Brindled straw flat-body & common wasp

One of my traps in the garden here at Sedlescombe contained a small, lively moth when I visited on this mild January afternoon.

It was a brindled straw flat-body (Agonopterix arenella), a common and widespread Oecophorid moth in Britain with larvae that feed on thistles and related plants.

The adults hibernate over winter, but are clearly quite active in mild weather.

Perhaps another consequence of the mild weather was the discovery of a very active worker common wasp (Vespula vulgaris) in the kitchen this morning.

I know wasp colonies do sometimes survive the winter, but I am not aware of any attic nests this year and it has been extremely cold for some weeks until the last few days.

Winter hoppers

Several species of plant hopper (Homoptera: Cicadellidae) are quite common in the winter as they hibernate in evergreen conifers and similar, but always seem to be quite active, however cold the weather.

Two common species are shown below, Zygina angusta  on the left and Z. flammigera on the right.  Both of these were found in our garden this afternoon.

After the cold and snow

In our garden I have a tower of logs from which I can catch saproxylic invertebrates in a sleeve net (see here.) emerging from or attracted to the decaying wood and its flora of fungi and other plants.

Since 2 January 2010 the trap has been covered in snow and the netting frozen to the top of the top log.

By today it had thawed enough for me to be able to remove it and to see if any insects had gathered inside.

There was a surprisingly large number of species:  Gymnometriocnemus brumalis (see picture above of a mating pair on the roof of a new dormouse box) and Limnophyes minimus , both Diptera: Chironomidae; Bolitophila saundersii (Dipt: Bolitophilidae); Issus coleoptratus, Zygina angusta and Trioza urticae all various kinds of plant hopper (Homoptera); a springtail (Entomobrya nivalis) and a small unidentified spider.

It is remarkable how much invertebrate life there is on the move, even after very cold weather, for those who take the trouble to look.

Snow helps young trees

The heavy snow has flattened many of our local bramble patches with its sheer weight.

In one place I noticed a birch sapling that had been separated out from of the surrounding brambles by this weight of snow, the birch having a stronger, more upright stem (see centre of the picture below).

Later in the year it will, no doubt, grow away quite quickly surrounded by a low collar of brambles.  These may also grow, but perhaps will not be able to catch up with the tree again, a tree that last summer they were overtopping.

I suppose this must happen whenever there is a heavy snowfall, quite an unusual event in East Sussex.  But our long-stay indigenous flora and fauna has to be able to survive the once in fifty (or five thousand) year events and to some extent may benefit from them.

Greater tussock-sedge in snow

On New Year's Day I walked with a friend through the Powdermill Nature Reserve at Catsfield in East Sussex.

There had been a light fall of snow which powdered the wigs of the small army of greater tussock-sedge plants (Carex paniculata) that flourish in one of the swampy areas.

I used to know many places locally where this splendid plant grew, but most have become over-shaded and the sedge plants have died.

Inside the tussocks is a large compacted rhizome, like a tree fern trunk and I am sure that both in life and in death this must attract a wealth of smaller organisms - fungi and invertebrates. One day I might try to devise a method of finding out what they are.

Combating climate change?

The recent spate of media activity on climate change is rapidly turning me into a grumpy old man, so I thought I would get some of it off my chest here.

My spleen was first activated by an 'independent' report for the Forestry Commission by Sir David Read et al. which seems to want to go back to the mid-20th century with a huge tree planting programme recommended in order to increase carbon capture.

I wonder where these new woods will go.  Agricultural land is likely to be needed if we are going to get halfway towards feeding ourselves, so this leaves hills, mountains, heaths, moors and bogs etc., all places that the Forestry Commission has afforested, or tried to afforest, in the past.  Remember the Flow Country?

In the case of bogs Paul Simons, writing in The Times today (30 November 2009), has pointed out that these absorb hugely more carbon than trees.  See this link.

I also get unnaturally depressed by the emerging vogue for planting trees.  Millions, apparently, will be required.  Where will they come from?  Presumably, unless they are imported, there will have to be quantities of tree nurseries (many perhaps, run by the Forestry Commission).  Good for employment and rural economies no doubt.

If fields and other land is abandoned it will, of course, turn into woodland quite quickly and of its own accord in most parts of Britain .  The Woodland Trust, with the blessing of the Forestry Commission, is already planting their new Heartwood Forest in Hertfordshire, though they must be aware of the two famous woods, Broadbalk and Geesecroft Wildernesses at the nearby Rothampsted Experimental Station that have developed on deliberately abandoned fields to mature mixed woodland without a seed being sown or a tree planted.  Trouble is, not many people were employed in creating these places - nature did it.

Not many people are employed either in making and maintaining bogs so, however much carbon they capture, I fear they will take second place to the new woods and forests, especially as the latter make much better copy for the public relations officers.

In addition to this emerging plantation psychology, the Forestry Commission is waving the flag for the introduction of various exotic species such as the Serbian spruce (Picea omorika) and the shining gum (Eucalyptus nitens).  Most of their list will, of course, be inedible to British wildlife as well as looking totally out of place in the British countryside, but it might give the FC greater control on British forestry and move the industry away from the, to them, irritating areas of conservation and biodiversity into a more disciplined industrial and commercial operation.

Talking about trees also skates round the importance of other kinds of vegetation in capturing carbon and I would not be surprised if an abandoned field garners just as much C as one planted with, say, Nordmann fir.  And the field would be a veritable wonderland for wildlife as it went through its various successional stages.

REFERENCE

Read, D.J., Freer-Smith, P.H., Morison, J.I.L., Hanley, N., West, C.C. and Snowdon, P. (eds) (2009) Combating climate change – a role for UK forests. An assessment of the potential of the UK’s trees and woodlands to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The synthesis report. The Stationery Office, Edinburgh.  (Also on-line).

Maidenhair trees with nuts

In the grounds of a school near Forest Row, East Sussex, I found a line of mature maidenhair or ginkgo trees (Ginkgo biloba).

This remarkable species from China is a survivor from the age of the dinosaurs and the only living representative of its order.  It seems probable that the species has survived, more or less unchanged, for 270,000,000 years.

The tree above had a large crop of fruit rather like small greengages.  There is a soft, fleshy outer layer (said to smell very badly, though I didn't notice anything)  with a nut inside like a small hazel nut.

Apparently the species only fruits well in Britain after warm summers.  Another manifestation of climate change?

The kernel of the seed is popular in China and Japan and it is easy to find recipes for them on the Internet.  When raw they are said to be slightly toxic (though I ate one and it had no ill effects) so they should be roasted before consumption.  All the descriptions of its taste that I have seen differ.  To my mind it was somewhere between a hazel nut and a soya bean and quite pleasant though unremarkable.

Killingan Coppice in autumn

The coppice just up our road is rapidly moving into autumn mode.

Many of the new sprouts from the cut stools have been grazed of by rabbits and/or deer and I expect this will get worse as winter comes in.  Brambles (see below) like thorny trip wires are spreading rapidly in some places growing flat over the ground like a blanket.  By this time next year walking through the area will probably be difficult.

In other places there is still much bare ground and, despite recent rains, no sign of any seedlings or woodland fungi.  The hornbeam and other tree species' seed that germinated in spring all seem to be doing well though.  On some of the bonfire sites the bonfire moss, Funaria hygrometrica, is growing thickly and has produced many bright orange sporophytes.

Here and there flowers are still brightening the ground like the pink musk mallow (Malva moschata) and the yellow smooth hawksbeard (Crepis capillaris) below.

The Selsey Bill Rant

Yesterday I made my first visit to Selsey and Selsey Bill in West Sussex. I had been working nearby and had half an hour or so to spare, so I made may way to this most southerly point in Sussex.

The final stretch of road ran through what was effectively a large, suburban-style estate on the road to nowhere with total coverage by bungalows, semis and the occasional grander structure, all with their nurseryman’s catalogue gardens. Chichester, the nearest large urban area, is some nine miles away. The gardens are more wildlife friendly though than the vast open fields spreading across the flat Manhood Peninsula to the north of Selsey.

Why, I wondered, had the planners allowed the end of this thrust of land to be covered in houses. Apart from the beach there seem to be few places to walk, though there is Pagham Harbour not to far distant by car.

The Bill itself is an extraordinary place. The road just runs out and there is a single metal bar to stop cars driving into the sea, plus a litter of tired street furniture and wonky fences. If people didn’t live there, the place would benefit from a good tsunami.

Immediately to the east of the dead end there is a playing field style open space, but everywhere else the houses and gardens encroach as closely as they can to the pebbly, breakwatered beach. Strange constructions of concrete like a parkour course allow passage on foot around the private properties and, at one place, there are some strange eyeless amphorae made of concrete and beach pebbles – perhaps an attempt to create a Mediterranean feel to the place. They reminded me of Easter Island moai staring inscrutably out to sea from their platforms.

Despite this wrecked landscape, the sun was warm, the sea blue with its waves eternally marching towards the shore. I even made a few wildlife records including some tiny wrack flies, Thoracochaeta zosterae, in washed up seaweed. The most southerly invertebrate records in Sussex no doubt.

Selsey Bill has a sadness about it and it is a kind of monument to our corporate inability to look after our own environment. It epitomises our disastrous tendency to want to cover memorable places with houses as though the residents can gain some sort of apotheosis by owning a bit of what might otherwise be a wonderful wild place (or the middle of a potato field). How very peculiar that the most southerly part of our area, the Land’s End of Sussex, should be part of somebody’s garden.

I think I shall start a campaign to forbid any building within half a mile of the sea (ports and harbours excepted). The state should buy existing houses as they are vacated and demolish them, allowing the land to re-wild in its own way but enabling the public to go there.

Nature's symmetries

People have always been fascinated by the way an often chaotic-seeming nature produces intricate patterns of organisation.

Recently I have bee intrigued by the roundness of ivy flowers and the way that insects, such as the fever flies (Dilophus febrilis) distribute themselves apparently in orderly fashion across the flower heads.

These insects - they all seem to be females - were in the flower heads for a couple of days then they all suddenly disappeared.

Caper spurge (Euphorbia lathyrus) is really a weed in our garden and does not, as sometimes suggested, drive away moles.  The leaves arrange themselves with great symmetry in four rows around the central stalk.  Very few British plants seem to be like this, but I have seen some unrelated plant species from New Zealand that are similar.

Caper spurge is not a British native but a long-standing resident species known as an archaeophyte and originally from places further south.  It is widely naturalised out side its native range.

Natural selection?

I have, this year, grown some crimson-flowered nasturtiums in a pot and, needless to say, the white butterflies soon found them.  Before long both large white (Pieris brassicae) and small white (Pieris rapae) caterpillars appeared, the large whites (below) being particularly obvious on the leaves and flowers.

This morning nearly all these caterpillars had disappeared and a couple of wasps were spotted searching the plants for more.  By the evening all I could find was a solitary small white (below) that had survived, perhaps, because of its more cryptic colouring.

Caterpillars of the white butterfly family, the Pieridae, store toxic chemicals derived from their foodplants within their bodies making them distasteful to some of their predators, mainly birds.  That is why the large white larvae feel safe to feed openly on the foodplants and have a black and yellow pattern of colour that acts as an " I taste nasty" warning.

While it may offer some protection against birds it does not stop the wasps and various other creatures that eat large white and other caterpillars, indeed the bright colour may even help them find their prey.

Since wasps and large whites have probably been around together for thousands of years, it makes one wonder about the survival of the fittest dictum.  Constant removal by wasps does not seem to have resulted in better adapted caterpillars, yet somehow they evolved to their current colour and shape.

The last laugh, perhaps, will go to the nasturtiums who have survived the onslaught and have plenty of summer time left to set seed.

Speckled bush cricket

This year seems to be a good one for crickets.  This afternoon I found this female speckled bush cricket (Leptophyes punctatissima) on a leaf of our nasturtiums.  (Much better than Mr Pooter finding a brick in the middle bed of geraniums).

I wondered if it might be eating the burgeoning population of large white caterpillars, but apparently they are wholly vegetarian.

It is remarkable how difficult it is to see such a large insect.

An urban walk round Hollington

I have always enjoyed walking round streets visited little except by those who live there.  Today I walked from Fern Road in Hollington on the western side of Hastings in a circuit around the eastern side of the Hollington Stream/Filsham Valley (see below).

Note the fine stand of self-sown buddleia at the bottom of the picture.

In some places obscure public footpaths weave among the houses, usually with close-mown lawns containing a wide range of colourful short turf plants - bird's-foot trefoil, cat's-ear, self-heal, yarrow.

On one bank by a busy road I found, among the Irish ivy, a patch of fading woodruff : not a common plant in our part of East Sussex.  The Dr Pepper can adds, I feel, to the picture with a nice touch of colour

 

Woodruff and ivy are quiet plants, but sometimes there is a hot spot, such as this duet of tufted vetch and smooth hawksbeard by a footpath.

Broidered bracken

Under the hedge across the lane in front of our house is a frond of bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) that is very different from the norm.

The pinnae and pinnules are congested and twisted giving the very healthy-looking frond a 'crispy' appearance.  No weed killer is used in our area, so it is not a 'herbicide morph'.

I e-mailed the above picture to Graham Ackers, a friend from the British Pteridological Society, and he replied "I do not think this variation has been given a botanical name, but horticulturally (if anyone was foolish enough to cultivate it) this would be Pteridium aquilinum 'Crispatum'".  He adds that this form is "occasional to rare".

'Broidered' by the way was a word I made up only to discover via Google that it already exists and seems quite appropriate for my bracken frond.  Maybe I had seen the word somewhere before and tucked it into the back of my brain.  The translator of Voltaire's philosophical dictionary, for example, described love as "the stuff of nature broidered by nature" (C’est l’étoffe de la nature que l’imagination a brodée).  Not that I have actually read Voltaire's philosophical dictionary.

Amazing beetles

My tower of logs at the end of the garden is producing some wonderful insects in this warm weather.

Yesterday there were several rhinoceros beetles (Sinodendron cylindricum) and the rare 'ancient woodland' species Tillus elongatus.

Tillus larvae prey on woodworm larvae and other smaller beetles.  They are supposed to be largely nocturnal and therefore rarely seen (except in traps like my log tower).  All our current Sussex records appear to be from the western half of the macrocounty .  Only the females have this red and bluish black colouring: the similarly shaped males are wholly black.  Charles Darwin, no less, wondered about this sexual dimension where the female is markedly more showy than the male, but did not appear to reach any conclusion.

I wonder if that is a somewhat anthropocentric speculation.  The brighter colours in the female could be simply to do with some chemical manifestations that happen to show up in these colours and do not signify that one sex is trying to use them to catch the eye of the other.

Yellow vetch (Vicia lutea) inland

Yellow vetch is a rather rare native plant of  coastal shingle and bare open land.  One of its strongholds is the Sussex Coast in places like Eastbourne, Shoreham Harbour and Pagham.  Elsewhere it has been widely recorded as an alien.

The example above (identity confirmed by Paul Harmes, the East Sussex Flora Recorder) was brought to me from Barcombe by a friend who farms there.  The opened flowers are white rather than yellow, though the unopened buds have a yellowish cast.

Away from the Sussex Coast, the Ouse Valley appears to be a route that the plant is taking inland.  It has been recorded from Friston Forest and from several places in the Lewes area which lies a short distance to the south of Barcombe.  Since its arrival on the farm there it has spread to a second field.  It is described in the Atlas of British Flora as a  "Submediterranean - subatlantic species."  Maybe global warming is helping it spread northwards.

Horned treehopper (Centrotus cornutus)

I had my first close encounter with a horned tree hopper the other day.  This small sap sucking homopteran is associated with young oak trees and does not seem to be very common.

The purpose of the 'horns', if there is one, would seem to be to frighten would be predators off as they do not seem to be a display item.

The pronotum also runs backwards over the top of the body like some alien's armour and might, I suppose, have some protective function.

I find these complicated forms quite difficult to grasp in evolutionary terms.  If such excrescences are of value, why do so few creatures develop them.  Most homopterans, for example, have neither horns nor a backplate, nor do they appear to be on the way to developing them.

Dock bug orgy

The dock bugs (Coreus marginatus) in our garden seem to have been somewhat carried away by the hot weather.

Mystery sorrel

I found this procumbent yellow-sorrel (Oxalis corniculata) growing in a corner of Battle market square.  It is the form with dark leaves known as var. atropurpurea.

It is not a native plant and, although found all over the temperate and tropical world, no one seems to know its original home.  Its success is partly due to the fact that its explosive seed pods can expel the seeds for up to 2 metres.

Like many other Oxalis species the leaves are said to be edible and can be made into a herbal tea.

Often regarded as a pernicious weed, procumbent yellow-sorrel is said, by the Royal Horticultural Society to be "strongly resistant to the range of selective lawn weedkillers."  Hooray!

Abundance of St. Mark's flies

The fields to the east of the Pestalozzi International Village in Sedlescombe were today alive with St. Mark's flies (Bibio marci).  Some hovered in the air with others of their species and often they settled on the leaves of shrubs and brambles along the field edge.  These all seemed to be males.

They are quite large, black flies and seem a bit threatening, but are quite harmless and indeed beneficial as they can help pollinate fruit trees.

They are named after St. Mark because they emerge around St Mark's Day, 25 April.  Prior to the 16th century calendar adjustments this was ten days earlier than it is now so 4 May is pretty much on cue.

The larvae feed on the roots of grass and decaying vegetable matter and are characteristic of old, unimproved pasture such as that at the top of North Clays on the Pestalozzi Estate.  Part of this area is a living illustration of the 'Vera Hypothesis'.

Here a clump of bushes and a tree have developed in an area ringed by nettles, brambles and gorse .  These have prevented grazing so that trees and shrubs can get away in the centre.

The grass outside this prickly grove is grazed by rabbits and, occasionally, by sheep and, because it is all humps and bumps, will not have been ploughed (at least not for a very long time).  Interestingly bluebells are scattered across the sward to the right of the picture and the plants are quite widely separated unlike the way they crowd together in woods.

It makes me wonder if the bluebell was originally a plant of open places that has been able to exploit coppicing and other woodland operations.