All posts by Ian Alexander

I have been in love with nature as long as I can remember. Nature photography, birdwatching, lichens, fossils, orchids, mountains, insects, everything else. Conservation, gardening at home, community gardening. I've loved it all.

The Gravest Threat to Brazil’s Tribal Peoples: Racism

Jair Bolsonaro. Photo Agencia Brasil under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Brazil License

“It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the [U.S.] Indians” – Jair Bolsonaro, President-elect of Brazil

In the view of the charity Survival International, which campaigns to save tribal peoples everywhere, Bolsonaro’s “racist views represent the gravest threat to Brazil’s tribal peoples in decades. ”

May I urge you to join Survival’s mailing list now. And tell your friends to do the same. Thank you.

Expedition to Fray’s Farm … to collect logs

Unloading wheelbarrows from roof of Land-Rover at Fray’s Farm, one of London Wildlife Trust’s numerous reserves on the western edge of London. All we needed to do was to find the logs!
We fanned out across the reserve looking for log-piles. On the way, I found this beautiful Oak in full autumnal splendour, as well as a buzzard, a red kite, and a common darter dragonfly (not bad for mid-November), and a brief glimpse of a roe deer. Jules found a handsome Carabid ground beetle.
Anna and Netty loading the spoils. The logs were covered in lichens and the ones which had lain a year or two with elegant curtain crust fungi as well.

Willow Emerald Damselfly Eggs in Willow Twig

Willow Emerald Damselfly Eggs in Willow Twig. The female cuts a slit in the bark for each egg. The cuts have healed up (by now, November) leaving a bump around each egg.
Willow Emerald Damselfly (photographed earlier this year). The species is very new to Britain, having arrived last year or not long before that; and this year is the first time we’ve seen them at Gunnersbury Triangle, so it’s very exciting to see the unique egg-laying traces!
Netty with glorious autumnal Aspen twig. The colours are exactly as photographed.

Deer and Dragonflies … at Hallowe’en

Deer floating in sunny grass, Richmond Park

Well, I might reasonably have expected to see Red Deer in Richmond Park in today’s beautiful sunshine, but Dragonflies for Hallowe’en? That was a bit of a surprise. I saw that magical sparkle about 7 times, twice consisting of an attached pair (“in cop”) of Common Darters. Most of the rest were certainly also darters, but once I caught a flash of blue, so perhaps that was  a Migrant Hawker or more probably a Southern Hawker dashing into the distance on the breeze.

Book Review: The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy

Moth Snowstorm, by Michael McCarthy. John Murray, 2016 (paperback), 2015 (hardback)

This is a powerful book, one of the few on nature that can simply be called great. Perhaps Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring was the last one.

McCarthy states that nature is under deadly threat from humanity. We build roads, dams, sea walls, houses, factories; habitat is destroyed. We drive cars, fly in planes, live in houses made of brick or concrete; oil is burnt, releasing carbon dioxide, causing global warming.  The extra heat warms the oceans, making sea level rise. The carbon dioxide makes the oceans acidic, threatening species-rich coral reefs. We buy food containing palm oil: the palm plantations march across the tropics, replacing species-rich rainforest. We eat hamburgers. Cattle grazing spreads across the world, replacing more rainforest; methane from cow stomachs joins the atmosphere, accelerating global warming. Every habitat is under attack. A 6th extinction, to rival or exceed the great extinctions like the Cretaceous-Tertiary which destroyed the dinosaurs, is under way already.

McCarthy tells what this means in his own experience, his own country, England. When he was a boy, Buddleia bushes in the suburbs were covered in butterflies: now they aren’t. When he was young, car headlights and windscreens were covered in insects; any night drive in the country seemed to be through a blizzard of flying insects, the ‘Moth Snowstorm‘ of his title. Now, if he sees one moth, a single one, on a journey, it is worthy of note. Nature has been thinned out, not quite to extinction in most cases, but the great, joyful abundance is gone, in one lifetime. Half the farmland birds are gone. Common sights like a field of lapwings, a street of house sparrows, a tree full of starlings, are no more.

Nature matters, McCarthy writes, not just for worthy reasons of biodiversity conservation, or even for pragmatic ones like pollination of insect-pollinated crops like beans and apples and cherries by bees tame and wild. Probably, he suggests with grim humour, some scientist is even now hatching a crop plant that won’t need pollination: even honeybees may soon be redundant.

No, he argues, we need nature because our species, Homo sapiens, grew up with it for 50,000 generations. We feel well in nature, on a walk by a river, in the hills, in meadows with flowers and butterflies in the sunshine, on a wild coast whether of cliffs or salt marshes, with thousands of wading birds in great clouds, the wind on our faces. In a word, nature brings joy. Without it, life is sad and grey, missing something vital, whatever the distractions offered by online shopping and instant messaging and all the rest.

Pond-dipping in London Wildlife Trust’s Gunnersbury Triangle local nature reserve

Joy, argues McCarthy, is the one thing that can motivate people to fight for nature. Given that it’s threatened,  we need a powerful, universal feeling to drive our politics. As the human population rises and pressures mount, as global warming bites on every continent, we will need to fight hard to keep whatever’s left of nature alive. Our survival, the survival of whole ecosystems and millions of species, depends on it. We need, urgently, to teach people to love nature, for which we need reserves, in cities and outside them, where people can experience the joy of nature for themselves; where children (and adults) can walk and run and play and pond-dip and bug-hunt and laugh and see frogs and foxes and butterflies. Then, and only then, can we urge them to fight.

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

Scything the Gunnersbury Triangle Ramp

Scything and raking the ramp meadow. An Evening Primrose, still in flower on 23 October, has been left. The wooden rail has been replaced by a linear loggery of Birch and Willow posts, providing habitat for insects and fungi.
This Bank Vole nest was exposed by the mowing. The vole itself could be seen wriggling through the remaining grass and leaves, and we all had a brief but good view of it as it emerged, chunky dark brown body, short tail, and slow progress very unlike a woodmouse.
The next day … we saw this Bank Vole eating Mugwort seeds in the wildflower area with the apple tree, next to the tool hut.