Category Archives: Wildlife

Conservation, Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Of Witch’s Brooms and Anthills

Down to Aston Rowant on a fine clear sunny day with a cold East wind that brought spring migrants like the Ring Ousel, a rare blackbird of mountain and moorland. I saw a probable one diving into a juniper bush; they like to stop off on the scarp of the Chiltern Hills as the next best thing to their favoured moors, before flying on to Wales or wherever.

Anthills dotting Aston Rowant chalk grassland
Anthills dotting Aston Rowant chalk grassland

The scarp slope of the relatively hard Chalk falls steeply to the broad plain of the soft Oxford Clay below, to the West. Much of the grassland has been destroyed for agriculture, either falling under the plough or simply being ‘improved’ as pasture with fertiliser, encouraging long grasses at the expense of the wealth of flowers that once covered the English countryside. Happily, here in the reserve and in quite a few places on the Chilterns, the steepness of the land has discouraged improvement. The chalk grassland is dotted with hundreds of anthills, the tiny yellow ants living all their lives below ground, tempting green woodpeckers to come out and hunt for them.

Whitebeam coming into leaf
Whitebeam coming into leaf

The trees and flowers are visibly weeks behind those of London. The Whitebeam is just coming into its fair white leaves, which look almost like Magnolia flowers in their little clusters newly burst from the bud. But the tree’s name comes from its white wood, not its leaves.

Witch's Brooms
Witch’s Brooms

At the bottom of the scarp, a field away from the Ridgeway which follows the line of hills for many miles, Hornbeams and Birches marked a change in the soil, which must be neutral or acid down here, compared to the strictly alkaline rendzinas and brown earths of the chalk. One of the Hornbeams looked as if it was oddly full of Mistletoe, but up close it proved to be a mass of Witch’s Brooms, growths of the tree itself caused by an infection.

 

 

 

Wildlife

Fashionable Urban Foxy Lady

At 3 am these last few nights, the streets round here have echoed to a series of brief, hoarse barks. You might think it some kind of dog, and you’d be right: it is a fox, or rather a vixen*, barking, either to advertise her presence to males, or it seems to hurry her cubs along.

What the urban foxes live on is easy enough to discover: anyone who incautiously leaves out a bin bag for collection overnight, finds it ripped to shreds in the morning, the inedible wrappers scattered about the street, any juicy bits of meaty leftovers or chicken carcases devoured.

Fox footprints on a car bonnet
Fox footprints on a car bonnet

The foxy ladies aren’t averse to a bit of motoring, either, or at least to clambering all over cars to have a good look at something. As to whether the vixens are fashionable or chic, I’ll leave that to the dog foxes to decide.

* I suppose this odd-seeming word for a female fox has some connection to German Füchse(n), vixen, via Old English.

Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Spring has sprung

Ramshorn pond snails
Ramshorn pond snails

Today dawned foggy and cool, but the sun soon burnt its way through and it became a hot spring day. I spent most of it reroofing the tool shed at the Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve. It was in tatters after at least one hard winter, and it was an interesting exercise peeling off the layers hopefully tacked one on top of the leaky other. I then removed three full boards from the roof, complete with what I’m sure any mycologist would have found a fascinating colony of wet rot fungus, together with several wriggly centipedes and a lot of woodlice.

As it grew hotter on the roof, I was joined by at least two species of hoverfly, one large, dark, and almost unstriped. A brimstone butterfly chased around with a smaller white, perhaps a green-veined or an orange tip. A comma butterfly wandered about. Down below, the stinging nettles, hops, and garlic mustard (ideal for orange tips) are coming up nicely, but there’s too much cow parsley and some volunteers are pulling a lot of it out.

Newly-Hatched Tadpoles
Newly-Hatched Tadpoles

At lunchtime I walked down to the pond. Chiffchaffs were singing all over; the pond was suddenly covered in pond skaters (Gerris) with one or two whirligig beetles. The tadpoles have hatched out into a wriggling mass.
Spring has sprung.

Conservation, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

On the boardwalk, we’re havin’ some fun

Since rain was forecast, we drank up our morning tea quickly, took the tools we needed and wheeled our wheelbarrows off into the reserve. I was given the job of making the boardwalk over the pond safe. It looked all right, but quite a few boards were springy, one or two wobbled, and there were some alarmingly wide gaps where the boards fanned out to get around an angle, so they were tight one side, gappy the other.  A mallard duck and drake were snoozing on the other end of the boardwalk. She had laid an egg in the swamp, then moved it behind a tree, but didn’t seem to be sitting on it.

I’m not particularly keen on power tools, but the volunteer officer gave me some flattery about my always doing work aesthetically, so I took a look at the boards. Sure enough, at the angle the boards were all over the place, uneven, and fixed any which way. A chiffchaff sang its endless, two-note ditty: not all warblers have thrilling, nightingale-like songs.

I took the drill and set about pulling out the worst of the boards. Three screws came out; the fourth one was inaccessibly deep and the drill bit just rattled over it. I jemmied up the board, hammered out the offending screw from the back, and levered it off. This was not at all the quiet and restful day in nature I’d had in mind. I lined the board up where I felt it should have gone and screwed it down. The next gap was now wider than before, so it was the next board’s turn. You can guess where this was going. On the fourth board I pulled out six screws, but it still didn’t budge. Scraping around carefully, I spotted another screw, deeply buried in a dirty crevice. I cleaned it off as best I could and luckily it came out. The board was still remarkably solid at both ends: clearly there were still at least two screws holding it down. But where? I took a spare screw and scratched about suspiciously: sure enough, there were two more subtly buried heads. I picked the mud out of the heads, and remarkably they both came up with the drill. Nine screws where three or so should have sufficed, on a misplaced, unchecked board.
Just as I was fixing it down with these dark thoughts, a blackcap burst into song: the first of the year for me.

Mallard dispute
Mallard dispute

The remaining planks were not too gappy, but were a bit higgledy-piggledy at either end. I pulled up a few more and lined them up to step round the angle as evenly as possible. Then I walked about and put in a line of screws where the boards were springing up and hadn’t been fixed down to the stringer below.  The sun was shining and it was really quite warm on the boards. Suddenly there was a splash, and a lot of quacking. A rival drake had landed on the pond! The sleeping pair stood up and quacked for all they were worth. In a moment he had come over, and the pair jumped into the pond. He gave chase. Round and round they went, taking shelter under my feet, their position given away by a steady line of ripples. Then out they burst, flying, splashing down, sometimes with both males grabbing the female. They all flew off, but came back to fight some more a few minutes later.  Being a drake in the breeding season is clearly hard work, even when you’re the only resident on a pond.

Nature Reserves, Wetlands, Wildlife

Summer, Spring, Winter … in a day

Large Cumulus at Wraysbury
Large Cumulus at Wraysbury

We had summer already. Yes, in March.  It was baking hot for two weeks, then it ended as suddenly as it began. Then we had spring: the grass started to grow; the gooseberry bush is covered in its fresh green dress; the cherry trees in the streets are glowing with white and pink blossom; now the plum tree too is following with its delicate white flowers.

I grabbed my binoculars and went down to Wraysbury Lakes to see if any warblers had arrived. Even from the road I could hear a Chiffchaff singing; there were at least 10 singing around the lake, so plenty of migrant birds must have arrived to join any hardy overwinterers in the springtime. A Cetti’s Warbler, too, sang its loud brief song from the waterside. But no other warblers, yet; the chorus included a Song Thrush as well as the usual small birds, Great Tits making an odd rasping noise today (nothing like the typical ticha-ticha-ticha call), Robins, Dunnocks, Wrens, a Blackbird.

On the water, I had a surprise: there were two female Goldeneye still present, and a handsome male not far from them. Their biological clocks are still on the ‘Winter’ setting, clearly; their far northern breeding grounds guaranteed to be bitterly cold, devoid of food so early in the year. And near them, two pairs of Pochard, the handsomely rufous-headed males gleaming in the bright sunshine.

A loud splashing alerted me to the presence of an aggressive Mute Swan, its neck folded back, its wings raised threateningly; it had flown a short distance to warn off a rival male, which did its best to appear unconcerned. They both swam very fast, repeating the flying off a short distance  (the rival) and noisily giving chase (the threatener) three times. Eventually the rival decided he had saved face enough, and flew off a hundred metres or so, leaving most of the lake to the victor.

I turned to walk on, and out of the blue sky came a minute’s hail, the grains about 5 mm across, pattering cleanly on to the ground. The wind freshened to force 4 from the southwest, feeling wintry on my ears; presumably up at Cumulus cloud level, the wind was strong enough to carry the hail some distance sideways from where it had formed.

Conservation, Wildlife

Building a Stag Beetle Loggery

Packing the Logs in Tight

Today was an amazingly hot day for mid-March. It dawned foggy and chill, but quickly warmed up. Down at the Gunnersbury Triangle, a big pile of coppiced willow logs and some birch trunks were waiting to be built into a loggery. This is by intention a home for the stag beetle, which happens to have its British stronghold centred pretty much on south and west London. The stag beetle larvae are soft, white helpless grubs, a ready meal for a fox or a hungry bird – except that they live underground, or rather in timber which is in contact with the ground. They tunnel through the dead wood with their only really hard dark parts, their mouthparts, grow fat, split their skins and continue eating wood and tunnelling along, gradually making holes of larger and larger diameter. After some years – it can be up to seven – they metamorphose into handsome adult beetles with their black and shiny chestnut carapaces, walk or fly, mate, lay eggs in dead timber which is in contact with the soil, and die.

DSCN0268 Completed Trench for Loggery;
Completed Trench for Loggery

To accommodate this bizarre life history, we dug a trench somewhat more than knee deep – quite a feat in the sticky brown clay with some flint gravel – and packed in the logs as tight and close as we could get them.

DSCN0275 Shovelling earth into all interstices
Shovelling earth into all interstices

We then jammed short lengths of smaller wood in between the logs to prevent them from wobbling, and finished up by shovelling earth and clay into all the gaps and stamping it well down.

DSCN0276 Completed Loggery
The Completed Loggery

The rest is up to the beetles – millions of years of evolution has given them a superb ability to find suitable places to lay their eggs – and then with luck in a few years’ time we will see some shiny new stag beetles walking heavily about the reserve.

Conservation, Wildlife

Not much to see at this time of year?

A fine filmy Slime Mould on leaf litter
A fine filmy Slime Mould on leaf litter

After the brief heatwave it feels like March again. In the Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve, willow buds are starting to open but only the evergreen trees like the native yew and holly, and the invasive holm oak (from the Mediterranean) are in leaf. Not much to see, then? Not a bit of it.

In the leaf litter under the forest canopy, a large and handsome white slime mould was spread out, draped over some twigs in a fine shiny film. In detail its surface seems almost fractal, full of rounded holes at different scales like a Sierpinski Triangle if you know what one of those is. The individual cells – I’d almost call them animals – of the slime mould signal to each other with a chemical (AMP), which causes them to aggregate; they slowly ooze along like amoebae, eventually forming fruiting bodies rather like small fungi. It’s an extraordinary process, and in an odd way quite beautiful.

Leaf Miner, probably Ectoedemia heringiella on Holm Oak
Leaf Miner, probably Ectoedemia heringiella on Holm Oak

Meanwhile, the large holm oak by the picnic meadow looks utterly extraordinary, something like the horse chestnuts that have been attacked by plagues of leaf miner moths. Almost every leaf of the holm oak is scarred yellow and brown with the wandering trails of the moth caterpillars, making the tree look multicoloured and very badly battered. This is probably the work of Ectoedemia heringiella, according to the RHS.

A filzgall, Aceria ilicis, on Holm Oak leaf
A filzgall, Aceria ilicis, on Holm Oak leaf

Many of the leaves also have squarish brown furry patches (a filzgall or erineum ) on the underside; the leaves are naturally fluffy, with a tiny gall mite, Aceria ilicis, causing overgrowth; the thickened, darker hairs are too tough for the insect to eat, so the plant’s reaction works as a defence.

And that is not all; there are also a fair number of much larger pupae, probably of another moth species, wrapped in partly-rolled leaves, tied up with silk threads. We used to think of the holm oak as a useless non-native species with no pests or predators: not any longer, it seems, though at least the leaf-miner is a recent arrival itself.

Down at the pond, there are masses of frogspawn; at least a dozen large frogs, with at least four mating pairs, were responsible. When we came over the mound they must have seen us as there was a remarkable amount of splashing; even in amplexus they are capable of emergency diving: this is just as well, as much of the weed and reed has been cut during the winter.

Gardening, Wildlife

Upside-down Seasons

A barbecue in early March in cold, grey, foggy London? Surely not. But yes, that’s just what happened yesterday – not grey fog but grilled fish, right in my garden. The sun blazed down from a cloudless sky; shorts and a sun-hat were in order. The barbecue was damp and full of old ashes from months of disuse. I emptied the mineral-rich grey ash on to my spinach bed, in the hope that some of the potassium will still be there to help the veggies along (potassium, potash, pot-ash … that was the reason for the name). Then I collected some tinder-dry dead twigs from the vine that grows on the fence, snapped them into short lengths, lit a pine-cone and arranged some charcoal all around. It smoked a bit but eventually lit, and quite soon was hot enough for the fish. A barbecue next to the first daffodils of spring – actually next to some outdoor hyacinths and primulas too. The cooking was accompanied by a group of magpies – there is a family of 7 of them living in our road, with a big twiggy nest in the tallest tree. They seem to offer intense predation pressure, yet the small birds – blue and great tits, dunnocks, wrens, blackbirds, robins – survive and breed successfully. They must be good at hiding. As for the weather, it does feel like yet another piece of evidence of out-of-season behaviour. Climate change? Who knows. But the weather is becoming predictably unpredictable – anything goes, except the ordinary. It reached 20 Celsius, by the way.

Conservation, Wetlands, Wildlife

Slimbridge, home of Peter Scott’s original ‘Severn Wildfowl Trust’

Flamingoes at Slimbridge

I had the good luck to be able to visit Slimbridge this week with a friend. Back in 1946, Peter Scott founded the ‘Severn Wildfowl Trust’, setting up an observatory to study the White-fronted Geese and the Bewick’s Swans, and to help save other wildfowl from extinction. The geese and swans happily remain on the reserve today; there were 20 Whitefronts, as well as a hundred or more Barnacle Geese out on the marsh, not to mention plenty of Greylags and Canada Geese in the bright sunshine on the scrape.  And as the sun sank in the western sky, the collection Flamingos glowed in the warm light – no need for Photoshop tricks there.

The star of the show, though, was one of the European Cranes, tall and elegant with its tail ‘bustle’ like an late Victorian lady’s; incongruously, it was also wearing a radio transmitter and three coloured rings, such has been the excitement at the raising of these rare British birds from the egg, and allowing them to fly off as wild birds – only for one or two to pay a return visit. Meanwhile, a genuinely wild flock of cranes has established itself in Norfolk, so Britain once again has this beautiful and distinctive species breeding in its wetlands. The number of places, even near London, with ‘crane’ in their names is striking – Cranfield, Cranbrook, Cranford to name a few. I once imagined this was simply a confusion or word-shift, the bird having been a grey heron all along: but no, cranes were once common, as were wetlands and damp flowery meadows. Let’s hope they will be again.

Conservation, Wildlife

What are we conserving?

Kings Cross Development looms over Camley Street's new Viewpoint
Kings Cross Development looms over Camley Street’s new Viewpoint

Everyone in the packed council chamber turned to look at the chairman of the planning committee. The members had voted 6-6: a tie. “As chair with the casting vote, I am voting for the development.” There was stunned silence. The developers said nothing. We objectors took a deep breath and said nothing. Gunnersbury Triangle Nature Reserve would never be the same again.

London Wildlife Trust’s other central London reserve at Camley Street is also changing. A 10 storey block has cut off the view. Were all our reserves being trashed? Were we fighting for nothing? 30 years ago a passionate campaign saved the Gunnersbury Triangle from becoming four industrial units. Miraculously, with a huge input of volunteer effort, it became a wet woodland with little meadows, grassy banks, leafy paths, a handy pond for school pond-dipping. Now it’s surrounded by 4, 6, 8-storey buildings. The latest one at Colonial Drive is right up against the reserve boundary — at the top of a ten-foot bank. The quiet meadow and scrubby corner where the whitethroats nested will be illuminated 24 hours a day by stray lamps from a wall of flats. “I’m desperately saddened at the insensitive nature of the development — it robs local people of the sense of countryside,” says long- time campaigner and Gunnersbury Triangle committee member Jan Hewlett.

Certainly, the reserves will feel different. But Camley Street has a new ‘Viewpoint’, an architect-designed floating open-air classroom. It will be beautiful to sit and learn on the canal, in the little watery oasis in the midst of the busy city. At Gunnersbury Triangle, too, the blackcaps and thrushes will delight our hearts in springtime. School groups will still lie down on the boardwalk we built and enjoy catching newts, dragonfly larvae and ramshorn pond snails.

Our reserves must change with our great city. They do not feel like forgotten corners of countryside any more. They are little oases, islands in a sea of noise and pollution and traffic. They are special exactly because they are right in the heart of our vibrant capital city.