Still
warm, still early... or very late!
Although it's got a bit colder now,
things that shouldn't be flowering together still are - for instance, for the
last ten days or so we have had carnation pinks flowering next to
snowdrops in our back garden (the pinks having already decided to bud and then
bloom in December...), and I have seen daisies and dandelions flowering
together...
Lorry
 |
I just saw a lorry in town
that showed a striking melange of older and newer technological approaches...
The cab was painted in the traditional English way with deep yellow and red
old-fashioned 'tudor' lettering on a green background, with the excellent logo – ‘Mayling Transport Ltd – Who Cares Wins’ (!!!); and a wonderful fairground-style ‘streamlined sunburst’
pattern on the cab top faring. While the main body advertised ‘Integrated Logistics’ in 70s-style
‘modern’ san-serif slanted yellow lettering, with a red shadow effect - and then the website!
 |
| Ivy berries Susan Sweeney |
Wood
Pigeons on Ivy
As I walked past large stands
of ivy in the perimeter hedgerows of our local park, there were intermittent
loud clattering, and numbers of wood pigeons emerged from the foliage and flew
off. They must have been feasting on the ripe ivy berries – and those plump
matt dark fruits look inviting even to me...
Royal
Portbury Dock
I visited this isolated modern
industrial area between the motorway and Severn Estuary docks, looking for
siskins who’d been seen in alders there... No siskins, but yarrow in flower, and
some hawthorne actually opening new leaves, with snow visible on the far Welsh
hills.
I met a man walking with a
scanner who said he was tracking a tagged peregrine in the close vicinity which
he thought had brought down a duck – so he must have been a falconer and the
peregrine was his bird...
Right at the far end past the
last industrial unit, the lane I was following dead-ended against the high perimeter fence of the Docks, with great
cranes and a mighty container ship looming only a couple of hundred metres
beyond. Here in this most unlikely situation cowers a little ‘park homes’ site
(our English euphemism for trailer homes), seemingly owned by the docks. I
wondered who would live there? - there’s
one algae-covered letter box and no other domestic facility for miles. Did
security or caretaker staff for the docks get allocated there?
 |
| Portbury Docks Jon Mills |
A colleague replied: ‘ I
worked at the port for twenty five years but left when a private company took
over the Port 1991. Up to then there was just a chain link fence where
you were and you could see everything going on in the docks and very impressive
it was too. The new company decided that the caravan site did not fit in
to their business approach, I suspect, and offered the tenants a new site nearby.
Most of them moved quite readily, away from the noise of a 24 hour port and
nearer ‘civilisation’ but as usual some were not interested and stayed
put. We are talking about twenty years ago – are some still there? ...
under the guise of terrorist security the Port Authorities did block the views
as you saw...’
Park life
St Andrew’s is a small but perfectly-formed
park is in the middle of Bristol, where a friend holds a monthly hour-long bird
walk open to all. Over the years a surprising number of interesting and unusual
birds have been seen in that short time slot, and this Sunday in spite of
pretty dire weather it lived up to its reputation with great views of a great
spotted woodpecker, a goldcrest, coal tit, long-tailed tits, greenfinch, mistle
thrushes, twenty five redwings, and abundant gulls, starlings, blackbirds,
robins goldfinches and sparrows...
Shadow
On the train to Swindon on one of the
rare cold, clear blue days – I watched a buzzard fly low apparently chasing a
rabbit across a field. But no – it was its own shadow running below it...
 |
| Prehistoric patterns Wace & Thompson |
On the same train was a young woman
smartly dressed with a short wool skirt patterned with large straight and
diagonal crosses in anthracite and red, and a wool scarf with big chevron,
diagonal and straight line patterns in cream, anthracite and red. I liked how
these designs echoed our most ancient pattern-making, when we used straight-line designs in black,
red and yellow ochres, on pots, cave walls, beads and baskets...
Easter
Compton – Dyers Common
I started exploring this
partly-developed modern industrial area just in from the Severn Estuary, which
still contains open wetland and rhines. My bird list of a couple of hours shows
its richness: 1 mute swan, 2 shelduck, 8
mallard, 3 cormorant, 2 grey heron, 5 buzzard, 2 kestrel, 200+ lapwing, 30+
rook, 12 long-tailed tit, 6 skylark, 20+ fieldfare, 1 song thrush, 10 redwing,
1 mistle thrush, 8 stonechat, flocks of 30 goldfinch and 40 goldfinch, 1 bullfinch, and a flock 16 reed bunting
gathered in a rhine.
A local expert commended the
reed bunting count, and when I said I’d never experienced such numbers before
he confirmed that it was a ‘winter thing’ especially after a cold night...
But two blue tits were flirting
enthusiastically in a hedgerow – one picking and offering dead leaves – and rooks
were gathered in the local rookery and looking serious about nest building...
I went on a winter bird-watching trip to
Cornwall...
Cape
Cornwall – a wild westerly headland
 |
| Cape Cornwall Tony Atkin |
Down the hill in the pre-dawn to the car-park
lookout. Big winds blowing – barely-visible oystercatchers pottering on the
golf-course green, with buzzards pattering for worms...
Big waves, glaucous green and grey – as
the day brightens, bright pale green and white at the top when they flip over...
Gannets streaming south-west, down the
coast line and into the winds with razorbills, skuas and shearwaters. and
kittiwakes dancing lightly...
A jackdaw briefly flips and flies
upside-down and sideways with the wind, before righting itself...
Perranuthnoe
cliffs east of Marazion
Oh the wind! Strong initially
– but turning that corner heading west it’s powerful enough to stop your walk
and let you lean on it...
Out to sea – but not so far
that eyes and binoculars can’t usefully see it – a black-throated diver
peacefully sitting on the rolling ocean...
Lelant
Basin, Hayle Estuary
Leaning on the roadside wall
looking at this great peaceful expanse of sand and water heading towards the
open ocean and St Ives - full full full of lovely birds that aren’t afraid to
be quite close to us... ...wigeon, teal, grey and golden plover, dunlin,
sanderling, ringed plover, redshank, oystercatcher, curlew, hundreds of
lapwing, shelduck, cormorant, little egret, spoonbill, and gulls gulls gulls
visually dominated by great black backs. An exquisite all-white Mediterranean
gull with red legs, pottery-red/black beak, and its orbital eye ring also
turned a scarlet-red, but with the darker summer head feathers coming in
around...
 |
| Dozmary Pool Steve G |
Dozmary
Pool, Bodmin Moor
Bleak and isolated high
moorland, a lonely stretch of water, wind fiercely strong and mist down to the
ground... small swimming figures dully visible on a far edge, one of which is
meant to be the rare lesser scaup we are here to spot... I can’t identify a
thing even through a telescope – but right next to us is a goldeneye so bright
and cheerful (it’s those cheeks!) before it flies off...
February
 |
| Jackdaw Jans Canon |
Jackdaws
on our street (Written for
a booklet of members’ 50 favourite birds, compiled to celebrate the Bristol Ornithological
Club’s 50th anniversary)
I live on a street of 1920s terraced
houses, densely urban on the road side with lanes and long gardens behind. About
fifteen years ago Jackdaws started nesting on our roofs, which have many
bird-friendly chimney-pot covers. Initially they were very shy of humans and avoided
entering gardens – they might rest on a fence and look yearningly at scattered
bread, but were usually too timid to swoop down. But gradually they became
bolder until now they swagger round our gardens with insouciance. From my loft
room I follow their yearly breeding – the loving pairing, the early
investigation of nest sites, the terrible conflict with crows now keeping a
close watch on proceedings, the juveniles forming family groups round the
chimneys. I watch their exhilarating flights in stormy weather, and their soft
‘chacks’ accompany our days; and sometimes at dusk I see them stream off to
roosting sites I know not of... graceful characterful blue-eyed birds.
Little
things round Portishead...
Many small groups of lapwings
were flying between Portbury Wharf foreshore and the lakes behind, accumulating
to large numbers in all. Of all these, just three did a full tumbling display
flight in front of us – brief but lovely.
Then at the mouth of
Portishead Marina, two hundred-plus dunlin were wheeling over the mud banks. As
they flew, first one and then three more black-headed gulls joined in with the
flock, turning as they turned... just
some fun, or a deeper reason?
Song...
A blackbird was singing in front
of our house at 8am (sunrise at 6.45am)
 |
| West Sedgemoor Chris McKenna |
We visited a Royal Society for
the Preservation of Birds restricted-entry site on the Somerset levels. About
three miles square, it comprises moorland that is flooded in winter, and grazed
and cut for hay through the summer. Lovely abundant birds included lapwings,
golden plover, pintails, shovelers, wigeon, teal, kingfisher, cormorant,
peregrine, marsh harriers, buzzards and cranes. We watched from a hide in the
upper part of an open barn; a barn owl roosts here and its droppings and
pellets were everywhere! We opened some pellets and found field vole skulls and
skeletons within – I brought a few home for my ‘nature table’...
...and
song again
Today a blackbird was singing in
front of our house at 7am.
Orange
breast
 |
| Wood Pigeon Hedera Baltica |
Yesterday a wood pigeon flew towards me
with the sun on its breast - it gleamed dark orangey rainbow colours like
oxidised metal. Today I watched two on the roof opposite, one again with very
pronounced orangey breast, the other with the commoner more pinky tones. Is the
former juvenile colouring? I just hadn't bothered to notice this before...
March
Towerhouse
Wood and the Land Yeo river, inland from Clevedon
This small but ancient wood on the edge of
moorland levels is graced with small-leaved limes and bluebells; and reveals
signs of badger, dormice, bats, deer, fox, otters and water vole. On its edge
lies a pond which bubbles with natural carbonated gases whose source is still not
fully understood...
The pretty little Land Yeo river which
skirts it had herons, kingfisher, reed bunting, chiffchaffs, buzzards and grey
wagtails along its banks.
 |
| Land Yeo Martin Bodmin |
Here the Land Yeo passes a trout fish farm where
the owners have sensibly created a special sacrificial lake just for the otters
where they put fish that is substandard for fishermen but great for the animals.
Bullrush fluff was flying around. I picked some
up – like many seed heads, it was so soft and fine that it seems to disappear
like fondling seafoam, leaving just a delicate lanolin-like residue on ones
fingers...
First catch
your adder...
 |
| Adder Liz Burke |
At a Bristol Naturalists Society mammal
field meeting last Sunday, two members were discussing a recent project to
study the DNA of adders each side of a main road towards the Mendip Hills
(famed for its adder population), to see if this road formed a sufficient
physical barrier to prevent mating by snakes on either side. I asked – how?
Well, first catch your adder, then stuff it up a glass tube, then get a swab
sample (did they really say from the mouth, or was it the rear area?), and then
release. How peeved would that adder be! – one has to admire the cojones of the
naturalists involved.
 |
| Redbrook view John Thorn |
We went for a walk starting at the village
of Redbrook on the east bank of the River Wye upstream from Tintern, at the
base of the deep wooded Wye valley. The river was a dark clouded green flowing
fast. We crossed to the Penalt hamlet on the Welsh side on a quirky footbridge
bolted to side of an old railway bridge,
where until the First World War they had a millstone industry using the
local quartz conglomerate.
It's odd how immediately 'Welsh' it
becomes west of the Wye with oak woods, tumbling rocky streams, sheep-grazed
old pastures. Full
of birdsong – bright siskins on bird feeders, coal tits and chiffchaffs, grey
wagtails flirting across the streams... Bluebells were starting to flower in the
woods with bright wood anemones. An ancient Welsh longhouse marked on our guide
book was now only represented by the ‘footprint’ of the new bungalow on its
site. The guide book also pointed out ‘Britain’s most ancient pigpen’: a neat
stone-built cave dug into the steep hillside off the road back down to the Wye,
so well masked by a wheelie bin that we almost missed it...
Stone walls were covered with a marvellous
shaggy 'ferny moss' which I don't remember ever seeing previously. It turns out
it was no moss but a liverwort - the excellently-named 'Handsome Woolywort'. Apparently
as so many mosses and liverworts didn't have common names, the authors of our
source, ‘The Field Guide to Britain & Ireland's Mosses and Liverworts’ decided
to create some, of which this is one!
Swallows
& rainbows
I saw my first swallow at Dyers Common this
afternoon. There were strange rainbows arcing across the industrial landscape –
very bright, thick, and low down with a shallow curve...
April
Grandmother's
Footsteps
On this warm sunny day I was digging my
vegetable plot in our back garden. After some time I glanced behind and was
amused to see a couple of jackdaws on the fence just two metres away, and more
on the lawn only three metres away - extremely close by their standards! It was
obviously like a game of Grandmother's Footsteps - as long as I wasn't looking
at them the jackdaws were creeping close and closer. But as soon as they saw me
glance back they became uneasy, and soon flew off to more distant spots...
Coltsfoot.
 |
| Coltsfoot S Rae |
I saw a long bank of yellow Coltsfoot on the
edge of the levels at Ingst. My botany teachers confirm that this fleshy early Spring
plant with sunny flowers is relatively rare, but once it has established a spot
it sticks with it! So as the bank is at the start of my new Breeding Bird
survey route, I can look forward to seeing it again regularly each Spring...
Chiffchaffs
I was walking at Lawrence Weston Nature Reserve
today – a classic urban-fringe reserve bounded by motorways and industry. Chiffchaffs
abounded - twenty or more – foraging on the ground
or hunting insects from
branches in flycatcher mode, preening, and singing...
 |
| LawrenceWeston Stephen Burns |
Lapwing
Today at Dyers Common industrial area, a lone lapwing was circling around near
me before it settled on a more inaccessible area - the habitat here is a large
area of low-lying land that has been raised a few feet up with fill, rubble
etc, drained with rhines but not yet developed, and has a thin covering of
scrubby vegetation. No disturbing walkers or dogs come this way, though the
land is still open to other land, water and air predators... might the lapwing
be thinking of nesting here?
Urban Gulls
Wildlife can be found in the most
unpromising places... If you go north along the main road out of Bristol beyond where
I live, there's a big fenced-in gravel car park / wasteland between the road and the airfield and aerospace
buildings. All through the year when this area gets wet it develops large
long-lasting puddles which gulls love, and even when it's almost dry they seem
very happy resting there - mostly herring and lesser black backed gulls.
Pete Rock, Avon’s gull expert and
enthusiast, also guided me towards another
fertile gull area directly opposite where the huge flat roofs of new
industrial development form happy homes for many of ‘his’ ringed gulls – he
follows their lives as they commute locally to landfill sites or more distantly
to Spain or Gambia ...
Stealthy high
tides...
I was at Aust this morning to experience an
extra-high tide. It’s always a shock how quickly but stealthily the water comes
in: raising binoculars to look at gulls out in the estuary, one realises they
are actually sitting on water at eye-level unnervingly close and high, and the
deep Pill tidal inlet is suddenly full and then overflowing with swans gliding
across its banks...
Rookery Survey
 |
| Rookery Rosser1954 |
Our local
naturalists’ club runs a five-yearly Spring survey of rookeries in the Avon
county area. I love rooks, so this year I and a friend volunteered to survey
some ten-kilometre squares, on the coast and inland south of Bristol. It was a
fascinating glimpse into the rising and falling fortunes of their lives, and
their preferred nesting sites.
One thing
we’ve been theorising about is rooks’ great predilection for building along
busy roads and motorways. We think this is unlike pied wagtails for instance,
who seem to love man-made sites like supermarket and service station car parks
to forage and roost in, and who don’t seem to find humans threatening. However
rooks often seem to select their rookery sites where roads form a harsh,
off-putting barrier to humans,
and presumably to at least some ground-based predators. And the rooks in those
sites certainly reacted in a very upset manner when we got near or
underneath their trees. Yet others are so accepting, like those who pick trees
in school car parks!
Bird displays
Yesterday a coastal wren did a bold display
on a twig with its little wings stretched out as it bowed and danced. Today on
Sea Mills station platform, one wood pigeon followed another with its own
magisterial display, chest repeatedly bowed so low it almost touched the ground
and tail pushed up so high behind it went almost vertical...
Nesting in St
Andrews Park
Two jays were searching for just the right nest
twigs. The park’s resident pair of mistle thrush are nesting in the same tree
they used two years ago but in a higher crook, with their nest intriguingly incorporating
such urban materials as coloured plastic and fabric pieces.
 |
| Land Yeo aquaduct Martin Bodman |
Sometimes places close to home look so
insignificant or traffic-ridden on the map that you don’t bother to explore
them – yet when you do they hold a small wealth of interest. Such was Gatcombe by
Long Ashton on the west edge of Bristol, a farm on the site of a huge,
impressive Roman villa which is now quite invisible to the casual visitor. Up
woods, down meadows into Long Ashton, over and along deep railway cuttings;
then by the pretty Land Yeo venturing forth from Barrow Tanks Reservoir nearby and
then oddly taken across the deep railway
on its own little aqueduct...
Later I revisited with another friend
whose father had been a doctor at the adjacent Barrow Gurney mental hospital –
a name that struck a chill in us growing up in Bristol ... She re-found the
small brick twenties house where she had grown up, now almost derelict, on the
edge of the hospital estate which had been her playground... now being
redeveloped as luxury homes. Strange memories!
Snowy Owl
 |
| Snowy Owl Sylvia Duckworth |
I went on a bird-watching trip to the
Scilly Isles, a place I had last visited in my twenties. Of the many lovely
birds we saw, the most magnificent was probably the rare Snowy Owl we saw on
the small island of Bryher. It was a mighty beast sitting on a heather headland
and shining as bright as new-frozen snow. I was very intrigued how its face is
so insulated with feathers that its features disappear into mere smudges – eyes
and beak quite covered with fringes of plumage.
Razorbills
Asked which of all the birds we’d seen
were our favourites, I decided mine were the razorbills. Every day we sailed to
a different island and accompanying the boat would be successions of
guillemots, puffins and razorbills bobbing on the surging ocean. And though
those other birds are lovely, there’s just something about handsome
black-and-white razorbills with their powerful beaks, their insoucience and
somehow a sense of reckless fun...
 |
| Razorbill NikohFi |
I was also very intrigued by the
Scillies flora. Basically never having frosts but being buffeted by salty
storms, they have a southern Mediterranean / desert appearance with many
succulents; but where plants might grow large in the Med, here they not only
grow large but also stocky, rugged and weathered - a fascinating look...
Our hotel on St Mary’s was close to the
island dump. There the small mountains of waste were draped from top to bottom
with super-large nasturtiums, with just one or two buds breaking into orange
bloom before we left...
Green
Flash
I had a blast from the past on this
Scillies trip. On a previous year’s geology trip to north Brittany close to
where I holidayed as a child, I was reminded of a phenomenon by seeing a seaside
house named ‘Le Rayon Vert’: staying in the little seaside town of Rotheneuf in
the 1950s, on very clear evenings our father would walk us to a west-facing
cliff to watch as the sun went down over the sea. If we were lucky, as the very
last brightness disappeared it would glow green – an optical phenomenon called
‘the green flash’, which I had never experienced since...
However our hotel on St Martins faced
west across the harbour, and by doggedly following the sun down on consecutive evenings
of fine weather and then being frustrated by last-minute skeins of cloud on the
horizon – there it was at last, that extraordinary green glow!
Breeding
Bird Survey
For the first time I volunteered to take
part in the British Trust for Ornithology’s Breeding Bird Survey, taking a
kilometre square in an area I already know and love – Ingst on the S
Gloucestershire levels. The methodology is complicated, requiring training, and
pre-walking and surveying the environment of the plot, before doing the two
actual early and late bird surveys. You have to start as early as possible – it
was 6am on a clear, still but heavily frosted morning, crossing meadows, crop
fields, streams and small lanes. I logged some nice birds like sedge warblers, but
was intrigued how much richer the species list was around any human habitation
or activity, rather than the conventional farmland...
May
 |
| Brimstone Ian Kirk |
Stock Doves
One of our best birdwatchers has a
special knack for spotting Stock Doves – those handsome wild pigeons with no white
on their necks or wings - but in spite of my best efforts I never seemed to get
the knack myself. However in the Scillies Stock Doves were common and at last I
got close views. So I was excited to finally make an identification on my own, of
two birds in the fields of a riding stable on Bristol’s outskirts. They are
lovely, sturdy birds with gunmetal grey plumage, and strongly iridescent and
defined green and pink patches on their necks.
 |
| Stock Dove Chris Cant |
House Martins
Today at Sea Mills Station on
the tidal Avon, twenty or more house martins were busy flying together and
calling with their hoarse chirrups, collecting river mud, and visiting their
nest sites under the Victorian station’s eaves. They favoured one particular
section of mud - I suppose every day and tide they look for the 'Goldilocks'
patch which is not to wet and not too dry, not too hard and not too soft... For
the first time I noticed their extremely smart white legs which give them an
appearance of a Regency dandy in tight white breeches and hose, and pinkish
toes.
 |
| House Martin Gail Hampshire |
More
back garden Butterflies
A Brimstone
and a Holly Blue butterfly in our back garden.
The
Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs
A friend just gave me a copy of the 1954
Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs – a valuable gift as it is so hard nowadays to
get good identifying information, as
everyone is rightfully paranoid about illegal egg collecting and vandalism.
In the Foreword is the following startling
observation: ‘Our grandparents put birds’
eggs into the drawers of a musty cabinet, shot highly coloured species like the
Kingfisher to set them up in the parlour in a glass case where they slowly
gathered dust and dirt, or massacred grebes and terns to embellish feminine
headgear. (And yet, so hard do these barbarous habits die, that even in recent
years the writer has had the unpleasant experience of sitting opposite a woman
whose hat was decorated with the whole head and the red breast feathers of a
Robin.)’ Good god! At least we have come on a bit since then, I think!
‘Late’
 |
| Ash flowers Donar Reiskoffer |
Walking round Nettleton yesterday on top of
the Cotswolds east of Bath, it was striking how the ash trees had still not
really broken bud (efflorescences were mainly the big flower sprays, not leaves),
and their bare branches continued to contribute a wintery note into a generally
lusher May landscape.
On Sunday and yesterday 15th May, the St
Mark’s Flies were flying - but again
late for them, as they are usually punctual on their saint’s day of 25 April.
Blasé
We were interested how blasé the owner of a
local Cotswolds-top farm was about his abundant yellowhammers – familiarity
indeed breeding if not contempt, then a lack of wonderment!
 |
| Bluebells at Portbury Barnaby Kirsen |
Driving up through the woods from Portbury
to Failand west of Bristol, the ground was one mass of bluebells and only the
clichés apply: a river, a lake, a sea,
an ocean of blueness, up from which the trees dreamily float up...
Swift Day
On Sunday I attended a ‘Swift Day’ at the
home of Bristol’s leading swift preservationists (proudly seen on ‘Springwatch
a while back...). They are working with a local swift ‘consortium’ to make
suitable nest boxes available to the public, with proper instructions and
installation including the audio equipment to play swift songs, without which the
birds will not be lured into a new home...
The roof eaves of their suburban house are
lined with nest boxes and the swifts were just starting to call to each other
and sortie out. Each box has a webcam and it was beautiful to watch the couples
on their nests preening each other, with eggs just laid or about to be laid – a
rare privileged glimpse that only modern technology makes possible.
Fish
 |
| Chub Jonathan Couch |
At Oldbury on Severn village a large rhine
debouches into the Seven Estuary via a weir by the pub. Hanging over the bridge
we could see five or more large Chub fish there, each a foot or more long –
identified as such by a local young fisherman.
Shelduck rears
Birdwatching along the expanses of the
Severn Estuary, we mused on how dazzlingly white the shelducks’ rears were in
flight, and how they managed to remain so spotless while dabbling along the
oozy mud? A pair circled inland and landed on a small pool on the saltmarsh
just below the embankment, and had a wonderful bath and preen.
 |
| Brown Hare Evelyn Simak |
I carried out my second Breeding Bird
Survey at Ingst. This time the crops and grasses were high and the dew
extremely heavy, stiles overgrown and all an unexpected struggle for my short
legs! However it was again a privilege
to be out with the wild things so early, I got a fine list of birds, and had
the luck to see a brown hare close-to.
Banshee
At 4.15am this morning there was an unearthly
banshee wailing from outside – a mixture
of a gull and a baby screaming, that carried on for over ten minutes. I looked out my window, and saw a fox slink
off up the road...
Rodborough
Common
 |
| Rodborough Common Brian Robert Marshall |
A botany trip to one of the beautiful
limestone commons that top the Cotswolds Hills south of Stroud. On the steep
south-facing slopes and glinting in the sun was a brilliant Green Hairstreak
butterfly (my first ever); and almost as lovely but a more bluey iridescent
green – many Forester Moths. A female Common Blue, with its dark top wings
strongly edged in white with orange, white and dark spot border, looked as
though it was a different species from the male.
On the grazed common top were large patches
of Chalk Milkwort of a lovely deep bright blue; and flowering Bee Orchids.
 |
| Green Hairstreak Charlesjsharp |
 |
| Forester Moth Gail Hampshire |
June
I have just read an eye-opening
book, ‘The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions’
by Jaak Panksepp, 2012. Panksepp, a neuroscientist and
psychobiologist working primarily with animals, coined the term 'affective neuroscience', the name for the field that studies
the neural mechanisms of emotion. Modern work on human/mammalian and other
animal minds/brains shows that they have evolved emotional hierarchies. The
primary emotions are created and governed by the oldest evolutionary area of
the brain and form the fundamental level. These can then be controlled and
modified by more recently evolved structures such as the amygdala, forming the
next level up and giving more social and emotional control and variation (such
as shame, jealousy, vengefulness). Then humans have a top layer of intelligence
and self-consciousness created by our most recently evolved brain areas,
allowing a further level of control of, and detachment from, the emotions
below.
Panksepp’s
research is into the fundamental primary
emotions, that can be identified and tested neurologically. He lists them as:
Seeking, Care, Panic/Grief, Rage, Fear, Lust and Play. They have been
researched in mammal, birds and some reptiles; generally the behaviours
resulting are rewarded by powerful brain chemicals such as dopamine. What I
find so interesting is that while this list includes the raw and violent
emotions we think of as occurring at this level, it also includes ones we may
think of as far from primary - as sophisticated and elevated. Rage, Fear and
Lust speak for themselves, though unmodified by ‘higher’ emotions they usually
have a purity without punitive motivations. But see how ‘evolved’ the others
can be:
-
Seeking: Why any of us do anything! The desire to do, to discover, to persist
that needs to happen in even the humblest creature if is to find food, evade
danger and live on; but that also drives our search for knowledge and our
desire for beauty and creativity.
 |
| Swans & their cygnets Kalispera Dell |
-
Panic/Grief: the emotion that as well as protecting youngsters from danger, is
used to generate life-long societal bonds and the need to be part of a social
unit.
-
Play: the desire for often rambunctious, competitive rough-housing with others
of ones kind and the environment, naturally controlled by others’ willingness
to join in, preventing it degenerating into real violence or unpleasant
control. It also turns out that many other mammals beside humans have primary
laugh reflexes with enjoyable ‘tickle’ areas! Play is possibly also a daytime
equivalent of dreaming, allowing integration of new events.
 |
| Bogbean S Rae |
On Isla I saw my first Bogbean
flower. From
a distance I saw this striking orchid-like white flower standing up in a bog;
it had feathered insides to its petals like Fringed Water-lily, and is indeed
the same family - the fringes have it!
I also saw my first Lousewort – another
acid-loving plant of bogs, heaths and moors. Semi-parisitic, it has recently
been moved from the Figwort to Broomrape family, and has the lipped flowers typical of these groups - in this case a
pretty pink colour.
My first brief view of a hovering Golden
Eagle was disappointing – without expert guidance I’d have had it down as a humble buzzard...
Falls of Lora
 |
| Falls of Lora Michael Jagger |
For me, the most striking and evocative
place of our whole trip was the Falls of Lora, where the Firth of Lorn enters
tidal Lock Etive near Oban (with our old-fashioned hotel just above it). A
natural narrow rock dyke forms a dam between the two wide bodies of water, so
when the tide tries to come back into the loch, the water piles up in the firth
and you have the utterly counter-intuitive sight of water falling upstream
over the dam! Your body knows something is wrong, but somehow your mind
can’t work it out... Then on the outgoing tide, the water falls over the dam in
the ‘right’ direction!
The loch is broad, clear and serene, but
flows with concealed but ferocious speed at the turn of the tides, and with
such boiling power over the Falls that it forms a playground for extreme
canoeists. Its banks were edged with oystercatchers, common sandpipers and
female mergansers with terns hunting above. I would come down early and late
from the hotel, immerse myself in the shallow water edges (we had a heat
wave!), and on one occasion watched a lesser back-backed gull catch and eat
frog...
 |
| Lulsgate Landfill Site Thomas Nugent |
I crept my way through the fence into this
disused landfill site near Bristol Airport, to find many lovely wild plants
forming splashes of colour down the lumps and dips, including common figwort,
water crowsfoot, and meadow and bloody cranesbill.
Yellow
Yellow blooms seem at their zenith, partly
because bird’s-foot trefoil is so richly abundant this year. Have a look at the
verges on the dual carriageway down past the Mall Shopping Centre, Cribbs
Causeway, where hop trefoil, hawkweeds
and hawkbits and their ilk, and the bird’s-foot trefoil, make a lovely carpet.
Lamplighters
Nature Reserve
 |
| Vipers Bugloss Anne Block |
Lamplighters
Nature Reserve on Bristol’s edges on the lower tidal Avon, is giving a fine
showing of its seasonal common and more unusual plants, growing larger and
lusher than usual after the cold spring. (I measured the stem of some mouse-ear
hawkweed which I know as quite a shy grassland plant – one specimen was nearly
70cm tall). Along the path is a continuous show of hedge crane’s-bill whose
flowers while small are an intense eye-catching magenta purple, creeping
cinquefoil, and white briony lacing the hedgerows full of blooming dog rose. There’s
a fine swathe of dainty moth mulleins, both the yellow and white with their
pretty brown flower centres. And on the gravelly areas are vipers bugloss, vervain,
great mullein and extensive areas of bright yellow biting stonecrop (Sedum
acre) – youths have created some BMX bumps there which are now artistically
decorated with the stonecrop and bugloss...
 |
| Latticed Heath Moth Engeser |
Along the Severn Estuary mud, a shelduck
pair walked with their eight youngsters. Along the embankment were an abundance
of moths and butterflies, including Meadow Browns, Five-spot Burnets, and Burnet Companion, Straw Dot and Latticed
Heath Moths – the latter indeed showing an exquisite miniature lattice of black
on white on its wings, like a spider’s web draped across them.
The embankments were lined with lush displays
of Rough Hawksbeard grown to quite majestic sizes (one was nearly 1.5m tall),
and masses of Bee and Pyramidal Orchids some of whose own stems had grown to
great heights. Other more unusual plants included Sea Clover, Yellow Vetch,
Grass Vetchlings, Hairy and Smooth Tares, Sea Wormwood, Stone Parsley, Greater
Sea Spurrey with distinctively larger flowers, and Rough Chervil.
Pilning
Wetlands by the Severn Estuary
One of the bigger inland pools here has its
seasonal display of large rafts of Amphibious Bistort flowering bright pink.
The lane inland has a most extravagant mass of feathery grasses lining the
embankment, with Meadow Vetchling, Meadow Brown butterflies and blue Damselflies.
Swifts were hunting along it, and
three times came extremely close to my head – a very different experience to
close encounters with swallows, as the swifts’ extra size, strength and speed
makes it feel quite threatening... but a frisson to be so close to such iconic
creatures!
Fox &
strawberries
Before 6am this morning I heard an ongoing
cacophony of alarm calls in our back gardens, and looked out assuming a cat or
fox. Continuing watching, ten or so minutes later a very small fox – little
more than a cub – entered our garden and made straight for my strawberry raised
bed where it neatly plucked and ate every fruit it could.
Now for around twenty years I have been
trying to grow good strawberries without great success, and in the raised bed
they are as cosseted and pampered as they have ever been but still with quite
poor results. Has this been the problem all along – sneak thievery by foxes?
I’ve never netted them permanently before but will today – and henceforth...
Aust Services
On the cliff edge looking over to the old
Severn Bridge, the stone wall hosted a lovely display of flowering plants
including spiny restharrow, hedge bedstraw, meadow vetchling, pyramidal orchid
and goatsbeard.
Poo piles at
Sea Mills
 |
| Sea Mills Station Matt Buck |
The deep eaves of the fine red brick
Victorian structure of Sea Mills Station on the River Avon, annually host
twenty or more house martin nests who use the river mud to build their nests.
Watching one of the nests, I saw two well-feathered bottoms poke sequentially to
projectile-eject a white pellet of poo, which joined an existing and obviously
growing pile at the base of the wall. I surmised that one can follow the
development of the nest and the nestlings by following the piles of poo
below...
 |
| Rainbow Footbridge, Montpelier Sharon Loxton |
In this quirky inner urban area of Bristol,
there’s a small maze of paths, railways and allotments. One cutting is crossed
by a metal foot bridge painted in hippy rainbow colours, and on it and just by
it were flowering moth mullein and musk
mallow...
July
Water
Crowsfoot
 |
| Little Avon River Linda Bailey |
I was
hanging over the bridge above the small but beautifully clear and characterful
Little Avon River at Stone village north of Bristol, observing bright green Water
crowsfoot trailing in the water that had exceptionally large white flowers... our
local botany expert observed that ‘the Crowsfoot family is very plastic’ – by
which he meant that it morphs easily into differing forms...
There’s a couple of village names nearby
which are also one-syllable nouns – Ham and Hill. Why is this so amusing?
Rabbits at New
Passage.
In the rough smallholding meadows adjacent
to the embankment were many rabbits. One very large one lounged under a bush
with its back legs negligently stretched out... Three younger ones on the
embankment were a bright ginger – really the colour of a golden retriever! Is
this natural deviation from their norm, or contact with domesticated breeds?
 |
| Rosechafer Gail Hampshire |
Such a rough little reserve carved from
disused port industrial land – but what a list of flowering plants today! White
campion. Biting and English/White & Caucasian stonecrop (Sedum spirium). Mayweed,
Cat’s-ear everywhere, Bristly ox-tongue, Marsh thistle. Sonchus Arvensis, Nipplewort,
Yarrow, Hemp agrimony, Mugwort.
Meadowsweet. Hedgerow crane’s bill. Viper’s bugloss in profusion. Wood sage, Hedge
woundwort, Self-heal, Black horehound. Common mallow, Musk mallow, possible
Small tree mallow. Great mullein, yellow and white Moth mullein. Narrow-leaved
everlasting pea in huge abundance, Bird’s-foot trefoil, Melilot, Tufted vetch.
Upright hedge parsley. Hedge & Lady’s bedstraw. White briony Vervain. Great hairy willowherb. Scarlet
pimpernel. Wood small-reed, Early meadow grass, False oat grass
...and
butterflies and other insects: 4 Comma, a few Gatekeeper, 1 Ringlet, a Skipper.
A Cinnabar Moth caterpillar on ragwort, and a Rosechafer.
Michael
Wood
 |
| Hedgehog tracks |
There is a motorway service station on the
M5 just north of Bristol called ‘Michaelwood’, but it never occurred to me that
it was named for a real Michael Wood in which stands. But now I have started
exploring this area, and though the motorway goes right through it, it is still
beautiful and unspoiled with the Little Avon river winding through it in grassy
valleys.
We saw: Four muntjak deer; hedgehog tracks
delicately imprinted in the mud of the path; Beautiful Demoiselle damselflies
and Emperor dragonflies along the river;
two kingfishers, and what I hope and believe was a merlin. Grey poplar trees lining
the road left deep ‘snowdrifts’ of soft white seedheads along the verges...
Au plein
air
We went down to paint sea and rocks ‘au
plein air’ at St Ives in Cornwall. Along the coast I admired lush blue tussocks
of sheep’s-bit scabious, and dark pink betony, a Golden-ringed Dragonfly and
Beautiful Demoiselle damselflies.
There were signs & portents on this
trip... On our way down we saw a sundog
with a horizontal beam of light striking through it. As we painted, porpoises disported
in the bay, and in the sea rock below us a swarm of bees hummed round the
crevice they had made their home...
 |
| Pickerelweed KENPEI |
I just visited
the striking new (built 2014/15)
grass-roofed Gloucester Service Station off the M5 motorway, the younger sister
of the famous original on the M6 in Cumbria which supplants the usual chain
food outlets and electronic games with elegant modern design, home-cooked food,
and landscaped species-friendly pools outside. I found Gloucester’s graceful
pool at the rear, where species visible included black-tailed skimmer dragonflies,
house and sand martins and swallows all coming across low to drink with moorhens
on margins and pied wagtails on the paths. The lush flowering plants round the
pool edges included red mimulus, pontederia cordata (pickerelweed) with big
bright blue cylindrical flower heads, purple loosestrife, water plantain,
spearmint, great hairy willowherb, meadowsweet, and reeds. But like its older
sister, the water is strangely murky-looking...
Young Reed Bunting
At Pilning
Wetlands a young reed bunting sat on the pools fence, still a bit gapey and
cheeping for its parents. The mother foraged below and – yum! – came up with a great
green caterpillar to feed to its eager fledgling, gulped down before they both flew
back into the reeds...
Speedy caterpillar
Today in our back garden were Gatekeeper and Holly Blue
butterflies. A caterpillar that I think might be a Cream-spot Tiger Moth got
shaken from a plant, but then moved with remarkable speed from where it landed
on the lawn, back into sheltering vegetation...
 |
| Red Admiral Magnus Hasdorn |
At Pilning Wetlands today were many fine insects including Gatekeeper,
Meadow Brown and Red Admiral butterflies and an Emperor dragonfly.
A couple of the Red Admirals looked incredibly fresh, and I
admired how the upper red stripe on the top wing surface shows through to the
underside, and being transparent, glows scarlet from this view as the light shines
through it...
What fish?
 |
| MoD lake, Filton Adrian Pingstone |
Young birds
There seem to be a lot of young birds audible and visible
at the moment – quite late in the day, no doubt resulting from our late Spring:
In Filton - a gang of young magpies with squeaky calls
racketed about the rooftops and attacked unripe apples on back garden trees. At
Stoke Lodge Estate in a big cedar – downy young coal tits and goldcrest fed
busily. At Sea Mills Station – a newly-fledged house martin stood on a masonry
window arch but was still being fed by its parents.
I asked a local expert: ‘ I am seeing and hearing a lot of young birds of a
stage that normally I would have expected six to eight weeks ago, and I
see other people are also reporting young bird sightings. Are these
second broods and I somehow missed the first ones altogether, or
has the year really been so late? Or maybe first broods failed and
these are the second but successful broods? What think you?’ He replied, ‘As I was doing BN last month I was struck
by the same notion. So I looked up loads of species on the BTO-about birds-bird-facts
and counted from the arrival date, adding the incubation, time to fledge, and
came up with - must be second broods
– even though many of these species certainly don’t usually have two broods.’
More young birds - jackdaws
There are six young jackdaws resting on the roof opposite
with four adults nearby – presumably two adult pairs and their joint
youngsters. Their hoods are a dull brown rather than grey with more dull brown
on their bellies, their eyes do not yet have the ice-blue appearance of the
adults, and they still look a bit downy and dopey...
Highridge
Common (a botany trip)
 |
| Betony Ceridwen |
Just below Dundry and high on the west edge of Bristol, this small park
looks like dry common yet was noticably wet close up, and was full of unusual
plants. These included beautiful Perennial Flax with yellow-centred warm blue
flowers with a brilliant blue central style; and large patches of striking
Betony whose bold purple- pink flowers our leader considered superior to
orchids! Their long narrow leaves have an elaborate border like some wonderful
fabric.
August
A trip to the
south
I went on a car-camping trip to explore the chalk streams of
Hampshire, the South Downs Way, and Chichester Harbour and the Selsey Penninula
– all in chalk and flint territory...
 |
| River Test Peter Jordan |
-Then the South
Downs Way at South Harting: The South
Downs Hills stretch for over 100 miles from Winchester to Eastbourne,
and you can walk the whole way along the South
Downs Way. At South Harting near
Petersborough, they rose up sharply from the surrounding land, imposing,
mysterious, heavily wooded with hidden fields; with the path running
secretively below the summit through beech and oak, sometimes narrow, sometimes
well-used farm track. In the
hedgerows were
many beautiful Giant Bellflowers, habitués of
this type of environ-ment, with
showy purple-blue flowers pointing upwards.
 |
| Giant Bellflower Mike Pennington |
 |
| South Downs Way Chris Gunns |
-Then to the
Selsey Penninsula: a strange area of flint, agriculture and holiday camps which projects
south of Chichester with its great placid Harbour to the west, and the extensive
tidal flats of Pagham Harbour Reserve with lovely birds, to the east; and the
newer Medmerry Reserve facing the English Channel southwards. Sights included:
 |
| Cream-spot Tiger Moth Danny Chapman |
- At the Church Norton end of Pagham Harbour
- massive shingle banks dotted all over with sea kale...
- By Medmerry Reserve car park – Flowering
Rush, tall and imposing with large pink three-petalled flower heads.
 |
| Flowering Rush Ian Cunliffe |
‘Swimming’ off Medmerry
Along the south coast of the Selsey Penninsular are mighty, brutal
shingle beaches that face the Channel and bound the Medmerry Reserve. These
long stretches are billed by the local tourist blurb as ‘some of the best
beaches in West Sussex’ – well, God help visiting families and their children
if that is so! I visited three days running in good though sometimes windy
weather, and while the protected Chichester Harbour offered fine sand and
gentle waters, this coast uniformly offered a dauntingly grim, grey, dangerous
visage, with wicked waves lurching onto the steep flint cobbles slopes
punctuated with groins. This grimness is not helped by the lack of any
attractive esplanades: all the seaside towns seem to try and prevent you
accessing the water, with main roads that abruptly and ungraciously dead-end at
the coast with ugly concrete and scaffold-pole railings.
 |
| Selsey Penninsula coast Mark Trenchant |
Some birds of
the trip...
On the South Downs Way in Hampshire, a
confiding young greenfinch sat by a puddle. Its neck feathers were still in
pin, and its beak looked bulky and bony. When it sipped from the water, it
threw its head back like a bunting...
A family of young goldcrests in oaks were
foraging successfully for themselves, but also still being fed titbits by their
parents...
...but at Pagham Harbour young little grebes
were begging from their parents to no
avail - the
‘heartless’ period had set in!
 |
| Pagham Harbour SimonCarey |
An over-confiding young green woodpecker
foraged on the path just feet away, its tail still a stump, and beak also
looking big, dark and bony. But it made an adult-sounding yaffle!
A young black tern nestled down in the shingle
on ‘Tern Island’...
At East Head, Chichester Harbour, a tern
re-emerging from its neat sea dive briefly shook itself like a dog...
Along the shingle beaches fronting the
Medmerry RSPB reserve, a group of 12 sanderlings ran around me. It’s been a
long time since I’ve been lucky enough to be so close and able to admire their
smart black legs and beaks, and observe that rather anxious manner they have...
Some joys of
car-camping...
There are strange but nice unexpected side
effects of car camping, doing normal things in the oddest situations... for
instance:
- At
South Harting in the South Downs, I
camped in a small carpark near the church, but early in the morning drove up to
wash at a prettier more countrified spot I’d scouted the previous afternoon. It
had rained hard all night and was raining still, there were big puddles on the
little road... so if life gives you
lemons, make lemonade! Generally if sea or streams aren’t handy I wash in a
bowl (usually crouched by the car so passing drivers can’t see me), but today
glorious clean puddles were mine to splash in!
- At West Wittering on the Selsey
Penninsula, I camped in a proper campsite. Now the advantages are – toilets!
But the disadvantages are the odd lack of privacy in a car when one is used to
more solitary ‘wild’ parking. Again very early in the morning I’d had a lovely
shower and wanted to do my exercises - always a challenge on the wet or hard
ground which one often wakes up to, or here in too-public view of the other
campers. So I stole through to the children’s play area which was bounded by
enormous hedges, and there in early sunshine on the soft grass between the
badminton net and the swings, did my Pilates...
 |
| Dabchick and young Frank Vassen |
Views of young birds continue!
When I was at Pilning Wetlands today, I bumped into a local birders who have been
following the fortunes of a dabchick pair nesting by the building on the first
lake. Apparently they had tried three times to nest but each time the eggs had
been predated. Now the birders had literally just seen hours-old chicks riding
on their parents back... so success had finally come on the fourth try!
On the small side lane there lay three
rabbit carcasses in increasing states of desiccation and flatness. Everything
had been removed but the heads, pelts, paws, tails and skeletons – perhaps by
raptors scavenging on rabbits afflicted by disease?
 |
| Black-tailed Skimmer Gail Hampshire |
A female black-tailed skimmer dragonfly
at rest, dull bronze with a torpedo-shaped body, moved its head from side to
side...
More foxy
shenanigans
Early this morning I woke to shrieky
angry fox sounds, and looked out to see the local grey cat smugly sitting on
top of our tall back garden shed, with a fox below prowling round the base and apparently
trying to find a way up. Eventually it leapt lightly onto the fence by the shed
and within an easy further jump to the cat - but though its jumping can be as
athletic as a cat, it couldn’t do that ‘walking along a narrow line’ once
perched on the fence top, so after a bit
of awkward shuffling it jumped down again and went off...
 |
| Gree-veined White Ian White |
At Clevedon Harbour today I saw the
first Green-veined White butterfly that I feel I could identify with confidence
– handsome!
And yet more
foxes
At 4am, looking out at an almost-full
apricot-coloured low moon - two foxes raced down the road, one noticeably
larger than the other. They engaged in violent fighting in some front gardens
opposite, making low growls and hurling into gates and cars with audible
crashes...
Clevedon
Harbour to Kenn Pill
Still young birds... One young
(still downy) rock pipit, five young downy sparrows on a bramble bush with an
adult male who did quick upward flights every now and then, while the
youngsters did short flights out sideways and back - was it a parent
encouraging them to venture forth?
A red dragonfly – a Ruddy Darter, small with
a pinched-waist abdomen, and the golden wings they develop with age - in the
sunlight the wings really shone like a transparent fabric of spun gold.
 |
| Bristly Oxtongue Rob Hille |
Bristly Oxtongue: I think all the
hawkweed/bit/beard/sonchus dandelion-type flowered plants raise one's spirits,
but today's praise is for bristly oxtongue which has been showing its many
smallish firm yellow flowers for a few weeks now, of a joyful
ripe-lemon colour...
September
Swallows
& umbrellas
I just watched a local TV news item about an
auto repair centre in Somerset, whose owner over the last 25 years has allowed
swallows to nest in the steel roof trusses. Now they have from 12 to 15 pairs,
and the way they stop the droppings annoying people and vehicles is – he hangs
open umbrellas under the nests! So here you have mechanics beavering away in a
busy industrial unit under a garden of umbrellas, accompanied by swallow flight
and song! The last of the nestlings had just fledged and were filmed standing
on a truss...
Why threes?
After a botany trip to Clapton Moor Reserve
on the north Somerset levels viewing many water plants, I was prompted to ask,
‘Does anyone have a theory why so many water plants of different families, have
three-petalled flowers?’ One of our botany experts gave this fine technical
reply:
‘It is because they are all monocotyledons, where flowers
are "trimerous" (in threes, or multiples of three). Monocots
form a clade, so all the different families have a single common ancestor. I
think the water plants you have in mind probably all belong to the order
Alismatales. When you have a Frogbit (Hydrocharis)
flower, there is still a differentiation between the three petals (large and
white) and the three sepals (small and green).When you have six petals in a
Lily etc they are really "perianth segments", three petals and, in a
whorl below them, three petaloid sepals that look similar to the petals.If you
look at Butomus (Flowering
Rush) it is a sort of half-way house with three large petals and three smaller
petaloid sepals.An orchid has one specialised petal that forms the lip, two
normal petals and three petaloid sepals.Grasses, Sedges and Aroids have
extremely modified flowers where it is difficult to see that the components are
in threes.’
Red berries
 |
| Guelder Rose berries Derek Harper |
At the Oldbury Power Station’s overgrown
lagoons, hips, haws and berries were looking very bright & shiny. The rose
hips were in strongly different shades from orange to maroon red, and guelder
rose hung with profusions of translucent berry clusters glowing scarlet.
October
 |
| Giant Hogweed |
Exploring
with a friend north of Yate, starting from Yate Rocks (in limestone quarry
country), we passed a derelict cottage with an overgrown garden colonised
entirely by the most enormous Giant Hogweed, now dried but some towering over
three metres tall...
Cornwall
The
Fogou: Visiting my Cornish friend with a house at the start of the Porthcothan
valley, I walked up alone to the man-made Iron Age ‘fogou’ cave that is
secretively hidden in the valley side a mile further up. I entered without
artificial light and had to feel my way to the back, where looking back towards
the light I could appreciate the beauty of its ‘upturned boat’ shape that
heightens powerfully towards the rear. Creeping back to the entrance, two dark
creatures flew out ahead of me – pipstrelle bats apparently who roost in a
fissure by the entrance...
Cornish
turnstones - what are they like! On Newlyn Quay while eating a sandwich, I
encountered a
gang of about nine: the bold leader scurried to my feet where I
chucked it a prawn which it gobbled immediately, while the others gathered
behind. Though I know them as friendly little critters for what are wild waders,
I hadn’t seen them demonstrate such scavenging ways before...
 |
| Turnstones foraging Derek Harper |
Choughs: I was so pleased to see two choughs at Cape
Cornwall. We were drawing and painting at this dramatic headland, and the
choughs flew in and pottered around the cliff edge quite close to us.
The
Syrinx
There has been a fairly recent discovery
of a duck-like fossil bird Vegavis iaai (dating from the
late Cretaceous so still contemporary with the last of the dinosaurs) on an
Antarctic island; complete with its syrinx or avian voice box which has allowed
scientists to study its vocalisation in comparison with modern birds. I read up
more about this remarkable organ: in both this ancient bird and modern ones, it
is placed at the base not top of the trachea, comparatively small but governed
by many muscles, and uses almost all the air passing through it - compared with
a mere 2% efficiency for the human voice box. No wonder birds can sing all day
and create double notes and other marvels!
Another
letter published
In the 22 October 2016 edition of ‘New
Scientist’ magazine, I was proud to find out that I had another letter
published, headed ‘Evolutionary forces
may evolve too’. You can find it in here in the ‘Science thoughts 2013--’ page.
November
 |
| Grey Squirrel Anemone Projectors |
With autumn arriving and squirrel
viewings abundant, I was intrigued by some information on their famed agility.
The crucial adaptation seems to be the rear ankle joint which can turn
backwards by 180 degrees – something shared with the clouded leopard and
racoons. Combined with sharp claws and long fluffy tails giving great balance, this
enables these animals to climb head-first down trees for instance; and the
clouded leopard which can weigh up to 25kg, can even walk along the underside
of a branch and hang by its rear feet...
Blustery
Along
the pretty sheltered lanes round Upton Cheney in a wet blowy westerly yesterday
– a dead grey squirrel neatly squashed flat on its back, paws symmetrically
flattened.. At one end its tail plumes were reduced to thin clogged mats,
revealing the long whip tail within; at the other its long curved teeth projected
alarmingly from the skull - definitely an affirmation for those who like to
call them climbing rats...
 |
| Autumn leaves... Albert Bridge |
The trees were still in vibrant autumn
colours, but their leaves were tearing off in the high winds and giving us a
full-on ‘showered with golden coins’ experience...
Back above my Filton street, a flock of over
60 jackdaws were making fantastic patterns cavorting in the wind. I think most
or even all of them were local as their population increases year on year.
Early this morning along our back lane was a
great murmuring in some thick cypresses – maybe 100 or more starlings
vocalising. When I stopped beneath and craned upwards they shut up, but the
second I moved on they began again...
Bird behaviours
I just watched a local jackdaw do a
‘yearning’ dance on a back garden fence – something I don’t see so often since
over the years of their occupation of our north Bristol Filton streets, they
have become much more bold and confident than when they first colonised. This
bird’s head and neck craned forward and down towards a food item it wanted, but
its legs bounced the body vertically up and down in an agitated dance, not
daring to fly down... Comical!
Yesterday I watched a magpie moving
apparently methodically down the front of the street along adjacent first floor
window sills and bay roofs. It would stop and apparently peer into each window, peer up to the
gutters, have a poke round any cracks, then move on to the next perch...
(Colleagues replied with stories of crows
and magpies cacheing food in gutters and flower beds...)
December
A frosty walk
up the River Chew from Keynsham
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| Jack snipe AlastairRae |
We walked up this small river out of the
small town of Keynsham between Bristol and Bath, on a brilliant cold frosted
day. We saw a mandarin duck in an ornamental pool at the start – unringed and
origin unknown, apparently it has been happily patrolling along the rivers between
Keynsham and neighbouring Saltford over the last two years.
Rooks were paired in their rookery area in
the surrounding wood, some already bringing in nest sticks.
There was a dead grey heron on meadowland
further on, with blood on its drooped head – attacked by a fox?
Two common gulls were paddling for worms on
a steeply sunny south-facing grass slope,
Two peregrines came overhead, calling and (play?)
fighting. Young birds finding territories?
At one spot there were otter prints in the river
mud.
Tree Mallows
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| Tree Mallow Magnus Manske |
A small grove of tree mallows has recently
appeared in our back lane. There are about ten stems, some over two metres tall
and a couple of inches thick, and they are still flowering with a few of those
small but striking purple blooms with deep purple centres.
Owl
Flight
I just watched one of those TV animal
'superpowers' programmes, on owls. I was particularly struck with two lab tests
they did with a barn owl contrasted with a wood pigeon and a peregrine, flying
over an array of supersensitive sound recorders, and along a long bed of down
feathers. The owl managed to fly in total silence - not a flicker on the
recording screen - and its strongly beating wings still barely disturbed the
bed of down... extraordinary. They showed the various ways that the feather
structures damp sound - but also how these make them much less water resistant.
Everything is a trade-off in nature!
Aust salt
marsh
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| Short-eared Owl Sighmanb |
A
bright day with an exciting southerly wind susurrating the rushes... Some
linnets perched close by on a bush had the most pretty bright orange chests,
strongly streaked.
A short-eared owl appeared over the salt marsh near the road and
quartered the ground for a good few minutes before dropping down. I watched the
strong (though not low) downbeat of its wings, and if that creates a similar
lack of turbulence as the barn owl demonstrated above – what a miracle of
special engineering. I can understand how the feathers can be damped for sound,
but not how turbulence is so reduced...
New Passage
Along the shoreline at new passage today
were hundreds of waders - widgeon, godwit, knot, dunlin and redshank. And there
must have been something extra-tasty in the mud – all the probing feeders were
attacking the mud like little machines...
Stony
Littleton
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| Stony Littleton Long Barrow Neil Owen |
On Boxing Day we visited the extraordinarily
impressive but strangely little-known Neolithic long barrow / chambered tomb at
Stony Littleton, by Wellow south of Bath. 3500 years old, it is thirty metres
long with multiple chambers open to view, the roof height gradually rising as
one penetrates, starting at a hunched crawl. As always with these monuments,
one is struck by the beauty and elegance of the stonework – the cantilevered
and corbelled roof construction, the mighty flat stones creating the entrance,
the fine flat dry stone walling forming the low perimeter wall.
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| Old Man's Beard Colin Smith |
Elberton
In that strange between-worlds time between
Christmas and New Year, I stayed for a few days in Elberton just inland from
the Severn Estuary, walking the quiet country lanes round there...
- A fine old house had great yew bushes in
its front garden, topiaried into the most grotesque shapes - like Easter Island
heads by a cubist Picasso...
- A board at the entrance to a lonely farm’s
drive advertised, ‘Farmhouse & Bar’ – not a combination we are used to
seeing locally...
- Occasionally there would be an apple tree
completely bare of leaves but
still proudly carrying unshrivelled fruits along
its branches, glowing in yellows and reds like the finest Christmas decorations...
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| Apples in Winter |
OPS at dusk: I drove to Olbury Power
Station at sunset to try and catch a rumoured murmuration of starlings (when the
birds gather in often tremendous numbers from a whole area, each flock
performing those magic shadow dances in the sky before they plunge into reeds
to roost together for the night). Although that murmuration turned out to have
come and gone weeks ago, it was still quietly absorbing to sit in the car as
dusk drew on and watch the night-time rituals of the visible birds. Blackbirds
and robins are definitely the last to forage, as they are often the first and
last to sing, and can apparently search in almost complete darkness; and a wren
took a long luxurious ‘dust’ (or mud in this case) bath on the path beside me.
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| Oldbury Power Station Sharon Loxton |
Final thoughts
for 2016 - Winter is the time for Romance!
Perceived wisdom says that winter is just a
time of hardship and endurance for birds, but to me it seems as much a time of
romantic holiday-making! Firstly, we know that with feathers being the best
insulation in the animal kingdom and legs well primed with natural anti-freeze,
birds aren’t feeling the cold as we sometimes anthropomorphically imagine.
Secondly, if they can feed and make it through the long cold nights, it’s
otherwise the period of greatest freedom and least responsibility - they aren’t
yet fighting for territories and nest sites, or bringing up young. So a time for flirting and courting!
...The End - till next year...
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| New Passage waders December 2016 |
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