroyed for agriculture, either falling under the plough or simply being ‘improved’ as pasture with fertiliser, encouraging long grasses at the expense of the wealth of flowers that once covered the English countryside. Happily, here in the reserve and in quite a few places on the Chilterns, the steepness of the land has discouraged improvement. The chalk grassland is dotted with hundreds of anthills, the tiny yellow ants living all their lives below ground, tempting green woodpeckers to come out and hunt for them.

The trees and flowers are visibly weeks behind those of London. The Whitebeam is just coming into its fair white leaves, which look almost like Magnolia flowers in their little clusters newly burst from the bud. But the tree’s name comes from its white wood, not its leaves.

At the bottom of the scarp, a field away from the Ridgeway which follows the line of hills for many miles, Hornbeams and Birches marked a change in the soil, which must be neutral or acid down here, compared to the strictly alkaline rendzinas and brown earths of the chalk. One of the Hornbeams looked as if it was oddly full of Mistletoe, but up close it proved to be a mass of Witch’s Brooms, growths of the tree itself caused by an infection.

Wildlife

Fashionable Urban Foxy Lady

17 April 2014 Ian Alexander

At 3 am these last few nights, the streets round here have echoed to a series of brief, hoarse barks. You might think it some kind of dog, and you’d be right: it is a fox, or rather a vixen*, barking, either to advertise her presence to males, or it seems to hurry her cubs along.

What the urban foxes live on is easy enough to discover: anyone who incautiously leaves out a bin bag for collection overnight, finds it ripped to shreds in the morning, the inedible wrappers scattered about the street, any juicy bits of meaty leftovers or chicken carcases devoured.

The foxy ladies aren’t averse to a bit of motoring, either, or at least to clambering all over cars to have a good look at something. As to whether the vixens are fashionable or chic, I’ll leave that to the dog foxes to decide.

* I suppose this odd-seeming word for a female fox has some connection to German Füchse(n), vixen, via Old English.

Astronomy

Moon Mars Conjunction 14 April 2014

15 April 2014 Ian Alexander

The mediaeval universe as drawn by Peter Apian in his Cosmographia, 1524

In the Middle Ages, nature – understood as the world of change and decay – stopped at the orbit of the moon; all else above the moon lay in the orbits of the crystalline spheres, culminating in the Empyrean Heavens, the Dwelling Place of God and All the Elect: definitely not ‘nature’ then. The revolution in cosmology and physics brought about by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton swept all that away, so today I can happily talk about events in the heavens as natural.

It was spectacular. At 9pm, cloudless night sky was dominated by a brilliant full moon in the southeast, with a brilliant planet – brightly orangey-red in binoculars – just above it. The pundits say the Moon and Mars were just 3 degrees 19 minutes apart. With Mars about as close to Earth as it ever gets, and the moon almost dazzling in the binoculars (it would have been painful through the telescope), it was a fine sight. The ‘planets’ (as they would have said in the Middle Ages) were in the constellation of Virgo, but the moon’s brightness made the background of stars all but impossible to see.

The orbit of Mars is outside the Earth’s, so the planet can appear anywhere around the sky on the ecliptic. The two orbits are both nearly circular, but the planets rotate around the sun at different speeds, so it isn’t often for the two to be close to each other as they are at the moment. And it’s more interesting visually when the Moon is full, its whole disk lit up by the Sun, which means it is opposite the Sun. In other words then, the Sun, Earth, Moon, and Mars are all nearly in a straight line to bring Mars close to Earth, and the Moon to the full position. It doesn’t happen every day.

Natural History, Nature Reserves

A Six Warbler Walk… First of the Year

14 April 2014 Ian Alexander

A high pressure zone is bringing bright and mainly sunny weather to Britain, but as it’s not overhead it is also bringing quite a cold breeze. Down at Wraysbury Lakes, all the winter ducks have left, with just Tufted, Mallard and a pair of Gadwall remaining. Two Great Crested Grebes wandered around each other, not quite getting into a courtship dance.

Things were more exciting on the birdsong front. Blackcaps and Chiffchaffs sang sweetly all over. A Cetti’s sang very loud, very close by the lakeside as always, first in front … I stalked up very quietly … and then behind me. Invisible, the skulker. In the thicker scrub, several Whitethroats sang their scratchy short song, the first this year; and at least three Willow Warblers sang their descending scales, also the first of the year. And, briefly, one Garden Warbler gave me a burst of his even, musical tunefulness. There’s often a Sedge Warbler near the river but not apparently today. More song came from the Robins, a Song Thrush, and a Chaffinch or two.

Overhead, a Grey Heron circled upwards towards a Boeing 747-400 and did its best to resemble a soaring stork or crane, quite impressive really with broad, downcurved wings rather like one of those air-filled kites made only of light cloth.

A small patch of St George’s Mushrooms nestled among the Potentilla leaves by the path; it’s about the only edible mushroom at this time of year, but I don’t pick them, both for conservation reasons and because I’m not keen on their rather mealy taste.

The first Speckled Wood butterflies of the year are in evidence; they are fiercely territorial already, chasing off numerous Peacock butterflies. A few Green-Veined Whites settled, frail and shy, on the thicker herbs.

Great patches, almost carpets of Ground Ivy, which sounds a lowly herb, but looks glorious among the low-cropped grass, shining in the sunshine. It’s in the Labiate or Mint family, and has pretty rather short toothed leaves, purple-tinged, with attractive blue lipped flowers that are really quite orchid-like if you ignore their long tubes.

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