Redwings: there go the holly berry Christmas decorations

Over the last couple of weeks I've invested a lot of time in trying to creep close enough to redwings to get a decent picture. They are extremely wary birds, so most attempts have ended in failure. The three pictures below were the best I could manage.

Then, three days ago, this redwing (below) turned up on the holly outside our front door, just ten feet from the window. I'd estimate that it must have consumed at least a couple of hundred berries. So many that sometimes it just seemed to sit on the branch in a dazed state, rather like me after a heavy Christmas dinner.. 

By the end of this week, aided by several voracious blackbirds, it will have polished off all the berries that we planned to use as Christmas decorations.

An Autumn Walk along the River Tees

The long, narrow gorge spanned by Egglestone's Abbey Bridge bridge provides one the most picturesque viewing points on the River Tees in autumn

This is the view from the bridge looking upstream - Egglestone Abbey is just  above the trees in the middle distance (double-click) and is ...

...... visible from the bridge now that the leaves are falling.

The view downstream - there are footpaths on both sides of the river and you can follow it down to its confluence with the River Greta, at the Meeting of the Waters.

The river squeezes through narrow gaps and tumbles over boulders ...

.... and you can hear it through the trees all the way along the path, even when it isn't in spate.

The high humidity in the gorge makes this a fine habitat for mosses and ferns like this polypody growing as an epiphyte on a tree branch over the river.

Yellowing horse chestnut leaves provide a sunbathing spot for flies whose days are numbered, now that frosts are on their way.

Nectar-rich ivy flowers provide a last-minute refuelling station for drone flies.

Shades of yellow - hazel, oak and beech autumn colours.

Some of the large beeches have been attacked by honey fungus - always fatal, but it can take decades to kill the tree.

A nuthatch, dangling down to pick beech nuts out of beech mast - it seems to be a 'mast year', with a very heavy crop.

Ripe holly berries are a reminder that there are only 50 shopping days until Christmas.

Downstream there are some wild cherries with a fiery display of autumn colours..

... and a fine crop of ripe yew berries.

A passing shower leaves a rainbow, which is wasted on those two sheep that are watching - they only have dichromatic vision and can't distinguish red from green.

Looking back upstream - on what Kenneth Grahame in the Wind in the Willows called a 'golden afternoon'...

A Tree-Spotter's Guide to Flowers: 6

The tiny green flowers of Spindle Euonymus europaeus are some of the least impressive of any British native tree but they go on to become one of the most eye-catching fruits. The flowers are pollinated by small flies, which also perform the same service for....

.........holly. There's an old country saying that a good holly berry crop indicates a hard winter on the way - in reality, it's the result of a warm spring when weather conditions during the flowering period in May were good for the flies.

Yellow Holly Berries

Season's Greetings and Best Wishes for 2011 to all readers of this blog

 

These berries, belonging to the yellow cultivar of holly Ilex europaeus 'bacciflava', are the only berries left in my garden after weeks of freezing weather. All the scarlet holly berries disappeared within a week of the first snowfall, along with all the other red berries, but the birds have completely ignored these yellow fruits. As far as I can tell, they haven't eaten a single berry.

Birds' vision is much more sensitive to the red end of the spectrum (bird-pollinated flowers are almost always red) and it's tempting to speculate that these yellow fruits simply aren't visible to the blackbirds and thrushes that stripped all the other berries. But I'm sceptical about so simple an explanation. They quickly find and eat the blueberries that I try to grow in autumn, which reflect light at the short-wave blue end of the spectrum, and yellow berries are much closer to the red end of the spectrum. So maybe there's something else that makes yellow holly berries unappealing to birds, even when they are on the verge of starvation in a winter such as this.......... 

Only 218 days until Christmas

They say that a heavy crop of holly berries in autumn is a sign of an imminent hard winter but what it really signifies is that the tree experienced favourable pollination conditions back in the spring. There are separate male and female holly trees so they need to be cross pollinated by insects (usually flies and perhaps small bees), so good weather for pollinator activity means a heavy berry crop come December. These are female holly flowers and their green centre (the ovary) will start to develop into the scarlet berry once an insect arrives, attracted by the nectar that's visible in this picture, and deposits a load of pollen on that sticky stigma.