Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wetlands

Definitely not a Jack Snipe

This morning dawned bright and crisp, all the car windscreens covered in frost (the air 1.8 Celsius). In the garden, a Chiffchaff was singing, not a bird that often visits here: probably it has only just flown in from Africa.

Constrained to stay indoors all morning, I managed to get out to the Wetland Centre in the afternoon. There was a buzz of excitement in the hide, faces and optics jammed up against the windows, notebooks at the ready: someone had seen a Jack Snipe. A young man with a Canon SLR camera and a cream-coloured telephoto lens asked if I knew the difference between the Jack and the Common Snipe. Er, I said. It has shorter legs, a shorter bill, no pale stripe on its crown, and it bobs up and down a lot. He looked just a tiny bit embarrassed. Could I tell from a photograph? I went over and peered into the bright little screen. The crown, striped or not, was not in view; half the beak was in the mud; and the legs were bent and seemed … shortish. I said I couldn’t tell and did he have another photo. He apologised, the next one was overexposed. To me, it looked much more like a Common Snipe. Where did he see it? He pointed down, where I’d seen a Common Snipe zigzag in across the water and land. I said I thought it was probably a Common Snipe: he hadn’t seen it bobbing up and down? He thought not. I observed that the light was difficult, as the sun kept on coming out of a cloud, and the water varied from dazzling to nearly black in the reflections; did he bracket the exposures? He said yes, it would be a good idea. He took some more photos, said he had a nice one against the dark water. I looked into the screen again: it was true, the contrast of the sunlit brown-and-cream of the camouflaged plumage and the velvet-black water was quite lovely. I smiled and murmured that it was beautiful, but definitely not a Jack Snipe. We had both enjoyed seeing the commoner species, so close, so bright, so crisply patterned, in such fresh spring weather.

I left the hide and walked quietly around the sheltered lagoon. On the grassy bank, a Green Woodpecker’s red cap and black moustache – it was a female – caught my attention. The way the woodpecker was probing quickly in the soft ground with her long pointed beak, then bobbing up to take a quick look around for possible predators, was remarkably snipe-like. I suppose the problem of feeding on something buried a distance beneath the surface pretty much guarantees you are going to be vulnerable while your beak is jammed into the mud and you are busy feeling with your tongue to decide if you’ve caught something edible… your attention is simply not going to be on the sky for those moments. It was curious to feel the similarity between two such different birds as the big hole-dwelling woodpecker with its jolly green and yellow plumage and its black and red face markings,  and the plump little snipe with its marvellously cryptic brown and cream camouflage jacket, and an absurdly long beak. Each was delightful; but definitely not a Jack Snipe.

Nature Reserves, Wetlands, Wildlife

Summer, Spring, Winter … in a day

Large Cumulus at Wraysbury
Large Cumulus at Wraysbury

We had summer already. Yes, in March.  It was baking hot for two weeks, then it ended as suddenly as it began. Then we had spring: the grass started to grow; the gooseberry bush is covered in its fresh green dress; the cherry trees in the streets are glowing with white and pink blossom; now the plum tree too is following with its delicate white flowers.

I grabbed my binoculars and went down to Wraysbury Lakes to see if any warblers had arrived. Even from the road I could hear a Chiffchaff singing; there were at least 10 singing around the lake, so plenty of migrant birds must have arrived to join any hardy overwinterers in the springtime. A Cetti’s Warbler, too, sang its loud brief song from the waterside. But no other warblers, yet; the chorus included a Song Thrush as well as the usual small birds, Great Tits making an odd rasping noise today (nothing like the typical ticha-ticha-ticha call), Robins, Dunnocks, Wrens, a Blackbird.

On the water, I had a surprise: there were two female Goldeneye still present, and a handsome male not far from them. Their biological clocks are still on the ‘Winter’ setting, clearly; their far northern breeding grounds guaranteed to be bitterly cold, devoid of food so early in the year. And near them, two pairs of Pochard, the handsomely rufous-headed males gleaming in the bright sunshine.

A loud splashing alerted me to the presence of an aggressive Mute Swan, its neck folded back, its wings raised threateningly; it had flown a short distance to warn off a rival male, which did its best to appear unconcerned. They both swam very fast, repeating the flying off a short distance  (the rival) and noisily giving chase (the threatener) three times. Eventually the rival decided he had saved face enough, and flew off a hundred metres or so, leaving most of the lake to the victor.

I turned to walk on, and out of the blue sky came a minute’s hail, the grains about 5 mm across, pattering cleanly on to the ground. The wind freshened to force 4 from the southwest, feeling wintry on my ears; presumably up at Cumulus cloud level, the wind was strong enough to carry the hail some distance sideways from where it had formed.

Conservation, Gardening

How to Prune a Fruit Tree

Ice patterns in puddle, Huckerby's Headows
Ice patterns in puddle, Huckerby’s Headows

I arrived at Huckerby’s Meadows in the crisp early morning. No, I hadn’t heard of it either: it was round the back of the industrial estate at Cranford, squeezed in between the edge of London and the perimeter of Heathrow airport. The puddles were interestingly frozen, the looping pattern suggesting successive stages of freezing.

Wheels down: right under the flight path at the end of Heathrow's north runway
Wheels down: right under the flight path at the end of Heathrow’s north runway

The meadows have miraculously survived untouched by the rushing development all around them. In fact, it protected them – nobody wants to live exactly under the end of the flight path, just before the planes drop over the airport fence and shriek to a halt on the runway; and the airport itself may well have had designs on the land, buying it up just in case, but not sure what to do with it. Huckerby’s meadows are now leased by the airport authority to London Wildlife Trust. It discovered a hidden corner of England, taken over by wildlife: I saw muntjac deer prints, jays, a green woodpecker, mallard ducks, a singing song thrush, and fieldfares chattering in the hedges.

A carpet of crab apples - surely there for a reason
A carpet of crab apples – surely there for a reason

The meadows had become seriously overgrown with brambles, creeping across the grass from the hedges. Volunteers have now cleared most of them, revealing a curious sight: the meadows contain a large number of big, old crab apple trees in their midst, nowhere near the hedgerows, so they must have been there for a purpose. A possible clue is in the carpet of fallen crab apples: perhaps old Huckerby found them useful fodder for his pigs? The crab is so sour that it is barely suitable as human food – crab apple jelly about covers it – but pigs will eat them as a change from the swill they were presumably fed on, in those days.

We volunteers had been lucky enough to get a place on a fruit tree pruning course, run jointly by London Wildlife Trust and the London Orchard Project. The course tutor, Bob, had come down from Norfolk to get us up to speed. The pole saws we had to use were remarkable, extending to 12 foot long, with a viciously sharp curved saw at the far end – think of the scythe in the hands of the black-cowled figure of Death, and you have the general idea. Bob effortlessly lopped off an offending branch ten feet above his head. We wore awkward goggles and hard hats; fresh, sharp-edged sawdust falling in your eyes means an instant visit to casualty, and of course as you saw something and look up, that’s just where the stuff is going to fall.

Er, how do I hold this? LWT volunteers trying out pole saws for the very first time
Er, how do I hold this? LWT volunteers trying out pole saws for the very first time

Bob explained remedial pruning; you don’t want ‘a tree on top of a tree’, a new vertical shoot rising from the end of an exposed branch, or the tree will get topheavy and split. You can’t just hack away: the tree will go into emergency overgrowth mode if you cut away more than 20% of the branches in a year. If an individual branch is heavy, just slicing away from the top means it will split when you are halfway through, letting wet and fungi into the wound, so it is best to cut in stages, reducing the weight by cutting smaller branches further out. Then you can cut the main branch part-way through from the bottom, finishing off from the top for a neat job, a cut surface that will shed rainwater cleanly. And you want to shape the tree neatly, with no crossing branches: they should radiate out tidily, giving each other space. Suddenly there was a lot to think about, and we looked at trees with newly informed interest. Then it was time to try it for ourselves. It was a lot harder than watching Bob do it; the poles were tricky to manoeuvre through the tangle of branches, the sun was in our eyes, and sawing at a distance felt nothing like holding a handsaw. But with supervision and encouragement we got the hang of it, and were soon bringing sizeable lumps of wood safely down to earth.

Bob also answered our questions about fruit trees – I needed something to pollinate my Cox’s Orange Pippin apple as it wasn’t bearing much fruit. The pollinator needs to be a suitable variety, so the flowers are open at the same time and the pollen is not rejected as being the same – Coxes do not self-pollinate. Lord Lambourn, for instance, is a good choice, as it is a useful cooking apple to complement the sweet eating Cox, and the two varieties pollinate each other as the bees fly about the garden visiting flowers.

By the end of the day, I had learnt a great deal, realising that I was only just beginning to grasp the rudiments of a fascinating subject. Maybe I’ll try grafting next year.

Natural History, Nature Reserves

Drown that Dabchick

On a glittering, beautiful spring day I visit the London Wetland Centre. Even out in the street the magnolias and cherries are dazzling, splendid in full flower. Inside, the blackthorns are covered head to foot in soft, pure white blossom, like costume drama heroines in broderie anglaise.

Every species seems to be celebrating springtime. The parakeets race overhead in pairs. My first red mason bee of the year perches on the welcome signboard. Redshanks stilt-walk about in the shallow water, probing in the mud with their long beaks. A reed bunting, handsome with black and white head markings, sings from atop a bush. A greylag goose flaps his wings, vigorously chases off a Canada goose, several times; then both start courting their females. Cetti’s warblers sing, very close and really loud. A little troop of long-tailed tits flit between trees. A greater spotted woodpecker drums rapidly on a tree trunk. Little clouds of midges enjoy the warm sunshine. A pair of shelduck snooze like holidaymakers on an island; a large cormorant with fine large white thigh patches and grey head and neck stretches out his wings in the species’ classic Christ-on-the-cross pose: renaissance painters used the cormorant for its symbolism. The first chiffchaff of the year warbles out its simple happy song.

But all is not sweetness and light. In the flooded reedbed, a tremendous amount of splashing, struggling and trilling disturbs the peace. A coot seems to have decided to try to drown a dabchick, a little grebe. Perhaps it is too close to the coot’s nest. Whatever the reason, the dabchick keeps on vanishing underwater and popping up nearby, squealing loudly, as the coot splashes about aggressively. If the coot really hopes to drown the bright little waterbird, it is disappointed: the dabchick is as buoyant as a cork, bobbing instantly to the surface and definitely alive.  Spring has sprung.

Conservation, Wildlife

Building a Stag Beetle Loggery

Packing the Logs in Tight

Today was an amazingly hot day for mid-March. It dawned foggy and chill, but quickly warmed up. Down at the Gunnersbury Triangle, a big pile of coppiced willow logs and some birch trunks were waiting to be built into a loggery. This is by intention a home for the stag beetle, which happens to have its British stronghold centred pretty much on south and west London. The stag beetle larvae are soft, white helpless grubs, a ready meal for a fox or a hungry bird – except that they live underground, or rather in timber which is in contact with the ground. They tunnel through the dead wood with their only really hard dark parts, their mouthparts, grow fat, split their skins and continue eating wood and tunnelling along, gradually making holes of larger and larger diameter. After some years – it can be up to seven – they metamorphose into handsome adult beetles with their black and shiny chestnut carapaces, walk or fly, mate, lay eggs in dead timber which is in contact with the soil, and die.

DSCN0268 Completed Trench for Loggery;
Completed Trench for Loggery

To accommodate this bizarre life history, we dug a trench somewhat more than knee deep – quite a feat in the sticky brown clay with some flint gravel – and packed in the logs as tight and close as we could get them.

DSCN0275 Shovelling earth into all interstices
Shovelling earth into all interstices

We then jammed short lengths of smaller wood in between the logs to prevent them from wobbling, and finished up by shovelling earth and clay into all the gaps and stamping it well down.

DSCN0276 Completed Loggery
The Completed Loggery

The rest is up to the beetles – millions of years of evolution has given them a superb ability to find suitable places to lay their eggs – and then with luck in a few years’ time we will see some shiny new stag beetles walking heavily about the reserve.

Conservation, Wildlife

Not much to see at this time of year?

A fine filmy Slime Mould on leaf litter
A fine filmy Slime Mould on leaf litter

After the brief heatwave it feels like March again. In the Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve, willow buds are starting to open but only the evergreen trees like the native yew and holly, and the invasive holm oak (from the Mediterranean) are in leaf. Not much to see, then? Not a bit of it.

In the leaf litter under the forest canopy, a large and handsome white slime mould was spread out, draped over some twigs in a fine shiny film. In detail its surface seems almost fractal, full of rounded holes at different scales like a Sierpinski Triangle if you know what one of those is. The individual cells – I’d almost call them animals – of the slime mould signal to each other with a chemical (AMP), which causes them to aggregate; they slowly ooze along like amoebae, eventually forming fruiting bodies rather like small fungi. It’s an extraordinary process, and in an odd way quite beautiful.

Leaf Miner, probably Ectoedemia heringiella on Holm Oak
Leaf Miner, probably Ectoedemia heringiella on Holm Oak

Meanwhile, the large holm oak by the picnic meadow looks utterly extraordinary, something like the horse chestnuts that have been attacked by plagues of leaf miner moths. Almost every leaf of the holm oak is scarred yellow and brown with the wandering trails of the moth caterpillars, making the tree look multicoloured and very badly battered. This is probably the work of Ectoedemia heringiella, according to the RHS.

A filzgall, Aceria ilicis, on Holm Oak leaf
A filzgall, Aceria ilicis, on Holm Oak leaf

Many of the leaves also have squarish brown furry patches (a filzgall or erineum ) on the underside; the leaves are naturally fluffy, with a tiny gall mite, Aceria ilicis, causing overgrowth; the thickened, darker hairs are too tough for the insect to eat, so the plant’s reaction works as a defence.

And that is not all; there are also a fair number of much larger pupae, probably of another moth species, wrapped in partly-rolled leaves, tied up with silk threads. We used to think of the holm oak as a useless non-native species with no pests or predators: not any longer, it seems, though at least the leaf-miner is a recent arrival itself.

Down at the pond, there are masses of frogspawn; at least a dozen large frogs, with at least four mating pairs, were responsible. When we came over the mound they must have seen us as there was a remarkable amount of splashing; even in amplexus they are capable of emergency diving: this is just as well, as much of the weed and reed has been cut during the winter.

Gardening, Wildlife

Upside-down Seasons

A barbecue in early March in cold, grey, foggy London? Surely not. But yes, that’s just what happened yesterday – not grey fog but grilled fish, right in my garden. The sun blazed down from a cloudless sky; shorts and a sun-hat were in order. The barbecue was damp and full of old ashes from months of disuse. I emptied the mineral-rich grey ash on to my spinach bed, in the hope that some of the potassium will still be there to help the veggies along (potassium, potash, pot-ash … that was the reason for the name). Then I collected some tinder-dry dead twigs from the vine that grows on the fence, snapped them into short lengths, lit a pine-cone and arranged some charcoal all around. It smoked a bit but eventually lit, and quite soon was hot enough for the fish. A barbecue next to the first daffodils of spring – actually next to some outdoor hyacinths and primulas too. The cooking was accompanied by a group of magpies – there is a family of 7 of them living in our road, with a big twiggy nest in the tallest tree. They seem to offer intense predation pressure, yet the small birds – blue and great tits, dunnocks, wrens, blackbirds, robins – survive and breed successfully. They must be good at hiding. As for the weather, it does feel like yet another piece of evidence of out-of-season behaviour. Climate change? Who knows. But the weather is becoming predictably unpredictable – anything goes, except the ordinary. It reached 20 Celsius, by the way.

Conservation, Wetlands, Wildlife

Slimbridge, home of Peter Scott’s original ‘Severn Wildfowl Trust’

Flamingoes at Slimbridge

I had the good luck to be able to visit Slimbridge this week with a friend. Back in 1946, Peter Scott founded the ‘Severn Wildfowl Trust’, setting up an observatory to study the White-fronted Geese and the Bewick’s Swans, and to help save other wildfowl from extinction. The geese and swans happily remain on the reserve today; there were 20 Whitefronts, as well as a hundred or more Barnacle Geese out on the marsh, not to mention plenty of Greylags and Canada Geese in the bright sunshine on the scrape.  And as the sun sank in the western sky, the collection Flamingos glowed in the warm light – no need for Photoshop tricks there.

The star of the show, though, was one of the European Cranes, tall and elegant with its tail ‘bustle’ like an late Victorian lady’s; incongruously, it was also wearing a radio transmitter and three coloured rings, such has been the excitement at the raising of these rare British birds from the egg, and allowing them to fly off as wild birds – only for one or two to pay a return visit. Meanwhile, a genuinely wild flock of cranes has established itself in Norfolk, so Britain once again has this beautiful and distinctive species breeding in its wetlands. The number of places, even near London, with ‘crane’ in their names is striking – Cranfield, Cranbrook, Cranford to name a few. I once imagined this was simply a confusion or word-shift, the bird having been a grey heron all along: but no, cranes were once common, as were wetlands and damp flowery meadows. Let’s hope they will be again.

Conservation, Wildlife

What are we conserving?

Kings Cross Development looms over Camley Street's new Viewpoint
Kings Cross Development looms over Camley Street’s new Viewpoint

Everyone in the packed council chamber turned to look at the chairman of the planning committee. The members had voted 6-6: a tie. “As chair with the casting vote, I am voting for the development.” There was stunned silence. The developers said nothing. We objectors took a deep breath and said nothing. Gunnersbury Triangle Nature Reserve would never be the same again.

London Wildlife Trust’s other central London reserve at Camley Street is also changing. A 10 storey block has cut off the view. Were all our reserves being trashed? Were we fighting for nothing? 30 years ago a passionate campaign saved the Gunnersbury Triangle from becoming four industrial units. Miraculously, with a huge input of volunteer effort, it became a wet woodland with little meadows, grassy banks, leafy paths, a handy pond for school pond-dipping. Now it’s surrounded by 4, 6, 8-storey buildings. The latest one at Colonial Drive is right up against the reserve boundary — at the top of a ten-foot bank. The quiet meadow and scrubby corner where the whitethroats nested will be illuminated 24 hours a day by stray lamps from a wall of flats. “I’m desperately saddened at the insensitive nature of the development — it robs local people of the sense of countryside,” says long- time campaigner and Gunnersbury Triangle committee member Jan Hewlett.

Certainly, the reserves will feel different. But Camley Street has a new ‘Viewpoint’, an architect-designed floating open-air classroom. It will be beautiful to sit and learn on the canal, in the little watery oasis in the midst of the busy city. At Gunnersbury Triangle, too, the blackcaps and thrushes will delight our hearts in springtime. School groups will still lie down on the boardwalk we built and enjoy catching newts, dragonfly larvae and ramshorn pond snails.

Our reserves must change with our great city. They do not feel like forgotten corners of countryside any more. They are little oases, islands in a sea of noise and pollution and traffic. They are special exactly because they are right in the heart of our vibrant capital city.

Wildlife

Flood

The forecast offers a brief ridge of high pressure in between wind, rain and distant storms. I take my gumboots and drive down to the lakes to enjoy the unlikely burst of sunshine. Sure enough, the sky clears, the temperature plummets, and I quickly put on fleece and windproof jacket. On the main lake are three Goldeneye, the males handsome as they surface between dives. Other than them, there are few birds on the water: more come when the wind is colder and drier, from the north or east, bringing winter ducks from icy Scandinavia or further afield. A few Great-crested Grebes, some Tufted Duck more or less complete the waterfowl, barring a stray Cormorant, a Mallard or two, a lone Moorhen.

The bushes are more interesting, as a party of Long-tailed Tits, unconcerned by human presence, flutters along one after another; the light is good enough to make out their slight pinkish tinge as they dangle upside down for a few moments before drifting onwards. From a tangle on the lake’s edge comes the loud Chwit-i-pit-i-pit, Chwit-i-pit-i-pit of a Cetti’s Warbler. It sounds grand and splendid but the Cetti’s are resident and while not exactly common, are not unlikely where there are bits of wetland. But the main and most obvious concern is the path, which has disappeared under a foot of water: the river is pouring across the grass, down the path, and across into the lake, which is higher than I’ve ever seen it. I take a stick and probe carefully: gumboots are all very well, but vanishing into a hole isn’t the best move when there’s a brisk wind over chilly water and very slippery mud. About a hundred yards are flooded in all, some of it probably too deep for boots, but I skirt the edge, only ankle-deep.

Around the corner, the water is halfway up the Private Fishing sign, and another section of path is under water. I reluctantly leave the path and scramble through the bushes on what has become a small hilly causeway. Re-emerging into the sunshine, I am observed curiously by a rabbit and a squirrel. Since the wind is now in my face, they cannot catch my scent, but watch as I very slowly raise my binoculars. They are still, but alert and watchful; eventually they wander off. A Buzzard flies down the wind, hardly needing a wingbeat in the brisk airstream. The horse field is like something out of the First World War, pocked with holes, rutted with tracks, slimy with mud and dung; the farmer has installed an oddly clean new fence, all shiny wire and white wooden poles, so I am obliged to take a detour through the worst of the Flanders mud to the ugly new galvanised steel gate. Still, it is a delight to be outside in the open air and sunshine, to see what nature is up to now.

I realise I am not particularly birdwatching, nor just walking for exercise, though I’m happy to do both: I’m just staying in touch with the natural world, and feel – what? If it were food, it would be starved: I would be feeling sad and starved of the flow of nature, of the seasons, without it. Walking in flood and mud, in the breeze and sunshine, I am simply myself, with whatever nature has to offer today. If that’s pretty primroses, that’s lovely; if it’s slimy deepening mud in an exceptionally wet winter, that’s fine too. Is it Climate Change? I’ve no idea, but I’ve certainly never seen a winter like this before.

The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature