Category Archives: Nature Reserves

Bugs Day at Gunnersbury Triangle

31 May 2014 Ian Alexander

Saturday 31 May was Bugs Day at Gunnersbury Triangle. The team arrived early to set out home-made cakes, lemonade, a face-painting stall, tables for children to paint butterfly cut-outs, signs advertising the day, and a wall-sized display of the Tree of Life, or rather a Tree of Invertebrate Phylogeny.

Throughout the day a succession of families with small children came and had fun decorating the butterflies.

The Tree of Life occupied a whole wall of the tool shed.

For the first time, we carried out a worm survey, organised nationally by Riverford organic farms (there’s a free identification guide to print out) – bizarrely, there is no map of the distribution of our native earthworms, so perhaps in a year or two there will be one now. We found no ordinary Lumbricus terrestris (Lob worms), the big ones that burrow deep under lawns (, maybe we needed to dig deeper), but good numbers of Black-headed worms (Aporrectodea longa, dark head, brown body, long and thin), a few smallish Green worms (Allolobophora chlorotica), and a Grey worm (Aporrectodea caliginosa, grey with a pink head and a pale saddle). It was surprising how many individual worms there were in a spadeful of earth, and the number of species. Darwin showed how important the earthworm was, but they seem to have been quite thoroughly neglected ever since.

An entomologist from the Natural History Museum led a guided walk on the bugs to be found in the reserve.

We gingerly plucked banded land snails from some tall stinging nettles, finding a good range of colour varieties from clear yellow to heavily striped with dark brown and black.

Woodland bug hunt - slugs, centipedes — Woodland bug hunt – slugs, centipedes.

In the woodland, the entomologist boldly ventured outside his special area (Diptera) to familiarise visitors with the range of local slugs, centipedes, millipedes and woodlice: bugs in the very broad sense. We did have some true bugs too: shield bugs that give off a warning stink when held between finger and thumb. And in between, ‘bugs’ often means insects in general.

The sawflies and ichneumon flies are difficult for non-experts as there are hundreds of similar species and no popular books. However, the sawflies have thick cylindrical bodies, whereas the ichneumons, like the social wasps, have a very narrow ‘waist’. The Hogweed flowerheads (very large white umbels of dozens of small flowers) played host to plenty of good big sawflies with yellow legs and waspish black-and-yellow stripes.

Nice side/tail view of Cuckoo Bee on Hogweed

A keen amateur entomologist (who recalled visiting the Triangle before it became a reserve 31 years ago) found this Cuckoo Bee. It parasitises and resembles ordinary bumblebees such as Bombus hortorum, but it never makes a nest or raises young. Instead, the females enter a bumblebee nest that already has a good number of worker bees, displace their queen, and lay their own eggs. Their brood is then brought up by the host workers. It’s a nasty way of life. The adults have a rather distinctive ‘tail’ with less ‘fur’ than usual.

The Hogweed was also feeding plenty of Tree Bumblebees, a smallish species with a bright orange-brown furry thorax and a black abdomen tipped with white, so they are distinctive and easy to recognise. Only ten years ago or so they were unknown in England, but common just across the channel. They seem to have arrived all by themselves – bumblebee expert Dave Goulson (see Book Reviews) found them by chance in the New Forest – and now they are common here. Perhaps their northward spread is part of a global drift of species and habitats towards the poles as the climate warms.

Micro-moth Nemophora degeerella - longest antennae of any UK moth — Micro-moth Nemophora degeerella – longest antennae of any UK moth

The entomologist found this beautiful micro-moth, giving the lie to any idea that they are all small and brown. Nemophora has a bold yellow-orange stripe across its forewings, making it instantly recognisable, but even more impressive are its antennae, which are over 4 times as long as its body (fw: 10mm): the longest antennae of any British moth. Quite a surprise.

Natural History, Nature Reserves

More a Bug than a Butterfly Transect

29 May 2014 Ian Alexander

I had a go at the ‘regular’ butterfly transect down at the reserve. It was warm and humid but overcast and it didn’t look promising. A large willow covered in Gypsy Moth caterpillars had been loosened by all the rain, and had fallen across the path. I lopped off the crown branches and carted them down to a dead hedge to fill in a gap someone had been climbing through.

The sun peeped out and the cloud cover reduced to maybe 60%, making it warm and pleasant. A single Small White appeared over the ramp and made it onto the transect. I wandered around the reserve, but there was nothing until I found a solitary Speckled Wood in the large meadow.

However, there was plenty to notice all around. The building site looks a lot better now the ‘Costa Concordia’ white horizontal balcony cladding on ‘Chiswick Point’ (well, it’s in Acton Green and on Bollo Lane, but I guess Bollo Block didn’t quite have the same cachet) has been completed: it will be nice when the noise of cranes and drilling stops.

Handsome iridescent green male Oedemera nobilis on Catsear

Many ichneumon flies were out on the Hogweed, some mating; almost every Catsear flowerhead had one or two handsomely iridescent green Oedemera nobilis, the “thick-kneed flower beetle” – only the males have the swollen hind femurs, but both sexes have a gap between the slender wing-cases. The males were of noticeably varying sizes, presumably the large ones having the best chances of mating.

Tent of Comma? caterpillars on Stinging Nettle — Tent of Peacock butterfly caterpillars on Stinging Nettle

A fine bustling mass of hairy black early-instar caterpillars of the Peacock butterfly, wriggled on their silk tent atop a Stinging Nettle.

Laburnum leaf beetle larva doing an impressive amount of leaf damage

The Laburnum by the main path is being eaten full of holes, probably a good thing for a non-native shrub in the reserve, by spotted and striped larvae of the Laburnum Leaf Beetle. Never seen it before.

The wild rose in the car park hedge was host to a mating pair of Rose Sawfly, a serious pest for gardeners but an attractive insect with a bright yellow abdomen.

Large Red Damselflies in cop over a lot of healthy Starwort in the pond

As if all these treats weren’t enough, there were Large Red Damselflies mating and egg-laying on the pond, Common Blue Damselflies, lots of Hoverflies, Click Beetles (seemingly Athous haemorrhoidalis), large brown frog tadpoles and small black toadpoles, singing Blackcaps, a Song Thrush, a Jay, and plenty more. Maybe it’s not just Bugs Day on Saturday, but Bugs Week.

Conservation, Natural History, Nature Reserves

Swifts Screaming High Over the Cow Parsley at Gunnersbury Triangle

27 May 2014 Ian Alexander

On a grey rainy day, I put on my waterproofs and go down to the Gunnersbury Triangle reserve. A newly-fledged Green Woodpecker flies off. The cow parsley has taken over the whole of the meadow by the approach ramp; last year there really wasn’t very much of it, but now the tall white umbels are quickly turning to seed-heads across the whole area: they need to be pulled up quickly before they ripen. They are accompanied by quite a lot of cleavers (sticky-grass), nettles, hogweed, even hops twining their tall fibrous way over the other plants. And a few brambles are coming up again: we had a blitz a year or two ago, pulling out most of them, and the meadow is much improved, but that hasn’t saved the rather nice garlic mustard (good for orange tip butterflies) from the cow parsley invasion.

I loosen one bunch of roots after another with a fork, and pull up the cow parsley roots – much like carrots, they’re in the same family. When the soil is shaken off they are a pale brown, some straight and carroty, some branched into five smaller swollen roots. When I have a big armful, I carry them down to the dead-hedge.

Digging again, a nettle manages to sting me lightly through the leather-and-cloth gardening gloves. I hear a screaming sound and look up: eleven swifts are wheeling together high overhead, the most I’ve seen over this part of town this year, indeed for many a long while. Sixty or more sometimes gather over the lakes at the London Wetland Centre, pausing to feed before moving on up north on their spring migration.

I gather another armful of cow parsley. The meadow is starting to look a little better. I pull a six-foot stick out of the herbage; half-a-dozen diversely coloured white-lipped land snails, some plain yellow, some striped with black, fall out on to the path. The polymorphism has been argued over by ecologists: it might be camouflage adapted to different backgrounds, some lighter, some darker; or more interestingly, it might be a way of defeating predators like Song Thrushes which could be searching for snails of a particular pattern, so if a bird had learnt that snails were striped and had that ‘search image’, that bird might not spot plain snails, perhaps.

It comes on to rain. I help out in the hut, making preparations for Bug Day when we hope the reserve will be buzzing with excited children and their parents. They will be welcomed by a smiling ‘GunnersBee’, who is a black-and-yellow cutout on a huge blue card with yellow cutout flowers. Even in the drizzle, several species of real bumblebees are busy gathering pollen and nectar.

Natural History, Nature Reserves

Thursley Common: a Special Place

19 May 2014 Ian Alexander

Heath landscape at Thursley with birch scrub, scattered pines

Thursley Common is one of those few, special places where the quiet visitor is almost guaranteed a beautiful experience of nature, at least if busy weekends are avoided. The area of a few hundred hectares offers several habitats, all acid: pine forest; dry sandy heath with heather, gorse and birch scrub, ideal for Whitethroats and Stonechats; acid bog with sphagnum, bog-cotton, marsh orchid, round-leaved sundew; bog pools buzzing with dragonflies; open water with teal and tufted duck.

Marsh Orchid, Round-Leaved Sundew at its foot, Thursley Common

Dragonfly habitat: bog pools at Thursley; in the background, white of bog cotton, birch scrub and pine forest

Over the pools were half-a-dozen swallows in a loose flock, mostly flying high, keeping a wary eye out for hobbies. Two hobbies at least flew across the heath on their long grey wings, diving at speed to snatch dragonflies low over the water. A cuckoo called from the pines; another replied cuck-uck-oo from the other side; one flew hawklike across the heath, its wings remaining almost entirely below its body, an odd and very distinctive flight pattern.

Female Four-Spotted Chaser basking over a bog pool, Thursley

Four-Spotted Chasers have a distinctive jizz, being generally brown, flying fast, and indeed the males aggressively chase off rivals. Today there were several pairs mating in flight; unlike many other dragonflies, they do not settle to form a “wheel”, but soon separate, the female at once starting to lay eggs, darting down to the water to dab her abdomen repeatedly.

Large Red Damselfly, Pyrrhosoma nymphula male on heather at Thursley

Large Red Damselflies were hardly in evidence near the water, but were around in small numbers on the heather, or basking on the boardwalk. Nearby, a pair of Reed Buntings blundered in and out of the bushes, the male handsome with his black head and white collar, singing his slow brief song. A Goldcrest squeaked its unbelievably high notes from the tops of the pine trees. A Tree Pipit’s repetitive but slightly random riff rang out again and again from somewhere in the same trees; the species, still marked by the book as ‘abundant’ (that’s a 2 not a 1, however), ‘breeds locally’ in places like this.

It is always a pleasure, too, to see the fluffy white seed-heads of Bog-Cotton. The thin fibres are too brittle to spin, so our native ‘cotton’ remains a symbol of wild and lonely places, from the mountains of Snowdonia to the Pennines. It’s a reminder of just how extensive the heathlands of Southern England once were, Cobbett’s “rascally heaths” famously extending all the way from the Marlborough Downs to the fringes of London. His opinion, loudly voiced in his Rural Rides, was that these unimproved lands were wasted, a sign of lack of proper agriculture. The Dig for Victory! campaign in the Second World War caused many areas of marginal land to be ploughed up, including acid heaths, alkaline chalk grassland, and neutral flowery meadows: all were lost by the thousands of acres in a desperate attempt to increase Britain’s arable production. That led, of course, to the surplus production of the Common Market years, the destruction of farmland wildlife accelerated by grants to grub out hedges, while the use of pesticides of all kinds created marvellously clean crops that even that old badger of a critical farmer, Cobbett himself, would have heartily approved of. The one small problem was that the crops were so clean that there were no wild flowers to support the bees that used to pollinate the fruit trees, the clover, beans and alfalfa, the cabbages and turnips and oilseed rape, the potatoes and vegetables that feed the nation. The cereals themselves need no bees, their grass pollen blowing in the wind: but the rest of the crops are tied to a more balanced ecology. Thus I meditated, even as I enjoyed a nostalgic glimpse of Molinia, the Bog-Cotton; and so it is that delight in nature’s beauty is tinged with sadness at the mess we’re in.

Tiny yellow clubs of Bog Beacon fungus, Mitrula paludosa, in marsh — Tiny yellow clubs of Bog Beacon fungus, Mitrula paludosa, by bog pool at Thursley

I was delighted to see the small but bright yellow Bog Beacon fungus. It appears as small clubs with white stalks, and it only grows on dead vegetation in acid bogs. Its specific name ‘paludosa’ means ‘of the marsh’. A single Broad-Bodied Chaser dragonfly scooted swiftly across a small pond.

Stonechat on fencepost of training area near Thursley — Stonechat on fencepost of Hankley Common training area near Thursley

Stonechat males displayed atop gorse bushes or fence posts, or dived into the bushes for cover, appearing nearly all black from above, with a bold white flash on each wing. Several young ones perched lower down in the gorse, much browner and more streaky than their fathers. They are rather few and far between on the Common itself; more on the training ground just across the road at Hankley Common. Like Thursley Common, the land has remained wild because the army needed it for training; so the Second World War both destroyed much of the wildlife value of our farmland, and saved some places from the general destruction.

Conservation, Environment, Natural History, Nature Reserves

Gypsy Moth plague

16 May 2014 Ian Alexander

The Gypsy Moth, Lymantria dispar, is a notifiable pest listed by DEFRA, or at least it was when that document was published back in 1997. The insect was announced to be “a serious pest of trees and shrubs” and nurserymen and landholders were required to notify DEFRA or the PHSI HQ immediately.

Gypsy Moth caterpillar on birch trunk: blue warts at front, red warts at back. The black-and-white pattern may also be aposematic

It has arrived in the Gunnersbury Triangle with the hairy dark caterpillar larvae with blue and red warts on their backs all over some Birch trees. The infestation is rapidly defoliating them, and causing substantial damage to some Oaks too.

Lymantria means ‘destroyer’, quite a well-named genus. The caterpillars are aposematic, their hairs and bright coloration warning off predators; the hairs are irritant, containing diterpenes, complex organic ring compounds found in wood and plant resins for defence against microbes and fungi, and retained by the caterpillars for defence against predators.

It will be interesting to see how the trees cope. Oaks can generally recover even when thoroughly defoliated; the Birches may suffer more. People can hardly use pesticides in the nature reserve, even given the means to spray whole trees safely, but biological controls are imaginable. The caterpillars are parasitised by Ichneumon flies, which may well be keeping Gypsy Moths under some sort of control in Europe. There were no controls in place to halt the spread of Gypsy Moth in America, however, where the pest was accidentally introduced in 1869 from Europe by the amateur entomologist Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. He was hoping to cross-breed them with silkworms to improve their disease resistance; he is remembered instead for starting a disastrous continent-wide caterpillar plague which still continues. Attempts with other pest species to introduce their predators or parasites have often proved unsuccessful and sometimes disastrous in their turn.

Conservation, Natural History, Nature Reserves

Giant Ichneumon in London Reserve

15 May 2014 Ian Alexander

A terrifying monster stalks the suburbs. Silently and with unerring accuracy, it scans the surface, using its advanced sensors to detect and identify targets buried deep below. Once a target has been located, the hunter drills down to find it, deposits the payload, and leaves in search of the next. It could be a cyber-borg or pilotless military vehicle. Actually, it’s Rhyssa persuasoria, the giant Ichneumon. And giant or not, it’s about 30mm long.

Rhyssa is a parasitic wasp, a solitary hunter distantly related to the social, black-and-yellow striped wasps. Her prey are the larvae of other insects which burrow in dead wood for food and safety. Only when she is above, safety below is hard to find. For Rhyssa‘s weapon is as long as her body: her ovipositor is greatly elongated into a precision instrument that can drill deeply through wood and into the body of the larva. Once there, she lays a single egg down the ovipositor tube. The egg hatches inside the still-living larva, and devours it from the inside. The larva dies (so Rhyssa is a parasitoid, not a true parasite that avoids killing its host) and a young Ichneumon emerges.

Rhyssa persuasoria dorsal view — Rhyssa persuasoria, dorsal view: in search of a host

Today at Gunnersbury Triangle we erected a new bench, to allow visitors to relax and enjoy a quiet moment in nature. It sounds a trivial task. If only. Two volunteers spent a day putting the “ready to assemble” kits together. All the supplied bolts were the wrong size, so they had to ream out all the pre-drilled holes to the larger size. Meanwhile, that day, I dug out the well-embedded MetPosts remaining from a previous bench. Then we dug 2 holes for the new bench: they promptly filled up with water, and the deeper we dug, the more the local weakly-cemented gravel (our local rock, when it isn’t sticky clay) collapsed into the hole, making it wider at the bottom. It was clearly hopeless.

So today we spent an hour prospecting for a drier place that would also be aesthetically pleasing, not harm the rare ferns nor disturb the nesting Blackcaps, and be close to an existing path. Then we started digging holes all over again. This time they didn’t fill up with water, much: just the bottom 10 cm or so. To keep the sides from crumbling, we avoided digging with spades: we lay on bin-bags, and wearing rubberised gardening gloves, scooped out handfuls of wet gravel. Then we levelled the two holes, cast a base of PostCrete in each, let it cure — at this point everybody disappeared for a cup of tea, leaving me in the wood guarding the site. I sat on a coppiced Willow trunk, and was approached by the giant Ichneumon when I least expected it. Luckily my little camera was not far away — you can readily imagine why I wouldn’t want the big camera with me while working.

The team reassembled, we gingerly lowered the bolted wooden creation into place, wedged it tight with broken bricks, and fixed it in place with plentiful PostCrete before cunningly sloping the top to shed rainwater. Needless to say, during this procedure we accumulated more and more tools all round the excavation site. If only it were as simple as drilling for an unseen caterpillar and laying an egg in it. But then, Rhyssa has the jump on us, with millions of years of evolution in her hunting technique.

Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Mayflies Rising!

12 May 2014 Ian Alexander

May is the fastest time of Nature’s year. What a difference a few days make! Last time at Wraysbury, a few sluggish mayflies sitting around as if waiting for something to happen in a one horse town.

Well, today it’s happening. In places, the sky is filled with rising mayflies: a few mating, most alone. Here and there, some repeatedly dance up, and a few seconds later, down; but most just climb, and fly about, seeming frail on their large wings, their triple tail streamers hanging below them: it’s worth zooming in on the picture. Even better, here’s a short video clip. The soundtrack combines an airliner taking off and a Blackcap singing.

One of the glories of summer by water is the brilliant turquoise and green iridescence of the male Banded Demoiselle – the so-called band is actually the appearance of flickering of the wings, the dark spot on each of the four wings giving a hard-to-describe semblance of a sparkling blue jewel in flight, with bands of colour too fast and changeable for the eye to understand. But he’s pretty fine at rest, too.

Common Blue, Bluetail, and Red-eyed Damselflies have all now emerged, the Red-eyed being the scarcest of the three, seemingly.

Soldier Beetle, Cantharis rustica on Cow Parsley

On the Cow Parsley were, as well as the damsels, two cantharid Soldier Beetles, Cantharis rustica or a close relative. Another enormous cloud of rising mayflies, and suddenly behind them a pair of Hobbies, hawking for insects – whether damselflies or even mayflies is impossible to tell. One comes close, wheels away on scything wings as it sees me.

A Silver-Ground Carpet Moth, Xanthorhoe montanata, flutters weakly past me among the Hawthorn bushes and flops onto the grass. Garden Warblers sing, a Whitethroat rasps in its songflight. A Treecreeper sings its little ditty sweetly from near the river.

On the hill, three Greylag and two Egyptian Geese form a peaceful flock. Stock Doves and a mixed flock of Crows and Jackdaws rise from the grass. A Song Thrush gives a marvellous solo recital near the road.

Conservation, Love of Nature, Nature Reserves

Yay! It’s Frog Day! Pond-dipping at Gunnersbury Triangle

11 May 2014 Ian Alexander

I try to get down to the pond on Frog Day because, whatever the weather, it’s always such fun looking into trays, seeing what people have caught, and helping people to get a rough idea of what sort of wildlife they are looking at. The parents too are frequently fired up with (especially boyish) enthusiasm. One dad turned out to be expert at catching newts; another family caught dozens of tadpoles (all still without legs).

People come and go; some are regulars, some are new, some were just passing by and are astonished to find a nature reserve here, let alone a pond and volunteers and free pond-dipping and wriggly wild animals.

And there definitely weren’t just the usual suspects in the water, either.

Budding Hydra, with head of a damselfly nymph — Budding Freshwater Hydra, with a nymph

This really was a surprise; a Hydra, not just bright green but actually budding. These tiny animals are coelenterates, like corals and jellyfish, with no proper gut running mouth-to-anus, but just a mouth surrounded by the tentacles, and a hollow bag of a body; anything undigested has to come out the way it went in. The animal is green with symbiotic algae, so it has quite a bit of plant about it, and when it isn’t in a white dish, it’s practically invisible.

This little fly has two tails, and may well be a Stonefly; it is a lot smaller than the common Mayflies, which have three tails. It seems like a special animal today.

A fine Dragonfly nymph was captured in one dish; here it is, being examined closely by one youngster. I saw a Broad-Bodied Chaser near the pond some years ago, so it might be that species.

With their characteristic three tails, the Mayfly nymphs are distinctive. Here in one dish are some, along with what seems to be a long slim beetle nymph, and the Dragonfly nymph. There were quite a few Damselfly nymphs about too, some quite boldly green.

At four we packed up to go and have a well-deserved cup of tea. As I turned round, I realised the Yellow Irises the other side of the boardwalk were in full bloom.

Environment, Nature Reserves

The Ghettoisation of Nature

10 May 2014 Ian Alexander

I suppose you are familiar with the ghettoisation of Britain’s towns and cities. To take a few rather random examples, Bath, Bradford-on-Avon, Edinburgh, Marlborough and Oxford are seen as ‘nice’ (terrible word), become populated with the middle class, Waitrose, estate agents and boutique shops, and suffer enormous rises in house prices, while nearby places are seen as less desirable, acquire sink housing estates, crime, and scruffy concrete jungles where once there were perfectly decent town centres. Areas of London do the same, but in a more rapidly shifting way, as the sheer pressure of population, and the desperate shortage of housing, forces people into scruffier areas which thus become ‘gentrified’ (though hardly by landed gentry, actually).

Perhaps the ghettoisation of nature is a little less familiar. As a boy, I was allowed out to go and do as I pleased in between meals (ah, those happy days when we didn’t know about paedophile celebrities: mind you, nobody is actually suggesting they stalked the countryside attacking random children, they had more subtle means of approach. But I digress). We used to go down the stream and build dams — the farmer never seemed to mind, and I guess our small engineering works of sticks, mud and stones never lasted long. It was tremendous fun watching the water well up, and exciting to run for more materials as the level rose and the water found new places to escape; I don’t think we ever tried to construct an intentional spillway anywhere. Or we wandered out in autumn to gather blackberries, returning with heavy plastic bags full of the squashy fruit, demanding blackberry-and-apple pie for supper like latter-day Peter Rabbit siblings. We scarcely remarked on the Yellowhammers in every hedge, Song Thrushes in the woods, Lapwings, Skylarks and Grey Partridges in the open fields: they were just there. There were Spotted Flycatchers, Swifts and House Martins nesting in the village, too; we noticed these last as the upstairs windows couldn’t be opened for months to avoid breaking their nests.

Leaving aside whether parents will allow children to go out unsupervised nowadays — kids have to learn to take care of themselves eventually, and the sooner they learn to be sensible, the better, specially if they have fun and play adventurously at the same time, a visit to the countryside today will, on average, involve less than half as many farmland birds as in 1970, and far fewer than that in the case of Lapwings, Skylarks and Grey Partridges. The countryside has emptied of birds — and of bumblebees and primroses and much else.

Instead, if you want to see Nature (the capital letter is intentional) you go to an official Nature Reserve. If you want to see a traditional village you study the web or the official Heritage handbook, fuel the car, pack a picnic, and travel to the official Heritage site, or rather to the official Heritage car-park complete with high-visibility-jacketed attendants and ticket machines, and walk down the officially landscaped path (keep off the official bit of woodland with bulbs underfoot to the officially declared bit of Heritage. It looks pretty attractive, but for the hordes of amateur photographers taking pictures of hordes of amateur photographers, ice-cream lickers, picnickers, dog-walkers, beer-swillers and motorcycle enthusiasts (why do oily chains, throbbing Harley-Davidsons and polished chrome go with pretty places? Answers on a postcard, please) in every street.

The official Nature Reserve also has a car park, which is at least generally free, at least to members. There is a big official sign with a colourful map, sometimes painted with happy butterflies, frogs, foxes and woodpeckers — the more conspicuously coloured species seem to be favoured in this form of natural selection, perhaps aposematism has something to do with it. There are quite often free maps and nature trails, even colouring sheets and clipboards for crayon-carrying children. Sometimes the trees and flowers are officially labelled as well, complete with Heritage notes about what Comfrey used to be grown for in the days when real people lived in the countryside (it was to help healing of bones, if you’re curious), or what Hazel coppicing was and why it was practised (tufts of small straight flexible wands, cut and used to make hurdles to fence in animals temporarily, and so on).

All of this effort is quite admirable in its way: relaxation, getting out of the house for the day, being together as a family, learning a little history, a little about nature. But what has been lost in the process is more striking: freedom, simple personal discovery and exploration (think blackberry-picking, dam-building, just coming across birds singing and bees buzzing). Don’t get me wrong, given the lack of nature in ordinary farmland there is a pressing need to rescue at least some areas of habitat; and given people’s cramped urban lives, it’s right they have some attractive places to visit. All the same, Nature, like Heritage, is being ghettoised. The process has not yet run to completion in Britain — there are still magnificent areas of mountain, moorland and coast where you can wander free of twee signs and uniformed attendants — but the paraphernalia are spreading: you can find them on Access Land in Northumberland, for instance.

As Joni Mitchell sang long ago, “Take all the trees / Put ’em in a tree museum. Charge all the people / A dollar and a half just to see ’em. Don’t it always seem to go / But you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. / They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”

Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wetlands, Wildlife

Mayflies, May Blossom… yes, it’s May at Wraysbury Lakes

9 May 2014 Ian Alexander

The sun is shining … in between the showers. Mayflies are resting all over the plants near the river. May blossom makes a bright show on every hawthorn bush. Yes, it’s May down at Wraysbury Lakes. The energetic breeze gives a cool feel, but out of the wind it’s very pleasant. Enjoying the brisk airflow are at least four Common Terns over the lakes and overhead; a few Swallows; and a small number of Swifts, newly arrived in the last few days, racing down to the water surface to catch flies — not the mayflies, which are active mainly at night. The warblers which are definitely about are hard to hear for the wind in the trees, but I caught snatches of Chiffchaff, Blackcap, many Whitethroats, plenty of Garden Warbler, a Willow Warbler, three Song Thrushes and a Blackbird, not to mention Robins and Wrens. A Cormorant lumbered past, climbing with effort, its jizz very much like that of the Boeing 747s lumbering heavily into the air.

There are some pale mayflies, with neither antennae nor the 3 tails: maybe these have broken off in the vegetation.

Beautifully iridescent green-bronze female Banded Demoiselle — Beautifully iridescent green-bronze: a female Banded Demoiselle

Also new today are quantities of damselflies: there are many brilliant iridescent blue male Banded Demoiselles, with their beautifully clear green-bronze females. This one seemed definitely to be watching me attentively. Two small blue species have also emerged, Blue-Tailed Damselfly and Common Blue Damselfly.

Over the lake, a long-winged falcon swooped at speed: I wondered for a moment if I had a Cuckoo, but the moustache and white face markings showed it was a Hobby, arrived from Africa in pursuit of the Swifts, and perhaps hunting damselflies as easier prey in this place. The low number of Swifts is worrying; they have been declining for years, as building renovation removes their old nest-holes, and increased human population pressure in Africa threatens them there too.

This small grasshopper, missing an antenna, is my first of the year.

Further along, the bare damp area that often has teasels is bright yellow with clumps of a yellow Brassica that has clasping leaves like wild turnip (or cultivated swede). There’s a definite cabbagey smell. A Whitethroat, caught out in the open, makes a dash for a bush.

ObsessedByNature