Signs of Spring: Arum maculatum leaves

There's a long way to go yet, and cold weather is on the way, but this is something I look forward to at this time of year - cuckoo pint Arum maculatum foliage spearing up through last year's dead leaves and beginning to unfurl.

Birch Brackets

I found two typical bracket fungi that live on silver birches this afternoon, on some trees on the banks of the river Tyne near Wylam. This is the aptly named hoof fungus Fomes fomentarius. We tend to think of toadstools as here-today-gone-tomorrow organisms that appear overnight, shed their spores over a day or two and then wither away but bracket fungi like these are perennial, adding a new layer of spore- producing tissue (the hymenium) every season until the tree that they are digesting has yielded up all its available nutrients. During their long lifetime the brackets can produce millions of spores. Each successive layer of spore-producing tissue is marked on the surface of the bracket by a ring-like indentation, rather like the annual rings of a tree but visible on the fungal outer surface. The hymenium on the underside of this specimen, formed from thousands of pores lined with spores, shows signs of damage - probably from a slug.

These two are old specimens, are probably moribund - their hyphae have exhausted the supply of nutrients they can extract from their host's wood, which by this stage has developed a crumbly texture akin to balsa wood.

 This is an old specimen of the most familiar bracket fungus growing on birch, the birch polypore Piptoporus betulinus, also known as the razor strop fungus on account of its past use for honing a keen edge on cut-throat razors. Young specimens tend to be cream-coloured but they go brown and become leathery as they age. 

Bracket fungi like these are hosts to a variety of different insects that breed inside their tissues, so this is a food chain where plant tissue is being converted into fungal tissue which in turn is being transformed into animal tissue. If you harvest one of these old bracket fungi at this time of year and keep it in a container covered in muslin (which I've just done) you can expect to see a variety of different beetles emerge in spring and early summer - and if they do I'll post pictures of them when they appear.

Mosses - plants with teeth

The developing spore capsules of wall screw-moss, Tortula muralis, spotlit by the low winter sun.

The capsules are still in the early stages of development but when they're ripe they'll shed their spores through a remarkable mechanism that involves the uncurling of a set of teeth, twisted like a screw thread, arranged around the mouth of the capsule. You can see them here.

Spurge Laurel

There are always landmarks in the changing seasons that I look out for and this is one that's particularly welcome at this time of year: spurge laurel Daphne laureola coming into bloom, a sign that spring is creeping a little closer. These lime green clusters of flowers always begin to open at about the same time as snowdrops bloom and depend on bees and butterflies that emerge on mild days for their pollination. In January, the plant is likely to be better served by these insects in southern England  than up here in the North East. The flowers have a faint fragrance, though nothing like as strong as some of the Daphne species grown in gardens.

When I was a kid growing up in Sussex I used to see spurge laurel quite often in the beech woods on the South Downs but in North East England it's an uncommon plant - but relatively easy to spot in hedgerows at this time of year because it's evergreen. This one is growing in a hedgerow at Wolsingham in Weardale.


Later in the year it produces glossy black berries which are poisonous, but like many poisonous plants it has been used in herbal medicine in controlled doses. The 18th. century botanist and physician William Withering had a high opinion of its therapeutic properties. "Very happy effects have been experienced from this plant in rheumatic fevers", he wrote. "It operates as a brisk and rather severe purgative. It is an efficacious medicine in worm cases; and upon many accounts deserves to be better known to physicians; but in less skilful hands it would be dangerous, as it is possessed of considerable acrimony. The whole plant hath the same qualities, but the bark of the root is the strongest. Dr. Alston fixes the outside dose at ten grains"


Sounds risky, so please don't try this at home - even if you can find kitchen scales that are calibrated in grains. 


Incidentally, Dr. Charles Alston, 1683-1760, quoted by Withering above, was  lecturer in materia medica and botany at Edinburgh University and was the first person to produce opium from poppies in Britain, conducting experiments with it on animals and drawing attention to its potential for pain relief and drug-induced feelings of well-being.

The Spider who was Determined to be on the Web.

There's quite a varied spider fauna on the window ledge in the room where I work (examples here and here) and this very small zebra spider put in an appearance at the beginning of the week, exploring my desk and even my computer keyboard. Since it seemed so eager to get itself on the web, I thought I'd oblige. The pictures are not very good because it really is tiny - just a few millimetres long - and these are small sections of the whole frame.

Zebra spiders don't actually spin a web to capture their prey. Instead they stalk it then leap onto it from a distance. They can do this with remarkable accuracy, thanks to the two large forward facing eyes that are somewhat akin to a pair of binoculars.

There are two further pairs of smaller eyes on either side of the central pair, so this arachnid has almost 360 degree vision. I find it hard to imagine how its relatively simple brain can process, prioritise and respond to all that visual information. It must be like watching six TV screens at once.

As you can see from this angle, its difficult to creep up on a zebra spider from behind - there's a rearward facing eye watching both flanks.

Although zebra spiders don't spin a capture web they do anchor themselves with a thread of silk, ready for instant escape ....... which is what my specimen did when I got too close with the camera ..... it bungee-jumped from the window ledge then climbed back up its escape thread when it thought the coast was clear. The other role of this escape thread is as an emergency safety line, in case the fly that it leaps on carries it aloft before the spider can subdue its victim.

Winter Aconites

I found these winter aconites Eranthis hyemalis just coming into bloom near Wolsingham in Weardale yesterday, amongst trees beside a stream. I've known them from this spot for 35 years and they must have been planted there long before that. I've tried to establish them in my own garden on a few ocasions with no success - maybe they need a little more neglect and some sheep hooves to churn up the soil in winter...

They come from southern Europe but are well naturalised in quite a few places around here. I've seen them in hedgerows in the Tyne valley, near Corbridge.

These early flowers are a little weather-beaten. They are unusual because the structures that look like yellow petals are really coloured sepals and the real petals are reduced to small, rolled-up green tubes that fill with nectar, located within the flower below the stamens - you can see one clearly at the 5 o'clock position in this photo. Hellebores, which are fellow members of the buttercup family, have a similar floral arrangement. Both are early bloomers so I imagine that these 'vases' of nectar have evolved to lure the few pollinators that are around on early spring days, on the lookout for an energy top-up....

River Wear, Wolsingham

Today's Guardian Country Diary describes a walk along the River Wear at Wolsingham in Weardale. Even though the riverbank woods look bare at this time of year there's always plenty to see along this stretch of river .....

 ... like the exquisite filigree of cypress-leaved feather moss Thuidium tamariscinum. Many woodland mosses make a lot of fresh new growth during mild spells in winter, when more light can reach them through the leafless branches.

There are often some fine fungi along here too on all the decaying wood - like these velvet shanks.

When we had prolonged heavy rain in Weardale a couple of weeks ago and the river rose very rapidly and flooded its banks. It scoured away all the dead leaves but the dead sweet cicely flower stems - which are chest-high here in summer and smell of aniseed - remained rooted but were flattened by the water, leaving a contour map on he ground of the path of the current as it had swept around the tree trunks.

Above the high water mark of the flood there was still a thick layer of autumn's decaying leaves ...

...... with bluebell leaves already spearing through.

Closer to the river the retreating water had deposited a thick layer of silt, but the buried snowdrops that grow in profusion here early in the year had already forced there way up to the sunlight and started to bloom.

When the water level falls if leaves behind these dark, temporary pools amongst the alders on the edge of the river. Sometimes there are fish trapped and the local herons are well aware of this - there are always heron footprints around the edges. In the spring toads breed in the pools and then it's a race against time for the tadpoles to develop before the pools dry up.

This stretch of river always has resident dippers and at this time of year they sing a lot, establishing their territory. It's amazing how you can always hear their song above the sound of the river - its pitch must have evolved to penetrate the background noise of the water rushing over a stony riverbed.

The riverside woodlands are constantly raided by parties of long-tailed tits .....

nuthatches ......

..... and treecreepers, all looking for insects in tree bark crevices, while ........

...... this heron, evidently out of luck in the riverside pools, flapped away to try its luck on earthworms in the fields above the river.

Stemonitis fusca - joss sticks for forest fairies?

Slime moulds are interesting organisms but you couldn't really describe them as being beautiful (one of the commonest bears the name 'dog's vomit slime mould') - but this one is a little different. When Stemonitis fusca has finished crawling around and feeding in its plasmodial stage it enters its sporing stage and produces these cinnamon coloured structures, about a centimetre high. You can find   a wonderful movie of it on YouTube.

I've found it on a number of occasions on dead wood in forest plantations in Weardale. On the first occasion when I showed them to my kids (many years ago, when they were very young!) they were convinced they were looking at  'sparkler' fireworks for the forest fairies. Once they got to their teenage years they revised their opinion and claimed they were joss sticks for the forest fairies, who had clearly developed become hippies in the intervening years........... 

Winter Blossom and Bullfinches

I planted this Prunus subhirtella autumnalis about fifteen years ago and every winter at this time it graces the garden with these flowers on bare twigs. It begins blooming in November and reaches a peak in February, but one of the best things about it is that .....

.... bullfinches find its apparently inexhaustible supply of flower buds irresistible. Yesterday there were three cock birds like this one feeding on it, together with three females.

This flowering cherry also diverts the birds' attention from the pear trees' buds further down the garden, so on the basis of its winter flower display, bird visitors and decoy attributes, planting it was a win-win-win strategy. 

Convolvulus hawk-moth (deceased)

I receive quite a lot of natural history specimens to identify, some live, some dead. I found this dead Convolvulus hawk-moth Agrius convolvuli specimen waiting for me when I went into work last week. It was in a plastic beer glass, covered in cling-film .......although it must have been deceased for some time ..... with new indication of who left it or where it was found, but I'm assuming it was local i.e. from Durham.

Even in death it's a magnificent insect and when it was alive and hovering in front of flowers it must have been truly spectacular. Those wings are each 4 inches long, making this one of the the largest British moths on a wing-span basis. Convolvulus hawk-moths migrate here from North Africa in late summer and this one must have benefited from the long, mild autumn before it expired.

The natural distribution of the species extends into tropical East Africa and right across Asia. There are records in the literature of it pollinating papaya and baobab trees in Kenya. Those that reach here, after a 1000+ mile migration journey, tend to feed on nectar from flowers of night-scented flowers like tobacco  and the caterpillars, which don't survive the winter here, feed on Convolvulus spp. leaves.

The proboscis of a convolvulus hawk-moth is something to behold. In his New Naturalist book Moths E.B. Ford (1955) mentioned that it can be three times the length of the body when fully extended. When this one died the proboscis contracted into a tight, brittle coil that I can't uncurl, to test the veracity of Ford's claim, but you can see here the slot between the eyes, on the underside of the head, where the proboscis normally sits.

In the newer New Naturalist book on moths by Mike Majerus (2002), he mentions that each compound eye of one of these moths has 27,000 facets. Hawk-moths certainly have outstanding low-light vision and can easily locate flowers by moonlight as well as by scent. There is evidence in the literature of some hawk-moths locating flowers by starlight on moon-less nights.

Convolvulus hawk-moths tend to spread up through Europe on their migration flights. reaching as far north as Norway in some years. It seems that the few that reach England cross the English Channel and most often turn up in the southern counties but Majerus also mentions that they regularly take refuge on North Sea oil rigs, so maybe these head north into Scandinavia then cross to eastern England via a North Sea route?

A magnificient moth ..... so thanks to whoever it was who left it for me to have a look at. Now I want to see a live  one and will be planting tobacco plants and lurking with a torch in late summer - ever the optimist!