Category Archives: Natural History

Natural History

Bringing Nature Up Close

What the Wetland Centre is famous for — birds nice and close up in the city.
But there’s much more … much closer …

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The WWT’s London Wetland Centre of course brings nature close, from faraway reedmarshes to a corner of our great city. But today I want to look at some features which go much further, bringing nature within touching distance, even if the observer is in a buggy or wheelchair.

The Wetland Centre achieves this with a whole lot of ideas, implemented in robust and attractive materials. One is the accessible pond, in the Thames Water Pond Zone. Here, there are raised ponds (about knee height) surrounded by asphalt, so a group can get up close. The sides are made of railway sleeper-sized chunks of wood, arranged for convenient sitting, and there are built-in interpretation signs with well-drawn pictures of common pond animals. Pond-dipping is allowed under supervision.

Accessible Pond, with Interpretation Key to Pond Animals

The Pond Zone actually has a different kind of accessible pond, more like an aquarium: a robust concrete tank, with an impressive front wall of 50mm thick bullet glass. This is presumably intended to let visitors get really close to (well, 50 mm away from) the pondlife, but not to touch. Ingenious, but it doesn’t feel as natural as the railway-sleeper pond, for my money.

Pond-Aquarium: impressive bullet glass

Accessibility goes for plants as well. Here’s the Herb Garden, next to the beautiful thatched reedbed museum, again with chunky wood to sit down on. Very cosy.

Accessible Herbs – bay, rosemary, thyme and more.

Ok, so that’s ponds and herbs. How about Accessible Bees? The towering bee homes (there are several of them) are certainly talking points.

Bee Home as a towering feature.

The spacious Rain Garden has some nice touches, like an array of large boulders sporting mosses and lichens.

Gloriously lichen- and moss-clad boulders adorn the Rain Garden

Nearby is a very pretty loggery. The fungi are certainly flourishing.

Handsome saprophytic Bracket Fungi on the traditional Loggery

The planting beside the main building puts a giant flowering Rosemary bush against the brickwork, to stylish effect.

Rosemary demonstrating what an elegant plant it is, against reclaimed London Yellow Stock brickwork

Some of the hides have low ‘green’ rooves. This one is covered in masses of the bushy lichen Cladonia ramulosa with attractive chocolatey apothecia (fruiting bodies). Some red Stonecrop lurks in the background (you can’t have everything). It’s definitely “nature up close”.

The ground-dwelling lichen Cladonia ramulosa on the green roof of a birdwatching hide.
Magnification about x4: that’s “nature up close”.


Natural History

Warmest February Day on Record for My Wraysbury Walk

South-West London today reached 20.1 Celsius, a record for England in February. I remember February on a school football pitch – icy wind, horizontal drizzle, slimy mud, frozen knees, goosebumps, the whole winter thing. Actually I remember public school as being nearly always cold, and nearly always hungry, but I digress. Global warming feels absolutely real and present when there’s a winter’s day as warm as, well, an English Summer.

Male and Female Goldeneye in breeding plumage

The result is visibly paradoxical – trees still bare, osiers as orange winter twigs, winter ducks like the Goldeneye still about in good numbers – but the sky blue, the air balmy, and the birds definitely singing.

A watchful Rabbit on the path a hundred yards ahead

Other than that, I saw and heard Greater Spotted and Green Woodpeckers; a resident Chiffchaff hopped about a bush; a Cetti’s Warbler whirred like an oversized Wren from the lakeside vegetation below my feet; Cormorants lazed about in the trees; a Heron fished in the river, flapping slowly and improbably away in the narrow space between the willows, rising like some stick-and-string kite to surmount the treetops.

P.S. One day later, the winter temperature record for Britain was broken again, this time 21.6 Celsius right here in the west of London, as measured at Kew Gardens. It’s of course the pleasantest side of global warming, ignoring the increased hurricanes, winter storms, droughts, scorched crops, spreading deserts, famines across the Sahel, and all the rest. Ashdown Forest (home of Pooh Bear, Piglet, Tigger and Kanga) had two major fires today, so it hasn’t been jolly all round.

Natural History

Spring in February at the Wetland Centre

Accessible Nature … silence, birds, and sunshine in the clamorous city

Well I don’t seem to have made it to the Wetland Centre for ages, but this gloriously sunny day was irresistible. It was an astonishingly quiet cycle ride along the river and through the backstreets, away from the grinding traffic.

Common Gull (greeny-yellow legs), a lot bigger than the Black-Headed Gull (ok, the gull with a chocolate-brown hood on the front of its head, breeding plumage only)

The centre was even quieter, as far as engine noise was concerned; from the hides over the Main Lake, birdsong, or rather the sharp calls of ducks and gulls, was all I could hear. The paths and play areas were heaving with families on Half-Term, young fathers looking unexpectedly burdened with excited and active toddlers.

Bathing Bliss – Black-Headed Gulls getting the grease, dirt, and perhaps parasites out of their plumage

The birds, marvellously undisturbed, got on with their normal behaviour: I watched dominant/submissive social interactions, and of course preening and bathing in the calm shallow water.

Teal with Reedy Reflections in the glorious sunshine

The different gulls showed off a rich variety of breeding and immature plumages, of which each species has many. At this time of year, the species look maximally different, as they signal their fitness to potential partners.

The Great Blackback Gull isn’t called Great for nothing! In the background, Black-Headed and Herring Gulls, a lot smaller

Ducks seen included Pintail, Teal, Mallard, Tufted, Shoveler, Wigeon, Pochard, and Gadwall. A mob of Lapwings, perhaps a hundred strong, got up from the islands from time to time, accompanied by Starlings that seem to be convinced they are waders and waterbirds. Cetti’s Warblers called loudly from all over. Long-Tailed Tits whirred about between the willows. Greenfinches wheezed their extraordinary but hardly tuneful spring song and massed on the bird-feeders; Chaffinches hopped about on the ground beneath them, hoovering up the crumbs. Children jumped up and down in the Splashometer puddles and on the deliberately wobbly rope suspension bridge cunningly set at water-level. Mothers wondered how to dry out their shoes. Grandads licked ice cream cones. I saw 32 species of bird, and enjoyed the Common Orange Lichen on the slate roof of the Wildside hide.

Common Orange Lichen (Xanthoria parietina) and other species on the Wildside hide roof

Natural History

A Windy Walk at Wraysbury

Wind or not, a sunny winter’s day is too good to miss, so I wrapped up warm and squelched through the mud around Wraysbury Lakes. In the car park, a Grey Wagtail hawked for insect life. Among the few ducks on the lakes were some Goldeneye, one of the winter specialities of the area. The Great Crested Grebes had most of the water to themselves, looking predatory with their sharp spear-beaks.

On the meadow, four Stock Doves got up – an under-recorded species if ever there was one, as people take them for feral or wood pigeons. A Green Woodpecker gave its ringing Plue-Plue-Plue call, really loudly: spring is on the way, honest! The Jackdaws wheeled and dived in the strong wind, totally at home. A Buzzard soared with barely a wingbeat, turning on well-rounded wings with fanned tail. Towards the end, the bushes thrummed with twittering Goldfinches.

But the best thing wasn’t a bird at all, but the Mistletoe hanging from a bare beech branch. Let’s hope it spreads.

Best plant of the day – Mistletoe at Wraysbury
Natural History

Jet Contrails over Chiswick at Dawn

Four jets criss-cross the dawn sky over Chiswick in the West of London, adding their contrails to at least six others. At the right, a plane coming in to land, making no contrail, rumbles off towards Heathrow Airport. This month, Heathrow is consulting on how best to add yet more flight paths over the city to accommodate the planned third runway, which will be directly in line with Chiswick High Road.
Natural History

Greater and Lesser Stag Beetles Over-Wintering at Gunnersbury Triangle

Tara with two species of Stag Beetle
The (Greater) Stag Beetle is a much bigger beast than the Lesser Stag Beetle
Enormous Stag Beetle larvae found deep underground on roots of dead Pear tree. The body of the larva is soft and white except for the hard brown head and legs, and extremely hard sclerotised black mouthparts, adapted for chewing wood. The plump larvae are a tasty meal for foxes, which can easily sniff out and dig for them in soft earth or rotten wood, so their only protection is to be deep down in a large block of wood. This is part of the value of leaving standing dead wood in the nature reserve; and it explains why we bury logs with several feet of their length below ground!
Natural History

January: Cold. Grey. Gloomy? Not Now!

January. Cold. Grey. Gloomy.

Well, not always. On a clear early morning, Venus gleamed brightly in a deep blue sky, and the waning Moon shone over the city, giving it a wintry beauty.

Venus as Morning Star, and Moon over Chiswick

On the common later that morning, the harsh blowing-over-a-comb buzz of a Mistle Thrush alerted me to a flock of winter thrushes flying up into the trees. As they moved along, the chack-chack calls, medium size, and occasional flashes of handsomely contrasting brown and grey backs showed that most of them were Fieldfares, down here from the snowy wastes of Scandinavia or Russia to enjoy the relatively balmy warmth and accessible food of Chiswick in January.

In the Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve, as I rounded a corner a male Sparrowhawk finished his drink in a hurry and flew up from the gravelly ditch, an intimate moment.