We’re all getting used to the local effects of global warming − garden crocuses and primulas coming up earlier and earlier (they’re flowering already in my garden).
This past fortnight I’ve realized that my efforts to earth up the rhubarb to protect it from frost weren’t working, as frost or no it was cheerfully and energetically pushing up new leaves on long thin red petioles, the leaf-stalks that greengrocers see as rhubarb.
But I’ve never seen a pond growing over with blanket-weed in January before. Generally it’s an effect seen late in summer, the tangled green mat forming in a rather nutrient-rich (eutrophicated) lowland pond. Each green thread is a flexible cylinder consisting of a single row of plant cells inside their thick cellulose cell walls, with amazingly elegant green spiral chloroplasts inside, hence the apposite and beautiful name of the genus, Spirogyra, drawn and carefully labelled in millions of high school biology exercise books. The strands grow like crazy in warm ponds and ditches, benefiting from the excess of nutrients from runoff in agricultural areas or indeed from towns. The blanket can blot out light from the deeper parts of a pond, killing other organisms living there. But warm enough for blanket-weed in January? That’s something new.
After a chilly grey start, the clouds dispersed and it turned into a brilliant winter’s day, the sky crisp blue, the air clear. I grabbed the telescope and went down to Wraysbury to see if the winter ducks had finally arrived.
Snapped tree (Poplar) over path
The first thing I saw was a sign of the violence of the recent storms; a Poplar, always a fast-growing and short-lived tree, had snapped off and fallen over the path. But a way had already been cut beneath it.
Soapy Pollution in River Colne
The next sight was a sad one: for the first time I can remember, the River Colne was obviously polluted, with lumps of foam drifting rapidly by, or caught on branches in the normally clean water. The river supports Kingfishers, wagtails and assorted waterfowl, so I hope the cause is a brief one-off event.
On the lake were four or five Goldeneye, the males waving their heads up and down to signal to the females – or to warn off rival males – the bold white patches on the sides of their heads visible without binoculars.
A little further on was a small party of Goosander, a male and two redhead females, their long serrated hooked bills and distinctive long bodies instantly recognisable, a sign of winter in this part of the world as they come down from their chillier breeding grounds.
Then, just as I was moving on, the bold whiteness of a male Smew caught my eye. With him was a redhead female, both ducks far smaller and shorter than the rather big Goosanders. A few grebes and tufted ducks vied unsuccessfully for my attention.
Ramalina lichen on Poplar
Some of the poplars, half-fallen, offered normally out-of-reach branches for close inspection. Along with the usual Common Orange Lichen and the grey leafy lichens (Parmelia sulcata and such) were a few bristly tufts of Ramalina, easily told for being rather stiff, slightly forked, and the same grey-green on both sides. You’ll probably have seen the genus on rocks just above the high-tide mark by the sea, or on big old stone-age megaliths. It’s a lichen that demands clean air, so it’s rather a nice surprise to see it so close to Heathrow Airport. Perhaps the prevailing Westerly winds keep most of the atmospheric pollution away. There is no doubt, though, that London’s air quality is far better than it was a generation ago: hardly anyone burns sulphurous coal any longer, and while there are hotspots of nitrogen oxides (Heathrow for one, Oxford Street for another) and diesel particulates, these aren’t as harmful to lichens as sulphur dioxide was.
Red Kite
Around the corner into the area of wet grassland and scrub, I was delighted to be surprised by two Red Kites circling silently overhead against the brilliant blue, their long wings and forked tails a welcome sight that would have been familiar to Shakespeare but was missing until their recent reintroduction to lowland Britain. There was plenty of professional angst about whether the new Chiltern population should be encouraged to interbreed with the remnant Welsh population: but in the event, the birds easily dispersed the couple of hundred miles involved, and soon the gene pools mixed all by themselves.
Ponies and Hay
Up on the smooth green hill that was the old rubbish mountain and is now home to a dozen ponies and horses, the distant chack-chack of Fieldfares drifted to my ears. At least fifty of them were standing, watchful but constantly feeding, on the bare grass, flying up and chattering at the least warning. A solitary Mistle Thrush stood big and grey with its boldly spotted breast among them; a flock of a hundred Starlings moved flightily between trees and grass. A Wood Pigeon panicked and all the Fieldfares flew into the trees, still chacking. I splashed through the ankle-deep mud and puddles on the somewhat flooded path to the road.
This week down at the Gunnersbury Triangle I found myself faced with a rather large challenge: a willow had fallen on to another willow, which … had fallen on to a third, which had fallen right across our little ‘Mangrove Swamp’ wetland at the end of the reserve, and was overhanging the boardwalk that we had all rebuilt last winter.
Fallen Willow across Gunnersbury Triangle’s ‘Mangrove Swamp’
I cut off all the small branches for two other volunteers to drag away for dead-hedging. Then I sliced off all the larger wood I could reach. The rest was alarmingly high up, or far too large for a bandsaw: much of it will have to wait for a chainsaw team. We held a little conference, and I realized I could cut some more by scrambling up on a fallen trunk. I sliced through a largish branch, and the cut end gradually sprang back to the vertical, ending four metres up, and posing a nice puzzle for anybody wondering how it might have been cut! We cut up and dragged away the considerable pile of bits, and I ended the day with a pleasantly clear ‘Mangrove Swamp’ area, bordered by a neat line of large horizontal willow trunks, defended by a thicket of holly which had become trapped and had regrown all around the fallen trees.
Mangrove Swamp, some hours later, cleared of fallen trees (well, mostly)
The other odd thing that happened was that the picnic meadow was utterly befouled by a filthy assortment of broken raw eggs, cotton wool pads, mashed potato from powder, pieces of raw onion and raw ginger, and nearly empty bottles of vinegar and vodka. It smelt terrible. The team picked the stuff up with gloves and a litter-picker, and we speculated how it had arrived there.
Our story is that a group of new students at the start of term held a night-time initiation ritual there en plein nature, each initiate being required to take a bite of onion, mouthful of mashed potato, shot of vodka, swig of vinegar, etc etc, and to pay a forfeit of being pelted with eggs if they flinched. Or maybe they were pelted willy-nilly, who knows. And then perhaps they tried to clean the worst of it out of their eyes with the cotton wool.
Whatever the truth of the matter, there is no doubt that city-dwellers make contact with nature in a myriad ways. Some go birdwatching; some microscopically study pond life; some walk or run or cycle in green and pleasant places; some hold drunken picnics. Perhaps we should value nature (and nature reserves) for its ability to support all these activities.
Greater Thames Futurescape. Image: RSPB; Map: Google
This is the immense area (3834 km2) of the Thames estuary, including broadly all the neighbouring land up to the 5 metre contour (actually it covers all of the Isle of Grain and the Isle of Sheppey too).
Futurescape has a slightly unfortunate hokey sound to it – reminiscent of the French Futuroscope (near Poitiers), a once imaginative place with exciting architecture and a vision of the future which has turned into a sprawling business park. But the idea and the execution are very different.
There are actually a whole lot of Futurescapes around Britain; the RSPB’s contribution is to manage the Greater Thames one, and it’s a good choice, as there is a concentration of wildlife here – not least, 300,000 migrating waders – and a matching clump of RSPB nature reserves, including Cliffe Pools, Elmley Marshes (now managed by its own conservation trust), Nor Marsh and Motney Hill, Northward Hill, Old Hall Marshes, Rainham Marshes, South Essex Marshes, Shorne Marshes, Vange Marshes, Wallasea Island Wild Coast Project and West Canvey Marsh. There is also a rich sprinkling of conservation acronyms and designations across the area, with Special Protection Areas (SPA), Ramsar sites, national nature reserves and dozens of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).
If there are so many fine, well-protected and skilfully-managed reserves in the area, why create yet another layer of management? The answer goes to the heart of the challenge to nature in a crowded place like Southeast England, and indeed in a crowded world. With a changing climate and rising sea levels, it’s always possible that a reserve, specially one down on the mud flats within a metre or two of the high tide mark, may become unsuitable for the species it was meant to protect – or may disappear altogether. If so, the wildlife will have to move to neighbouring sites, preferably suitably protected, or die out in the region.
A thousand Oystercatchers in the Thames Estuary at Sheppey
The logic of this means that although having a reserve like Cliffe Pools that is splendid for avocets, or Elmley Marshes for waders and Marsh Harriers, is a brilliant start and very necessary, it isn’t enough. What is needed is to manage the entire landscape to make it resilient: if a shock occurs in one place, the landscape as a whole can absorb it, meaning that populations will barely fluctuate but instead simply move about. Perhaps the avocet area will turn out to be a lifeline for some other wader, or a snail, a bumblebee, or a rare pond plant.
The result is that no one organisation, not even a rich one like the RSPB – it is the largest single landowner in the Greater Thames area – can hope to do the best for nature on its own. Instead, all across the landscape, different areas, protected initially by separate organisations for their own purposes – flowers, bumblebees, birds, whatever – need to be managed together. And that means partnership, consortium, multi-organisation projects with EU funding, meetings, planning, glossy leaflets, and management-speak.
The Greater Thames area is home to a large population of humans: 6 million, not counting the similar number of Londoners who live within the area’s contour. There are powerful pressures on the land and even the mudflats below the high tide mark: housing, business, roads, bridges, railways, even mad ideas for whole new 4-runway hub airports. London mayor Boris Johnson is just the proponent of the seventh proposal in the past 50 years for a new airport in the Thames Estuary. Others (I digress, forgive me) included John Prescott’s daft attempt to put an airport on the Cliffe Pools reserve, using the Northward Hill reserve as a convenient source of spoil to spread 15 metres deep over the marshes; an earlier attempt wanted to take the Ministry of Defence’s wild seascape at Foulness, a lengthy train-ride from London. So Boris hardly invented the idea; and its dismissal for the seventh time is no guarantee that it won’t come back yet again. What is needed is enough education of the public about the value of the Thames Estuary, a vision of the future that stresses its importance to wildlife and the benefit of that wildness to us humans, so that the idea of plonking an airport in the midst of the Greater Thames land-and-waterscape sounds as ridiculous as trying to put it in Hyde Park. Prescott actually said, as he flew over (as one does) in his helicopter, clutching a map of the Southeast, “What a lot of whitespace down there”. No, it isn’t whitespace, it’s one of the best places for nature in Europe, and irreplaceable.
Crossrail has built a 180 metre jetty at Wallasea to accept shiploads of spoil for the RSPB’s new nature reserve there. Image: Crossrail
Since the sea level is certainly going to rise, areas are going to have to be managed actively to make them suitable for wildlife when the tide reaches higher than it does now. It isn’t enough just to breach the sea wall and gouge out pools, leaving the sea to shape mudflats, as can be done on the (rising) west coast of Britain. Huge amounts of material will have to be brought to places like Wallasea Island to turn them into wetlands and prevent them from simply vanishing beneath the waves. The RSPB has spent 10 years of patient negotiation (what a marvellous tolerance of sitting in meetings) with partners such as Crossrail, a commercial company, with the wonderful result that Crossrail will dump all the millions of tons of spoil from digging its tunnels under London at Wallasea in the Wallasea Island Wild Coast Project. Even so, more spoil is needed, and the RSPB is patiently sitting in meetings about future dredging in the Thames estuary (yeah, sounds exciting), waiting for the chance to get more mud for its nature reserves.
There were Dryad butterflies all over beside the paths on the fen peat of the Tourbières, the old peat workings (the French word Tourbe is cognate with our ‘turf’, a block of peat for the fire).
Turtle Doves cooed peacefully as we arrived, and continued the whole time.
Vendoire is one of the best wet meadow areas in all of Aquitaine, with its shallow fen pools and alkaline peat making it a wonderful place for dragonflies. Today, there were Keeled Skimmers all over, making local dashes low over the water; Blacktailed Skimmers here and there, dashing about widely; a pair of Emperors; Scarlet Darters fiercely territorial; White-legged damselflies; Common Bluetail damselflies; Banded Demoiselles; some Small Pincertails on the chalky entrance path.
Marsh Frogs, Rana ridibunda, lived up to their Latin name (‘laughing frog’) with hilarious, loud laughing song (“what’s that bird?”) during our picnic. Around the peat-ponds are woods and Carr of Ash, Alder, Willow, Sallow, Alder Buckthorn, and wet meadow with long grass rich in flowers.
A single Hobby came overhead, its slender Swift-like wings scything, presumably hawking for dragonflies. A Rose Chafer whirred heavily into the air from the scented Meadowsweet and Purple Loosestrife.
Purple Loosestrife at Tourbieres de VendoireAlder Buckthorn
Among the butterflies, Large Skipper, Dryad, Gatekeeper, Mallow Skipper, Meadow Brown, Speckled Wood, Common Blue, Holly Blue. The attractive and common micro-moth Pyrausta purpuralis too.
Pyrausta purpuralis, a handsome micro-moth in the Pyralid familyMallow Skipper, a rewarding insect to find
Plateau d’Argentine
One of the delights of France is that species like Glanville Fritillary, almost gone from Britain, are still fairly common
This wonderful reserve, if such it is – it’s still used to launch aircraft, not military any more but hang-gliders – is a flat bare plateau of hard limestone, topped with dry calcareous grassland and scrubby trees, rich in flowers like Viper’s Bugloss, Horseshoe Vetch, Knapweed, Autumn Squill, Eyebright and Devilsbit Scabious, as well as Orchids in springtime, and alive with butterflies. The temperature reached 33 degrees on this sunny afternoon, the Common Blue and Glanville Fritillary butterflies seemingly unaffected by the heat.
Common Blue on Autumn Squill, a delicate-looking blue flower of calcareous grassland at Plateau d’Argentine
Back at base, a hairy black-and-red striped beetle, Trichodes alvearius visited the Fennel, remaining wary of approach. The very large, black-and-yellow-legged Sand Wasp did the same; it’s tricky to observe as its eyesight is so good.
Marine in St Malo: Plush Soft Toy Lobster and Crab
In St Malo, even the soft toys are marine invertebrates: lobsters and crabs, dressed in nautical striped shirts. The people are called Malouines: Malvinas in Spanish. The name is from Saint MacLaw, presumably a Scot, though that might not be sufficient grounds to claim that Las Malvinas, the ‘St-Maloers’ – better known as the Falkland Islands – are therefore inherently British.
Coastal vegetation zones at St Malo: from top: grassland with gorse; the orange sea lichen Caloplaca marina; the black tar lichen Verrucaria maura; green algae; (dark) brown algae.
Around the walls of the old town, black redstart, house sparrow, jackdaw, chaffinch, rock pipit, herring gull, lesser blackback, black-headed gull, oystercatcher, swift.
Set-aside meadow beside saltmarsh on estuary of La Rance. Egrets, Kestrel, Turtle-Dove, Wood Pigeon, Wren, Swallow, House Martin. Butterflies in the meadow Large White, a Fritillary, Small Skipper, Meadow Brown, Gatekeeper, Marbled White.
A young Englishman has been very ill, has spent a long time in hospital, has had the joy of life knocked out of him, is lonely, disorientated. He is brought home by his parents, to the old ironstone house that he loves, in the fields whose names and shapes he knows. Slowly he regains his strength. He reads Paul Gallico’s old tale, The Snow Goose (illustrated by Peter Scott, founder of the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust; Peter Scott Books, 1946).
He decides to go to America to follow the real Snow Geese all the way from Eagle Lake, Texas to the Foxe Peninsula, Baffin Island, three thousand miles on their spring migration.
Here we are in Texas:
“The first sign was a faint tinkling in the distance, from no particular direction, the sound of a marina, of halliards flicking on metal masts. Drifts of specks appeared above the horizon ring. Every speck became a goose. Flocks were converging on the pond from every compass point, a diaspora in reverse, snow geese flying in loose Vs and Ws and long skeins that wavered like seaweed strands, each bird intent on the roost at the centre of the horizon’s circumference. Lines of geese broke up and then recombined in freehand ideograms: kites, chevrons, harpoons. I didn’t move. I just kept watching the geese, the halliard yammer growing louder and louder, until suddenly flocks were flying overhead, low over the shoulder, the snow geese yapping like small dogs, crews of terriers or dachshunds – urgent sharp yaps in the the thrum and riffle of beating wings and the pitter-patter of goose droppings pelting down around me. They approached the roost on shallow glides, arching their wings and holding them steady, or flew until they were right above the pond and then tumbled straight down on the perpendicular. …”
Fiennes writes with glittering perfection: this is a book of rare beauty, taut as a fairytale, a journey back to joy in life, a story of homesickness and longing, of loneliness and company, of the generosity of strangers, of Greyhound bus journeys, and days and nights in a tiny ‘roomette’ in a Canadian sleeper train, of long periods of waiting in small towns and hotel rooms, of wildlife and landscapes, of snow geese themselves, and, marvellously simply, of returning home.
This is a special book that can be read as literature or as narrative natural history. Either way, it’s a marvellous read. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.
Thursley Common on a sunny July day can shimmer with the wings of dragonflies. Today, hundreds of Keeled Skimmers, joined by plenty of other species large and small – from the mighty Emperor to the dainty Small Red Damsel, made the air seem to sparkle as brightly as the water beside the boardwalk. There were Keeled Skimmers perched alertly on stalks, ready to spring into the air at an instant’s notice; Keeled Skimmers in tussling pairs, their wings rustling and scuffling as they clashed in brief, brutal territorial disputes; Keeled Skimmers in groups of four or five, dashing and swerving over the water; Keeled Skimmers over every pond, bog pool, and lakeside.
Emperor Dragonfly patrolling its pond at waist height
Over one quieter pool, an Emperor Dragonfly patrolled in more stately fashion, almost hovering, drifting forward slowly as if a helicopter pilot was holding the machine’s collective drive stick just a little forward of the hover position, its striped blue tail gleaming in the sun.
Small Red Damselflies in cop over a bog pool at ThursleyA Four-Spotted Chaser, pausing momentarily over a sparkling pool
Many of the Odonata were busy laying eggs, from the Skimmers to the damselflies. One or two Black Darters were about: they can be here in large numbers later in the season.
Azure Damselfly pair egg-laying
On the sandy heath, the Sand-Wasp Ammophila sought her insect prey, her distinctive shape almost dragonfly-like with an extremely elongated red waist leading to a plump ‘tail’ to her abdomen.
Sand-Wasp AmmophilaLizard on the boardwalk
Overhead, a Hobby dashed and stooped, handsome through binoculars, moustachioed, spotted below, its long scything wings like a giant Swift easily outpacing the fastest dragonfly. Below, a lizard rested unobtrusively at the edge of the boardwalk, ready to scuttle into the heather at any threat; another a yard further on. A Reed Bunting rasped out its short scratchy song, skreek, skreek, skrizzick. A Curlew called once; a Skylark soared invisibly high into the blue, singing as if John Keats were at hand to report on the beauty of its song.
Large Skipper on the rather special Cross-Leaved HeathFour Wings Good, Eight Wings Better – Keeled Skimmers in cop
I had a beautiful, peaceful, sunny summer walk down at Wraysbury Lakes. Away from the roar of the traffic and the enormous queues brought on by roadworks and summer weekend commuting, I was surrounded by fluttering, glittering, shimmering Banded Demoiselle males, and on the vegetation also the gloriously iridescent green females, their clear green wings like fine lace dress trimmings to accompany their dazzling emerald-jewelled and enamelled bodies.
Common Blue damselfly pair in cop
As well, Common Blue damselflies basked in the sun; a few pairs in cop carried out their incredibly complicated sex act, all claspers (male tail to female neck, female tail to male belly with its spermatophore and secondary sexual organs, forming the startling ‘heart’ or ‘wheel’, in which the pair can, at a pinch, fly like synchronised swimmers.
At first I thought there were no warblers about, but gradually little bursts of song punctuated the afternoon, and by the end I had heard six warbler species, and good binocular views of three of them (Garden Warbler, Whitethroat and Willow Warbler).
There were some handsome Ichneumons about, but perhaps the insect I was most surprised to see was a Small Tortoiseshell butterfly. When I was a boy these were so common as to be unremarkable – as were House Sparrows, Starlings and Yellowhammers. It is almost a shock to discover that seeing just one is now a rare treat: more nostalgic than pleasurable, perhaps. Much work needs to be done on landscape-scale and farmland conservation to bring back our common butterflies.
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.
Mayfly look, but no tails. Hmm
There are some pale mayflies, with neither antennae nor the 3 tails: maybe these have broken off in the vegetation.
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.
A small Grasshopper on Comfrey
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.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
