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.

Woodland walk along the river Tees that J.M.W.Turner trod 200 years ago

This is the view of the river Tees from Abbey bridge near Egglestone, on a tranquil spring day. When the snow melts in Upper Teesdale this becomes a raging torrent, roaring through the rocky gorge. 

The woodland on the steep banks of the river here is exceptionally beautiful in spring, carpeted with wild flowers. Last week wood anemones were the star of the show; next week the bluebells will take over.

Fallen trees are left to gently decay and often develop their own 'garden' of flowers as they rot - like this one with a flora of wood anemone, ramsons and herb Robert.

Last week the bluebells had just begun to flower but it will be early May before the tree leave canopy begins to close over them. The fully-grown trees are mostly sycamore and oak.

The path winds through a dense carpet of wood anemones, high above the river.

Wood speedwell Veronica montana

When we arrived there was still a chill in the air and dew on the leaves, so the wood anemone flowers were all nodding downwards ...

..... but by mid-morning, as the sun climbed higher in the sky, they turned to face it.

This wood anemone had purple leaves.

Some early wild cherry blossom, hanging over the river.

Wood sorrel, nestling against a moss-covered tree base. The leaves fold down at night, like triangular tents.

Beyond the woodland the path passes through pastures, with ground ivy Glechoma hederacea flowering in the shelter of a dry stone wall.

Last week the first influx of warblers arrived, with this willow warbler and blackcaps singing

Last time we passed this way the elms were just coming into flower. Today their clusters of seeds were well-formed.

A bee-fly, a parasite of mining bees, sunbathing in a clearing.

Crane-flies mating.

A comma butterfly soaking up the spring sunshine after a long hibernation.

In 1816 J.M.W. Turner must have walked this footpath and perhaps sat somewhere near here to sketched this scene, at the confluence of the river Greta and the river Tees, which he painted in 1818. I like to think that perhaps he sat under this ancient oak, which would have been more youthful then, to view the scene, which you can see in his painting by clicking here.

Ivy - the all-year-round carbon dioxide fixer

Ivy's flowers provide a wonderful nectar and  pollen resource for insects in autumn (see some examples at the bottom of this post) and its berries are a vital food  resource for migrant birds in early spring, but it also has another important attribute with more general implications.

As an evergreen that stores carbon in its woody trunk, ivy is an all year-round carbon dioxide fixer, constantly removing the gas from the atmosphere. In that respect it contributes towards combatting the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is the underlying cause of global climate change.

Deciduous trees like this ash have a short growing growing season in our seasonal climate. It comes into leaf in May and sheds its foliage in September, so for about half the year it fixes no carbon dioxide at all. But when it supports a luxuriant growth of ivy the two organisms together fix carbon dioxide 365 days a year.







































The combined efforts of an ash tree with ivy cladding are likely to be more effective at fixing atmospheric carbon dioxide than an ash tree alone.

The tangle of  thick, woody ivy stems on this sycamore are as effective a store of carbon as the tree's trunk.

Ivy can even turn a dead tree into a carbon dioxide fixing pillar of evergreen foliage, as it did with this dead oak at Egglestone in Teesdale a few years ago. Even better, in autumn this stump became a tower of flowers, humming with insects that came for the nectar and pollen. In spring it was covered in berries.

Another example, at Wolsingham in Weardale.

Sadly, there are still plenty of ivy-haters around who are convinced that ivy is a parasite (it isn't, it just uses trees for support). They'll usually also advance the argument that a top-heavy mass of ivy is likely to bring trees down in winter gales, but most trees that are felled in this way are moribund anyway and topple because they have already been weakened by root-rotting fungi, not by ivy. Logically, a good cladding of well-rooted ivy stems is more likely to anchor a shaky tree, delaying its demise. 

The fact that trees that have been killed by fungi often have a healthy covering of ivy suggests that it might well be resistant to some of the fungi that kill trees.

From all of this you might have gathered that I'm something of an ivy enthusiast - not least because of the insect fauna that its flowers attract in autumn. All of the pictures below were taken in a few minutes late last October on another ivy clad tree just across the road from the oak-clad stump pictured above. 

A hay meadow going to seed

Monday's Guardian Country Diary is an account of a wonderful hay meadow at the eastern end of Hawthorn dene, a Durham Wildlife Trust nature reserve on the Durham coast. 

Most of the Pennine hay meadows are cut at around the third week of July, which allows the farmer to take a decent hay crop but also allows key meadow wild flowers - like hay rattle - to set seed. This meadow is managed entirely for its glorious native flora and so was still uncut when we visited in late August. There were still plenty of species in flower, including knapweed, meadowsweet, field scabious, devils bit scabious and hemp agrimony, but all the plants here were also producing masses of seed. 

This view was taken looking northwards .......

.......... this one is from the coast side, looking towards the wooded dene ...

.......... and this is the view to the south. In spring this field holds thousands of cowslips, together with early purple orchids and wood cranesbill. In summer meadow and bloody cranesbill are prominent. When I walked across here I counted about fifty species without even bending down to have a close look - I suspect that there are least twice as many here. 

Although it's cut very late, it still must be cut and a hay crop taken, because there is a constant rain of seeds in autumn from the wooded dene and without the mower it would soon become ash, sycamore and hawthorn shrub - last autumn's tree seedlings were already well established. 

Field scabious flowers produce these attractive hemispheres of bristly seeds after pollination

The late flowering hemp agrimony is a great attraction for butterflies like this comma.

Devil's bit scabious, one of the most attractive late summer wild flowers in this limestone grassland, and so called because the stumpy root looks like Old Nick himself has taken a bite out of it.

Although vast quantities of seed are produced by the plants here only a small minority germinate in any single year and become mature plants, simply because there is so much competition in a dense sward with so many species. The best germination sites are mole hills like this, which provide a perfect vacant seed bed for any seed fortunate enough to land on them. Every hay meadow needs mole hills.

The missing comma ........... a butterfly with two different life histories

This comma butterfly has been flitting around our garden all day but only once landed on the ripe plums on the bird table - the butterfly magnet that's now attracting several red admirals. Then it disappeared, or so it seemed ...........

.... until I eventually found it under the bird table, drinking the fermenting plum juice that was oozing through the mesh trays - you can see its tongue drinking from the dark patch of sweet juice here .

If you take a look at the top image and this one (another comma sunbathing on the beech hedge a couple of days ago), it's clear that there are distinct differences compared with .....

....... this specimen which was photographed in summer. It's the form of comma known as hutchinsonii, which is much paler and has wings that are not so deeply scalloped around the edges as the dark-winged form.

These are the  two forms of comma which have different life histories. Darker, deeply scalloped and paler, less scalloped forms are produced in the first generation to hatch, in early summer, but only the pale form (form hutchinsonii) then lays eggs in summer - the dark form just feeds then eventually hibernates. Dark-winged progeny from eggs laid by the pale form emerge as a second brood in late August and these will hibernate alongside the much older, non-breeding, dark-winged first brood individuals.

Willowherb Blizzard

This diadem spider Araneus diadematus laboured to spin its invisible snare but made the mistake of weaving it downwind of a patch of Rosebay willowherb ....

... which made it instantly visible to insects that might otherwise have blundered into it. I watched the spider - perhaps driven by hunger after failing to catch any prey - meticulously trying to remove the cottony seeds from the web. It managed to clear the central  zone, but the outer sticky threads ....

.....collected more seeds faster than it could remove them, thanks ..

... to this large patch of willowherb upwind of the web, that released a blizzard of seeds with every puff of wind.

It's interesting to watch the willowherb seed pods open. First the four outer segments peel back like brittle banana skins, exposing ....

... a double row of seeds on each.  In still air they remain attached in rows....

.......pushed upwards on the cotton threads as they dry in the sun ....

 

.... until the slightest puff of wind whisks them away and up into the thermals. No wonder this plant is such a successful coloniser.

It's also the food plant of the elephant hawk-moth caterpillar 

Last Thursday's Guardian Country Diary was an account of pursuing this comma butterfly into a patch of willowherb.....and unleashing a blizzard of seeds in the process.