Honeybee Housekeeping

Yesterday we found about 20 honeybees dead in the snow near some hives in Durham City, and immediately jumped to the conclusion that some new catastrophe was befalling these useful insects. But a bit of Googling around beekeepers' web sites suggests that it ain't neccessarily so.

Apparently dead bees are quite common around hives in winter but when they are scattered in the grass and withered leaves they usually pass unnoticed. Opinion seems to be that they are there for two common reasons for this winter mortality. One is that on sunny days, even in the depths of winter, members of the hive remove the corpses of dead bees and dump them some way away, as part of their winter housekeeping. The other possibility is that bees' metabolism ticks over during winter and waste material accumulates in their hind gut, so they occasionally leave the hive on bright days just to defaecate; some don't make it back before the cold gets to them. Given that all of these dead bees were in a few metres of one another, I'd go for the former explanation in this instance.

A Stoat's Christmas Dinner

On Christmas morning, while our dinner was cooking in the oven, we walked out over the local farmland and spotted this stoat, about 100 metres away, racing across the snowy pastures. It soon became clear that ...

.. it was out hunting its Christmas dinner - as the rabbit that it had spotted broke cover. The panic-stricken prey raced towards us, with a head-start of about 30 metres on the the stoat ... 

... but stoats are light, fast movers over snow, bounding across the frozen surface in a series of leaps ... and they are relentless in the chase.

 

As the rabbit approached us its lead was reduced to just a couple of metres and the stoat was almost close enough to pounce.

If you have a sensitive disposition, you may want to surf the web elsewhere at this point.....

The heavy rabbit's fate was sealed when it plunged into the deeper snow drift that had piled up in the lee of the hedge......

 

... allowing the stoat to get close enough to make the fatal leap.

 

After a short struggle the stoat stood over the apparently lifeless body of its victim ...

... and its first thought was to have a good look around, to make sure that nothing was going to take its dinner away.

Then it spotted us....

 

... and instead of running away it wriggled through the snow towards us.....

.... right up to the fence, where it paused to have a good look at us. It's hard to believe that such a cute face belongs to such a deadly hunter.

What happened next was an even bigger surprise, because it hadn't killed the rabbit .... which began to crawl away...

 

... but, quick as a flash, the stoat turned, raced after it and leapt onto its prey again.

 

There was a short struggle and this time there was no mistake....

 

Yellow Holly Berries

Season's Greetings and Best Wishes for 2011 to all readers of this blog

 

These berries, belonging to the yellow cultivar of holly Ilex europaeus 'bacciflava', are the only berries left in my garden after weeks of freezing weather. All the scarlet holly berries disappeared within a week of the first snowfall, along with all the other red berries, but the birds have completely ignored these yellow fruits. As far as I can tell, they haven't eaten a single berry.

Birds' vision is much more sensitive to the red end of the spectrum (bird-pollinated flowers are almost always red) and it's tempting to speculate that these yellow fruits simply aren't visible to the blackbirds and thrushes that stripped all the other berries. But I'm sceptical about so simple an explanation. They quickly find and eat the blueberries that I try to grow in autumn, which reflect light at the short-wave blue end of the spectrum, and yellow berries are much closer to the red end of the spectrum. So maybe there's something else that makes yellow holly berries unappealing to birds, even when they are on the verge of starvation in a winter such as this.......... 

Urban Farm

If you're visiting Newcastle and cross the Ouseburn (a tributory ot the River Tyne) using this little humpback bridge and then walk under Byker Bridge, you reach ....

.. Ouseburn Farm, which is the subject of today's Guardian Country Diary.

Behind these beautifully designed steel entrance gates lies...

.. a neat little greenhouse made from discarded plastic drinks bottles, a polythene tunnel, raised beds for vegetable growing and on the left here, a fine environmental education centre.

This is a view of the farm from across the Ouseburn, which is in the foreground. These days the water level in the Ouseburn is controlled by a lock gate at its confluence with the Tyne but on the day that this photo was taken the lock was open to let snow meltwater flow into the river at low tide. There are some more photos of the Ouseburn and its wildlife here. The buildings in the background are (on the left) Victorian warehouses that now house artists' studios and Seven Stories (the National Centre for Children's Books) and (on the right) The Cluny, an excellent pub and one of the most popular live music venues in Newcastle. From the mid 19th. century until the mid 1960s this was one of the most heavily industrialised parts of the city. The farm sits on the location of an old white lead works and a flax mill that, along with other industries, discharged into the Ouseburn. After decades of clean-up operations, it now hosts the occasional kingfisher and, on the day that this photo was taken, redshanks that had ventured inland from the coast. 

 

The environmental education centre is a favourite destination for school parties and caters in particular for those with learning difficulties and disabilities. The farm has a flock of sheep (that were away being tupped when we visited) and visiting animals like these alpaca.

Next to the pig pens are these two stone mountings for the beam engine that once powered the flax mill, where linen sails were woven for sailing ships on the Tyne, the remained standing on the lead works site. 

The visiting alpaca are a long way from their Andean peaks in Peru but seem at home under Byker Bridge and approach visitors with cautious curiosity....

... sporting fetching haircuts.....

... and very thick fur that's perfect insulation for the kind of bitterly cold weather we've been having lately.

All the farm animals, including chickens...

... goats...

... and these ginger Tamworth pigs are accustomed to frequent visitors and the farm has created an educational resource and agricultural oasis in what was once a site of intensive industry. While we watched a sparrowhawk came hunting over the farm and just a few yards further along the Ouseburn, in an overhanging bush weighed down by the snow, we found..

... the remains of this goldfinch nest, exquisitely woven from sheep wool that can only have come from the Ouseburn Farm flock..... another landmark in the environmental regeneration of the Ousburn.

Architecture in the Snow

A snowfall has a wonderful tendency to turn pieces of natural architecture into something magical....

... and to sprinkle a bit of magic over man-made architecture.

Hogweed stems

Durham Cathedral from Observatory Hill

Lunchtime today

A Walk in the Bishop's Park

Today's Guardian Country Diary describes a visit to the Bishop of Durham's deer park at Bishop Auckland. The bishops have lived in Auckland Castle for over 800 years and for much of that time the park provided resources like venision and timber, but now it's simply a beautiful and tranquil place to visit at any time of the year, but especially so in autumn. It's just five minutes walk from the busy centre of the market town of Bishop Auckland.....and a much-loved natural resource for all who live in the area.

The River Gaunless flows through the park and would have been a source of fish for earlier generations of clergy who lived here, but now its home to kingfishers (that occasionally breed here) and dippers. When I first visited, 35 years ago, there were water voles here too, that I used to tempt out of their bank-side burrows with apple cores, but they are long gone, sadly.

Bishop Trevor's bridge spans the Gaunless and if you're lucky you can sometimes catch a glimpse here of a kingfisher flashing past underneath.

The park is famous for its mid-18th. century Gothic Revival deer house, where clerics could picnic...

...and where the deer herd was fed and could shelter from severe North-Eastern winters.

Originally the arcades around the outside would have been roofed over - you can see the sloping roof line on the end wall in this photograph.

The cloister arches provide a frame for some of the park's magnificent trees, including the beeches on the steep bank of the Gaunless, where landslips have pitched some trees into the river in recent years.

The ancient trees are one of the park's finest features. This is a magnificent sweet chestnut, whose stout bole seems to be melting into the soil under its own weight ...

... and this is one of several decaying sweet chestnuts that have been on their 'last legs' for the thirty-odd years that I've been coming here, and will probably still be producing new shoots long after I'm gone.

As Oliver Rackham, the noted authority on woodlands once observed, there's only one thing more useful than a live tree and that's a dead tree. Old beeches like this have been slowing crumbling away for decades as bracket fungi digest them, and provide a home for all sorts of beetles and sundry insects that in turn attract woodpeckers - of which there are many (green and greater-spotted) in the park.

I haven't identified these toadstools yet, but there was a perfect ring of them around an old hawthorn earlier this month and...

... these Russula atropurpurea appear every autumn under a magnificent Scots pine....

... while oyster mushrooms Pleurotus ostreatus favour the decaying beeches

With so many different trees here, the autumn colour is spectacular: this is hawthorn, with elm in the background ...

... and this is Scots pine and European larch, evergreen and deciduous conifers respectively.

From the highest point in the park the view over the tree canopies is magnificent and the view...

... across to the west takes in the Newton Cap viaduct, which once carried stream trains (what a magnificent sight that must have been!) but now carries a road. The River Wear flows underneath the arches.

These are the homes of the Bishop's other parishioners. There are well over 200 of these hemispherical meadow ant nests on the south facing slopes of the parkt - so many that this ant metropolis is easily visible on Google satellite maps. At a very conservative estimate, I'd say that somewhere around one million ants live here in summer and you can almost always find green woodpeckers visiting these mounds for a meal.

There has been alarming news recently that the Church Commissioners are contemplating the sale of Auckland Castle (the Bishop's palatial residence) and with it the park. Understandably, this has raised great public concern about future access to the park and the fate of its trees and wildlife. The idea of the palace and park being acquired by, perhaps, some hotel chain or multinational corporation that would restrict access and - God forbid - 'tidy-up' the park and its venerable trees is too depressing to contemplate.

Click here to listen to a Radio 4 Living World programme about the park and its wildlife

For further Guardian Country Diary posts click here