Rook

 

An unexpected visitor to the garden bird feeder this week: a rook. They don’t appear in the garden very often, but when they do it’s usually in early spring, when they are looking for twigs to renovate nests.

Ffty years ago, when we first came to live in this small market town in the foothills of the North Pennines, on the edge of farmland, we used to have two large rookeries close-by, but as the town has grown, with new housing around its margins, they’ve shifted their nests further away. It’s a long-term pattern of behaviour that has been well documented in many places: rooks generally do not tolerate a lot of disturbance under their rookeries.

 Peering up into a rookery on a windy spring day, at the swaying nests overhead, can be disorientating, unless you steady yourself by leaning against a tree trunk, feeling the transmitted power of the wind when the bole flexes against your back. Down below, earthbound, there is something Hitchcockian about those dark silhouettes wheeling overhead, with their broad wings, finger-like primaries and bony dagger beaks that prise insect grubs from grassroots.

The rooks ride the gusts, sometimes settling into what sounds like conversational cawing, often rising as a raucous flock for no obvious reason. A few bring twigs to repair nests, others seem to be here just to be sociable.

It seems strange to see these ungainly birds visiting the garden bird table because their pickaxe beaks seem ill-adapted for picking up sunflower and millet seeds, but they are birds with a very varied diet.

Come summer, after the harvest, when the breeding season is over, they’ll be pacing through local stubble fields, in the company jackdaws and crows, looking for wheat, barley and oat seed that the combine harvester dropped: nature’s gleaners at work.

A bit of a stink

 

 Stinking hellebore Helleborus foetidus, malodorous but a wonderful source of pollen and nectar for the first bees to emerge in spring, started flowering in the garden last week. Its nectar is secreted into nectaries formed from small tubular petals inside those green sepals, and only accessible to long-tongued bumblebees that must hang under the bell-shaped flower to reach it. The specialised nectaries are more easily visible on open-flowered hellebores like ….

…… this non-native Helleborus argutifolius, also flowering now. The petal/nectaries are the ring of dark green structures tucked in behind the stamens.

Hellebores, which are poisonous, have a somewhat gruesome history in folk medicine, as a vermifuge: “Where it killed not the patient, it would certainly kill the worms; but the worst of it is, it would sometimes kill both” noted Gilbert White in 1779, in The Natural History of Selborne.

Beatrix Potter, mycologist

 

When I first became seriously interested in natural history, about 60 years ago, the Wayside and Woodland series of nature guides, published by Warne, were some of the best available, but too expensive for me - the affordable Observer’s books, by the same publisher, were the limit of my budget. Now there are glossier, better illustrated up-to-date guides but the old W & W series often turn up in secondhand bookshops and have a nostalgic charm. This one cost me 50p. in a charity shop and is particularly interesting because most of the illustrations are watercolours by Beatrix Potter, of Flopsy-bunny, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Tiggywinkle children’s book fame.

Before she turned to writing children’s books Helen Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) was a passionate mycologist who approached the study of fungi with a scientist’s meticulous curiosity and an artist’s sensibility, encouraged by Charles McIntosh, her local postman-naturalist who often supplied her with toadstool specimens to paint.

Her studies extended to culturing fungal spores in her kitchen and in 1896 she submitted a research paper, on the subject of velvet shank toadstools Flammulina volutipes (pictured below) to the Linnaean Society of London. At that time it didn’t admit women as members but her paper was read at a meeting and returned for revision but never resubmitted nor published.

She moved on to writing and illustrating some of the best-loved children’s stories, devoting the latter years of her life to sheep breeding and conserving the beloved Lake District landscape that was her home, but her mycological legacy lives on in her exquisite watercolours.

Attack of the parasitic jelly fungus

 

This gloopy-looking stuff is Yellow brain fungus Tremella aurantia, growing on the dead branch of a tree along one of my favourite walks, in the Deerness valley, County Durham. It’s a jelly fungus with a rather sinister lifestyle, parasitising another common fungus, hairy curtain crust Stereum hirsutum, which you can just see, dying, on the underside of the branch.

The microscopically-fine hyphae of the parasite, invisible to the unaided human eye, creep through the decaying wood, find and clamp onto those of their host and eventually kill it. The damp, foggy weather we’ve had recently has been perfect for the growth of the gelatinous parasite.

There are two common species of Tremella in the British fungal flora - this one and Tremella mesenterica - which are virtually identical and can only be easily identified by the hosts they parasitise: T. mesenterica preys on another crust fungus called Peniophora, which often grows on gorse stems hereabouts.

And here, a little further down the dead branch bearing the yellow brain fungus, is some more hairy curtain crust, so there’s plenty more of its victim for it to feed on.

Tree sparrow courtship

 

Excited male tree sparrow, displaying to a potential mate, in the garden earlier this week. Flitting around her, cocking his tail, trembling his drooping wings and singing for all he was worth. He senses that spring is not too far away now. 

The Curse of the Black Spot

 

The curse of the black spot! Tar spot fungus Rhytisma acerinum, that disfigures sycamore leaves in summer, continues to develop on its dead, decaying foliage in the leaf litter. The black spots become increasingly wrinkly as winter progress, then hundreds of asci - microscopically small flasks filled with needle-shaped spores - develop along the ridges. When spring arrives the spores are released into the air, just in time for them to infect a new crop of sycamore leaves, where they germinate and invade through the breathing pores (stomata) in the leaf surface.

Tar spot fungus is less common on urban sycamores that on trees in rural areas and it used to be thought that this was because the fungus was susceptible to sulphur dioxide in polluted city air. A more likely explanation could be that the fungus is less common on city sycamores because their fallen autumn leaves tend to be removed by councils from public places, so the annual cycle of reinfection from dead infected leaves is broken.

The long journey of the Weeping willow

 

A weeping willow on the bank of the river Wear below Durham cathedral, glowing in early afternoon winter sunshine. An idyllic spot for a riverbank picnic in summer, watching the boats on the river.

The true weeping willow Salix babylonica, of willow pattern ceramics fame, came to England from China and was carried by traders along the Silk Road to Aleppo in Syria, from whence it was brought to England in 1730. 

All the original introductions here were female trees and had to be propagated from cuttings, but these were not fully hardy in our climate and pure-line S. babylonica trees are now thought to be extinct here. Fortunately they hybridised easily with native willow species and have persisted as hybrids of unknown male parentage, although frequently-planted Salix x sepulcralis is thought to be a hybrid with white willow Salix alba. It came from a nursery in Berlin, sometime around 1888.

Willow species in general are notoriously prone to forming hybrids and can be hard to identify with certainty, without scrutinising bark, buds, leaves, flowers and general habit of the tree throughout the growing season.

Judging a book by its cover - and by its contents

 

Edwardian publishers certainly knew how to produce exquisite book covers. I found this charming, gilded, art nouveau example in a second-hand bookshop a few years ago. I was beguiled by the cover, but even more enchanted by the contents.

The cover illustration, and others inside, was painted by artist/illustrator William Bennett Robinson (1870-1915).

The text is by Thomas W. Hoare, Teacher of Nature Study, about whom there seems to be very little information, although I did find one reference that suggests he might have died in 1939.

The book is an omnibus edition of seven books of practical nature study, in the Look About You series published from 1904 onwards. I’m guessing that this de lux edition, which must have been quite expensive, might have been published around 1914. The publisher, T.C. & E.C. Jack, was taken over by another Scottish publisher, Nelson, in 1915.

Here’s Hoare’s preface, setting out his intentions, using the study of nature close to home as a gateway to a broader education based on a child’s natural curiosity. It seems to have been intended as a structured guide to educating children at home.

Each of the seven books is composed of lessons in the form of a conversation between a family member and the children, sometimes with experiments they performed together, and at the end of every lesson there are four questions or tasks for the children to address. At the end of every book there are teachers’ notes, which strongly emphasise the need for kindness and compassion for animals and the need to exercise care and restraint in collecting and keeping living organisms.

Harvest time. The period illustrations capture a lost rural world, of farming with heavy horses and hard manual labour.

Aeronautics, before powered flight became commonplace. The book teaches scientific concepts like cloud formation, rising air currents and air density, by referencing familiar everyday phenomena, from condensed steam from boiling kettles to intrepid balloonists.

Colour plates for insect identification

Wild flowers, butterflies and moths

And when lessons are over, letting off steam by chucking snowballs at a snowman effigy of teacher.

And finally, something else about the Look-About-You series that distinguished them from contemporary early 20th.century outdoors natural history manuals that were mostly written for boys; this series was for the edification of sons and daughters.

You can download free digitised copies of some of the series from the Project Gutenberg website

 

Velvet shank

 

Autumn is the main toadstool season but some hardy fungi produce theirs in the depths of winter, even during periods of frost and snow. This is velvet shanks Flammulina velutipes on the trunk of an old lime tree on the bank of the river Wear in Durham city. On mild, wet days the cap is smooth and shiny. The pale stem (stipe) darkens as it matures, developing a velvety texture.

Books say this species is edible when cooked. John Wright, the The River Cottage Mushroom Handbook described the flavour as ‘unusual ….. distinctly sweet and malty’ and the texture ‘pleasantly chewy’ but cautions against mistaking it for sulphur tuft (gastrointestinal devastation) or the funeral bell (the essential caution is implicit in the name). Velvet shank differs from both in having white spores.