A harvest festival of ripe fruit and colourful butterflies

 Apples, pears and plums are ripening faster than we can eat them, so the bird table has been taken over by butterflies feeding on the fermenting juice of over-ripe fruit.

There were are least twenty red admirals and half a dozen comma butterflies getting legless on alcoholic fruit juice in this afternoon’s warm sunshine in the garden. When they are in such a lethargic, inebriated state butterflies are very easy to approach and if they do fly they settle again almost immediately.

Drinkers on the bird table ‘Last Chance’ saloon.

Comma butterflies on pears, a red admiral on a rotting apple, plus a bonus seven-spot ladybird that probably came to feed on the mould growing on the fruit.

Comma butterflies seem to have a particular liking for pear juice

A red admiral with its proboscis sunk deep in the hole left by a plum stalk, drinking sun-warmed plum juice

As sometimes happens, a fight broke out between drunkards when this red admiral and comma butterfly were competing for the same feeding cavity in a pear. Wing blows were exchanged and the comma prevailed. It seems even some butterflies can become aggressive if they over-indulge with alcohol, although most seem to just become semi-comatose, to the point where they’ll crawl onto your finger rather than fly away if you poke them.

Scrumping bears

Whenever I look over a garden wall and see this sight it takes me straight back to youthful scrumping adventures. This is an old and very fine apple tree, in a garden in Durham city, that holds onto its apples right up until Christmas. Fine food for fieldfares, because the fruit is too high up to be pickable (these must be around 15 metres above ground) and will most likely be smashed when it falls and hits the deck. I wish I knew what variety it is.

Genuine native crab apples are quite rare and their fruit stays green and incredibly bitter, but there are plenty of hedgerows around here with feral culinary apples that must have sprouted from discarded apple cores. The skin colour of this one, which is just about to rot, is particularly attractive. 

Molecular biologists, comparing DNA sequences, have shown that the cultivated sweet apple Malus pumila is not descended from crab apple M.sylvestris.  Dr. Barrie Juniper at Oxford University has suggested that the unknown ancestor of culinary sweet apples appeared about 10 million years ago in the Tien Shan forests of Central Asia, where brown bears may have played a role in its evolution. Apple trees always cross pollinate, so apple seedlings are genetically variable and never exactly resemble their parents. Juniper has argued that wild brown bears, known to have a ‘sweet tooth’, would have selected the sweetest, largest fruit as part of their autumn diet. Tough seeds of these superior fruits passed through bears’ digestive tracts unharmed and were dispersed widely. Once humans arrived on the scene their horses, also partial to apples, distributed apple seeds in their droppings as tribes migrated westwards. With the advent of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago, humans began selecting even sweeter varieties from the pool of genetic variability in feral apples and learned to graft them, to perpetuate the sweetest varieties.

A Tree-Spotter's Guide to Buds: part 4

Aspen Populus tremula twigs are tipped with these sharply pointed buds that sometimes have a slight stickiness about their bud scales. This is quite common in poplar species and is most pronounced in balsam poplars, where the resin that's responsible has a wonderful fragrance. Poplars have a tendency to hybridise, sometimes making identification tricky, but aspen is easy to identify when it's in leaf because of a peculiarity of the leaf stalks; they're flattened from side to side, so the leaves tremble from side to side in the slightest breeze - hence the Latin epithet tremula. They also turn a wonderful shade of lemon yellow in autumn, and the sight of a whole tree of lemon yellow foliage trembling in the wind is something to behold.

Apple Malus domestica buds are blunt and downy, with few bud scales. The knobbly, scarred twigs have a character all of their own, especially........

...in old trees that have acquired their own epiphytic flora of lichens. Old orchards, now fast disappearing, are wonderful resources for people and wildlife and their cause has been vigorously championed by that admirable organisation Common Ground - see http://www.commonground.org.uk/

Most hedgerow apples are likely to be descendants of discarded cores of domesticated apples, rather than the native crab apple Malus sylvestris

The buds on the main twigs of wild cherry or gean Prunus avium are not particularly distinctive but a little way down the twig from these you'll find....

... the fruiting spurs that will carry those clusters of dazzling white flowers in spring - and in summer the cherries. Over the last couple of years I've tasted quite a lot of wild cherries and this particular tree bears unusually juicy and large deep red fruits, that make excellent cherry sauce for pouring over ice cream. Unfortunately, someone else has made the same discovery and this year raided all the low branches on the tree before I could get to it. All I can say is that I hope they suffered the same fate as the badger that had over-endulged in the fallen fruits: the ground nearby carried the purplish-red telltale signs of a badger with a severe stomach upset, along with a mass of cherry stones that had passed unharmed through its digestive system.

Sallow (aka pussy willow aka goat willow) Salix caprea carries green buds with no apparent bud scales, The single scale that sheaths the whole bud deepen in colour through the winter, taking on a brownnish hue, and when the leaf and flower tissue inside swells in spring the whole covering is shrugged off.

For part 3 see http://cabinetofcuriosities-greenfingers.blogspot.com/2009/12/tree-spotters-guide-to-buds-part-3.html

For more posts on tree ID click here