Backstone Bank wood

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary is about this fledgling tawny owl that we found comfortably ensconced in the crevice formed by the roots of an oak tree in Backstone Bank woods in Weardale. 

Here it is on the day that we found it .....

.... and here it is a few days later, although this might not be the same bird; it most likely had siblings, which the parents had distributed around the wood and would come back to feed at dusk.

Backstone bank is an ancient woodland SSSI and part of the forest that once clothed Weardale. It's a lovely sessile oak wood on acid soil, covering the hillside on the eastern edge of Tunstall reservoir.It's a popular spot for birders, not least because ....

...pied flycatchers nest there. Above, a male, below, .....

..... his consort, who is nesting ....

... in this nest box.

While we sat and watched this long-tailed tit caught caterpillars ...

... and this robin paid us a visit.

The woodland has lots of fallen wood that is left to decay, gradually sinking under a blanket of moss and woodland wild flowers.

There are some nice stands of wood horsetail and lots of ...

... bilberry.

Yellow pimpernel, an indicator species of ancient woodland, is plentiful here.

The trees are mainly sessile oak, with ash, hazel holly and birch and some scattered bird cherry and rowan.

All in all, a lovely place for a tawny owl to raise a family.

Spignel, Meum athemanticum: tales of Norse gods and bawdy behaviour

This plant, Spignel Meum athemanticum, must be a strong contender for the title of most attractive foliage in the carrot family (Umbelliferae).

It's a rare plant, confined to one site in Northumberland, a few places in Cumbria and rather more locations in Scotland. I've never seen it growing in the wild but was introduced to it by Frank and Marjorie Lawley, when I visited them in 2002 to write a feature about their garden at Herterton House in Northumberland for The Garden magazine. 

A few years ago I bought a plant in a nursery and have been growing it ever since. 

 

It makes a very attractive, compact mound of this finely divided foliage, then in May produces ..... 

.... small umbels of white flowers

David Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield, in their book Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: an Ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland [Timber Press 2004] describe how its aromatic roots were used to treat flatulence and how the plant was driven to the point of extinction in the Pennines when it was collected to make scented snuff.

They also describe alternative theories for the origin of its other name, baldmoney. One is that it was sacred to the Norse god Balder, the other that this is a corruption of the word 'bawd-money', alluding to its use as an abortifacient after the sobering consequences of bawdy behaviour.

Every flower tells a story ....

The amazing hidden world of tree root systems

Some fine examples of tree root systems - and (scroll down) the micro-habitat they sometimes create:



An old oak tree rooted in a rock face at Plankey Mill in Northumberland.

Sycamore, beside the river Tees at The Meeting of the Waters in Teesdale, where winter floods scoured the soil away, exposing the roots ...

.... so that a lot of tree seems to be balanced on quite a small root system!

Young beech roots at Allen Banks in Northumberland, again exposed by water erosion. Interestingly, you can see how the roots autograft on to each other when they come into direct contact. In a few decades it might look like this....




.......a wonderful mature beech near Wolsingham in Weardale, where the mass of autografted roots seem almost to have melted into the ground.

The hollows formed where roots have grafted onto one another often house small pools of water, known as phytotelmata, which are home to transient communities of small organisms. These mini-ponds, trapped in a cavity formed by the coalesced roots, can contain vast numbers of small organisms, feeding in bacteria and fungi growing on the rotting leaves trapped in the water. The pool is fed by rivulets of water that trickle down the trunk when it rains. Temporary pools of water trapped in plants like this are known as phytotelmata. The pools in this beech tree's roots hosted nothing larger than rat-tailed maggots - the larval stages of drone flies. But while the species diversity in the beech-tree pool might have been low, the sheer abundance of the tiny single-celled protists that are present can be staggering ..............

These little organisms, taken from one of these beech root pools, are called Colpidium colpoda.  They're single-cell protists that swim with incredible speed using ciliary hairs on their surface, that beat in rhythm. Here they're magnified one hundred times. This single drop of  water on a microscope slide probably contained about five hundred...

Here they are magnified two hundred times. The circles that you can see in some of them are contractile vacuoles that constantly expel water from the cell cytoplasm.

At 400 times magnification you can see the fine cilia (top right) that are arranged in rows over the surface of the cell - you can just make out their dark parallel lines and you can also see algae that the Paramecium has ingested, inside the cell.

Static images don't really do justice to the helter-skelter movement of these little protists, so click here and click here to take a look at these two video clips of this sample, which give a much better impression of what is going on in those little temporary pools of water that you find trapped in beech tree root systems.