Gorse seed weevils

 Gorse can be found in bloom in every month of the year, even in the depths of winter. I don't know how many of these flowers produce seed without bumblebees and honeybees to pollinate them but I do know, from experiments I did years ago, that their pollen is viable and capable of germinating at low temperatures, close to freezing. So it may be that, with some violent buffeting from winter winds, some pollen is shaken onto stigmas and they do produce some seed.

If they do, then they may avoid seed predation by the gorse weevil Exapion ulicis, which hibernates through winter. This little beetle emerges from hibernation in spring and lays eggs on the ovary, where its grubs feed on the developing seed through the summer. They pupate as the pod ripens and adults often hatch in the pods, only to be thrown out along with any remaining seeds when the pods burst open on warm summer days.

When the autumn weather is wet some of the seed pods do not develop walls that are brittle enough to split open, so the weevils die, trapped inside. I took some old, undehisced pods home and opened a few to see if there were any dead weevils inside, and found a few live ones. 

When they fell out of the pods I thought they were dead, because they were lying on their backs with their legs curled up, but this was just thanatosis - feigning death, a predator avoidance strategy which weevils often use when danger threatens. Soon their were waving their legs in the air and rolling over onto their feet, to scuttle away across the kitchen table.

Gorse seed weevils are very effective seed predators and have been used in New Zealand and California, where gorse has been introduced and has become a noxious weed, in attempts to limit its invasive tendencies.

Goldcrest

When our kids were little they used to call goldcrests 'squeaky wheels' because their thin, repetitious, high pitched notes sounded like the squeaky wheel of the push-chair.

It will be about three months before goldcrests start singing and at this time of year, because they are quiet most of the time, and because they are so small, these little birds are easily overlooked.

They spend most of their time in conifers but this one was flitting around in a gorse bush, probably on the lookout for spiders - which must be hard to find in January. Sometimes these can be very approachable - this individual came within a few feet of me.

It's remarkable how closely the hue of the goldcrest's yellow crest matches the colour of gorse flowers.

Northumberland Coast

Just come back from a couple of days on the Northumberland coast, which was windy, cold but indescribably beautiful.

Cullernose point.......

.......with its breeding colony of  kittiwakes and fulmars, which also has .....



.... sea spleenwort fern growing is fissures beside the seabirds' nests.

Gorse, between Craster and Dunstanburgh flowering more profusely than I can ever remember and, appropriately, providing a perch for this ....

















... stonechat (??)

Primroses by the sea near Craster

Sea pink Armeria maritima blooming in a rock crevice at Cullernose point

The other common name for sea pink is thrift, a virtue that it was used to symbolise on the old pre-decimalisation brass threepenny pieces.. 

Scurvy grass flowering on the wall of Craster harbour

Knotted wrack Ascophyllum nodosum on the intertidal rocks at Low Newton, along with ....

... channelled wrack Pelvetia canaliculata growing around a rock pool

Newly minted butterfly.....

We found this newly-emerged green-veined white, still 'pumping up' its hind wings, when we walked along the sea cliffs south of Seaham this morning.

This early purple orchid - the first I've seen this year - was flowering in the meadows near Hawthorn Dene and was already past its best. Spring flowers are enjoying a very short season this year, having been held back for so long............... 

........... but the display of cowslips in the same meadow is magnificent. We also saw ....

............ a few false oxlips, which are the natural hybrid between primroses and cowslips.

Down on Blast beach, at the base of the cliffs, landslips have created sheltered, steep banks at the top of the beach that are carpeted in primroses.




The finest floral display, though, is at the top of the cliffs, where the gorse is in full bloom, with its wonderful coconut aroma and .....




...flowers that are so closely packed together that they completely hide the bushes

Shiver Stabilisation System

I was so cold  and shivering so much when we walked along the river Wear near Durham this afternoon that I could hardly hold the camera still....... which made these pictures a severe test of Panasonic's image stabilisation system. Even dead hogweed umbels are attractive when they're covered in a rime of frost.

I takes more than sub-zero temperatures to stop gorse flowering.

Dead, but still looking good....

These carline thistles Carlina vulgaris flowered last summer but their papery seed heads survive the winter and still look decorative in spring. Photographed yesterday on the cliffs south of Seaham in Co.Durham, along with...

..... blackthorn coming into bloom ....

..... dog's mercury ......

.... some magnificent, coconut-scented gorse blossom ...

..... stinking hellebore Helleborus foetidus, almost certainly a garden escape .....

..... along with some irrepressible daffodils, struggling to flower through a tangle of last year's bramble stems

Thornhope Beck

Today's Guardian Country Diary describes a walk along Thornhope Beck, a tributary of Waskerley Beck that flows into the river Wear at Wolsingham in Weardale. The walk starts here, on the road from Wolsingham to Tunstall Reservoir. When this line of ash trees, all of equal stature, were planted they must have been part of a hedgerow that has long-since disappeared. Now they are slipping past their prime and have some dead branches which ....

.... make them excellent drumming sites for great spotted woodpecker courtship.

A little bit further along the footpath, where these stepping stones cross Thornhope beck, there is a magnificent old beech tree ...

...... whose trunk seems to be melting into the ground.

On the south facing slopes of this little valley primroses have been in bloom for a couple of weeks.

The gorse has been in bloom all winter and shelters an extensive rabbit warren.

At this point there are two ways to cross the meandering Thornhope beck, which doesn't have a lot of water in it because it has been a very dry spring: either take the footbridge or the ford.

This Scots pine plantation used to host red squirrels, but I haven't seen one here for 15 years. There were plenty of 7-spot ladybirds though, sunning themselves on the south side of the trees in the late afternoon. A few years ago the ladybird population in Durham plummeted but it seems to have recovered well; I can't recall a spring when I've seen so many. When I walked along here there were several sunbathing on every fencepost.

Beyond the Scots pine plantation the path runs through what my kids used to call 'the sunken lane' when we brought them on walks through here 25 years ago. It's a track worn down by feet, hooves and cartwheels, where stock was moved between pastures and grazed in the woods in the way. Because of the depredations of sheep and cattle there isn't much regeneration of new trees and many of the old ones are decaying and shedding limbs ....

... which makes this excellent woodpecker feeding and nest hole territory.

Beyond the woodland the oaks become more sparse and well-spaced, so I suppose you could call this habitat woodland-pasture.

I sat under this oak as the shadows lengthened and listened to more woodpeckers drumming.

Under the oak there were spruce cones that had been carried here out of the nearby conifer plantation. The scales on this cone have been gnawed away by a grey squirrel ...

..... while this one shows the tell-tale feeding activity of a woodpecker, which has wedged the cone in the oak tree, hacked it with its beak to extract the seeds then let the cone drop to the ground. This oak must have been the woodpecker's favourite feeding tree - there were over 20 similarly shredded spruce cones on the ground underneath it.

The scolding call of this mistle thrush, perched in the topmost branches of an oak, could be heard right across the valley. It probably already has a nest with eggs; mistle thrushes are early nesters.

There's a fine view from here. This is the view eastwards, down the valley, with the swelling buds of the silver birches beginning to impart a warm reddish tint in he tree crowns ....

.... and this is the view westwards, up onto the high pastures and moorland.


Which direction to go from here? Eastwards, down the valley towards home. It had been a glorious day, but as the sun dipped below the hills the temperature dropped like a stone.