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. 

Evening primrose

We came across this patch of evening primroses when we were walking through the sand dunes at Cleethorpes local nature reserve at the weekend. There are about twenty very confusing evening primrose species and interspecific hybrids but I suspect this one is probably Oenothera glazioviana (formerly known as Oe.erythrosepala), which comes from North America. 

There are no native species of evening primrose in Britain but this is one very attractive alien species that no one seems to object to when it escapes into the wild. It seems to thrive in waste places, especially in poor, arid soils. Recently I've seen it flowering well in a supermarket car park and on the edge of a pavement in a city centre. The seeds are very small and I imagine they are easily distributed on birds' feet, and the pale yellow flowers, which seem almost luminous at dusk, attract moths which must very effective pollinators; Sir Edward Salisbury, former director of Kew Gardens and noted authority on weeds and alien plants, once calculated that these plants commongly produce around 33,000 seeds each.

One species of evening primrose, Oenothera biennis, is sometimes cultivated as a crop, on account of its herbal medicinal value. The oil extracted from the seeds contains high levels of linoleic acid, which has a variety of medicinal uses.

Why do crane-flies lose legs so easily?

I've often wondered why crane-flies (like the individual that you can see if you click here) have a tendency to shed limbs so easily. This one, that found its way into our conservatory, has a full set of six but I've often seen individuals with half that number, still busy laying eggs in autumn. Maybe, for an insect that skims low over the grass to lay its eggs amongst grass roots, there's a benefit in being able to lose a limb because at this time of year there are spiders' webs everywhere. Perhaps being able to escape at the expense of a snared leg and maybe finish laying a full complement of eggs has some natural selective advantage in these insects. One way to find evidence, I suppose, would be to inspect spiders' webs for detached crane-fly legs - left by the ones that got away.

This individual is a female, identifiable by its pointed abdomen, and I think it's Tipula paludosa .... which, before it found its way into our conservatory, was probably laying eggs in my neighbour's lawn where its larvae (leatherjackets) will feed on the grass roots - if the starlings don't find them.

In this photo you can clearly see the paired appendages called halteres behind the wings. They move up and down in opposition to the beating of the wings, damping out the vertical oscillation that would otherwise result from the wing beats and blur the insect's vision, and also providing a way of sensing changes in direction that the wings can respond to. 

More on crane-flies here