Rambling brambles

There is something very stealthy about the way that brambles move around. The shoot in the photo above has used its prickles to grip the far side of the mossy wall, then extended its growth until it reached the top of the six foot barrier and is now undulating along this side of the wall. 

Eventually that long shoot will bend under its own weight, towards the ground....

..... and when it touches the soil this will happen - adventitious roots will form.

Now, securely anchored and with an additional supply of mineral nutrients and water, a new, long, arching shoot is beginning to form and soon the whole process will begin again. Constantly conquering new territories, bounding across the landscape.

Fruity

It looks like being a very poor year for brambles up here in Durham but it was a different story down in North East Lincolnshire at the weekend, where the blackberry bushes at the back of the sand dunes at Cleethorpes local nature reserve were laden with fast-ripening fruits.

The scrubby vegetation at the back of the dunes here is dominated by sea buckthorn, which also carried a fine crop of ripening berries, that look particularly attractive against the shrub's silver-grey foliage. Birds never seem very interested in these berries, which often are still untouched well into winter. The same can't be said for the elder berries here, which were being consumed rapidly by large, noisy flocks of starlings.

Many of the juvenile starlings were in their transitional plumage, still bearing traces of their first set of brown feathers but rapidly moulting into their smart spotty winter attire. 

After the Deluge .....

It was what my granny used to call "a clearing-up" shower. 

The ferocity of the rain hammering on the car roof drowned out our conversation, the road was awash and the windscreen wipers struggled to cope with the deluge. We were forced to pull over and park. We contemplated turning around and heading for home. 

But, as is often the way with the trailing clouds in a band of rain passing overhead during a depression, the short, intensive downpour suddenly slackened ....... and then stopped. Within a few minutes the sound of bird calls was added to the sound of water trickling down drains. A break in the clouds appeared, then a small patch of blue sky, then sunshine. 

We got out and walked.

The air was still cold and the vegetation was festooned with raindrops.

A few butterflies, sheltering in the undergrowth, cautiously opened their wings.

Somehow this skipper had survived unscathed, even though raindrops still clung to the harebell where it had taken refuge.

Bumblebees began to return to operating temperature in the sun, but this one was still so chilled that all it could do was raise a leg in self-defence ...

... but the butterflies were soon feeding on the devil's bit scabious flowers again ...

... in competition with hoverflies ......

... all seeking nectar supplies to restore their energy levels.

Within half an hour the breeze had shaken most of the water from the leaves and this caterpillar returned to feeding on nettle foliage ...

... where a cranefly sunbathed ......

.... and finally the bumblebees got busy again on the bramble blossom, which is very late after this soggy summer. They'd better get busy.......... 

........... because autumn is just around the corner, and the thistles are already releasing clouds of thistledown.

Arranging any kind of outdoor event in the British summer can be a nightmare, but our fast-changing weather patterns provide naturalists with some of their most memorable moments.

All pictures taken along the disused railway line between Romaldkirk and Cotherstone in Teesdale, last Wednesday, 29th. August.

Islands in the Stream

Now, I have to concede that this site of industrial dereliction might not look like a good place to spend a morning communing with nature, but it has its charms. This is the Ouseburn, a tributory of the Tyne that flows into the river about a kilometer downstream from the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this was the location of some of the most polluting industries imaginable: lead smelting works, potteries, iron foundries, flax spinning mills, holding pens for imported cattle, surrounded by slum housing and all discharging effluent into the tidal Ouseburn. Part of the Ouseburn Valley was filled in with noxious industrial waste and the tip sometimes spontaneously combusted during hot summers. Slum clearance and industrial decline left it as a site of dereliction until serious regeneration of the lower Ouseburn valley began in the late twentieth century. Old warehouses have become artists' studios, the Cluny pub is now one of Newcastle's best small music venues, there's a city farm, a riding school, music rehersal studios and the National Centre for Children's Books is nearby. The building on the right in the picture above is the posh Hotel du Vin (rooms start at £160 per night), formerly the Tyne Tees Steam Shipping Company headquarters.The derelict building with the chimney is an old Maynard's toffee works, now scheduled for redevelopment as a business centre for high-tech design studios. Nature, of course, has been creeping back here ever since the old industries closed. 

The latest development is a lock at the junction with the Tyne, which has converted the Ouseburn from a linear muddy puddle at low tide into a permanently filled canal ... with a small marina for pleasure boats (mostly converted ship's lifeboats). Just around the bend in the river in the picture above are all the new developments mentioned above.

There are some surprising wild flowers here. This is ramping fumitory, a sparsely distributed species in Northumberland that's usually associated with hedgebanks around arable fields in rural areas.

How come it's here, in the heart of the city? It probably arrived in hay for horses and has clung on - literally, it grows in cracks in walls - ever since.

Brambles (some ripening already) would have been early arrivals, in bird droppings. This is probably one of the best sites for brambling in the Toon, within a  mile of Newcastle city centre.

When nature comes back, people want to come back too. What I find fascinating about the Ouseburn is that, whenever I visit, nature has reconquered a little bit more of what was once an industrial hell-hole.... often with some inspired help from imaginative people. When the lock was built it created a canal with bare concrete walls, so to introduce wild flowers along the water's edge floating islands like this one were constructed, filled with waterside wild flowers and anchored to the wall.

Here's another one, under a mass of flowering brambles dangling over the wall. Purple loosestrife and winter mint are currently blooming in profusion on these islands......

... and the purple loosestrift was at its best this morning. Without these man-made islands there would be nowhere for it to take root.

At a time when almost all wildlife news in the media seems to be bad news, it's uplifting to visit a place like this where a century and a half of destruction is being rapidly reversed. This shoal of fish, cruising the surface waters of the revived Ouseburn this morning, seemed to be enjoying the revival and thriving .........  anybody know what species they are?(double-click for a larger image)

Season of Mouldy Fruitfulness

A few days of mild, humid weather has produced some fine displays of moulds and rust fungi on fruits and leaves that are reaching the end of their useful lives. This bramble is afflicted with both diseases – Botrytis mould consuming its rotting fruit and the rust fungus Phragmidium violaceum producing some beautifully colourful effects on its ageing foliage. There’s a peculiar kind of beauty to be found in decay.

Pristine bramble fruits, before Botrytis fungus found them.....