Wednesday 27 March 2024

Scrambled ..


Day 280 #365DaysWild

Native primrose - primula vulgaris - is now beginning its best time.

Surely the prettiest of our native flowers..?

These are self-sown seedlings are a scrambled-egg

delight for onlookers and for invertebrates too. Delighted that beeflies visited ‘pin’ and ‘thrum’ forms of the flowers for successful fertilisation.


Once fertilised, the flowers will produce tiny round sticky
seeds which we hope will germinate and add even more of these lovely flowers to the springtime Birch Border.

Tuesday 26 March 2024

Tiny tawny


Day 279 #365DaysWild

Tiny volcanic eruptions where vegetation is thinnest.

Tawny mining bees have emerged and are excavating their tunnels. 

These are solitary bees and not in hives.

The males serve their function early in the season and die , leaving the fertilised females to dig their tunnels and provision the eggs with pollen.

We have a self-set flowering currant that is in full bloom at the moment. Currants are one of the flowers the tawny mining bees visit.

Little amber gems.

Monday 25 March 2024

Red-legged

Day 278 #365DaysWild

Who doesn’t like visitors?

We’re enjoying breakfast and coffee. 

Turning it over.

Usual wrestling with the calendar.


And uninvited guests arrive - a pair of red-legged partridge. Nosey. Looking through the lounge windows. Prettily-patterned charmers.

Our native partridge is the grey partridge - another farm bird in calamitous decline.


Our red-legged visitors are prospecting around the garden as their kind always does in spring.

Part of the annual, unregulated release of millions of game birds by landowners for shooting. Not native. Sometimes termed ‘French partridge’. First released for ‘sport’ by King Charles II. Perhaps, with his local connections he had them released in Bestwood? He and Nell Gwynn.

We offer safe harbour for wildlife here. Less so royals.

The birds will struggle to find a place where fox, carrion crow, tawny owl or stoat can’t find their eggs and young.


Sunday 24 March 2024

Snakes head celebration ..

Day 277 #365DaysWild


Snakes head fritillaries 

Snakes head refers to the bent necks of the flower buds on the stems stems, like a snake about to strike.
Fritillary means chequered.

The boffins disagree over whether it is

naturalised or native. ‘Who cares?’ I say.

It is utterly exotic and unlike any other garden flower.

We planted bulbs of Snakes head fritillaries around the pond edge. In their first year they flourished -

but the increased rainfall has raised the pond level and flooded the bulbs, possibly rotting them.

However, in the meadow, fritillaries have appeared on their own initiative and are now in striking, nodding bloom.


Snakes head central is Cricklade North meadow in Wiltshire.
On the ‘bucket list’ as young people say.

Our great hope is that the lily beetles that are their nemesis don’t find them and that the delicate flowers can go on to produce seed, increase our population to rival Cricklade.

Saturday 23 March 2024

Heron


Day 276 #365DaysWild

For several weeks I’ve been sleuthing.

Two years ago George’s Pond was croaking with frogs and their spawn.

But last year we had no spawn.

And this year we have had a few frogs but no spawn.

I’ve found ‘star jelly’ (the unfertilised spawn) in the grass by the pond and I’ve found spawn on the grass. But none in the pond.

This morning another suspect strode in. This one slender and elegant.

A grey heron. We know his family has form for frog-eating.

And it is now added to the list of suspects that already includes fox, badger, tawny owl, rat and mallard …




Friday 22 March 2024

Frampton Marsh

Day 275 #365DaysWild


Amongst the dark clouds of biodiversity loss there remain shining lights.
Over to the corner of Lincolnshire to the RSPB Frampton Marsh reserve.

To get there you travel through a barren landscape of glyphosated fields. Intensification of farming is a key factor in the current wildlife crisis that has been termed ‘the sixth mass extinction’ by the WWF. A local intensive poultry unit cast an olfactory shadow over us throughout our visit. 

There, beneath towering skies, using vision, creativity and imagination, the RSPB has created the kind of place so packed with birds that it is reminiscent of such places you’d find abroad.

Arrive to a raucous chorus of black-headed gulls.  

And there’s a slender animated gem of a bird to greet you that is underwhelmingly called a lesser yellowlegs. This trim beauty has travelled across the Atlantic to reside at Frampton. A real delight. Confiding too. None of this hiding in some distant corner. Only metres from the car park. Worth the journey itself.

Across the entire reserve the movement and noise fills the senses.

Long-billed black-tailed godwits are turning a rusty plum colour in anticipation of the move to their breeding grounds.

In glorious breeding plumage too were golden plover, now many with black bellies and faces to contrast with their breeding uniform of laced gold.

So many more treasures as we counted over fifty species of bird.

But amongst it all, there was one crowning moment that will remain until my memory dims.

The reserve is separated from vast, grassy salt marshes of the Wash by a raised, grassed bank.

We watched perhaps a thousand dark-bellied Brent geese grazing on the marsh. Dark-bellied Brent breed on the Arctic coasts of central and western Siberia and winter in western Europe, with over half the population in England. Their migratory return journey will begin in days or weeks..

And then, as we watched, at an unseen command they rose and in a cacophony of calls flew low over us in a low black cloud to settle on the reserve. 

Only nature can deliver such emotional hammer blows.

Congratulations RSPB Frampton Marsh. 

Thursday 21 March 2024

Mallards

Day 274 #365DaysWild


Mallards.

Another bird of conservation concern.

But plentiful here. I disturbed five drakes on the pond this morning. Population possibly supplemented by birds released for shooting.


The missing females must by now have begun nesting and egg-laying.

They never, as far as we can see, bring ducklings to adulthood.

Foxes, badgers, stoats, carrion crows, birds of prey and magpies all predate the eggs or the young.

The unregulated release of fifty five million gamebirds each year increases the numbers of predators which in turn puts downward pressure on the breeding chances of ground nesting birds like mallards.




Wednesday 20 March 2024

Pearly gates …

Day 273 #365DaysWild


If St. Peter let’s me through those pearly gates, he’ll lead me into a place very like the walled vegetable garden at National Trust Felbrigg for an eternity of gardening with scratching bantams and white fantail pigeons..

I just hope I can explain to the BIg Guy that I won’t be cutting the grass so close..



Tuesday 19 March 2024

Splendid fungus

Day 272 #365DaysWild



Splendid fungus fruiting beneath sycamore in an area enriched with bark chippings.


Ann suggests it is a member of the Psathyrella group but it requires microscope work to identify to species.

Research suggests that these are widespread but not necessarily common.

The mycelia of fungi interact with the roots of plants in 

what is sometimes called ‘the wood-wide web’. The relationship between plants and their fungal partners isn’t fully understood but is generally mutually-beneficial - saprophites.


When fruiting, as these are, they can release many thousands of spores which will be carried by the wind and settle to become the next generation.

There can be specific invertebrates who feed on them.

A first for us in the garden.

‪STOP PRESS: Grandson has discovered our squeaky wheelbarrow wheel makes Merlin app find whooper swans. Hilarious!! Especially for the neighbours!‬

Monday 18 March 2024

Catch ‘em young!

Day 271 #365DaysWild


Catch ‘em young!

My favourite little boy went around the garden with me in the rain using the Merlin app, identifying bird calls and songs.

‘What’s that one calling Poppa?’ He asked.

I couldn’t hear it. Roy Dennis remarked on the sad loss of the ability to hear bird song as he aged.. These days I struggle to hear redwings flying overhead. And treecreepers.

Before I could answer, up popped ‘Goldcrest’ on the app.

That’s another whose frequency is too high for me to register.

At home, our boy used daddy’s phone to ID garden birds and he sent me a list.




—————————————————

These posts will be part of a family book I am writing for my grandchildren’s children and other family members of their generation.

What wildlife will be left by the time they grow up?

Sunday 17 March 2024

Defiant



Day 270 #365DaysWild

Yes. Raining again.

On mums 95th birthday.

Defiant wild daffodils. Now in flower in the damp edges of George’s Pond in the meadow.

A gift from my favourite uncle and aunt.


Nothing blousy or overstated. Not showy. Diminutive.

And very pretty.

Saturday 16 March 2024

staggeringly good ancient oaks..

Day 269 #365DaysWild

To Calke Abbey, Derbyshire.

Red and fallow deer in the park.

A flock of redwing in song. 

And the Abbey, a living set for Dickens Miss Haversham. No attempt to add gloss to a shabby ancient stately home that had disappeared under the clutter of generations. Such engaged and knowledgable volunteers to make the day fascinating.


But the wonderful veteran trees especially caught our imagination following our day at the Notts Biodiversity Action Group day on Wednesday. Some staggeringly good ancient oaks.

And glorious standing deadwood. Left by the National Trust. Not felled and removed as the tidy gardeners of the past may have thought necessary.

We need more dead and decaying trees and the wildlife that takes its life from such decay. Standing and horizontal dead and decaying trees. More for our too-frequently-overlooked saproxylic beetles.

Congratulations National Trust.

Friday 15 March 2024

Prunus incisa 'Kojo-no-mai'

Day 268 #365DaysWild


Another grey day! No rain yet!

A couple of greylags have landed. Warily from the raised prairie beds scanning the lawn. They’re not quite sure why they’re here or what they’re

supposed to be doing. They’re alert and uncertain. Perhaps it was their calling card I mistook for hedgehog poo?

Meanwhile, pretty Prunus incisa 'Kojo-no-mai' is in her full regalia. Near the door giving a cheery, cherry welcome for any visitor. A small, ornamental, always full of flower in the early spring.


Bees busy visiting her flowers.



Thursday 14 March 2024

Tiggywinkle..?

Day 267 #365DaysWild


Hedgehogs were once common.

As a kid, I recall my little Jack Russell terrier having played with a ‘tiggywinkle’ of garden hedgehog and coming into the house thick with fleas. 


We had regular visits from hogs here till 2019. I monitored their poo trail journey around the garden and recorded them on camera. Along with one of our student volunteers I set up hedgehog cafes. Emilia was French and so we opened a classy ‘Cafe du hérisson’. But since then, no single animal seen.


Had they been predated by badgers? Or poisoned by farmland insecticides? Killed on our busier and busier roads? Or another factor?

Deeply troubling how a local extinction can take place..

So perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself..

But this morning there appeared to be hedgehog poo in the meadow.

Straight away, the cafe reopened for business. Special hedgehog food. Cafe secured with bricks on the roof in case badgers of foxes try and help themselves.

And now to wait..

Wednesday 13 March 2024

Toad time

By torchlight, last night..

Chirruping and plopping in the pond.

Our toads are now busy with the next stage of their life cycle.


Males are grasping females in amplex. Three pairs last night. With luck there’ll soon be characteristic strings of spawn.