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.
Natural History

A Five-Warbler Walk at Wraysbury Lakes

A heraldic pair of Greylag Geese

Well, I guess the point of a walk in nature in May is to see what is in flower, what birds are singing, and which insects have emerged (in other words, it’s all about sex). The first warbler to make itself heard was the Blackcap, with many singing males trying out different brief songs. They were mixed in with Garden Warblers, which have a distinctly longer and more even song. A Cetti’s Warbler or two sang their loud abrupt call chwitipitit, chwitipitit: once heard, never forgotten. I couldn’t find any Sedge or Reed Warblers by the river for some reason. In the thorny scrub, a couple of Chiffchaffs sang their names, and many Whitethroats rasped out their short scratchy song, flying up to the tops of Hawthorn bushes and hopping about for the optimal perch.

A Little Egret flapped slowly across the lake: it would once have been thought a wonderful sighting, but the species has happily spread northwards and is now quite common on British coasts and lakes.

I was however delighted to hear the wheezing spring call of a male Greenfinch. It was until recently a common bird around towns and villages, but the population was halved by the Trichomonas parasite in the 2000s. Here in London it almost completely disappeared, and it is only slowly recovering.

I glimpsed one damselfly, probably a Common Blue.

Chicken of the Woods fungus on a fallen Poplar. Some find it delicious, others terrifying!
A handsome parasitic wasp, on the hunt for caterpillars
Bugle in flower in the woods
A Whitethroat on his singing perch

Environment

Canoes in Chiswick Mall

A party of fully-equipped kayakers in Chiswick Mall. Note the dashed white line up the middle of the road, and the parked cars! In the background is the River Thames, a Houseboat, and Chiswick Eyot, a nature reserve in the river.

Chiswick Mall, like Strand-on-the-Green, is a low-lying riverside street here in Chiswick. At High Water on a Spring Tide, the streets regularly flood, but not always as much as this … and in 20 years, I never saw kayakers here before! So I was delighted to get this shot.

Diagram by Jhbdel on Wikimedia Commons under CC-by-SA 3.0 license

For landlubbers who’re a bit rusty on what a Spring Tide is, the tides follow the moon’s 28-and-a-half day cycle from Full Moon (opposite the sun) via half-moon (right angles to the sun) and New Moon (roughly in line with the sun, when eclipses sometimes occur). There is a high tide roughly twice a day (and a low tide twice also); every Full Moon, High Tide (High Water) is especially high, as the pulls from the moon and the sun on the oceans have maximum collaborative effect then.

Environment

A Shepherd in London

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Yes, a shepherd in London. Mid-March is lambing time, and she was out with her Land-Rover on the wide grassy banks of the reservoirs at Wraysbury, just beyond the end of the runways at Heathrow, checking that the new lambs were healthy. The ewe looks as though she’d like a rest, unsurprisingly. The grassy banks are quite steep, and mowing them would be costly and dangerous; how enlightened of Thames Water to use sheep instead. Genuinely “green”.

Also on the walk, several Brimstone butterflies, and a couple of Peacock butterflies (presumably overwintered in a hollow tree or some such place). Near the sheep were two Buzzards and a Red Kite, on the lookout for some carrion, I won’t mention what they were hoping to find. Also about was an early Chiffchaff singing its simple song (its name, over and over), a Cetti’s Warbler, and a Song Thrush. And a flock of Goldfinches finishing up the last of last year’s seeds in a big patch of thistles, burdocks, and teasels.

Love of Nature

Cherry Blossom in Chiswick

A magnificent street tree in all its glory

Suddenly it’s spring! The cherries and magnolias and flowering pears are all trumpeting their splendour.

In my garden, I hear the amazing sweetness of a Blackcap singing somewhere in the block of little gardens. He must be newly-arrived from Africa, as he certainly won’t find a female in such an unpromising territory – Blackcaps like woodland edges where they are safe and undisturbed. But he sings, high and pure, far too good a warbler to be any usual garden bird, though our Robins, Blackbirds, Dunnocks, Great and Blue Tits, and Goldfinches sing sweetly too. Somehow it seems silent in the city as he sings; I really can’t hear any trains or planes or trucks in this perfect spring moment.

Natural History

Winching a Lodged Tree-Trunk after the winter storms

Storm Eunice snapped three or four trees in the reserve, and left many others leaning a bit. A few days later, Storm Franklin blew in, and dumped a lot of water on the trees. Some trees fell. Then over the next week, the trees with roots no longer securely fastened to the ground, or already leaning over, started to sag on the wet ground, and one after another, big old birches fell, crashing to the forest floor, or lodging on other trees. One of the biggest cherry trees in the reserve fell, bringing down several other trees and giving us quite a problem with the tangle it left behind. The winch enabled us to pull a lodged birch trunk down, but not before we’d pulled a bit in one direction, then another to dislodge it, then back to the first direction … and suddenly it started to slide. I thought it had jammed again, but one more pull and it fell.