CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

Signs of Spring: Arum maculatum leaves

2012-01-27T16:31:00.000Z

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

2012-01-25T22:19:00.000Z

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

2012-01-24T13:00:00.000Z

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

2012-01-23T17:53:00.002Z

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.

2012-01-21T00:24:00.001Z

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

2012-01-20T06:00:00.000Z

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

2012-01-19T07:58:00.000Z

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?

2012-01-18T17:38:00.001Z

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

2012-01-17T20:47:00.001Z

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)

2012-01-16T12:39:00.001Z

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!

A Touch of Frost

2012-01-15T14:29:00.001Z

At last we've had a photogenic frost. These are the frost-dusted fruits of stinking iris aka roast-beef-plant aka Iris foetidissima. It's a British native wild flower but not, I think, native to North East England. It's an excellent plant for a wild flower garden, holding onto its strikingly coloured fruits all through the winter. My plants are growing on a dry, sunny bank in the garden, under a hedge. Its common names come from the fact that its crushed leaves smell of roast beef - to my nose they have the over-the-top beefy aroma of beef-flavoured crisps. There are some pictures of the flowers here.

Back in the autumn the Norway maple tree at the end of our garden produced a massive crop of winged seeds that are now scattered all over the garden. If they were left to germinate and grow it'd be a forest in no time. They look attractive when they're welded to the soil with frost, though. Frost breaks they're natural dormancy and they'll germinate in late March. It's amazing how far they can travel - on just a moderate breeze I've watched them 'helicopter' 50 metres down the garden then fly over the house on an updraft.

Some very fine ice crystals formed last night - these are on the surface of a sage leaf.

Underground

2012-01-14T09:19:00.000Z

This is a lesser celandine Ficaria verna plant that was growing in our garden, which has already produced an amazing network of new roots. While we wait for new growth to appear above the soil surface in spring, there's a lot happening underground, out of sight . Once new growth begins in spring - even while the first new leaf is beginning to unfold - underground roots are making vigorous new growth. If you want to control the buttercups in your garden, now is the time to do it - don't waiting until spring, when they'll have produced very large root systems.

Lesser celandine survives the winter as a cluster of teardrop-shaped root tubers, filled with starch, and its this energy store that's used for new root growth, even before the new leaves become functional.

You can find more on the beautiful internal structure of roots here .....

.... and more on hidden characteristics of lesser celandine flowers here.

A Brief (and very dubious) History of Chewing Gum

2012-01-12T21:18:00.000Z

I was passing some wild cherry trees in Weardale thisafternoon and noticed this ball of solidified gum exuded from a damaged branchof one of them. Prunus species tend to do this if they're wounded – plum andcherry trees in particular are prone to exude gum if they’re wounded.

I vaguely rememberedthat this gum is supposed to be edible and when I got home checked it out insome early natural history books. Curiously the notion of its edibility seems tobe based on the same original account,repeated more or less verbatim in booksfrom the 18^th., 19^th., and 20^th. Century (plagiarism has always been rife in natural history writing). It goes as follows:

‘Hasselquist relates that more than a hundred men, during asiege, were kept alive for near two months without any other sustenance than a littleof this gum taken into the mouth sometimes, and suffered gradually to dissolve’.

That comes from William Withering’s 1776 treatise called ABotanical Arrangement of all the Vegetables Naturally growing in GreatBritain..., which was the oldest source I could lay my hands on.

So who was the mysterious Hasselquist, who seems to be theoriginal source of this persistently plagiarised information? It turns out thatFredrik Hasselquist (1722-1752), a Swede, was a contemporary of Linnaeus who travelledextensively in the Middle East during his all-to-short life.

I couldn’t find the original source of Withering’s quote onthe web but did find another, even more improbable, account by Hasselquist ofthe miraculous nutritional qualities of chewing gum.

It comes fronm his book entitled Voyages and Travels in the Levant in the years 1749, 50, 51, 52, containing observations in natural history,physick, agriculture and commerce, particularly on the Holy Land, and thenatural history of the Scriptures. Remarkably, its available to read on the web, here, courtesy of Google books.

In this passage he’s referring to gum Arabic rather thanPrunus gum, but for gum chewers everywhere it's reassurance that, if you arecaught in a difficult situation, salvation may come through mastication.

‘The Abyssinians make a journey to Cairo every year, to sellthe products of their country......They must travel over terrible deserts ...the necessities of life may chance to fail them when the journey lasts toolong. This happened to the Abyssinian caravan in the year 1750, when provisionsbeing consumed, when they had still two months to travel... they were obligedto search for something amongst their merchandise, wherewith they mightsupport life in this extremity, and found nothing more proper that gum Arabic.This served to support above 1000 persons for two months ... the caravanarrived safe in Cairo, without any great loss of people either by hunger ordiseases’.

Improbable maybe, but I've seen more outrageous claims made in the popular press about purported benefits of health foods.....

Meawhile, back to cherry trees - and you can read about their beautifully fragrant wood at this excellent new blog.

Rotten Antiques

2012-01-11T16:33:00.002Z

I guess most of us would shy away from buying antiques infested with a wood-destroying fungus - unless the agent of decay is this one. The green staining in this dead branch is caused by the green elf-cup fungus Chlorociboria aeruginascens (which used to be called Chlorosplenium aeruginascens) and the tinted wood was once used to make Tunbridge Ware - furniture inlaid with a patterned veneer of different coloured woods. According to John Ramsbottom in his Mushrooms and Toadstools (New Naturalist, 1953) the green pigmentation is produced by a fungal compound called xylindeine and Ramsbottom mentions that patents had been taken out on a process to produce attractive green wood by artificially inoculating it with the fungus, so that cabinet makers wouldn't need to forage for it in the woods. I wonder if the process was ever developed and commercialised? The fungus is very common and widespread on a variety of different trees, including oak, ash, beech, hazel and birch and the tinted wood is commonly known as 'green oak'. The fruiting bodies look like small, cup-shaped green scales on the surface of the rotting wood, but they aren't produced very often so are not easy o find.

Bad Hair Day

2012-01-10T18:40:00.000Z

I found this amongst some old photos. My kids bought it for me for my birthday years ago... claimed it looked like me on a bad hair day ...I don't know whether you can still get them, but I hope you can. All you needed to do was water his scalp and lush green hair grew.

It's a catkin..... but not as we know it ...

2012-01-09T15:06:00.001Z

I found this strange hazel catkin when I was out walking along the River Wear at Wolsingham at lunchtime. Unlike the normal one on the left, this one has branched into seven separate 'tails' at the tip. Might have been caused by damage during the very early stages of its development last summer.

Microcosm

2012-01-02T17:14:00.001Z

In winter, it's the smaller things that tend to capture your attention on country walks - like, for example, this miniature garden of mosses, lichens and fungi growing on top of a drystone wall at Stanhope in Weardale. In the space of a few square inches there are toadstools (haven't identified the species yet - can anyone help me out with some suggestions?); at least four species of moss; at least three species of lichen. If you really got to work with a hand lens I suspect you could probably double the biodiversity count for this tiny patch .......... and if you resorted to using a microscope, who knows how many! Below are two of the larger ones that I think I can identify.....

This (I think) is an Orthotrichum species although I'm not certain yet which one..... most probably O.anomalum.

..... and his, with the distinctive hair-point extensions to the leaves and capsules that curl downwards into the moss cushion, is Grimmia pulvinata (with another moss on either side of it and Orthotrichum anomalum at the top and bottom).

It's a long time since I last tried to identify moss species.....................

Next Year's Christmas Card, an Early Spring and a Job Well Done .... ..........

2011-12-30T15:12:00.000Z

While we were out walking in Teesdale this morning we encountered this very obliging Robin ......

.... that struck a variety of poses that might be suitable for next year's Christmas cards.

Incredibly, hazel catkins are coming into bloom along the River Tees near the Meeting of the Waters. With a mild weekend forecast they look like they'll be shedding pollen in the New Year. Strange days indeed.....yesterday we saw lesser celandines in bloom in Sunderland (but I forgot to take a photo).

Meanwhile, lambing will begin in a few weeks. We spotted this magnificent ram in a field of sheep, with a contented look on his face that suggests a job well done....

Drying Wings and Wet Feet

2011-12-29T21:24:00.000Z

On our walk along the coast today from the National Glass Centre in Sunderland to Seaburn we passed several cormorants near St. Peter's marina ......

...... drying their waterlogged wings at the end of a fishing session.

Due to their superior fishing skills cormorants tend to be unpopular with fishermen but along this stretch of coast they are the subject of some fine examples of public art, including an impressive series of metal sculptures and ...

... this very attractive weather vane on the bank of the river, where .....

..... this red-throated diver in winter plumage was also out fishing in the River Wear estuary.

These sanderling, perched on a rock off Roker beach, were just about to be displaced by the incoming tide and I was concentrating so hard on taking their photograph that I didn't notice the threat until the waves were lapping around my ankles. That's not the first time it's happened either - one of the perils of seashore photography. I completed the rest of the walk with squelching shoes.....

Skeletons.....

2011-12-28T17:00:00.000Z

I threw these old seed heads of henbane Hyoscyamus niger on the compost heap back in the autumn and since then winter weather and fungal decay have done their work, reducing them to skeletons and revealing their complex network of veins.

More skeletonised plants here

Elusive Black Grouse

2011-12-27T15:48:00.000Z

Teesdale has a very famous black grouse lek and the numbers of this spectacular game bird seem to be increasing. In winter they sometimes disperse away from Teesdale and I occasionally see them in Weardale in winter, in rushy pastures. This one has taken up residence near Woodland, between Weardale and Teesdale, and I've being trying to photograph it for some time. I'm accustomed to seeing them on the ground but they also like to perch in trees and this one has a liking for the hawthorns beside the road. The first time I tried to photograph it I took the picture through the car window, which confused the autofocus and I got this fuzzy image. When I wound the window down ....

.... the bird immediately took flight, so all I got was a picture of its bum and a lump of black grouse poo (bottom left-hand corner of picture) in mid-air (is this a first?).

Today, when we were on out way down to Teesdale it was once again perched in the hawthorns, and once again it took flight as soon as I stopped the car ..... but at least this time it perched on a fence and I got this distant shot.

Frustrated again .... but I'll be back.

Meanwhile a walk along the Tees in the rain, downstream from Middleton-in-Teesdale, was notable for numerous velvet shank Flammulina velutipes toadstools - they are usually associated with freezing weather which they seem to tolerate, but this Christmas warm weather seems to have suited them very well too.

Santapede

2011-12-26T10:40:00.000Z

This centipede Lithobius forficatus broke cover and raced across the floor when I was shifting some flower pots around in our conservatory in Christmas Day. Centipedes lose water very easily through their exoskeleton, so tend to spend much of their time in crevices and prefer to rest in places where there is something solid above and below them - under a stone (or flowerpot) for example, where their flattened shape allows them to crawl into small spaces. Providing this one with a piece of wet paper to rest on gave it an opportunity to top up its water supply and allowed me just enough time to photograph it before it raced for cover.

It always comes as a bit of a disappointment to learn that there are no centipedes with 100 legs and L.forficatus has a mere 15 pairs. The hind two pairs are much longer than the others and have more of a sensory than a locomotory role, because when the animals wedge themselves in crevices they often have to reverse out - I guess you can think of those long hind legs as the invertebrate equivalent of parking sensors fitted to the rear of expensive cars. For these beautifully articulated animals, reversing out of a narrow gap must be rather like reversing a car with fifteen trailers attached.

Centipedes have very poor eyesight so rely heavily on their antennae for locating food and monitoring their surroundings by touch and smell. Understandably, they take great care of their antennae and this one is drawing the left antenna through its jaws to clean it. The jaws are located out of sight under the head and are separate from those lethal venomous fangs on each side of the head.

Centipedes have one pair of legs per segment, while millipedes have two, but L.forficatus hatches from the egg with only seven segments and seven pairs of legs - additions are made with each moult, until a full complement of 15 segments and pairs of legs is reached.

Look Behind You! Boo!! Hiss!!!

2011-12-24T10:00:00.000Z

A very Merry Christmas (and pantomime season) to all visitors to this blog - and thank you for all the comments over the last year.

These wonderful pantomime dame wigs - made from papier mache and currently on display at Newcastle City Library - are the work of Keith Wigham (yes, really!) who also performs as a pantomime dame at the People's Theatre, Heaton. More about him here.

The Heat, The Flies.....

2011-12-23T18:25:00.001Z

Unseasonably mild weather tempted this blowfly to buzz around our conservatory. I persuaded it to stay still long enough for a photograph by providing it with a drop of honey......

Eggleston Burn

2011-12-22T00:30:00.000Z

Today's Guardian Country Diary describes a visit to the steep-sided valley cut by Eggleston Burn in Teesdale, as it flows down into the river Tees at Eggleston. Confusingly, there is an Eggleston and an Egglestone in Teesdale, upstream and downstream of Barnard Castle respectively, and this is the view along Eggleston Burn from the old stone bridge that carries a road across it, just north of Eggleston village. You can see the shadow of the photographer about two thirds of the way up the right-hand side of the picture, where the shadow of the bridge cuts across!

The footpath down to the beck is reached by this very narrow stile in the bridge parapet. The path through the woods from here is treacherous in places, with a long, steep drop into the burn on one side....

.... and you can hear the sound of fast-flowing water growing louder as you descend.

At the bottom lies this very sheltered little valley, where sunlight onto penetrates right down to the bottom for about an hour in the middle of the day at this time of year.

You can follow the footpath for about a quarter of a mile before it turns away from the burn and climbs back up through pastures and only the moorland.

The valley is sheltered from prevailing south-westerly winds and the burn keeps the humidity high all year-round. This provides ideal conditions for growth of mosses and lichens on the ancient hawthorns and blackthorns on the burn-side ........

....... and on the lower slopes of the pastures above.

This bushy lichen is, I think, a species of Usnea - possibly U. subfloridiana..

.... and I think this may be Evernia prunastri..

So far the redwings and fieldfares haven't got to the hawthorn berries....

...... or the sloes, which have softened and split after last week's frosts. The combination of grey lichens, scarlet berries and blue-black sloes provides festive decorations for bare twigs in the depths of winter.

A Tree-spotter's Guide to Conifer Cones: 2

2011-12-18T18:38:00.000Z

It's not easy to get your hands on intact cedar of Lebanon Cedrus libani cones because they tend to remain firmly attached to the tree and, at the end of their three year ripening period, break up without falling to the ground. This cone has reached the stage where it is about to disintegrate and is about 8 cm. long. The best way to obtain a cedar of Lebanon cone is to check out trees after gales - a broken branch will often have cones attached. Young cones have a lovely cedar fragrance. The tree has been grown in Britain since 1638 but most date from after 1740 when a famously severe frost killed many of the young trees - so the oldest specimens here are still quite youthful, compared with trees in their native Lebanon that are speculated to be up to 2500 years old. The tree is portrayed on the Lebanese flag and is protected in its native country, where only ten small natural populations remain.

This is a ripe Sitka spruce Picea sitchenis cone, which has thin scales that have a crinkly edge. It comes from the North West coast of North America and, like the Douglas fir, it was discovered by Archibald Menzies and introduced into Britain by David Douglas in 1831. It has been an extremely successful plantation tree in upland Britain and cones prolifically, but sadly closely-spaced plantation trees can never display the full majesty of this species, which can grow to 60m. tall and become very handsome as an isolated specimen. This cone is about 8cm. long.

More pictures of cones here

For more posts on this blog on tree ID - buds, bark, flowers or fruits - click here

Sloe gin

2011-12-16T16:50:00.000Z

Frost and snow lately has finally softened the sloes on blackthorns in Teesdale and Weardale and there's a real temptation to taste a ripe one - a temptation to be resisted. I did once - and only once - and it was so breathtakingly sour that I'll never do it again. There's only one way to consume these - as sloe gin, marinaded in gin and sugar for a few months.

Elder and Lichens

2011-12-14T17:19:00.000Z

Lichens are just about the most colourful objects in the landscape hereabouts at this time of year. This one is a Xanthoria species - Xanthoria parietina I think - growing on an elder twig. The little orange discs are apothecia, which produce the spores from the fungal component of the symbiotic relationship between the alga and fungus that constitutes a lichen.

Old elders (is that a tautology?) are often smothered with this yellow lichen, bringing the whole tree to life when it's lit by winter sunshine. X.parietina thrives in sites where there is plenty of nitrogen in the substrate, such as tree branches where birds have perched and left droppings.

Skeleton leaf

2011-12-11T15:39:00.001Z

I found this almost intact skeleton leaf when it was raking up the leaves from under the hedge. The network of smaller and smaller veins is the plant's amazing distribution and collection system for the living cells in the leaf - water carried outwards via the xylem to the outer reaches of the leaf then sugars, made by photosynthesis in the leaf cell chloroplasts, carried back into the plant. A wondwerful example of the beauty of the functional in nature...

What does it feel like to swallow a live crab...?

2011-12-09T17:37:00.001Z

After yesterday's gales the sea was a tad choppy along the Roker seafront at Sunderland today.....

.... but with reassuring British fortitude this couple were taking afternoon tea on the promenade as the waves smacked into the sea wall...

.... meanwhile, in the sheltered mouth of the River Wear this eider duck was fishing for crabs .....

..... spending quite a while manoeuvring this one into the right position in its beak so that it could swallow it in one gulp. I wonder what it feels like to swallow a live (and very angry) crab?

Meanwhile, the rough seas and rising tide had driven the turnstones up onto the promenade .......

.... where the starlings were taking a bath in the puddles left by yesterday's torrential rain.

Nature's Velcro

2011-12-06T20:56:00.001Z

If you go out for a country walk at this time of year there's a good chance that you'll return with some of these burdock seed heads stuck to your clothing. Those hooked burrs are difficult to remove when they hook into woven cloth ..... which is why they provided Swiss engineer George de Mestral with the inspiration for Velcro fastenings.

When I was a kid we used to chuck these at each other on the way home from school - and Shakespeare probably did too because he refers to their clinging qualities in several of his plays. The simple pleasures of a rural childhood transcend time.

In Troilus and Cressida, act 3, scene 2.....
Pandarus.
They are Burs, I can tell you; they'll stick where they are thrown.

In As You Like It, act 1, scene 3.....
Celia.
They are but Burs, cousin, thrown upon thee in holiday foolery; if we walk not in the trodden paths our very petticoats will catch them.
Rosalind.
I could shake them off my coat; these Burs are in my heart.

A Tree-spotter's Guide to Conifer Cones: 1

2011-11-30T18:42:00.001Z

We are in the Christmas tree season - a Baltic state and German tradition introduced into Britain by George III's queen and popularised by Queen Victoria's consort Prince Albert and by Charles Dickens - so what better time to take a look at conifer cones?

Botanically, conifer cones are spiral whorls of scales arranged on a common axis, with each scale bearing a pair of ovules that develop into winged seeds after pollination and maturation, when the cone becomes woody, opens and releases them.

This is Douglas fir Pseudotsuga menziesii, easily recognisable by the papery bracts, like three-pronged tongues, above each scale. Its common name commemorates David Douglas, the Scottish plant collector who in 1826 introduced this tree into cultivation. Douglas led a colourful life before coming to an unfortunate end when he was gored to death by a bull in Hawaii, at the tragically young age of 35.. The Latin specific name commemorates Archibald Menzies, another great Scottish plant collector who discovered the tree in 1792. Douglas fir is a giant tree in its native west coast of North America, where some trees may have been even taller than giant redwoods, reaching almost 400ft., before the finest trees were felled for their exceptionally fine timber. Trees introduced into Britain grew very rapidly, with some now exceeding 200ft., making them amongst the tallest trees in the British Isles. The cone is about 7cm. long.

Bearing in mind the size of a giant redwood Sequoiadendron giganteum, the tallest of all trees, its cone (above) is disappointingly small - only about 4cm. long. These trees have thick, fibrous bark that protects the living tissues below the bark from periodic forest fires, whose rising heat opens the cones and allows the winged seeds to spin down into the mineral-rich ash that they leave in their wake. The cones take two years to ripen and can stay on the tree for 20 years in their native California, though they fall much more quickly here.

We only have three native conifers here in the UK and of these only Scots pine Pinus sylvestris carries woody cones. Like many cones, those of Scots pine open when they dry, due to tensions that arise in the shrinking lignified fibres in their woody bracts, allowing the winged seeds to shake out into the breeze. The pictures above and below are of the same cone, wet and dry - a poor-man's weather glass if you keep one outside on a window ledge. This cone is 4cm. long but cone size can be quite variable in this species.

For more posts on this blog on tree ID - buds, bark, flowers or fruits - click here.

Roe Deer

2011-11-29T15:29:00.001Z

This roe deer stood watching us as we walked along the River Tees this morning, from Barnard Castle to Cotherstone. It's just beginning to grow its winter coat, which blended beautifully with the autumn colours in this beechwood.

A little further on we found a doe with is year's fawn, both looking in fine condition at the end of a long, mild autumn when there has been plenty of food available.

Earthworms- Nature's Ploughs

2011-11-26T08:39:00.000Z

This is a rather alarming view of a very familiar animal - an earthworm. That's its mouth at the tip. As Charles Darwin observed in his book The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, published 1881, 'the whole country has passed many times through, and will again pass many times through, the intestinal canals of worms'.

This was one of many that I disturbed when I was digging our vegetable garden yesterday.

Darwin's book - the last that he wrote - remains one of the most fascinating sources of information about these useful animals. In his day there were still many people who treated them as pests, but he confirmed their essential role in maintaining soil fertility. Darwin was an inveterate experimentalist, demonstrating that earthworms swallowed earth 'for the nutritious matter it contains' and finding tiny smooth stones in their gizzards 'used as millstones' for grinding up buried leaf material. His treatise contains information about their food preferences (he showed that they preferred onion, celery, carrot and cherry leaves above all others) and reports experiments that showed that up to 53,767 worms can live in a single acre of healthy garden soil, that they add fine soil to the surface (via worm casts) at the rate of between 7.56 and 16.1 tons per acre per year (depending on soil type) and that their constant 'ploughing' of the soil, via tunnelling and feeding, buries objects like large stones at the rate of about 0.2 inches per year.

Worms' bodies are beautifully adapted for tunnelling. The inside of that spindle-shaped body is a fluid-filled cavity which forms a hydraulic skeleton, so that contractions of the circular muscles that run around the segments or the longitudinal muscles between them, acting on the incompressible fluid within, makes sections of the body shorter and fatter or longer and thinner.

Here, contraction of the circular muscles elongates the front segments of the body. You can also see the 'upper lip' (prostomium) of the mouth which, with the aid of powerful pharygeal muscles within, can act as a kind of sucker and allow the animal to grip and drag leaves - and surprisingly large stones used to block its burrow entrance. Those little pores on each segment are the site of retracted bristles.

When the longitudinal muscles contract and the circular muscles relax the body becomes shorter and fatter, filling the tunnel and forcing out short, curved bristles that give the animal purchase on the tunnel walls, allowing it to drag the hind segments forward or resist being pulled out by a predatory bird if caught dangling its tail out of the tunnel - as earthworms are prone to do.

The bristles are too small to see with the naked eye but you can hear them - put a worm on a sheet of paper and you'll hear them scratching the surface as the worm wriggles.

Darwin investigated the senses of earthworms in considerable detail, demonstrating that they could detect light but had no sense of hearing, although they were 'extremely sensitive to vibrations in any solid objects' - like soil, for example. His famous description of these experiments in his book are worth quoting in full.

'Worms do not possess any sense of hearing' he wrote. 'They took not the least notice of the shrill notes from a metal whistle, which was repeatedly sounded near them; nor did they of the deepest and loudest notes of a bassoon. They were indifferent to shouts, if care were taken that the breath did not strike them. When placed on a table close to the keys of a piano, which was played as loudly as possible, they remained perfectly quiet'.

He then went on to show that if he moved his pot of worms from the adjacent table onto the piano, they immediately retreated into their tunnels when notes were played, because the vibrations travelled through the piano, pot and soil.

You can download the whole of The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms from Darwin on-line, here - it's well worth reading.

Traveller's Joy .... Ecologists' Despair

2011-11-24T16:40:00.001Z

When people move around they often take plants with them to remind them of their origins. This kind of sentimental attachment to plants has produced some disastrous consequences in various parts of the world. South Western Australia is infested with sweet briar Rosa rubiginosa, taken there by early settlers as a fragrant reminder of the hedgerows of the 'old country' that they left behind. Similarly, settlers took purple loosestrife Lythrum salicaria to North America, where it has since run riot through wetlands, doing enormous ecological damage. It's commonly the case that European plants that are perfectly benign in their native habitat become botanical hooligans when they're shipped overseas.

This plant, traveller's joy or old man's beard Clematis vitalba is another example of a British botanical export that has run amok in its new surroundings. Traveller's joy was taken to New Zealand in the early years of the 20th. century and is now one of that country's worst weeds, climbing to the tops of trees and smothering native vegetation.
It's not a native species up here in North East England but it is in Sussex, where I grew up, and there it decorates hedgerows with its fluffy seed heads, so when we moved up here thirty five years ago I asked my family to send up some seeds, as a reminder of home. The two plants in our hedge produce plenty of these seed heads that look beautiful amongst the dying leaves, especially when they are back-lit by the low winter sun, and so far there are no signs of the plant spreading in its new surroundings. It really only thrives in limey soils, like those of the chalk downs of Sussex, and our soil here isn't alkaline enough, so I don't think I'll be responsible for a local invasion by this plant any time soon.

I brought this plant up here with me from Sussex too, although it's actually native to North Africa. It's winter heliotrope Petasites fragrans and, true to its name, it blooms from November to February. There are separate male and female plants but only males are known in Britain so there's no chance of it spreading via seeds. It is invasive though. I introduced just one small plant into my garden but it has creeping underground rhizomes and now the clone covers about four square metres, so I'll need to bring it to heel soon. It's not the world's most attractive plant but I grow it for sentimental reasons, because it grew on the roadside leading to our house in Sussex and because it has one distinctive feature that reminds me of childhood. The flowers have a wonderful fragrance of marzipan (though some think it smells of vanilla) and it reminds me of the smell in the kitchen at home at this time of year, when my mother was icing the Christmas cake.

A Quiet Walk.........

2011-11-24T00:01:00.000Z

I imagine most nature bloggers have their favorite, regular paths on their 'home patch.' There are plenty to choose from in Weardale but for me one of the best is a circular walk that follows the path uphill from St. John's Chapel, alongside Harthope burn. It's the subject of today's Guardian Country Diary. The burn descends in series of cascading steps, cutting a ravine that's flanked by a larch plantation, where we recently watched what may well be one of the last red squirrels in Weardale.

The path emerges through the trees onto the flanks of Chapel Fell, where .....

.... the view westwards towards the upper dale continues to improve as you climb further up the fellside. I'm always struck by how quiet it is up here, once you leave the sound of tumbling water behind. You suddenly become aware of the sound of your own breathing as you labour higher up the hill, and the sound of the wind in your ears. Quietness - or at least freedom from mechanical noise - is a rare commodity these days. There are, of course, plenty of natural sounds here - the mournful calls of golden plover in spring (especially spooky if its a misty day and you can't see them), wild calls of lapwing and curlew in April, and last weekend...

... our attention was drawn skywards by the mewing of buzzards. No less than eight were circling overhead at one point, drifting slowly down the dale until they disappeared into the blue ....

Sometimes there are shepherds and border collies up here, rounding up sheep, and even falconers that bring their birds up here to train.

There are other native raptors here too - last weekend, we watched a wandering hen harrier, slowly quartering the rough pastures.

It's a tough place to farm, a weathered landscape ....

... bearing the traces of earlier generations of farmers ....

The view northwards across the dale reveals farms that are aligned with the natural springs that flow down into the river Wear ....

.... and when you get back down to the bottom of the valley at Daddry Shield you follow the river, through the hay meadows, until you reach the ford and turn back into St. John's Chapel. A perfect Sunday morning walk, in any season of the year.

More pictures of the same walk in another season here and here.

Terrors of the Night

2011-11-22T11:03:00.001Z

The mild, wet weather seems to have brought an influx of mosquitoes into the house, attracted to the light and entering via windows left open after sunset. Strange how you don't notice them until you get into bed, isn't it? Then the big question is whether it's a biting species of mosquito or a more benign one............

After consulting Keith Snow's Mosquitoes (Richmond Publishing Naturalists' Handbooks No. 14) I'm inclined to think that this one, with its distinctive black and white striped legs, is Orthopodomyia pulcripalpis. He mentions that the females appear to feed on birds - so it's probably safe to go to sleep with one of these in the room - but he does add that "Little is known of adults' ecology and behaviour..." so that isn't completely reassuring. There's another rather similar species called Culiseta annulata which, he says, are "often found in houses where they feed readily on the occupants".
For some high magnification images of the beautiful eyes of mosquitoes, click here.

Oh, I-do-like-to-be-beside-the-seaside....

2011-11-19T17:05:00.001Z

Tynemouth this morning: blue sky, blue sea, a bracing breeze, salty air, ships on the horizon, lapping waves, raucous gulls, fish-and-chips for lunch at the Waterfront in North Shields ..... perfect Saturday morning at the seaside.

Northern winter moth

2011-11-16T17:21:00.001Z

Moth identification is not my forte but since there aren't many around to choose from at this time of the year I've whittled down the possibilities and am going to hazard a guess that this might be a northern winter moth Operophtera fagata (but I'd welcome any more accurate suggestions). It was resting on fallen beech leaves in Hamsterley Forest this morning and since beech is listed as a food plant, and since in Waring and Townsend's Field Guide to Moths of Great Britain and Ireland it's described as 'similar to a winter moth, but paler and somewhat silky in appearance..' it seems plausible. Correct ID or not, I really liked the combination of shapes, textures and autumnal colours....

Ivy

2011-11-10T11:48:00.000Z

Rob, over at The Living Isle, on the Isle of Wight, has posted some interesting pictures of wasps visiting ivy flowers , while pictures of red admirals and honeybees on the same plants were posted by Blackbird over on Bugblog recently. Despite a frost earlier in the week, the ivy up here in the North East is still flowering well and attracting the last surviving insects - which are now mostly flies.

Ivy is so common and widespread that we tend to take it for granted but it really is one of the most important plants in the British flora. What other species provides so much nectar and pollen late in the autumn for insects, followed by berries to feed departing migrants in spring - with a dense covering of waterproof leaves through the intervening winter to provide shelter for hibernating insects?

This fly, which is showing a lot of wear-and tear on the trailing edges of its wings, is acting like a living pollination brush. The structure of the flowers, with the anthers elevated above the nectar secreting ovary, pretty much guarantees that the ivy flowers will be pollinated ....

... as the fly stumble across the flowers, reaching down with its short proboscis, half-blinded by pollen that it's picked up. The strange musty scent of ivy, which has been likened in mouldering papers in damp cupboards, seems very attractve to flies - if you put a cut flower shoot in a room where flies are bouncing against the window, they'll soon turn their attention to the flowers and start to feed.

I've Seen a Ghost...

2011-11-08T14:58:00.001Z

About 50 years ago, when I was a feral 10 year-old growing up in the Sussex countryside, I was mooching through the reed beds at the head of Fishbourne Creek in Chichester harbour at dusk when a large brown bird rose up in front of me and flapped slowly above my head, transfixing me with a penetrating stare of its raptorial eyes. I knew instantly what it was - a marsh harrier - because I'd spent hours scrutinising the pictures in P.A.D. Hollom's Popular Handbook of British Birds in the library - and had the usually schoolboy obsession with rarities. Trouble was, no one would believe me. In those days marsh harriers were rarer than they are today, especially in that part of Britain (where there were, then, some ruthless gamekeepers that shot everything with a hooked beak and proudly hung it all on a gibbet) so all the wildlife 'experts' that I mentioned it to gave me a condescending smile and told me I must have got it wrong. I even began to wonder whether I'd imagined the encounter... but I knew what I'd seen.

I'm sorry to admit, to my shame, that I lapsed into 'wildlife expert' mode a couple of days ago. We were walking up a little valley near St. John's Chapel in Weardale when my wife, who was about ten yards ahead of me, turned and said "Look! A red squirrel".

Now the last time I saw a red squirrel in the middle section of Weardale must have been about twenty years ago and - apart from a small population right up at the head of the dale, at Killhope (see pictures and post here) - it seems to be generally agreed that they are extinct here.

So my instant reaction was a dismissive "No, it can't be. They're long gone. Must be a grey squirrel with a tinge of brown fur".

But it was indeed a red squirrel. A ghost from the past - except that it was as large and life and scolding us as it raced from the ground up the trunk of a larch tree.

So I had to apologise for my shameful scepticism pretty quickly. It reminded me of why I've never like the term 'expert', which all-too-often equates with 'know-all".

Anyway, having got that admission off my chest, isn't this a lovely animal?

As we watched it leap from tree to tree it sent down a shower of golden larch needles every time it landed on a branch.

These are big enlargements of small sections of the whole image,so the quality isn't great, but who cares!

Magnificent ear tufts...

The big question, of course, is where did this animal come from? It's very unlikely that it made it down the dale from the distant population at Killhope - most of the intervening territory is open moorland. There are a lot of predators that could catch and kill it in the open (at one point on Sunday we watched eight buzzards soaring overhead).

This larch plantation is too small to support a red squirrel population all year-round, but there is another much larger conifer plantation about a mile away, that might conceivably shelter a relict population.

Or maybe this is the result of someone's freelance red squirrel reintroduction programme?

There are no answers at the moment but it was a magical - and, I have to admit - humbling encounter.

Sparkle and Glitter

2011-11-07T16:08:00.000Z

Last night we had our first hard frost, so .....

..... the strings of pearls of autumn have given way to .....

... the diamond necklaces of winter ....

Silverfish

2011-11-03T20:32:00.000Z

If you have a cupboard under the stairs, or kitchen cupboards that have dark, damp corners, then the chances are that you also have some of these silverfish Lepisma saccharina lurking in them. These primitive wingless insects belong to an order known as the Thysanura and are often thought of as being living fossils, having first evolved over 300 million years ago. They are covered with silvery scales that are easily detached and they also move fast, which makes them difficult to capture intact; this one has lost part of one of its three tail appendages and also the tip of an antenna. They are most active at night, emerging to feed on whatever organic material they can find - spilled food, paper, even the glue from cardboard cartons. Sometimes they find their way into baths in bathrooms.

Although silverfish are present in most houses they don’toften produce severe infestations because the females only lay about twentyeggs during their lifetime, hidden in crevices until they hatch. They are, apparently, easy to maintain in captivity and will live for up to five years ona diet of damp paper and a pinch of flour, with regular access to moisture.

The first detailed description we have of a silverfish wasrecorded in Robert Hooke’s Micrographiaor Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasseswith Observations and Inquiries thereupon, published in 1665.

The book contains this copper engraving of the insect, whichis of stunning accuracy when you consider that Hooke observed it with lensesthat he ground himself for his simple microscope – modern microscopists stillmarvel at his extraordinary skill and powers of observation. (You can see another example of his skill here).

Samuel Pepys was also mightily impressed and bought a copyof the book on publication, noting in his famous diary on 20th.January 1665 ‘took home Hook’s book ofmicroscopy, a most excellent piece’.

Hooke called the silverfish ‘the small silver-colour’d bookworm’ and described, in his elegantprose, how ‘it appears to the naked eye,a small glittering Pearl-coloured Moth, which upon the removal of Books andPapers in the Summer, is often observ’d very nimbly to scud, and pack away tosome lurking cranney, where it may the better protect it self from any appearingdanger. Its head appears big and blunt, and its body tapers from it towards thetail, smaller and smaller, being shap’d almost like a carret’.

He described how it had ‘ conical body, divided into fourteen several partitions, being theappearance of so many shells, or shields that cover the whole body, every ofthese shells are again cover’d or tiled over with a multitude of thintransparent scales, which, from the multiplicity of their reflecting surfaces,make the whole animal appear a perfect Pearl-colour’

You can find pictures and information on the firebrat - the silverfish's larger but less common cousin - here and you can also view some other animals that share our houses with us here and here.

Yew Midge Gall

2011-11-01T09:35:00.000Z

This year some of the yew trees in Teesdale are heavily infested with this 'artichoke' gall, caused by a tiny midge called Taxomyia taxi. This insect has a strange two-speed life cycle. Eggs are laid on the yew shoot tip foliage in late spring, inducing the formation of a swollen terminal bud where they spend the winter. Some emerge as adults in the following year but others, like his one, have slower development and spend a second winter inside an enlarged and more conspicuous gall before emerging as midges two years after the eggs were laid.

Margaret Redfern's recent New Naturalist book, Plant Galls, is a mine of information on the strange world of these plant-insect interactions.

An Autumn Walk along the River Tees

2011-10-30T23:25:00.001Z

The long, narrow gorge spanned by Egglestone's Abbey Bridge bridge provides one the most picturesque viewing points on the River Tees in autumn

This is the view from the bridge looking upstream - Egglestone Abbey is just above the trees in the middle distance (double-click) and is ...

...... visible from the bridge now that the leaves are falling.

The view downstream - there are footpaths on both sides of the river and you can follow it down to its confluence with the River Greta, at the Meeting of the Waters.

The river squeezes through narrow gaps and tumbles over boulders ...

.... and you can hear it through the trees all the way along the path, even when it isn't in spate.

The high humidity in the gorge makes this a fine habitat for mosses and ferns like this polypody growing as an epiphyte on a tree branch over the river.

Yellowing horse chestnut leaves provide a sunbathing spot for flies whose days are numbered, now that frosts are on their way.

Nectar-rich ivy flowers provide a last-minute refuelling station for drone flies.

Shades of yellow - hazel, oak and beech autumn colours.

Some of the large beeches have been attacked by honey fungus - always fatal, but it can take decades to kill the tree.

A nuthatch, dangling down to pick beech nuts out of beech mast - it seems to be a 'mast year', with a very heavy crop.

Ripe holly berries are a reminder that there are only 50 shopping days until Christmas.

Downstream there are some wild cherries with a fiery display of autumn colours..

... and a fine crop of ripe yew berries.

A passing shower leaves a rainbow, which is wasted on those two sheep that are watching - they only have dichromatic vision and can't distinguish red from green.

Looking back upstream - on what Kenneth Grahame in the Wind in the Willows called a 'golden afternoon'...

New Suit of Armour

2011-10-28T09:42:00.005+01:00

The trouble with being an invertebrate with a hard external skeleton is that you have to change your suit of armour every time you grow a little bigger - which is what this woodlouse is doing. It's a risky business, leaving you exposed to predators until your new exoskeleton hardens, so this cautious crustacean is doing it in two stages. It's already slipped out of the rear half and its new shell plates have become hard and shiny. Now it's extricating itself from the head end, and here you can see that the newly exposed shell plates are still soft, with a dull surface. The animal hasn't quite removed its delicate, all-important antennae from inside their armour yet - if you double-click the image to enlarge you can just make them out inside their old translucent covering.

This woodlouse is Oniscus asellus and you can find more about its biology here

The whole process is known as ecdysis and all invertebrates that shed their old armour in this way are grouped together as ecdysozoans. You can read all about it here.

A Forest in the Fog

2011-10-26T10:46:00.001+01:00

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary describes a visit to Hamsterley Forest in Co. Durham on a foggy day.

The forest is a mixture of deciduous trees and conifers, with some fine beech plantations and some ancient oaks. Forests have a wonderfully mysterious, spooky quality when the sun begins to break through the fog.

In addition to the usual Scots pine and Sitka and Norway spruces there are some less familiar conifers, like this western hemlock. Its blunt resinous needles have an appealingly fruity, citrus-like aroma when you crush them.

Hamsterley is always a good destination for a fungal foray - this (I think) is the larch bolete Suillus grevillei and this ...

... is yellow stag'shorn Calocera viscosa.

This looks like Coriolus versicolor, not yet fully expanded. The brackets exude droplets of moisture underneath.

And finally, one toadstool that's unmistakeable - stinkhorn Phallus impudicus. These always appear in large numbers in early autumn in a Norway spruce plantation in the forest and if you happen to be approaching from downwind you become aware of their presence from some distance. This is a perfect specimen that must have grown up overnight ....

.... and here' one that's probably a day old. Flies have carried off all its sticky brown spores, leaving one late arrival with nothing to eat. Slugs have already made inroads into the remains.

Hitchhikers

2011-10-23T21:40:00.000+01:00

Harvestman spiders like this Mitopus morio turn up quite frequently in our garden at this time of year and quite a few of them carry these little scarlet parasitic spider mites - which apparently are mite larvae belong to a genus called Leptus - attached to their legs and body.

I really need to catch one of these and take a look under the microscope - at this magnification they just look like little blobs of red sealing wax.

You can see another kind of parasitic mite, on bumblebees, here

On the Benefits of Exploring your own Backyard

2011-10-17T21:48:00.002+01:00

I was recently sent a book to review that brought home to me the great benefit of wildlife blogging – the wonderful way in which it allows people toshare their exploration of Nature in their own local patch in a collaborative,mutually supportive way.

The book, OnExtinction: How we Became Estranged from Nature by Melanie Challenger, is along and often lyrical meditation on how people lose contact with their naturalenvironment and the effect of this on the way in which we humans exploit andoften abuse the natural world. You canread a recent review of the book, by Kathleen Jamie in the Guardian, here butin essence it begins with the author, a poet, working in an abandoned tinminer’s hut in Cornwall, lamenting how little she knows about the wild flowersthat surround her and contemplating extinction and the way inwhich advancing technology and human exploitation of natural resources have ledto the loss of livelihoods, cultures and species. Over the following 133 pagesshe travels to an Antarctic whaling station in South Georgia, to the Falklands,Whitby and Baffin Island and visits the Inuit on the Arctic tundra, witnessingfor herself evidence of humans’ impact on animals, their environment and eachothers’ cultures, with – along the way - numerous digressions into history,culture, literature, politics and economics, explaining how all this came about. In thefinal chapter having - quite literally - travelled to the ends of the Earth theauthor, drifting downstream in her canal boat towards Wicken fen inCambridgeshire, finds at least partial personal salvation in learning toidentify the plants and animals around her - and so reconnecting with thenatural world. She has discovered a fundamental truth – that nothing engendersrespect for nature, and alertness to forces that threaten it, more powerfullythan being on first-name terms with the wild plants and animals with which we shareour local patch of the planet on an everyday basis. When they are part ofthe fabric of a person’s life, then it’s well-nigh impossible not to care aboutthem and be aware of changes.

Having read and learned from many hundreds of fellow nature bloggers’posts over the last two and a half years, it seems to me that this is aconclusion that many have reached and, perhaps even more importantly, haveconveyed to blog posters around the planet, sharing their personal explorations thatoften venture only a few miles from home.

The first picture I posted on my blog was of a spider’s weband here, 450 posts later, is another such, in celebration of the modern technology’sweb that connects people who share and care about nature in their own backyard.

Wonderful resource the web, isn’t it?

On Extinction: How we Became Estranged from Nature by Melanie Challenger is published by Granta. ISBN 978-1-84708-187-2. www.grantabooks.com

The Best Buddleja for Butterflies?

2011-10-08T20:37:00.000+01:00

The 'butterfly bush' Buddleja davidii, an import from China that has become firmly established in the wild in Britain, is famed for its ability to attract butterflies. Unfortunately its flowering time does seem to be shifting ever-earlier - as a result of climate change, according to some experts who I've talked to - and its certainly the case that there were very few butterflies on the wing when the plants in my garden were at the peak of flowering back in the summer. In contrast, this orange late-flowering hybrid, Buddleja x weyeriana (a hybrid between B. davidii and B. globosa) - has been feeding red admirals, commas and small tortoiseshells (not many of the latter around this year) since early September and will be providing bees and butterflies with nectar right up until the first frost. This shrub is the 'last chance saloon' for an energy top-up in my garden: highly recommended.

Dipper

2011-10-05T18:01:00.000+01:00

Photographing dippers can be a frustrating business - they have a habit of waiting until you get within range then flying off around a bend in the river, a sequence that's repeated until they get to the limit of their territory, when they turn around and fly back downstream. This one, on the River Derwent near Blanchland in Northumberland, was more accommodating because, I suspect, it's one of this year's juveniles. It's remarkable how well its plumage blends with the peaty-brown colour of the water - take your eye off one of these delightful birds for a moment and it can be a struggle to locate it again.

In this picture it's plunging into the current to feed. Dippers can swim like ducks but also walk under water, held down by the pressure of the current on their back, searching amongst the stones for food items. It's interesting how it seems to close its eyes when it pushes its head into the water - much as we might when we dive into a swimming pool. I assume they must open them again once they're submerged...

This is the moment when it became aware of my presence - and whizzed off around the bend in the river...

The First and Last Rose of Summer

2011-10-01T21:23:00.000+01:00

Burnet rose Rosa pimpinellifolia is the most fragrant of all the British wild roses and also the first to come into bloom - sometimes in mid-May - and now it has come back into bloom in a hedgerow here at Wolsingham in Weardale.

There's been a lot in the press recently about the heat-wave inducing spring flowers to produce a repeat performance in October but it's not really that uncommon. Primroses, for example, quite often produce a few flowers in early autumn. For any species whose flowering is triggered by daylength, the hours of daylight are more-or-less similar now to those that the plant would have experienced in spring, so it's just responding weakly to the environmental stimulus that switches it into flowering mode. Spring-blooming wild flowers are more likely to produce an autumn encore if they experience in growth check in summer - maybe drought or low temperatures - that's followed by favourable conditions that allow resumption of rapid growth in late summer. I've noticed this particularly in some trees after a summer drought - somewhere I have some photos of rowans producing flowers alongside ripening berries in late summer, when rain after a drought has triggered a resumption in growth.

The Spider and the Fly: 2

2011-09-30T21:44:00.000+01:00

Most flies that find their way into our house end up in one particular window, which is the highest and brighest in the house, so it's not surprising that canny spiders tend to set up their snares there too. Some titanic battles take place, where the flies almost always come off worst - I posted one here a while ago. Here's another. The striking aspect of this one was the size difference between predator and prey.

Initially the fly was caught in only a few of the spider's loosely-woven threads and when the spider abseiled down it was a bit circumspect about engaging with the struggling fly, that might still have flown off with the spider attached to it.

Eventually it subdued the fly with enough threads, then spent some time cutting it free of the windowledge, before ....

... dragging it away into the corner of the window...

... and tucking into a meal that will last it quite a while..

Skipton Woods

2011-09-29T15:49:00.000+01:00

We recently paid a visit to Skipton Woods - which are well worth exploring if you are in that part of North Yorkshire. It's just five minutes walk from Skipton High Street and to find it you need to walk down the steps near the castle, by the little canal known as the Spring Branch, that used to connect the limestone quarries to the Leeds-Liverpool canal.

On the way to the woods you pass the old Corn Mill, still with intact waterwheel.

Looking back along the main path through the woods, with the Eller Beck down on the left and the so-called Long Dam - a sort of long, shallow pond, on the right. The woods are managed by the Woodland Trust - click for details.

After a few minutes walk you come to the Round Dam, a more-or-less circular lake that has a resident heron that's something of a local celebrity, that already features on YouTube and on Facebook.

Here he (or she) is, in profile.....

... and head on. I hadn't realised until I looked closely at this photo (double-click) that herons are cross-eyed.

A little further on, upstream of the round dam. Hard to believe that this is just a few mintes walk from a busy shopping street...

.... and this is the most picturesque bit, where the Eller Beck tumbles over rock ledges in this little gorge.

There are various possible circular walks, but this one takes you back into town, via this very attractive path that runs alongside moss-covered walls.

It's only a short walk but I'd recommend taking a pork pie or two with you from this fantastic butchers, near the start of the walk, that makes the Supreme Champion Great Northern Pork Pie. To my taste buds, they're just about perfection. Their sausages are also legendary...

Harvestman

2011-09-23T10:20:00.000+01:00

It isn't until you watch a harvestman walking aross a rough surface - like this pebbledashed wall of a house - that you realise how practical those lanky legs are. Anything with short legs with a body close to the ground would have to negotiate every pebble, but a harvestman can stride aross this rocky terrain with no impediment.

It's interesting to contemplate what the view must be like from those two eyes, mounted on the turret on the animal's back, that give all-round vision. It must be much like the view of a tower crane driver I guess, exception that eight knees substitute for the single crane jib.

I think this might be Leiobunum rotundum........(?)

You can find more on harvestmen here

Bright Eyes

2011-09-09T20:37:00.000+01:00

There's been something of a roe deer population explosion up here in the North East in recent years, so it's not that unusual to see them during a country walk, but this encounter was a little out of the ordinary. We spotted this doe deep in the shadow of a pine plantation and with sunlit fields behind her she was little more that a silhouette - but her eyes shone in the gloom. I've often seen eyeshine in animals when they've seen caught in the car headlights in the dark (the cat's eyes effect) but it's not so often that you see it in daylight; it's only visible here because it was so dark in the plantation - the fact that I got a picture at all is a tribute to lens image stabilisation technology.

Here, thanks to the magic of photoshop, is the lovely blue-eyed doe after having the shadow areas lightened a bit. Having grown up with conventional silver-based photography, I'm still amazed at the ability of digital sensors to record this level of detail in such poor light.

Here's the head portion of the image enlarged, showing the eyeshine more clearly - spooky, eh? The eyes shine like this because of a highly reflective layer behind the retina (the tapetum lucidum) which reflects light back through the retinal cells and enhances the animal's vision in dim light.

As soon as she turned her head away the effect disappeared.

A little further down the footpath (beside the South Tynedale Railway at Alston) we met her consort, who spotted us immediately ...

.... watched us for a minute or two while chewing a leaf ...

... then ambled off into the undergrowth, with just a parting glance in our direction.

The Pulling Power of Plums

2011-09-08T12:14:00.001+01:00

This year our Victoria plum tree has been laden with so many plums that they almost broke the branches off. There's only so many plums you can eat but they make excellent bait for attracting butterflies, like this red admiral.

The bloom on the skin of a plum is yeast, so the juice quickly ferments and the butterflies become inebriated and easy to photograph. I'm not sure if the wings of this one are drooping because it's sunbathing, or whether it's just drunk on alcoholic plum juice, but either way ...

... you can get very close to the butterflies in this soporific state. It's interesting to see how hairy they are.

Rotting plums piled on a bird table will attract red admirals, peacocks, small tortoiseshells and commas - and also wasps, so you need to keep a wary eye out for them.

Willowherb Blizzard

2011-09-05T15:01:00.000+01:00

This diadem spider Araneus diadematus laboured to spin its invisible snare but made the mistake of weaving it downwind of a patch of Rosebay willowherb ....

... which made it instantly visible to insects that might otherwise have blundered into it. I watched the spider - perhaps driven by hunger after failing to catch any prey - meticulously trying to remove the cottony seeds from the web. It managed to clear the central zone, but the outer sticky threads ....

.....collected more seeds faster than it could remove them, thanks ..

... to this large patch of willowherb upwind of the web, that released a blizzard of seeds with every puff of wind.

It's interesting to watch the willowherb seed pods open. First the four outer segments peel back like brittle banana skins, exposing ....

... a double row of seeds on each. In still air they remain attached in rows....

.......pushed upwards on the cotton threads as they dry in the sun ....

.... until the slightest puff of wind whisks them away and up into the thermals. No wonder this plant is such a successful coloniser.

It's also the food plant of the elephant hawk-moth caterpillar

Last Thursday's Guardian Country Diary was an account of pursuing this comma butterfly into a patch of willowherb.....and unleashing a blizzard of seeds in the process.

Bent Beak...

2011-08-20T16:55:00.000+01:00

This unfortunate juvenile herring gull with a strangely deformed beak was on the foreshore at North Shields, near the mouth of the River Tyne this afternoon.

I've seen starlings with a similar deformity on several occasions but this is the first time I've seen it in a gull. The bird probably has difficulty feeding and doesn't look in particular good condition, but if it hangs around the car park behind the beach and feeds on the chips that people chuck to the gulls it might be OK...........

Shieldbug

2011-08-18T10:26:00.000+01:00

I found this little forest bug Pentatoma rufipes out for a stroll on a patch of willow herb yesterday.

Here you can see that long proboscis - used for eating plants and for impaling the occasional caterpillar - folded back between the front legs.

I wondered what those inflated purple patches were at the point where the hind leg joins the thorax - until I consulted a few books and realised these are the stink glands that give these insects their alternative name - stink bugs. These secrete a noxious smelling fluid to deter predators...........or in this case the paparazzi.

For some excellent pictures of this insect (and remarkable eggs) - see here.

Opportunists

2011-08-17T12:08:00.000+01:00

Last autumn I watched a bulldozer scraping away topsoil to level an area of building land, and made a mental note at the time to return this year to see what opportunist plants had established themselves on the bare soil. This one, common field speedwell Veronica persica, was well represented there. Usually the lowermost petal in this species is much paler, but this particular individual had exceptionally vivid blue flowers with deep blue, heart-shaped stamens. This species is an alien and was first recorded in Britain in 1825, and I imagine that its small seeds arrived on birds' feet, unlike .....

... this common sowthistle Sonchus oleraceus that must have staged an airborne invasion with its parachute-equipped plumed seeds.

I've been walking past this piece of land long enough to remember when it was arable land, with a wheat crop, and several of the other opportunists probably germinated from the residual seed bank of arable weeds in the soil ..... like this red-leg Persicaria maculosa....

...... this fumitory Fumaria officinalis ....

... and this field pansy Viola arvensis.

All of these are common and would be classified as weeds if they were competing with crop plants, but as colonisers of disturbed bare ground they're classed botanically as ruderals - species with constantly shifting populations that colonised disturbed habitats before more permanent vegetation establishes itself.

Common they may be, but the world would be a poorer place without them and just occasionally something a little less common reappears when the soil is disturbed.......

...... like this henbit Lamium amplexicaule which is much less abundant than it once was, thanks to the use of herbicides in intensive agriculture.

Lethal Beauty

2011-08-12T15:31:00.000+01:00

They almost look good enough to eat - which would be a big mistake. Poisonous cuckoo pint fruits ripening. The birds must eat them though, because from one original plant there are now cuckoo pints all over our garden.