Some natural wonders from North East England
I often whizz past, at 60 mph, motorway embankments that are covered with flowering ox-eye daisies, but it's not so often that I get a close look at these wild flowers in such abundance beside a footpath. This fabulous display covers an embankment in Hexham in Northumberland, on edge land between the railway line and a retail park road. It is absolutely stunning.
These anxious curlews accompanied me on part of a walk in the Deerness valley, County Durham last week. They must have recently hatched young because they were highly agitated, with those yelping calls that they make when anything threatens their nest site.
The weather is cold, wet and windy and they have crow predators to see off. They are nesting fields that I hope will be cut for hay, rather than mown early for silage. I've seen curlews raise successful broods in the same place in previous years, so fingers crossed.
Some more pictures of the dung beetle described in today's Guardian Country Diary
' Deerness Valley, County Durham
Waiting for the clip-clop of hooves to fade away, using a
polythene bag as a glove, I picked up a tennis ball-sized, steaming lump of
horse manure. Checking that no one else was around – this kind of old-school
natural history might seem a tad eccentric to a casual passer-by – I hurried
home: I had dung beetles to feed.
I’d found them on the edge of a pasture and, coincidentally,
had recently been reading The Sacred Beetle, Jean-Henri Fabre’s century-old
account of the breeding biology of scarabs, including our native species. Could
I witness what the great French naturalist first described in such fascinating
detail? Fabre, meticulous observer, curious experimentalist, cautious
interpreter of facts, spent years studying these ‘dealers in ordure’ whose coprophilous
habits make them an agricultural asset. One study has estimated their value to
the UK cattle industry, as soil improvers and recyclers of dung, at £367m per
annum.
My captive Geotrupes stercorarius, also commonly known as dor
beetles, dumbledores or lousy watchmen (they often host parasitic mites), fell
out of the collecting tube onto their backs, revealing beautifully iridescent
amethyst-violet undersides.
They have endearing parenting skills; Fabre discovered that both
sexes share in tunnelling and nest preparation. They clambered over the ball of
dung in the vivarium, pausing to saviour it before dropping into the grass,
then digging with flattened fore-legs, forcing themselves into the soil with
powerful thrusts of spiny hind limbs. Clumsy on the surface, they’re superbly
equipped for subterranean life. Within a minute they had disappeared.
Fabre’s account describes how they dig downwards, excavate
side-tunnels provisioned with what he called ‘sausages’ of ordure dragged down
from the surface, then the female lays an egg in each. The next generation should
emerge in autumn.
‘The mind, wrote Fabre, ‘is an activity, not a repository’. In
some respects, naturalists live in a golden age, with so many resources available
for identifying and naming what we find – AI, web sites, apps, on-line keys,
social media study groups – but there’s more to natural history than compiling
an inventory of biodiversity. Nothing comes close to that pleasure, first
experienced in childhood, of first-hand observation, marvelling at lives of
other creatures that share our planet. '
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