Stand and Stare

Seeing Red

2011-09-19T00:41:00.001+01:00

Wobbling my way along a quiet lane near Wooler in North Northumberland yesterday, I was gently bonked on the head.

Working on the principle that unripe nuts don't just drop off trees on still days I stopped the bike and looked up. Nothing. Silence. But I knew it was there somewhere so I parked up the bike and stood and stared. Five minutes passed. Nothing. However, when it comes to capacity to stand and stare I'm right up there with the best. The little blighter cracked first and showed itself but not until after fully 10 minutes of stand off.

It moved across a branch and looked down at me making a quiet alarm call. At each call its whole body jerked as if to force the air out of its lungs. I've seen this before but done with more vigour, accompanied by a little jump followed by all four feet banging on the branch simultaneously, making an audible knocking sound but this one made do with a shudder and a squeak.

We are very fortunate in Northumberland to still have the red squirrel though the inexorable northward march of the grey keeps it under threat. Where I work in Co Durham to the south, the reds have long gone. Greys are commonplace so I know that if this had been a grey I would not have had to wait 10 minutes before it made itself known.

Many people hate grey squirrels but actually they are fascinating to watch and wonderfully inventive. I take my squirrel fur hat off to them. I have a bird feeder outside my first floor window at work and greys regularly appear on the external window sill looking in at me. They just shin up the brick wall and chew the feeders to bits. If I disturb them they just jump off, land on the grass and lollop off waving metaphorical double digits. As a survival machine they've got what it takes. But I'm sorry, American readers, reds have cute factor 10, and being our native squirrel, yours has no chance in the popularity stakes round here.

Sometimes I have thought that the fate of the red squirrel is sealed, that we might as well stop trying to kid ourselves otherwise and give up trying to protect them against the tide of greys. However, you only have to see one like this to realise that the effort is well worth while. Even if it is only postponing the inevitable, let's stick with it as every encounter with this marvellous animal is a priceless bonus.

Come in No 62, your time is up..

2011-09-15T23:37:00.000+01:00

A few posts ago I promised to bore you with my bird ring big fish story once I found the photos. So here we go.

My most impressive ever bird ring find was in the mid 1980s. Wandering along a Hebridean beach, I saw the tip of a brown feather sticking out of a bank of seaweed. It looked at first like a juvenile gull but, as ever, I went to dig it out and check what it was. A major expletive ensued when I pulled on it and out from the seaweed appeared an immense hooky beak and a huge taloned foot.

There had been just the two of us on the whole beach so I nearly jumped out of my skin when a deep voice from nowhere growled, 'What have you got there? I looked up to see a huge dodgy-looking bloke with a spade held against his shoulder like a rifle. Now this was at a time when there was a battle going on between farmers and conservationists about eagles and their impact on sheep farming. There were strong suspicions that eagles were being systematically poisoned or shot on certain estates. So, my brain worked it out faster than the blink of an eagle's eye. Having shot the bird, buried it in the seaweed and been rumbled, he was now planning to bludgeon me to death with the spade and bury me in the seaweed too.

The remnants of no.62

I survived, but I had a feeling that the evidence wouldn't if I left it there. But what exactly does one do with a rank eagle in the middle of nowhere. The best I could manage was to retrieve the skull and, as I couldn't get the ring off the leg, I got the leg off the bird. Lunch was turfed out of its carrier bag and in went the stinking bits of eagle.

At this point I wasn't sure what it was. Golden eagles were well established on the island but the re-introduction of the white tailed sea eagle on Rhum had been going well and birds were beginning to spread. One thing I did know for sure was that the skull was absolutely enormous.

Once home I was able to confirm from the skull measurements that I had indeed found a white tailed sea eagle. I reported the find to the BTO ringing scheme and got in touch with RSPB Scotland and the sea eagle re-introduction programme people. They were keen to send the skull off for any brain remnants to be tested for poisons or pesticides. Someone from the RSPB went out, found the rest of the carcase from my description of the location and had that tested too. The results were inconclusive for evidence of deliberate poisoning and it was impossible to tell if the bird had been shot. One worrying outcome though was that high levels of the pesticide residue DDE (a breakdown product of DDT) and also PCBs were found in the brain tissue, presumably acquired through the marine food chain and probably contributing to loss of condition and the death of the bird.

This was all the more concerning when the ringing details came through. The bird I found was less than a year old, one of two young ringed at a wild nest the year before. The demise of this bird was a sad blow to the re-introduction programme at that point as breeding was only beginning to get established beyond the Rhum release area.

25 years on, it's good to know that the re-introduction programme has worked in spite of the early loss of No. 62. Without it I would not have been able to enjoy the magnificent sight a couple of years ago of a sea eagle bothering a golden eagle that had just been bothering a raven.

(Apologies for the poor picture quality. These are scans of prints that weren't sharp in the first place!)

Sorting out one's Eristalis bulge

2011-09-11T21:45:00.006+01:00

There is something special, I find, about watching a hoverfly in suspended animation right in front of your nose, especially if you can get the sun on it but highlighted against a darker background. They stay so perfectly positioned with just a glinting blur of wings.

Last weekend I spent a happy half hour fiddling about trying to catch this in a photograph. I've had a draft post hanging round for a while, incomplete, and just as I was about to finish it off, in pops a post from Blackbird's splendid Bugblog with a photo exactly the same as the ones I was trying to get only different. The difference being that hers is nice and sharp and top quality ....and mine isn't. Maybe if I keep it small you might not notice.

It's a little easier to focus once they settle.....

and this one was easier still. It's a wrap.

(If anyone would care to put a name to these for me that would be jolly decent.)

The bee mimicking hoverfly below looks odd in that it seems to have only one eye - you can't see the clear line of division normally visible between the two. That's because I caught it in the middle of cleaning its eyes and it has rotated its head through a full 90 degrees. They are fascinating to watch as they clean their lenses using the front pair of legs like windscreen wipers to scrape over the eye surfaces and scoop off the dust etc.

In terms of identifying this one, I made use of Stuart's helpful 'Eristalis bulge' tip - see his Donegal Wildlife blog - where he does a nice piece on hoverfly i/d for numpties (thanks Stuart). This hoverfly had the tell tale loop in the wing vein which identifies it readily as one of the Eristalis group.

And talking of hovering, I think it's time for my mouse to hover over the amazon web site and find that book on Syrphidae identification.

( PS: For more super-duper superior flight shots - check out Phil's post here.)

Second to Noon

2011-09-01T23:25:00.015+01:00

Some while ago I bemoaned the lack of information to be had about one of my favourites flies – Mesembrina meridiana aka the Noon Fly. This bonny matt black insect with unreal gold angular decorations on its head and a tasteful hint of gold on the wings bothered me because I could establish so little about its lifestyle other than it laid eggs in cow pats. (See my earlier post here)

Phil Gates pointed me towards a book – though I thought he was having me on when he said it was called ‘Insects of the British Cow Dung Community’. I mean, I know plenty of people who talk a load of cow manure but who in their right mind would write a book on it let alone give it such an evocative title. Well, one fine chap and largely unsung hero called Dr Peter Skidmore of course – published by the Field Studies Council. A hunt for the book proved fruitless as it was long out of print. I forgot about it until Mel Lloyd posted on cow pats a while ago on her Sandy Wildlife blog.

To cut a long story short I now have my hands on a copy after handing over a deposit (sorry) to the library loans people. What a gem it is and I suspect, between this blog and Mel's you haven't heard the last of it by a long chalk.

So.....I now know that the little female noon fly lays no more than 5 eggs in her whole short life. These are laid one at a time, two days apart in soft fresh dung. Trouble is that within two days any one cow dollop will have crusted over, so she is a one-egg-per-pat kind of girl. It follows that if you were to find a lot of eggs in one pat they must each have been laid by a different fly. Elementary my dear Watson. (He never said that).

Within an hour in the nice warm steamy slop, the egg has hatched . By the third instar stage, the larva turns carnivorous and munches its way through large numbers of maggots of the face fly (Musca autumnalis). This fly is responsible for spreading various unpleasant diseases in cattle so you see, this delightful dipteran is actually the farmer’s friend.

Another Skidmore gem is that the noon fly maggot is the largest you will find in your average British cow pat and, he says, is popular for that reason with both anglers and rooks. (Though somehow I can’t imagine many anglers fingering their way through fresh dung to look for noon fly maggots). He omitted to mention choughs, which make a very decent living by sticking their noses into cowpats rooting out goodies, no doubt including noon fly maggots, as I observed first hand on Colonsay. earlier this year.

(Distant) chough poking in a cow pat

Chough looking for a cow pat

So, a toast to Peter Skidmore, sadly no longer with us, for his splendid legacy and a plea to someone to reprint his book asap.

For posts from other noon fly fans try:-
The Living Isle
Martin's moths

On the Technical Use of Gastropods (or how to stop a squeaky wheel)

2011-08-08T00:21:00.007+01:00

I stood on a slug on Friday. Arion to carrion. You see, they closed the car park near my office so I now have to park right up the top of the hill. This means that I start my day with a ten minute scenic detour along the track at the woodland edge. (Every cloud has a silver lining). So it was this morning that I disturbed a roe deer and as it stepped out onto the track right in front of me, I stomped to an emergency stop and experienced that unmistakable oozy sensation of shoe upon very large slug. (Every silver lining has a cloud.).

I'll save you the gore of the squashed one - the Arion ater that I stood on looked like this before the close encounter with Doc Martin.

Arion ater, Mountjoy, Durham

Now here's a thing. In rural Sweden, in days of yore, their 4-wheeled carts had hard wood tree trunk axles, and used to squeak like hell and drive everyone crackers. In no time some bright Swede realised that a couple of those big Arion slugs were just the job - simply squash them in the gap and hey-presto, silence. You can almost hear the sighs of relief and the lowering of shoulders as the hapless molluscs do for the cart wheels what WD40 just did for my door hinge.

Furthermore, immigrant German glass blowers in Sweden's southern parts collected Arions to smear on their frying pans when cooking pancakes, and in Essex, kids collected them along the railway lines to sell to the rail workers to lube their wheels (just the job when badger lard is in short supply).

If you think I'm making this up, read the whole paper, gloriously entitled, 'Black Slugs (Arion ater) as Grease: A Case Study of Technical Use of Gastropods in Pre-Industrial Sweden', here. Nice one Ingvar.

The colour variation in Arion is interesting. There is a north-south divide. In Northumberland, I've only ever seen the jet black version. They are black in Sweden too.

Arion ater, Chillingham, Northumberland

In the south of England I read that most are red/orange/white ie anything but jet black. (Can my southern English readers confirm this?). In Durham, there seems to be a bag of all-sorts as if we are on the overlap.

Brown ones of varying shades of light and dark.

Black ones with a snazzy orange and black skirt.

I had some interesting discussion with Phil Gates about this on his blog a while back. Worth a look (here) if you missed it, if only for Phil's magnificent close up pictures which, as per, knock the spots off mine.

(Postscript - 27-08-11: Have a look at Blackbird's excellent blog for an interesting post on species and colour variations. The link is here. Looks like I will have to edit my post to read Arion sp. !)

This Shag Incapacitated

2011-07-20T17:30:00.001+01:00

900,000 birds are ringed every year in the UK. That's pretty impressive considering this is nearly all done by amateurs. Now, I'm always on the lookout for dead stuff and assiduously check every leg I find, yet it is a rare enough event to trigger a surge of excitement whenever I find one that's ringed. So this dead shag was a welcome find on the Bamburgh shoreline in Northumberland. (Sorry if you are reading this while eating your tea.)

As well as the usual numbered metal ring this bird also had the large blue ring above, intended to be readable from a distance while the bird is still alive.

A few weeks after reporting the find (online here) I received an email to tell me that my shag had been ringed at the Isle of May Bird Observatory in the Firth of Forth last June as a nestling. Sadly, this one didn't see its first birthday, well short of the record age of a recovered shag of 29 years 10 months 25 days. The British Trust for Ornithology records seem to show regular movement in both directions between the Isle of May and the Northumberland coast. (see map)

According to the BTO, the ring recovery rate is less than 2% so its hardly surprising that you find so few of them. I suppose this means that ringing is a pretty inefficient way to study how birds move about, how long they live etc. Up to now its been the only practical way but I do wonder if the days of mass ringing might be numbered as technology gets smaller and cheaper. Just look at the recent cuckoo studies - more information discovered in a week or two than in decades of ringing.

So, this shag on a rock was a nice find but my most impressive ring - and I'm still dining out on this one- was 25 years ago on the Isle of Skye. I'll bore you with the story as soon as I find my old 35mm slides. Don't hold you breath though - it could take some time.

Blown away (again)

2011-07-19T08:28:00.001+01:00

Every year stuff comes round and stuff moves on. Another year, another swallow. Marvellous though all of the seasonal comings and goings are, I guess we all have those handful of special things that manage to gobsmack us each and every year even though we've seen it all before.

I was standing in an overgrown field staring at butterflies but it wasn't the ringlet that did it. It was the momentary reflection of sunlight in the corner of my eye followed by an unmistakable plasticky clatter of wings and then the breathtaking moment when a brand new dragonfly perched on a hazel leaf right in front of me. As I slowly rotated my head to get a proper look without scaring it off, so the female southern hawker slowly rotated its head to and fro and we scrutinised each other. There is no escaping the immense fixed eyes that fold right around the top and sides of the head.

The big hawkers are truly astonishing insects, right at the top end of my list of living things that impress me anew year after year. I began compiling a top ten in my head of things that never fail to blow me away again with each annual first encounter. The year's first harebell among the marram grass; the sight and sound of massed geese dropping out of the sky in a Lindisfarne dusk after a summer in the arctic; the first full throated blackbird song of the year; the smell of gorse blossom in early summer sun...... I wonder what yours are?

To see the empty nymph case of a Southern Hawker, click here . The mould of the eyes is fascinating.

A Colonsay Abstract

2011-06-05T20:16:00.000+01:00

It was something of a surprise to me to discover the spectacular jagged cliff scenery on the west coast of Colonsay. The many ledges support strong colonies of seabirds and in a few areas it is possible to get very close.

Guillemots are always interesting to watch en masse on their breeding cliffs. Quite a few of the birds on these cliffs were ringed and it was possible to read some of them using John's telescope which cranks up to 60x. Passing these records on, it turns out that all the birds had been ringed at this same spot and one dated from 1993. Not bad, but the oldest known ringed guillemot in the UK was 31 years 9 months 11 days old when it was found dead in 2004.

Guillemots are fine but there is just something about their close cousins the razorbills which I find more appealing. I think it's the bold black and white plumage together with a more interestingly shaped bill with delicate white lines that gives it the edge in the elegance stakes.

The angle of the light together with the dark nature of the rocks seemed to emphasise their black and white patterns and I rather enjoyed the effects this created if you scrunched your eyes up. Try it.

Having had a go and failed miserably to capture this effect in a sketch, I reverted to photographs, and ended up with the abstract collage at the top of the post using black and white shots with all the mid tones removed.

On the tracks of otters

2011-05-31T23:03:00.001+01:00

These are otter prints. The animal has been bounding along (diagonally left to right in the photo) using the typical bendy movement it shares with its cousins the weasel and the stoat.

What you see are characteristic clusters of four separate footprints. First, the left and right front paws hit the ground slightly out of sync and one in front of the other. As the otter's momentum carries it forward, the body moves over these two prints until the two back paws plonk down beside marks left by the front feet.

As followers of my previous tracking posts will have guessed by now, I applied my usual techniques of skill and field craft to work this out - which is to say, none whatsoever. I watched the otter bound by and then went up and had a shufty at the tracks.

Here is the first bit - front paws hitting the ground, one at the back, the other further forward. The back legs start to move through.

Then , kerplonk, down go the back feet right beside the front feet marks but managing not to overlap any of them.

The push off given by the back legs together with its forward momentum, propel the animal quite a way forward such that the next time the front feet hit the ground the animal is far enough away to register a separate and distinct group of four.

With an otter of this size moving at a reasonable pace but not full tilt there is about 9 to 10 inches between the groupings.

The sighting of this otter was just one of those fortuitous things that is bound to come along if you spend enough hours outside in the right places. Apart from a few tracks and signs it had been an otterless week until the last hour of the last day on Colonsay when I decided to wander along the beach to see off the last ten minutes before heading off to the ferry. I looked up in response to a movement and stood riveted as this otter ran along the top of the beach, not 20 yards away. Jammy or what!

A Gastropod Ate My Ship

2011-05-30T23:03:00.001+01:00

Christopher Columbus got stranded in the Caribbean in 1503 because these things ate his boat. The Great Shipworm is a mollusc, not a worm, but the 'ship' bit is perfectly correct.

Me and my longtime Hebridean travelling companion, were wandering about on the shores of Colonsay and found these chunks of tree trunk riddled with perfectly machined tunnels about 1 cm in diameter and beautifully lined with a hard chalky material. Much of the linings had eroded away but you can see it in the bottom right hole in the picture below. Also the hole above that seems to have a sort of calcium divider across it - not sure what is going on there.

The molluscs themselves were long since gone but some robust bashing and rattling caused some fragments of shell to drop out.

The tunnels are beautifully formed and those we could see were at least 12 cm long. The timber looked just like someone had been messing about with a drill bit. Allegedly, they keep out of each others tunnels by inter-twining but never breaking through. Maybe that's the point of the hard calcium lining? Who knows.

The odd thing is that although the animal can grow up to 20 cm in length, its shells (it's a bivalve) are reduced to tiny bits - bit being the operative word - because the shells are at its head end and it does indeed use them as a drill bit, twisting and turning to drill out the tunnel.

What I can't work out though is what happens when the animal grows. How does it keep widening out its tunnel when the drill bit is stuck up at the front end at the coal face. Can it turn round head over heels and double back? Maybe it just concertinas up and shortens itself? In which case how come the entrance doesn't stay narrower than the inner tunnel? And does it wait until it is fully grown before it lines the tunnel? Ach...so many questions?

Some old references say that shipworms do not eat the wood but just use the tunnel as a home. More recent papers revise this and describe special enzymes that the animal produces to break down the cellulose for digestion - so it really does eat ships after all. And anything else made of wood.

By another of those delightful coincidences I happened to tune in to BBC 2 last night just at the point where they were describing a wreck that had been covered in sediment until recently. Its a 17th century armed merchant ship known as the Swash Channel wreck. From fresh as the day it sank to a swiss cheese in no time and they reckon that within another few years it could all be gone . The culprits - the shipworm of course - along with its partner in crime, the fabulously named Gribble (whose wood crunching enzymes, incidentally, are causing a great excitement in the green energy world.)

If you didn't catch 'Britain's Secret Seas' have a look on the BBC i-player (here) and zip through to the 28th minute for a 5 minute piece including some great samples and photos together with an x-ray of the beast in its burrow.

I also read that in the Baltic Sea, where archaeologists have discovered 100s of really old and important wooden vessels, shipworms have always been absent and not a concern. However, in recent times they have begun to appear and are now munching their way through a smörgåsbord of delicious wrecks. I suppose the real reason is not fully understood but as shipworms don't survive in colder water, a presumption has been put about that that old devil called global warming is behind this, through a rise in sea temperature. Could just be that old devil called evolution of course but the change does seem rapid.

Which is to say - there's more to a hole in a piece of driftwood than first meets the eye.

Executive nestbox

2011-05-29T18:07:00.001+01:00

Hebridean residents can be very inventive in finding uses for old vehicles. Chicken sheds, kennels, green houses etc. The fisherman / fireman / estate maintenance man who came to fix the tap washer in our rented 'wee hoos' on Colonsay cut off the cab from his old landrover when it finally bit the dust and uses it as a garden shed. Others, applying the principles of human pace I espoused in my last post, leave them to gently ooze their elements back into the earth over a decade or three.

Phil Gates' recent post on starlings (another closet member of the starling fan club comes out) has prompted me to dig out these photos showing another technique. The once proud owner of this limo obviously decided that the best thing was to let it splutter its last then place it carefully in a prominent spot on North Uist so that starlings could have it as a nestbox and everyone could have an uninterrupted view. And the starlings duly obliged, gaining access to the lovely warm and dry wheel arch through the rot hole in the rear wing where the electric aerial once impressed people by easing itself up and down, germanically.

The flashiest starling nest site in the world.....?

Click here for yet more in praise of starlings.

Saviour of the Human Pace

2011-05-28T23:55:00.002+01:00

In my frantic world of work, where the insatiable email monster whips up expectations of responses to everything at the speed of light or faster, it's so easy to find yourself disconnected from the natural human pace and rhythm. A bit like city kids having no concept of the real night sky. So, how do you recalibrate your system back to human pace without crashing and needing a talking-therapy reboot?

I offer two foolproof options. First, try repeating the mantra of that well know philosopher and all round deep thinker, King Louie, in the Jungle Book film - 'Cool it, boy. Unwind yourself.' Alternatively, spend a week or more on a small Hebridean island.

The one I've just been to does nicely. No terrestrial telly signal, a mobile that wouldn't work, one loop of single track twisty road where no-one can really top 20mph. Even the ubiquitous Caledonian MacBrayne ferries don't visit every day. Then from that imposed slow baseline, go out all day, every day and get some proper awful weather catapulted into your face by a deepening Atlantic depression. By, it works a treat - as you can tell by this chipper CalMac ferry deck hand.

So for the next few posts I'll up-sticks from my usual NE England base to Colonsay. The glamorous end (choughs, corncrakes, otters and stuff like that) can wait. This was one of our most intriguing finds.

More next time.....

Beside an eider

2011-05-04T20:53:00.005+01:00

Seahouses on a British Bank Holiday Sunday - you either love it or you hate it. A heady mix of smells - chips, candyfloss, doughnuts, dogs (hot or otherwise); visual treats - people stuffing their faces with chips, candyfloss, doughnuts, dogs (hot only); and sounds - the whirring credit card machines at the Farne Islands trip kiosks, the hubbub of the tat emporium bursting at the seams with punters, and the local lads eyeing up the lasses and going ahh-ooo-er when they see one they like the look of....... and that's just the ducks.

Although I would admit to being particularly partial to a pintail, there is nothing in the duck world that quite matches the eider in my humble opinion and there is no finer place to get up close and personal than the harbour at Seahouses. Feed them your sandwich crumbs if you want an even closer encounter.

At this time of year there is much posturing going on between the males and the mixed group of a couple of dozen ducks and drakes were full of interaction, noise and bustle with a bit of sex thrown in too.

Almost as enjoyable as watching the eiders is watching the people watching the eiders. The sound that the drakes make as they throw back their heads and puff out their chests (here in case you need reminding) makes everyone smile. Its hilarious and so are the passers-by who, without fail, seem unable to resist turning to their companions and mimicking ah-ooo-er.

Much has been written about Cuddy's Duck and I dare say some of it is even true, but one aspect of the UK's heaviest duck that intrigued me recently can be found in my earlier post about snotty nose syndrome

The bells, the bells

2011-04-29T22:46:00.001+01:00

Usually I have plenty to say but not this time. I'm happy to let the beauty of a mature English bluebell wood speak for itself - and to thank Durham University for its gentle management of Great High Wood on the outskirts of Durham city. The future of one of the region's finest bluebell displays is in very good hands.

The Extra in the Ordinary (2)

2011-04-27T23:56:00.002+01:00

The old limekilns by the harbour at Beadnell in Northumberland are always worth a look if you are passing by. The other day when I was up that way the sun was catching a wall of stone that was positioned in front of a dark inner chamber. I thought that it might be interesting to hang about to see if anything landed on the wall in the front-of-stage spotlight against the dark curtains.

A woodpigeon seemed to find this idea amusing.

But the real star was the ever-extraordinary, superb starling.

There is such pleasure to be had out of this bog-standard, undervalued bird. As it moved, the metallic colours produced by the angled sunlight on the feathers flashed from gold to green and purple to bronze. Magnificent. Add to this the astonishing behaviour of winter roosting flocks (great video here) and you've got one brilliant bird. I rest my case.

*************

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The Owl Tree

2011-04-23T23:35:00.002+01:00

One of the curiosities of recording TV programmes is the little time capsules of news that you catch at either end of the thing you want. So it is that I have just watched a newsflash about Gatwick Airport being closed due to snow. It caused me to reflect for a moment on Newton's Fourth Law, which states: the airtime given by BBC News to snow and ice dramas is directly proportional to the amount of snow that falls upon London and inversely proportional to that which falls upon Northumberland.

A few years ago now we were driving down a quiet road in North Northumberland when my daughter annouced that she had just seen two owls in a tree. (By the way, there is a connnection to snow here if you stick with it). As it was 11am on a bright hot sunny May day, I thought little owl, but my tyres were right when they screeched a passable barn owl impression on the tarmac. We slowly reversed back up the hill to an old roadside ash to see four black eyes staring out of the hole in the bole.

We watched one fly out and disappear down the road. That night we came back and sat nearby at dusk to listen to quiet hisses before a bird silently emerged and sat around in the branches until it became to dark to see it anymore.

Since then, each year I have gone back to the owl tree and enjoyed the sight and sound of these fabulous birds. Last night, however, the owl tree was silent. I was half expecting this, having heard from my mate who runs a barn owl nest box and ringing scheme on the northern edge of the nearby Cheviots that things were looking pretty bleak for barn owl numbers after the hard winter. I fear 'my' birds have not survived either.

There has been a lot of press inches about the effect of prolonged snow cover on Barn Owl survival and given that their primary food source, voles, are inaccessible to a hunting owl in a snow covered landscape, this must be a significant factor. As with most things though its more complicated than that. The Barn Owl Trust has an interesting overview of winter survival here.

So with the gloom surrounding the Owl Tree this year it was all the more pleasing to have seen the owl at the top of the post fit and well on the Northumberland Wildlife Trust's Hauxley reserve.

Poring over Porifera

2011-04-22T23:21:00.001+01:00

The minute I turned to the page in the field guide and read, 'for all their simplicity these are the most difficult to describe carefully and scientifically' I knew I should have picked crabs.

Along with a hundred or so other volunteers, I am taking part in the Big Sea Survey on the NE coast of England. This brilliant scheme aims to plug a huge gap in knowledge of the status of intertidal life by harnessing volunteer power, trained and supported by Dr Heather Sugden and colleagues at Newcastle University's Dove Marine Laboratory, to carry out surveys using reproduceable scientific methods.

So it is that I am looking at sponges (someone's got to do it) and headed down to the low tide rocks at Beadnell in Northumberland. The kelp zone is a fabulous, alien environment, perfect for honing your swearing skills. If you don't believe me, you try walking on rocks covered in Laminaria digitata and see what comes out of your mouth.

It doesn't look much on the surface....

... but part the slimey fronds for the full technicolour experience.

Things get interesting when you try to identify the species of sponges here. The guidebooks assist with phrases like 'white-orange-yellow-green-brown' ; 'form may be very variable' ; 'surface furrowed or smooth' and other really helpful things. The commonest by far here is the breadcrumb sponge Halichondria panicea. Although the colour varies the form is predictable with these prominent volcano features:-

Sponges are simple little animals packed together in colonies. They take in water through the general structure and then eject it via the craters (oscula), filtering out goodies in the process. Some very interesting things feed on them too - sea slugs for example. Right next to this patch was a beautiful, delicate swirl of eggs produced ( I think) by one particular nudibranch - the Sea Lemon. There must be millions of tiny eggs in this mass - which was about 4cm across with the curtains standing a centimetre in depth off the rock.

I'm a convert. Sponges are cool. And at least they don't bite your fingers.

Bits on Bats 8: Goodnight - see you next Spring.

2010-12-01T23:40:00.002Z

Trapped in by domestic requirements, the icicles dangling off the conservatory gutters seemed like prison bars. The wintry scene set me thinking - why is it that so few animals hibernate and why can't we? Apart from bats, only the hedgehog and the dormouse hibernate among British mammals. Yet surely it has wider merit than that as a way of riding out rough patches. I mean, we're all mammals with similar physiology, so how come all mammals can't do it? I guess that there are a number of competing factors that determine whether it is a sensible strategy or not. For our bats its a no-brainer. They can't eat anything except flying insects and you'll probably have noticed that there's not a lot of those around right now. So they have three options - migrate, hibernate, die.

British species of insectivorous bats are pushing at the northern limit of their ranges and all originated in tropical areas. Although some do migrate, the commonest strategy is to hiberate. But the fact is, hibernation is not all it's cracked up to be. If you don't get stocked up on reserves you won't make it through. Also if you get disturbed and woken up this can use up significant energy reserves that can make the difference between surviving and not. It's a risky strategy.

I read an interesting take on why humans don't hibernate which I find persuasive. Humans evolved in tropical regions where seasonal food shortage wasn't really a problem. No advantage to be had from developing hibernation. We only spread out to the colder parts of the globe within the last 100,000 years or so and this isn't long enough to evolve the physiological changes to enable hibernation. Plus, there's no point (however appealing it may seem at this time of year!) as we are versatile eaters and the discovery of fire, clothing, shelter etc enable us to survive cold periods much more successfully than if we hibernated. By contrast, bats were catching insects in prehistoric skies while our ancestors were no more than small lemur-like primates. So they have had millions of years to evolve hibernation as a response to being totally dependent on a food source that disappears for months on end.

Hibernation is a fascinating business. Bats find cold places with steady, low temperatures (caves, tunnels, thick walls etc) and let their body temperature drop to a degree above ambient - ideally between 6 and 9 degrees C - and just close down. The heart rate drops to 10 beats per minute in a bat whose heart will be belting away 1000 times a minute in summer flight. Energy needs reduce to almost zero (less than 1% of that needed when fully revved up at 39C). The bat goes cold and stiff and a tiny pipistrelle can last like this for 100 days with ease. The bat in the photo below - which is courtesy of the Leeds university - is covered in condensation.

(photo c/o Bat Research Group at the University of Leeds)

Coming back to the question of whether humans could develop hibernation if need be there are a couple of tantalising stories of people who were rescuscitated hours after they were thought dead. One case involved a women trapped head first under water beneath a frozen river for over an hour. Another involved a japanese man found on a snowy mountain side 24 days after vanishing. When searchers discovered him, he appeared to be in a frozen coma. His pulse was almost undetectable. His body temperature had dropped to 22c and his organs had mostly shut down. He recovered fully with no lasting ill effects. One of his doctors said: "He was frozen alive and survived. If we can understand why, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for the future." Indeed.

Meanwhile, back to bats. They have one other neat trick. Apart from hibernation, at any time of day, at any time of the year they can let their body temperature drop to ambient if there is a cold snap or poor feeding. The technical term is torpor but one book I have refers to it as 'daily lethargy'. I must have bat genes tucked away somewhere then....

One hundred and one not out

2010-11-28T00:16:00.000Z

Ah well, back again. Once a blogger always a blogger, I guess. So to kick-start things for my 101st post, here is a slab of concrete.

It's my front drive actually, in urban north Newcastle. The only thing I can think of to say about it is that it's not very good woodcock habitat. For example, when my wife went out to take the kids to school the other morning there wasn't a woodcock to be seen on it anywhere.

When she came back there was. Dead as a dodo. Fresh as a daisy.

No doubt one of the gazillion cats round here did the damage but its notable in that it's the second successive year we've seen woodcock here -except that last year's was alive and well in the back garden. (If you missed that one you can catch up on the story and some interesting comments here)

The opportunity for a decent look at the plumage was too good to miss, and what a beautiful bird it really is - particularly on the scapulars and the upper wing coverts shown below.

Wonderful leafy camouflage and therein probably lay this one's downfall. My guess would be that it dropped into the street after a lengthy migration flight to the UK and holed up, knackered, under a bush somewhere, only to get Tiddlesed for its trouble. Pesky things - dumping in me raised beds and knobbling me woodcocks. Grrr gnash.

The tail feathers are very distinctive, should you ever come across one. The shape is unusual with a tapered, squared end and the tip is lighter on the upper side but flip it over and it's bright white.

Over and out (....possibly)

2010-10-06T23:55:00.002+01:00

I started blogging for no particular reason than I fancied a go. I enjoy sharing natural history observations with like-minded people but the opportunities for me to do so face to face are fairly limited, what with family, work and stuff like that. It seemed to me that the blogosphere might possibly fill that gap and to some extent it has. I assumed that I would soon run out of steam and yet here I am at my 100th post. As it happens, it has made me realise that I rather enjoy the process of writing. That's a discovery in itself. So, thank you to my small but regular band of readers and followers for tracking my burblings and for chipping in comments from time to time. I have also really enjoyed keeping tabs on my favourite blogs - thanks to you all for all the things I've learned (and for reminding me what quality photos are meant to look like!)

However, I don't know about you, but I don't find Blogger that helpful in promoting and sharing discussion about observations. For I-write-you-read blogging its great but for interaction its much less effective. If I leave a comment on your blog for instance, I never find out if you have responded unless I remember to go back to your post and check.

Similarly, if you comment on my blog and I respond to that, you have no way of knowing and, again, the chain is broken and the moment lost. This really does stifle any chance of ongoing discussion and interaction beyond the first comment. This in turn makes it quite difficult to get into much depth and means we all miss out on those delightful random links where one thing leads to another and another....

Maybe there is a better platform than Blogger for this somewhere that I haven't found yet? (It's probably called a natural history society!)

So, does my blog have a future? Well, to be honest, I'm not sure. Trouble is though, this blogging lark is addictive and the natural world is a bottomless pit of new discoveries to share. Maybe I'll start a companion blog to Stand and Stare called Sit and Think, where I post less but in more depth. Hmm. Now there's an idea.....

For now though, and while I cogitate, best wishes and many thanks to everyone who has ever bothered to read my stuff.

Allan

On things squatty and snotty

2010-10-05T15:50:00.005+01:00

Now, where was I? Oh yes, squat lobsters. I mentioned in my last post that this one was about quarter of an inch long in the body. (Sorry about dodgy pictures - I have lost my trusty Lumix and had to borrow my daughter's camera - which struggles more with close-ups shots).

The other notable thing about it is that it resembles none of those to be seen in any of my seashore field guides nor pictures to be readily found on the web. Is this some exciting new Northumbrian rarity then? Cue hilarious seashore pun. Hold fast! Before getting carried away maybe there is a clue in its size. Fully grown squat lobsters are up to 4 inches long in the body depending on the species so this, at about quarter of an inch, is very early stage youngster. Being a decapod crustacean, the squat lobster's lifecyle goes from egg and sperm to a larval form that floats about in the plankton before moulting into something recognisably squattish. I gather that the adult colouring and form doesn't immediately appear. Trouble is, that's all the books tend to show you.

If you ignore the colour or lack of it and the yellow socks but study instead the detail of the structures between the goggly eyes, this begins to look like the spiny squat lobster Gallathea spigosa. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. It is a bonny thing when adult. This close up is terrific.

And a quick 'did-you-know'. Squat lobsters are more closely related to hermit crabs than lobsters. (How have you got through your life without that fact to hand?)

Its strange how you get no clue about what's under a rock from how it looks on top. Some turn up nothing yet this one was alive with stuff. In addition to the squat lobster, there is the breadcrumb sponge it's sitting on, a colony of bryozoans along the edge of the sponge; the spiral tube worm Spirorbis and a few random snotty looking things that are probably sea quirts.

Meanwhile, just along the shore - more strange snotty blobs under a rock

The string of eggs give the game away. Not anemones but sea hares (Aplysia punctata ) - very difficult to photograph under water in a howling gale with a dodgy camera but you can just about make out the curvy flappy structures along their backs. They are molluscs but their shell is reduced to a very small remnant hidden under those flaps. It is also fair to say that they have very peculiar sexual habits - a sort of interesting variation on the conga. Each is both male and female, and although there were only two joined up here, they breed in long chains of linked individuals -each fertilised by the one behind while it in turn fertilises the one in front.

The size difference was marked. Nothing in the books about this - though they did tell me that they come ashore to breed in the Spring. Yeah, that'll be right. There is a crying need for a really authorative and detailed seashore fieldguide I must say.

Dahlia Smith

2010-09-29T17:30:00.000+01:00

My last post introduced the dahlia anemone (formerly Tealia felina but now Urticina felina). I've been trying to get more hard facts about this animal and as usual, because it isn't a bird, there's a scarcity on the internet- though I did unearthed this little gem. The massive crude oil spill from the wreck of the tanker Torrey Canyon on the south coast in 1968 devastated the intertidal life (or maybe it was the detergent used to break up the oil). One month after the spill, researchers found that the dahlia anemone was one of the most resistant animals on the shore, being commonly found alive in pools between the tide-marks which were completely devoid of all other animals. (I was very pleased to note that the person who published this research was called Smith. So that's the post title explained if you were wondering).

This photo shows the anemone with all of its tentacles retracted. It has sticky projections on the outside which attract bits of debris and provide great camouflage.

After reading that they can deal with whole crabs, I wondered how. Forget the web, my scruffy old 1961 reprint of a 1948 edition of 'Animals without Backbones' by Ralph Buchsbaum was more use. Clearly no anemone is going to lift up its skirt and run after a crab so it just sits and waits until one blunders on top of it. Then muscles contract to fold the tentacles inwards and pull the crab inside its insides. Its structure is quite simple - basically just like a purse with a draw string top. Inside the animal there are a series of radial partitions and further sub-folds and along the edges of these are cells that release digestive chemicals. Acidic in nature, they make short work of the calcareous external skeleton of the crab and hey presto - crab soup. One hiccup later and the rubbish gets chucked out from the same orifice as the grub went in. What could be simpler.

c/o Animals without Backbones: Ralph Buchsbaum: Penguin Books 1961

Meanwhile, not far away, I turned over a large stone and found this tiny thing clinging to a layer of sponge. Can a squat lobster be cool? Absolutely. No more than about 5mm long in the body, it was the yellow socks that did it for me. More on squat lobsters next time.

Autumn Springs

2010-09-27T23:42:00.002+01:00

Rockpooling. What better way to spend a glorious summer's day at the beach? Shorts on, sleeves up, paddling about in the water heated up by the beating sun. So why was I doing it yesterday on a freezing Northumbrian beach in an icy, cap-lifting, north easterly blast coming straight off a mountainous sea? Well, when me and John planned the trip three days ago to hit the autumn equinox low spring tides it was beautifully still and double the temperature. Remind me - why do I live here?

There was no way my boots were coming off for a paddle that's for sure, yet there was plenty of interest for the frozen fingers to get to grips with.

The sea-slugs are a curious group of animals. Some are extraordinarily ornate, all are difficult to find. This one, about an inch long, is the common grey sea slug (Aeolidia papillosa), and it looked like something you'd find in your hanky when out of water. Once back in water, its delicate form emerged.

This member of the Nudibranch group is reckoned to be common but they are very easily overlooked. It feeds exclusively on sea anemones, stinging bits and all. Now, here's an interesting snippet. They don't digest the stinging cells; they use them. Apparently, they somehow manage to transport the cells through their bodies to their backs where they are incorporated as a defence mechanism.

And talking of anemones, the lower shore produced a fair number of these beauties - the dahlia anemone. This one is about three inches in diameter. You can judge the scale from the dog whelk in the foreground. More of this and other finds, including a quarter inch squat lobster with fabulous yellow feet in my next post.

Wren, unimpressed

2010-09-23T22:22:00.032+01:00

Hello. I've been a bit quiet lately not least because my camera has disappeared off the planet, the computer's been playing up and anyway, even when it works I can't seem to get near it these days for kids doing homework and facebooking, frequently at the same time. But a window of opportunity has appeared so... with apologies to proper poets.....

Fun and games with terrific scientific names,

can while away the airport hours

waiting for that bloody plane.

Take this.

Troglodytes troglodytes.

Who came up with that one then?

Its just absurd for the smallest bird,

with the shortest name in English, wren.

Must have been some English men

who chanced to choose a country boozer
with a dingy cellar

as inspiration for

Cave-dweller cave-dweller.

On the other hand

they sometimes can

encapsulate within a name,

the very essence of the beast.

Take one, which loves to feast

on blood and which we like the least,

for starters.

Culicoides impunctatus,

aka, the Highland Midge

is but a smidge of life

yet generates such strife.

But the name itself is worth a smile,

and that was probably the plan.

It means, so says an Oxford Don, a man

of latin and of greek,

'wee puncturing bastard'

with delightful tongue in cheek.

One final note to end this verse

before it gets much worse.

The hoopoe's Upupa

is really rather super

and my favourite fish

Boops boops is even greater

but the latin name to end all names?

Gasteruption jaculator.

Luckily the flight departure was announced at this point - just as well....
I promise something deep and meaningful next time.

Bloody cranesbill, it's a monkey flower!

2010-09-07T22:59:00.002+01:00

Wandering aimlessly through wikipedia reminded me that the red rose as an emblem for Lancashire dates back to 1485 and the Battle of Bosworth. I assumed that the white rose of yorkshire dates back to similar times but another source (yorkshirehistory.com) casts doubt upon whether it has ever been officially sanctioned as a county emblem. Whatever. My point concerns the recent proliferation of County Flowers. Northumberland's is the bloody cranesbill. It's such a prominent and welcome addition to the dune flora along the coast here that its not at all a bad choice. I might have made a case for Burnet Rose but I can live with Geranium sanguineum.

Admiring the bloody cranesbills on the Cocklawburn dunes near Berwick at the weekend set me wondering how this choice was made. In fact, the county flower concept was only extended to cover the whole United Kingdom in 2002, as a promotional thing by the plant conservation charity Plantlife. They ran a competition to choose county flowers for all counties (and also a dozen or so major cities), to celebrate Liz's Golden Jubilee. There is a full list with photos here.

There are some very peculiar choices. London gets the rosebay willow herb. Wow. Newcastle upon Tyne, my home base, has the monkey flower of all things. I'm blowed if I know where the monkey flowers are in Newcastle and anyway that honour should surely have been reserved for Hartlepool. County Tyrone and Kirkcudbright seem to be fighting over the bog rosemary. I bet both local Tourist Boards keep quiet about that one. Still, it's all harmless fun. Nominations for County Fungus anyone?

Moorhen -v- Swamphen

2010-09-05T00:39:00.003+01:00

The Collins Bird Guide is decent enough but I always get irritated when I flick past the skuas to see the Arctic referred to as the Parasitic Skua. I can just about live with Barn Swallow but I refuse, point blank, to call divers loons. I reserve that moniker for the people who think this is a good idea (with apols to any American readers).

There is one change of name that I hadn't noticed however, because it refers to a bird I'd never come across until my recent visit to the S'Albufera reserve in Majorca. So it seems that the Purple Gallinule is now the Purple Swamp-hen. Well there you go. Whatever you choose it call it, it's well worth a look. This one strolled past the hide I was sharing with a few dozen mozzies.

As it strutted across some dried up mud minding its own business, there was a sudden commotion and a seriously cross moorhen appeared from nowhere and began circling the big rail in its best aggressive threat posture.

The moorhen did its utmost but the swamphen just stood and stared at it.

By this point the moorhen was absolutely doing its nut. After a short while, the Gallinule just stretched out its lanky legs and strode off into the sunset.

It was a scene that reminded me of the classic bit in the Jungle Book film where Kaa the snake is trying to hypnotise Shere Kahn the tiger. He goes through his eye twirling, th-th-inging routine until a bored Shere Khan just splats Kaa's head under a huge paw and says 'Oh, I haven't got time for that sort of nonsense'.

The story of the Purple Gallinule at S'Albufera is interesting. Hunted to extinction here, a re-introduction programme began in 1991 with 28 birds released. By 1999, there were 200 pairs.

Balearic ballerina

2010-08-24T23:49:00.004+01:00

Ah well, that's the holiday over for this year. For a lad who was never let out of doors without a string vest on, I struggled with the Majorcan temperatures of 30C and, as the sun beat down on my ever-widening parting, I yearned for a really miserable sea fret. My idea of holiday hell is sitting on a crowded Med beach, rubbing in gritty suntan lotion and slowly rotating all day. So, the compromise we arrived at whereby I dropped the family at the beach then took off for an hour or two's exploration was just the job. Luckily, we were not far from the nature reserve of S'Albufera and I managed a couple of afternoon sessions there. So here is a little piece of Majorcan elegance.. and its nothing to do with the bodies on the beach.

I watched this one do a black-winged stilt-walk for a while, delicately picking off bits and pieces from the water surface, and then it looked up and posed a half decent arabesque - without falling over.

Really, those legs are ridiculous. But not half as much as some you see on the beach.

Larva palaver

2010-08-10T21:42:00.000+01:00

Identifying caterpillars shouldn't be too difficult should it -especially the big flashy ones.

When my daughter found this one strolling across a grassy footpath on the Bamburgh cliff top I took a quick photo with the plan to sort it out definitively back home.

The first two field guides I tried were inconclusive, with none of the illustrations matching this one exactly or with illustrations so small that the detail could not be made out. This included, disappointingly, the Collins Field Guide to Caterpillars of Butterflies and Moths in Britain and Europe. The most helpful has been my old favourite, Margaret Brooks and Charles Knight's 'Complete Guide to British Butterflies' from 1982.

The trouble is that caterpillars can be a bit of a bother. They have to moult to grow, averaging four or sometimes five changes before full size. In some species not only does the look of the caterpillar change significantly at each moult but even the same instars of different individual caterpillars show variations in colour and pattern.

The easy bit is that spiny larvae are most likely to be members of the Nymphalidae family.

Given that this is Northumberland and we have a smaller range of species compared to the warmer southern climes, the realistic options are limited. Although this one does not exactly fit any of the descriptions or photos I have found, on balance it's the red admiral that gets my vote but I wish I could say that with 100% conviction. Any offers?

In the Net at Football Hole

2010-08-09T21:13:00.000+01:00

Rockpooling is a harmless enough pastime and Football Hole is as good a place as any to do it. Why this bay near Low Newton on the Northumberland coast is called Football Hole I know not but its a great name. I remember, years ago, when I used to lead guided walks on the shore, one of my fellow guides - Peter Davies - coming up with one of those walk titles I wish I'd thought of - 'Violence at Football Hole' (dealing with all the various aggressive goings-on in rock pools.) This post's title is my feeble tribute to the marine life guv'nor.

Anyway, the fishing nets hadn't produced much of note but when I turned over a large boulder we found this underneath.

It's the first time I've ever come across a live cowrie in all the time I've pootled in pools. I've waxed about searching for their shells before (see Trivial Pursuit) but the real deal is even better - a truly bonny beast. The tangerine stripes on the foot are magnificent as is the large orangey siphon tube. Perhaps the strangest feature of all though is linked to that orange oval on its back. This is the leading edge of the cowrie's mantle which it projects out from underneath its shell and up over the outer surface. As we watched the mollusc move, this veil was pulled up and retracted quite often. In this picture you can see that it is pulled further back.

This underside view shows the foot retracted.

There are two cowrie species in the North Sea - Trivia monacha and Trivia arctica. This one, I think, is Trivia monacha - the European Cowrie. I hesitate slightly because it is supposed to have three clear dark spots on its back. This one has only vague darkish areas but given that I found it fairly high up on the shore its unlikley to be T. arctica as this is reported as only occuring below low tide levels.

My own goal at Football Hole is to turn up a sea hare next time.

Where am I?

2010-08-08T22:42:00.000+01:00

I'm standing on the bed of a shallow tropical sea, wiggling my toes. My eyes are closed, yet I can imagine the desert island paradise before me. My head is swathed in a woolly hat to stave off the vicious north wind and the goosepimples on my exposed knees have goosepimples on them. Where am I?

Northumberland of course - in August. Don't believe the spin the tourist board gives you by the way. The sea temperature off the Northumberland coast is the coldest in the UK. I'm frozen stiff, enjoying a bracing week's Summer break. So, what was all that guff about the tropical paradise? Simple, I'm at Cocklawburn, just south of Berwick upon Tweed, where there are some wonderful geological features including limestone beds laid down when this part of the earth's crust was indeed located in the tropics and millions of creatures living in the warm seas died, fell to the sea bed and are now preserved as fossils in the limestone beds - on which I am standing, wiggling my toes to keep them warm.

The most obvious fossils are the stems of crinoids, sometimes called sea lillies, though they are not plants but animals - echinoderms - related to the star fish and sea-urchins.

The other common fossils found here are brachiopods, filter feeding animals housed in two small shells or valves, and anchored to the bottom or to a suitable substrate.

This part of the coast is one of the best areas in the UK to see exposed successions of carboniferous sedimentary rocks - limestone, sandstone, shale and coal in repeated sequences reflecting the changing climate and sea levels of the period from about 350 to 290 million years ago. The juxtaposition of limestone and coal fostered the development of an extensive industry in the 18th century. Coal fires were lit in kilns and limestone added. The intense heat broke down the limestone and produced quick-lime which could then be spread onto acidic moorlands and other infertile areas to bring them into commercial agricultural use.

A welcome legacy of the spoilheaps etc around this limekiln is an area of lime-rich soils supporting an interesting and varied plant community.

Bits on Bats 7: All in a day's work

2010-07-27T21:55:00.001+01:00

'Aarghh' was the cry that rang through one of our offices at work yesterday morning when staff arrived to find a bat flying round the entrance foyer and stairwell. Someone eventually made a link to me and I got a call for help. As often happens in these cases it was one of the biggest blokes calling to report that the smallest women were terrified. However, when I suggested that he might manage to pick it up and put it in a box himself the pretence faded. 'It might bite me!' he said. My advice that this would only happen if his jugular vein was exposed didn't seem to help so I gave in and went over to sort it out.

I found the bat squeezed into a little gap along the edge of a roof light. Often when bats get inside buildings they do so through a small gap and then struggle to find their way out again. If windows can be opened at dusk this often does the trick but in this case there were no windows so there was nothing for it but to catch the bat, check it out and release it at dusk.

After a bit of a struggle I managed to weedle it out of the crevice and here it is...

It is a pipistrelle and big enough to lie comfortably on the end joint of my thumb.

The photos show quite well one of the identification features commonly used in bats and that is the shape of the tragus - that small flap of cartilage just in front of the ear opening. It is small and round ended in the pipistrelles and this distinguishes the Pipistrellus genus from the Myotis bats (whiskered, Daubenton's Brandt's Natterer's etc) in which the tragus is longer and more sharply tipped.

So this little bat had a trip home with me and I then drove back to work at dusk and released it outside the building where it was found. At this time of year the bats are still present in their nursery roosts and it is important that this one was able to rejoin its colony.

All in a day's work.

Welcome to Goswick....

2010-07-25T22:00:00.053+01:00

....if the bombs don't get you the quicksand will.

Being regular visitors to this part of the north Northumberland coast, the signs do tend to become invisible and so when we came across a strange circular depression in the sand we scratched heads and pontificated on all sorts of natural reasons why the tides might have created this weird effect. It was only back home that the penny droppped. The signs are true. The MoD are still clearing the site of bombs dating back to its days as an air to ground bombing range from about 1945 to the early 50s. Sixty years on and bombs are still surfacing.

At least the dunes are a bit more tranquil and this time of year produces two of my all time favourite flowers - the harebell and rest-harrow. This summer seems particulary prolific for rest harrow, I must say.

This year I saw the first white harebells I have come across at Goswick - all mixed in with blues. I posted about white varieties of harebells last year and two theories emerged from the discussion - one that it was a mutation capable of continuation through self pollination so that seeds would produce white flowering plants and the other that a virus might be involved in which case seeds would produce blue flowered plants.

Are white harebells getting commoner or am I just noticing them more?

Bits on Bats 6: It's enough to drive you bats

2010-07-15T23:23:00.001+01:00

Bats in Houses by AM Hutson: Vincent Wildlife Trust 1990

Pipistrelles and humans have two things in common.  They are both mammals and they both show a marked inclination to live in modern houses. But hang on, I hear you cry, bats live in belfries don't they? Well I could pen the longest blog post on record if I set about dealing with all the common bat myths that still abound so instead I'll move on.

I met a couple yesterday who live in a 60's flat roofed two storey house which they share with 300 pipistrelles. That alone is not that unusual. In most similar scenarios the humans take the inside of the house and the pips the outside.  This is a convenient arrangement because never the twain shall meet apart from brief encounters at dusk if the human occupants venture outside at the point of bat emergence.  In fact it is perfectly possible to live your life blissfully unaware of your squatters. (If you don't believe me see Bits on Bats 1). Being crevice seekers, pipistrelle bats usually roost within the outer structure of buildings. There's not a lot of meat on a pip so large numbers can pack into small spaces eg tucked under roof tiles, under flashing round chimneys, inside cavity walls, within boxed-in eaves etc.

Assuming that there are no medical phobia complications involving either party, bats and people can usually co-exist in peace.  Things can get difficult, however, when bats start to find their way into the living areas of the house.

For this family it all started when they sat down to watch Corrie and a bat flew out from behind the tv and flapped its way round the room. I must say that would cause even me - arch bat fan - to jump. Now they find bats in the house on average every other day during the summer. In the bathroom, flying round the hall and stairway, in the sink, on the side of the bath, crawling down the stair carpet, in the bedrooms. Everywhere. Bat droppings on the window ledges outside and on the kitchen benches inside.  A favourite spot is hanging on the back of the telly. When they got their luggage scanned at Schiphol airport they were pulled over and searched because there was a bat in their case and the skeleton showed up on the X-ray. Bat preservation is all well and good but take it from me, there is nothing in bat protection legislation that obliges you to take your bats on holiday with you.

These tolerant but now very bat-weary people are having their home life ruined by their lodgers. They have been led to believe that because bats are protected there is nothing that can be done. The truth is that bats in the living spaces of private dwelling houses is something up with which you do not have to put. This is a home that hosts a few bats not a bat roost that hosts a few humans.

I am now working with the owners to see if we can establish how the bats are getting from the roost site into the living spaces so that we can take practical measures to prevent this without affecting the roost itself. I'll keep you posted.

Jelly and Ice Cream

2010-07-13T19:59:00.000+01:00

Sit on a Northumbrian beach at the moment and you can enjoy jelly with your ice cream free of charge.

The total number of jellyfish washed up on the shoreline in the last couple of weeks must amount to tens upon tens of thousands. Two weeks ago I counted over a hundred in just one short stretch before giving up. On that occasion three species were present though the vast majority were the Common Jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) with its four very distinctive purple reproductive structures clearly visible.

There were also a few Lion's mane jellyfish (Cyanea capillata)

and the closely related blue Cyanea lamarkii

Then, back on the beach on Sunday just gone, the wobbly hoardes again scuppered the family plodge, but this time they were exclusively the blue jellyfish Cyanea lamarkii with none of the other two species present. Why the difference? No idea, frankly.

So....how come we are suddenly up to our tentacles in jellyfish? It's not that easy to find a definitive answer to that one I have found. Perhaps it is nothing more than a combination of the timing of the breeding cycle and the weather/sea conditions combining to push the jellyfish drifts from the open sea to the shore.

I see that the Marine Conservation Society are asking for jellyfish sightings so you might like to report any that you see here. There is also a rather nice identification chart on the same web site. The only trouble I have found with both this and the standard seashore guide books is that they aren't that helpful when faced with a flattened blob on the sand.

Invasion of the Flying Dragons

2010-06-30T23:29:00.000+01:00

Picking up from yesterday's post, I was enjoying a sunny lunchtime break at work today watching the antics of the blue tailed damselflies at one of our ponds and rejoicing in the wonderful biodiversity that we enjoy on the Durham University estate. Suddenly, the peace was shattered by the plasticky clatter of a hawker's wings and a spanking male Emperor Dragonfly whizzed past. (No chance of me getting a photograph but for some crackers try the British Dragonfly Society web site.) The big dragonflies catch me out anew every year with their size, bulk and all round brilliance.

When I got home I decide to check Anax imperator because I still have it in my head as a southern species. Sure enough, the distribution map in the 1983 edition of Cyril Hammond's book, 'The Dragonflies of GB' shows that it definitely does not like NE England.

(c/o The Dragonflies of Great Britain and Ireland by Cyril O Hammond: Harley Books 1983)

So what's it doing in Durham then? Well, I guess the answer is that things change - and rapidly in the dragonfly world it seems. Have a look at the most recent distribution data on the NBN Gateway and you'll see what I mean. Dragonfly buffs will be saying.. yeah... and.. tell us someting new but for me as a rank amateur in most fields of natural history I was still impressed to note the rate of spread. So much so that I checked other species and found the pattern repeating.

For example, the wonderful damselfly with the wonderful name - the Beautiful Demoiselle (Calopteryx virgo), photographed here in Morven, Scotland last year, absent on the '83 map but now well established on the Durham University's Estate.

Two of the groovier exuvia

2010-06-29T23:17:00.002+01:00

There was a UK TV programme in the late '70s called 'Connections' where the presenter, James Burke, flitted randomly from one scientific item to another by means of the most off the wall and sometimes tenuous links. I loved it, probably because it resembles what goes on in my own head. For example, on a hot Tuesday last week, I watched the first big dragonfly I've seen this year speeding over an area of rough grassland at work. I always enjoy my annual re-aquaintance with these stunning insects. It shot by fast and at a distance and the only identification I could manage was that it wasn't Cordulegaster boltonii (one of the few scientific names I seem to be able to remember for some reason), but this is....

Here are my 'Connections' that got me from the field to the photo:-
Dragonflies - helicopters - Noel Edmonds - crash - Hadrian's Wall - Sycamore Gap - my garden - my garage - Cordulegaster boltonii (because I suddenly remembered that I had a Golden-ringed dragonfly exuvia tucked away in a box in there somewhere from years ago.)

The exuviae of the dragonfly nymphs (ie the empty cases that they leave behind when the adults hatch out) have to be amongst the most mesmerising of natural objects you can find. Perfectly detailed, yet perfectly empty. All the fine features of the once living nymph are there to be explored.

This photo shows the underside of the head and the large projectile jaw that fires out those crunching, jagged-edged weapons that make mincemeat of tadpoles.

I also found another one that I had forgotten about. This is the exuvia of a Southern Hawker Aeshna cyanea and whereas the golden-ringed has smallish eyes, this one's are immense and wrap over the whole head. It's worth a click to marvel at the detail. A hollow shell ready to walk off before your eyes.

Meanwhile, me and the family are busy watching the entire Life on Earth series right through again. In one episode, the Guv'nor shows a magnificent fossil of an early dragonfly* that had an astonishing wingspan of 75 cms (the largest insect ever known to have lived). Go on, measure it out on the table. It's immense. The most intriguing question for me however was not answered by the great man. What must it's nymph have been like? The hawker nymph is fearsome enough at about 4.5 cm long but scaled up, the larva of Attenborough's fossilised monster would have been at least ten times the size - with jaws big enough to take the end off your finger. 'Ahw-sum' as my American niece would say.

(*footnote: there's a photo of a scale model here)

The mighty maggot

2010-06-21T23:30:00.000+01:00

Warning: don't read this while eating your dinner.

Long ago, in an inexplicable poetic moment of youth, and clearly after a lot of deep thought, I penned the following .

We would sink
Beneath stuff that stinks
If it wasn't for the maggot.

I know - its pathetic really but it popped into my head out of nowhere at the weekend and has prompted me to spring back to blogging life after a 3 week hiatus. Let me explain.

On 23rd March this year I came upon a dead adult grey seal on the Northumberland coast. It was pretty much intact and odourless. On Sunday I walked passed the same spot and looked for it again. A high tide had swept it further up the shore but there it was, or at least what was left of it and what was left of it was not a lot. A huge beast reduced to a flat piece of skin, a few bones and a stain on the grass within less than three months.

Impressive, and those wonders of decomposition were still at it, working away on the last remants.

So, dear readers, raise a glass...to the baby blowfly. Cheers.

Packaging perfection

2010-06-04T19:25:00.001+01:00

Think of the Isle of Skye and what comes to mind? Eagles perhaps. Otters probably. Though I had plenty of the former and none of the latter during my week's holiday fiddling about on the Island, perhaps the most intriguing thing that the week produced was a tad less glamorous. Actually, there is a link, in that it was my eagle-eyed mate that spotted it. It could be a seed maybe, or perhaps a rabbit dropping?

It is, in fact, a beetle. The most intriguing part is underneath where all the legs and various other sticky-out beetle bits are retracted into precisely shaped slots in the body creating a featureless shape.

Byrrhus pilula - the perfect fold-away beetle.

Follow the cones

2010-05-14T22:54:00.034+01:00

As I stood and stared up at the tree tops in Hepburn Wood in North Northumberland watching a red squirrel bounding through the canopy, I was hit in the face by something. At first I thought it was a small moth but when I turned and looked I could see a steady flow of seeds helicoptering my way on the breeze. I caught one and saw that they were winged conifer seeds minus the seed, if you see what I mean - just the wing with the seed gone. I could hear twitterings from the tree tops by this point but couldn't pin the birds down. Then, eventually, I got a fleeting glimpse of the culprits.

A mixed flock of about 30 Crossbills.

I thought about following the birders' lead by explaining that this is a 'record shot' but actually it's just a crap photo. Most of my bird shots are. I don't even qualify to clean Richard Steel's lenses. But, to quote someone famous I can't remember, 'I'm cool with that' because I marvel that I can use a pocket digital camera, hand held, in poor woodland light, at a digitally enhanced magnification of 90x (yes that's ninety times) and come out with something reasonably sharp and recognisable with the application of no skill whatsoever on my part.

Crossbills depend almost entirely on the seeds of conifers and as cone crops are very variable year by year the birds move about in huge numbers to follow the cones. These large scale 'irruptions' occur quite frequently. The Atlas of Breeding Birds of Northumbria estimates that the county's breeding population can vary between 100 in bad cone years to 100,000 when things are very cone-iferous.

The contrast between the red males and the greeny yellow females made a wonderful sight as they crashed about noisily, pulling cones off and scattering seeds everywhere. This video clip is worth looking at for a decent close up of the extraordinary bill, and to see one using its curvirostra on a cone try this.

Tricky Tracking

2010-05-05T21:07:00.001+01:00

I love all those apocryphal tales of mythical bushmen endowed with demon tracking skills who can follow cats over solid rock in the dark etc. But then maybe those stories are actually true. David Attenborough seems to think so therefore they must be.

Anyway, see what you make of this. To the right of this fence is a strange flattened area among the heather.

A closer look reveals the presence of brown hair.

But why would an animal lie down here and what was it? A scout about in the nearby undergrowth produces bones. The pelvis and part of the lower spine....

a leg bone....

and finally, buried well away under the trees...

the skull with the teeth of a herbivore

Its a deer, but what happened to it and when? A close examination of the upper two wires of the fence reveals the slightest of kinks, one above the other, in otherwise ramrod straight lines.

And, by the kinks, on each wire directly in line vertically, a mark or stain.

Put the pieces together and the story goes like this. A year or so ago, a deer tried to jump the fence, spooked by something. Unlike these three that cleared the same fence without mishap.....

...this one misjudged the leap and its hind leg went through the gap between the top two wires. As the animal's momentum carried it over the fence and down onto the other side the top two wires got crossed over with the deer's leg pinned between the two. The tension in the wires was so drum tight that the beast had no chance of freeing itself. Doomed, it suffered a lingering death. Eventually the foxes, crows, buzzards, insects, fungi etc cleaned up the lot and scattered the remains.

Impressed by my tracking skills? Well don't be. A year back, I passed this same spot and found the deer hung up in the fence. Never mind all that clever Ray Mears stuff. This is the way to do tracking. Watch it happen, keep quiet about it then come along later and read the signs with authority. Maybe Mr M. already thought of that?

For more tracking cons....try this.

Red in tooth and claw (and bone)

2010-05-03T22:26:00.002+01:00

Alfred Lord Tennyson used 'red in tooth and claw' to describe nature in 1850. Two episodes in my garden confirm that this is a fair point. The first involves a blackbird's nest. The parent birds have been running themselves ragged feeding the young these last few days. A cacophony of alarm calls brought me to the window and in seconds it was from this...

to this......

via this.....

The crow, having taken the chick to the roof ridge and torn it apart, hopped off and just left it there.

Last week I had been watching a blue tit bringing nest material into a nestbox. Hour after hour every few minutes, in and out of the hole. I watched it come out and fly directly over a low hedge into a neighbour's garden. Seconds later, the flash of a sparrowhawk over the hedge and a silent nest box. The box is re-occupied now - maybe with a smarter, faster and more vigilant blue tit.

Meanwhile, the red bone in the title still remains a mystery.

Show us your legs: 2

2010-04-28T21:50:00.001+01:00

I'm back on barnacles again (well if Charles Darwin can spend 8 years writing a book on them they must be worthy of more than just being stood upon). We found a pool full of barnacles on top of an outcrop of rock jutting out into the sea. This meant that if I stood on the sand adjacent to the outcrop, the pool was at my eye level. So I was able to stand and stare at their feeding antics in comfort rather than the usual head-down-bum-up rockpooling position.

Out then back in, wait a bit, out then back in... The gentle wafting of their fishing net feet has a mesmerising, relaxing rhythm. I highly recommend it for a cheap chill. Pick a barnacle (metaphorically speaking) and just stare at it. Your shoulders will drop and your heart rate slow, or your money back. Fishing with your feet - that's neat. Then you can cogitate on how all that kit fits back into the tiny shell.

(The picture is worth a click to enlarge it a bit)

If you broaden your gaze and take in a patch of them the pace hots up as different barnacles get their legs out and wave them about at different times. Your eyes end up flicking rapidly around trying to guess which one is going to shake a leg next. It suddenly reminded me of that frantic fairground game where plastic moles pop out of holes at random while you try to thump them with a mallet. Time to move on...

Some related and not-so-related posts:-

Semi-interesting semibalanus stuff

Show us your legs: 1

Reading feathers

2010-04-26T22:24:00.008+01:00

Trying to make sense out of a pile of feathers is an enjoyable if sometimes frustrating experience. I was wandering along a ride in a coniferous plantation in Northumberland at the weekend and came across this scene of destruction.

I collected a sample of the different types of feathers and the photo below show a selection of wing feathers, the bottom one being the outermost leading edge primary from the left wing and, for scale, about 145-150 mm long.

Having pored over Tracks and Signs of Birds of Britain and Europe by Brown, Ferguson etc, I am reasonably confident that this is a woodcock.

The next question is what predator was at work here? Well, given that this was in a north of England coniferous plantation, I reckon that the options are fox, stoat/weasel, sparrowhawk, goshawk or buzzard. If I'm right and its a woodcock then this could either have been caught in flight and brought into the woodland for plucking, or nabbed while on the ground.

First of all I've ruled out fox, weasel and stoat as none of the feathers had been bitten through - they were all plucked clean. So I'm inclined to a bird of prey kill. If its a woodcock then the size would probably rule out male sparrowhawk.

So is it female sparrowhawk, goshawk or buzzard? I'm not entirley sure but in amongst the feathers were these:-

In a fanciful moment I could put these down as ripped out from the chest of a goshawk as the doomed woodcock kicked and screamed then gasped its last....and, the oracle on such matters (aka John Steele) confirms that they are indeed breast feathers from.....a woodcock. Ah well, dream on.

Red bone puzzler

2010-04-25T21:56:00.000+01:00

I came across a bird kill at the weekend while walking through a coniferous plantation and was amazed to see that amongst the feathers was a bright red bone, the likes of which I've never come across before. I thought it was a piece of plastic at first sight.

I presume that it was just saturated in blood but I've never seen one that was a uniform scarlet red all over like this. Anyone else ever come across this before?

Slough it

2010-04-22T23:46:00.000+01:00

One advantage of taking one of those child things with you is that they spot the stuff you miss. Their eyes are a) better b) closer to the ground and c) not troubled by the vagaries of varifocals. So it was that I walked straight past the lizard on the delapidated dry stone wall until my daughter's excited shout from behind pulled me up sharp.

The lizard shot into the undergrowth so we stood and stared until it came out again. It was only afterwards when we looked at the photographs that we realised that it was actually in the process of sloughing off its skin. Reading up a bit on this, that the protective scales you see on a lizards body are actually underneath a top layer of transparent skin. Common lizards regularly slough off (or should that be sluff ough?) this outer skin. It enables growth but full size adults also do it - apparently it assists in repair and parasite removal. Good job humans can't do it or the anti-wrinkle cream industry would collapse.

You can see the skin pulling away from the body just behind the back legs in the photo above and also on the back foot..

The following day we were back in the same place and found a piece of the sloughed off skin.

This piece shows the larger-sized underbelly scales with smaller ones from the lizard's sides. The picture below is taken down a 10x binocular microscope and shows the delicate structure.

The other interesting thing about this lizard was that it had lost its tail. A stump with a black scar was all that was left. Its a handy defence mechanism if grabbed by the tail of course, but how does it work. The New Naturalist series volume on reptiles and amphibians explains that several of the tail vertebrae have central areas which never actually fully harden into bone. These form planes of weakness at which the tail can break off. (Autotomy is the posh word) The bit that intrigued me most is that the lost tail wiggles and twitches for a while to distract the predator while the lizard beats a hasty retreat. People have found lizard tails in the crops of birds of prey and in the stomachs of carnivorous mammals so it must work.

Bits on Bats 5: Alcathoe's Bat

2010-04-20T20:48:00.000+01:00

The amazing announcement today that a new bat species has been discovered in England just goes to show how possible it is to know so little. Further details and a good photo are on the Bat Conservation Trust web site here and the Leeds University site here.

Alcathoe's Bat was first described and named as a new species in Greece in 2001 and it turns out that it has almost certainly been here all along and right under our very noses. The trouble with British bats is that apart from one or two really distinctive ones they all look pretty much like little brown furry jobs but it is rather amazing that bat workers all over the UK have just not picked this one up. Apparently it is very similar to two other species - Whiskered and Brandt's bats - and to be honest, even experienced bat workers struggle to separate these two sometimes. Since I first got hooked on bats in the mid 80s I've handled umpteen whiskered/brandts and now I'm left wondering just how many of those were actually Alcathoe's bat.

Ah well, back to the drawing board - oh, and I must find out how to pronounce Alcathoe.....

(For more Bits on Bats click on the 'bats' link in my subject index on the right.)

Driven to drink

2010-04-19T23:26:00.000+01:00

A while ago I posted a piece about the salt glands that eiders and other sea birds have to enable them to survive without fresh water by taking in sea water and excreting the excess salts.

Wandering along the Bamburgh shore the other day, I was surprised to see a male eider swimming towards me. Usually they move away rather than come closer. Then it came out of the water and padded up onto the shore right in front of me. It seemed oblivious to my presence - which again is unusual. Then the penny dropped. It was heading straight for a small pool of fresh water that had collected among the rocks from a small drainage run coming off the land. It obviously knew it was there and nothing was going to stop it. This was a duck on a mission. It drank at least half a dozen times, throwing its head back each time, before waddling off back into the sea.

So, salt glands or not, eider rather have the fresh stuff thank you very much.

Some light from Aristotle's Lantern

2010-04-01T23:05:00.000+01:00

I was going to clear out the garage but unfortunately, 2 minutes in, I came upon a bucket. In it was lots of flotsam I picked up on the Northumberland coast last year and promptly forgot about. Which brings me to sea urchins. Apart from the incredible beauty of the structural form of the external skeleton (or 'test'), two things are worth pondering. Did Aristotle really study the urchin's mouthparts 2,340 years ago and how does little become large?

So, to Aristotle first. The Common Sea Urchin grazes encrusting growths from surfaces. Its mouth is underneath its body (and its anus on the top funnily enough) and it has 5 hard protruding teeth.

Inside the body, revealed below in this washed up skeleton, is the incredibly delicate and complex structure of bone, tendon and muscle that operates the mouth. Commonly known as Aristotle's Lantern - it is indeed named after the great man himself. An accomplished naturalist as well as a philosopher and all round clever dick, he described it in his book Historia Animalium. He wrote, "In reality the mouth-apparatus of the urchin looks like a horn lantern with the panes of horn left out." 2,340 years later we still refer to it as Aristotle's Lantern. I rather like that. It's so much more elegant than the phrase I came across in a 1922 book on the seashore, which referred to this as the urchins 'apparatus of mastication'!

Which brings me next to the little and large question.

I found a good description of the way sea urchins grow in a book called 'A Student's Guide to the Seashore' ,written - in as fine an example of nominate determinism as you are likely to come across - by JD and S Fish. (I kid you not). The test is made up of beautifully interlocking plates and growth takes place around the edges of each plate where new calcite material is laid down.

From a millimetre or so in diameter when it first transmogrifies into a recognisable urchin from its planktonic stage, to about 4 cm across is achieved in the first year alone. Fully grown it is usually about 100 to 120 mm across. Apparently, if you take one of the plates and polish it up with fine sandpaper you can see annual growth bands and estimate the urchin's age. Must try that one day.

Meanwhile, the garage can wait. Its late and I'm off to bed.... but not before I have cleaned my masticatory apparatus.

The purpose of the porpoise's melon

2010-03-23T23:37:00.000Z

Just going back again to that porpoise skull I came upon the other day, I was trying to find out a bit more about the reason why porpoise teeth are blunt and dolphins' are sharp, when I came upon this fine web site which not only has a great picture of a porpoise skull but also shows the teeth of porpoise and dolphin side by side. My conclusion on the dental dilema is that the only reason for the different shapes is so that taxonomists can tell dolphins from porpoises....

The skull is weird. Apart from the curious concave shape at the front, there seem to be no eye sockets. There are a couple of decent photos of a live porpoise here. The eyes are small and very much to the side and low down. The other key feature is the bulbous forehead - quite the opposite of the skull shape and you'd be forgiven for thinking that the skull must be from a different animal altogether.

The answer seems to be connected with the fact that these animals use echolocation rather than sight to find their way about and to hunt prey. They produce the high pitched ulrasounds in organs in the nasal passages of the head and these then pass into an oil filled organ called the 'melon' which aids the production and focussing of the ultrasound beam. The melon sits in the concave front of the skull and creates the convex profile of the head.

Fascinating animals porpoises.

Seal legs

2010-03-22T22:40:00.001Z

Following on from the last post (cue for a tune) and in particular the photos of the limbs of the grey seal...

There is a good picture of how the skeleton sits within the seal's body here and you can see that most of the bones lie buried in the blubber with really just the 'hands' and 'feet' visible. In this group of seals all the thrust to move through the water is derived from the rear limbs which have evolved into large webbed flippers. Meanwhile the stumpy front limbs are handy for a scratch or the occasional wave and help the seal to drag itself across land when it does come ashore.

The rear limbs might well be wonderfully adapted for powerful swimming but once out of water they are no help since they can no longer be rotated into a position under the body.

Dead interesting

2010-03-21T23:48:00.001Z

What a pleasure it was today to lie back in the dunes with the sun on the face. Not a sound bar the twittering of the skylarks high above. Shelley enjoyed a similar experience and penned, 'Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert - That from Heaven or near it, Pourest thy full heart, In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.' Wordsworth had a bash too and managed 'Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky! Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?' Undaunted not, here's my go.
Oh little browne job! Flick of wings!
Beguiling high above the grass
No break for breath thy song thou sings
I thinkest thou breathe through thy ****

Moving swiftly on to dead stuff... having past a deceased shag with a neat pile of fox droppings on its head (I'll spare you the photo) I walked another 50 yards along the beach and came upon a dead grey seal.

A sad sight but a rare opportunity for a really close look at the different design of the front and rear limbs.

and also to note just how much hair there is on the animal's back - so different from the sleak, hairless appearance in water.

Then, to complete a trio of corpses, another 50 yards along the beach was this.

The shape of the skull is so characteristic - it's a cetacean and the peculiar little peg like teeth confirm this to be the common porpoise. I was going to bring it home but it was more than a touch on the whiffy side. You can never find a washed up fertiliser sack among the strand line junk when you need one.

City wakes to kittiwakes

2010-03-14T20:24:00.008Z

After a silent winter while the birds wander the oceans, the Newcastle quayside once again echoes the calls of the kittiwake as the early returners stake their claim to the best nesting ledges on the rivetted cliff better known as the Tyne Bridge. It's about an 8 mile flap to the sea from the bridge and this is thought to be the furthest inland kittiwake colony anywhere in the world - right in the heart of urban Tyneside.

It's the early birds that get the prime window boxes on the bridge's stone towers.

The other tell-tale sign that the birds are back is the guano on the pavement, and therein lies a problem. Newcastle is a city divided. There are those that love to have the kittiwake colony on the bridge and consider it a privilege. Then, there are those that loathe the noise and the mess and want the city council to net the bridge to keep the birds off.

In my opinion, we should all just chill out a bit more and enjoy this fabulous addition to the city's diversity. What mess? Just clean it up, pay up and smile!

Salt with everything

2010-03-04T22:41:00.003Z

Some years ago, in a sad case of misplaced enthusiasm, I paid good money for a second hand book called Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles. Well, £1.25 to be exact. (A friend reliably informed me that I had been ripped off.) While not the most thumbed volume on my shelves, there are treasurers to be found within. For example, the answer to important questions of the moment such as - why do eiders often have drips on the end of their noses?

I had already stumbled on the answer to this one when watching a friend who is an accomplished amateur taxidermist skin out a dead eider we found on the beach (freshly dead I hasten to add!). A distinctive feature of the eider is the high crown that gives the bird its unique profile (below).

I was intrigued to see that, once the skin was off, this profile was created not by the shape of the skull bones but by two large pinkish fleshy bits that lay on top of the skull, meeting in the mid line and overlapping the eyeballs. Salt glands. Take these away and the skull profile is very different - much flatter as you can see in the picture of the skull below. Compare the shapes and you get an impression of how big the salt glands are.

A closer look at the top of the skull shows where they lie - in the depressions in the bones and overlapping the eye sockets.

These salt glands enable the birds to excrete excess salt in the form of concentrated sodium chloride solution which runs down ducts and drips off the end of the

bill. Hence the snotty nose syndrome.

The size of these glands vary according to the amount of salt the bird takes in but most coastal birds have them - waders, ducks, gulls, etc. They help explain why ocean wanderers like fulmars can spend months at sea far from fresh water.

£1.25 well spent I reckon.

You can see the salt gland indentations on some other seabird skulls in Greenfingers' Cabinet of Curiosities

Rail Ways

2010-03-02T22:45:00.000Z

The water rail is a bird I haven't really dwelt on that much before. But then, have you? They pop up now and again if you regularly visit reedy ponds and lakes but the views are usually not great.

I spent an hour or so at Gosforth Park nature reserve on the north side of Newcastle the other day and this obliging water rail put in an appearance and kept me entertained for a good five minutes - probably the longest water rail show I've seen. They have always seemed slightly absurd to me - made up of random bits shoved together like one of those kid's card games. Yet given a prolonged decent view like this they are surprisingly attractive in a subtle kind of way. (For much better photos than I could manage zoomed on a compact digital in rubbish light, I recommend the last two shots on this post from JR and Sue's blog.)

Mostly, this one did what it says in the books and crept in and crept out again, but every now and then it had a spell of mania, leaping vertically and flapping wildly, before jumping about from side to side. Then, as if coming to its senses, it got a grip and flipped back into skulk mode. I wonder what that was all about?

That there is more to water rails than first meets the eye is illustrated in a great series of photos of two birds having a real ding-dong of a fight on the Bird Guides web site

Sperm Count

2010-02-28T22:39:00.001Z

A few weeks ago a 30 foot sperm whale washed up on the Northumberland coast. I wasn't able to get up to see it for myself but it caused plenty of media interest. This is only the second sperm whale to wash up on our shores in recent memory and a friend of mine recalled the last one - in 1973 at Boulmer. This prompted me to go and look up the newspaper reports of the time and they turned out to be highly entertaining.

The Boulmer sperm whale was bigger at about 41 feet in length and caused quite a stir. They reckoned this one weighed over 50 tons and so you can imagine the headache of trying to get rid of it. Local officials tried pet food companies and the like all over the country but no-one wanted it. Meanwhile the whale was beginning to get a bit wiffy so, under pressure to do something about it, the local Chief Public Health Inspector contacted his mate at a nearby quarry and two shot-firers were duly dispatched to blow it into manegeable bits with gelignite.

All was set up, the klaxon sounded and ... kerboom! But the whale just shuddered a bit and stayed put - all except a 1 cwt lump of blubber which shot over the heads of the waiting police and council officials and thumped into the cliff behind them. The explosives idea was abandoned after that but the Boulmer UFO (Unidentified Flying Offal) has entered folk lore.

Sounds evocative

2010-02-08T23:40:00.000Z

Greenfingers recently posted a piece called Call of the Wild extolling the virtues of the sound of the redshank and asking his readers if they have 'any iconic wildlife sounds that convey the same sense of place?

Sounds are such an important contributor to atmosphere that its so difficult to pick one above others. The redshank's familiar call has been the backing track to so many brilliant days on the coast over the years that its right up there on my own list of favourites. But, I have to say that the curlew would top that for me. If ever there is a sound that invokes open wild places, from summer moorland to winter shore, then this is surely it - the emblematic bird of the Northumberland National Park and rightly so.

However, I have a sneaky favourite - one bird whose sound I always love to hear when it arrives in numbers on the coastal flats of Lindisfarne and Budle Bay - the wigeon. Its whistle, floating on the wind on a cold winters day takes some beating - and its a bonny sight into the bargain.

I have a weird sort of brain whereby a sound can trigger a precise memory of exactly where I was when I heard it. One such sound that still brings back a vivid and wonderful memory, from many years ago now, of 5am on silent misty moors between Weardale and Teesdale is this one... the black grouse. Imagine a spooky silence and tricky shadows broken only by this sound, with the birds invisible somewhere in the murk and you've got it.

But before I get carried away completely and start mentioning kittiwakes echoing off the Cullernose cliffs just one more as I admit to a soft spot for a charismatic little bird whose sound encapsulates the best of mature deciduous woodlands. The sound of the wood warbler (nice recording here - scroll down to the last on the list) tootling its plaintive little whistle before shaking itself to bits is ten out of ten.

A challenge for Ben and Katie

2010-01-23T11:10:00.000Z

My nephew Ben, who is 7, asked me a tricky question in his comment on my post on rabbit urine. He wanted to know how I knew it was rabbit's. Good one! I explained that the only tracks in the snow around and about were rabbit's and promised to post a photo of some rabbit tracks. So here it is Ben. See if you and Katie can work out how many rabbits, which prints were made with their front feet and which with their back feet and which way they were going.

Junk Male

2010-01-21T22:02:00.001Z

'Greenfingers' posted some photographs of interesting bird sculptures on his blog Cabinet of Curiosities and posed the question "Anybody know of any further pieces of ornithologically-inspired public art?"
OK - this isn't a bird (smart of me to notice) but Phil's post did remind me of this superb stag sculpture hidden away by a remote loch in the north west of Scotland. This fantastic piece of work was made entirely from bits of old vehicles. The skilfull creator remained anonymous.

Art Naturel 3: Under the bed bug

2010-01-20T22:09:00.002Z

The source of my AN3 close-up caused a bit of a stir when my daughter discovered it wandering across the carpet under her bed at the weekend.

It's a hawthorn shield bug which really should know better as it's meant to be hibernating it's way through winter right now. It's a beautiful insect, of that there's no doubt, and although it's common enough hearabouts I wasn't expecting to find it inside the house in the middle of winter. The neighbours are having their house extended right now so I just wonder if it has been disturbed from its slumber within their roofspace.

It's latin name, Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale, is an interesting curiosity. I'm itching to know what the link is between this bug and haemorrhoids but can't find any information on this. Likewise, I can't find out whether those small dark dots are of any significance.

What most of the texts do say is that this beast gives off a bad smell when disturbed. Well this one was well and truly disturbed yet the air remained sweet. Proof again that once you move away from the feathered or the furred, hard facts are hard to come by.

On a final note - there is a brilliant identification chart for UK shieldbugs here on the British Bugs web site showing all the various instar stages they move through on the way to adulthood - very handy for sorting out your hawthorns from your birches.

Art Naturel 3

2010-01-18T22:59:00.001Z

I have to say that this picture, the third in my spasmodic series of abstract patterns from the natural world, appeals to me much more than any of the paintings I've seen recently in the Baltic Centre for the Contemporary Arts on Tyneside. Its a puzzle to me that although I struggle greatly with abstract paintings, I find the natural equivalent mesmerising.

I'll identify the source in a couple of days. If you can't contain your excitement until then, feel free to have a guess....

Let me tell you a wee story....

2010-01-05T19:42:00.000Z

I heard a snippet of a song on the radio once that went something like - 'for every day the sun does rise, a new thing falls upon the eyes'. I never did find out who it was by but the words have stayed with me because they explain perfectly why I find natural history so completely absorbing (to the point of obsession according to my family). All you have to do is get out and there is always but always something new to puzzle over, marvel at or simply stand and stare at.
But, as most of you who take the trouble to follow my witterings (and thank you for that by the way) are fellow NH bloggers, you know this already so I'll get to my point. Which is to say.... isn't rabbit urine a bonny colour in the snow?

My curiosity to know why it was bright orange led me to some fascinating wee facts. Apparently rabbit urine can vary from white to yellow to orange and even red. How cool is that? When at the white end of the spectrum this is due to secretion of excess calcium as calcium carbonate crystals which turn the urine thick and creamy. At the red end this is due to excretion of porphyrin pigments derived from the diet. Yellow urine will also eventually darken in the air through oxidation of the pigments.

So there you have it. Proof that the lyrics of that song are spot on.

Pigeon turns into Sparrowhawk - pure magic

2010-01-03T00:31:00.002Z

In my last post I made passing reference to the day a sparrowhawk ate its way through a pigeon in our back garden. What I didn't mention was the hours I spent rummaging through my digital photos failing to find the pictures I knew I had. Well, today I found them, in a cardboard box - prints from the last days of film.

So after all that, I decided to share a couple of blurry scans of only half decent originals snatched through window glass.

And the pigeon? Not a lot left I'm afraid!

Not bad for urban Newcastle - especially as I can remember the bad old days when sparrowhawks were a rare sight indeed. How things have improved since then.

Good Garden Game

2009-12-28T22:56:00.000Z

I suppose any garden will pop up odd things from time to time if its watched enough. Ours is very much an urban patch on the north side of Newcastle. Ok - its got a few mature trees - a poplar, a sycamore and a scrawny copper beech - plenty of ivy and more than a smattering of unkempt corners (or as I prefer to call them 'areas of managed neglect') but it's undeniably urban.

At the more unusual end of the garden bird tick list, we've a treecreeper creeping up a tree, a great spotted woodpecker wrecking a nest box, a grey wagtail on the patio, a cuckoo on the fence, tawny owls in the trees, a sparrowhawk tearing a pigeon to pieces on the grass....oh yes and a Senegal Parrot (boy are they loud!) that regularly turned up for peanuts for a year or so.

If I cheat a bit and add in the vertical airspace then there's pink footed, greylag and barnacle geese, oystercatchers, buzzard, mallard, mute swan and once - and I'm sticking to this - a goshawk (just don't press me to explain why it wasn't a female sparrowhawk). Then there's the fox that got the pet rabbit at 3 am but that's another story.

I digress. About noon today, a cry of 'what's that funny looking bird?' had me rushing to the window just in time to see, strutting its stuff across the grass....... a woodcock of all things. Not only is that a first round here but its also the best and clearest view of a woodcock I've had for many a year. Alas it didn't linger long enough for a photo.

Woodcock migrate to this country in late autumn/early winter from colder areas of Europe - Russia, Finland etc and reading up a bit on this it seems they prefer to travel at night by a full moon with an easterly wind - which is close enough to what we've had these last few nights. So I suspect that this was a migrant recently arrived, probably wacked and desperately seeking a worm - not an easy task in frozen, rock hard ground.

I wonder if this bird was part of a larger influx?

Joseph Rock Rocks

2009-12-26T22:39:00.000Z

When I decided to plant a rowan in the front garden I chose the yellow berried variety Sorbus 'joseph rock' because the autumnal combination of yellow berries against alizarin foliage is just superb. My ulteria motive of course was lots of berries to pull the birds. When I got the tree home, I was puzzled to read on the label that birds wouldn't eat the yellow berries. Complete rubbish! They love them.

The car park at work has a couple of these rowans in one corner and at lunchtime on the last day before the christmas holiday break they were absolutely covered in berries and absolutely heaving with 4 of the 5 winter thrushes - redwing (the most numerous), fieldfare, blackbird and mistle thrush (but no song thrush to complete the set). By hometime at 5pm they were stripped bare and the birds were long gone.

For me, the arrival of the winter thrushes from the far north is another one of our great annual events. The BTO has tracked the arrival of fieldfares through its birdtrack scheme and published a graph for the last three years on it web site (click here). This shows a remarkable consistency in arrival dates and numbers. The recent peak in records seems to coincide with my sightings in Durham.

A propos of nothing much.....one of the enjoyable spin-offs of natural history blogging is wandering off down the side alleys that present themselves at random. So, who was Joseph Rock anyway and why the tree named after him? Turns out he was an interesting character who travelled a lot in China collecting plants and taking photos in the early 20th century. The report I found here, says of the Joseph Rock rowan:-

'One of his best-known yet least-documented finds cannot be unequivocally attributed to Rock. It appeared as a chance seedling among Rock’s collections at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. No record could be found of an herbarium specimen or field note, and some even believe it to be a hybrid.'

So there you have it.

Art Naturel 2 (and a bit)

2009-12-18T22:42:00.000Z

Art Naturel 2 wasn't ripples in the coaly sand by moonlight but plain old

Arion ater

The Large Black Slug, in spite of its common name, has been recorded in colour from jet black, through chestnut and orange to pale grey and creamy white. It is omnivorous, and its diet includes fungi, carrion, earthworms, leaves, stems, dead plant material and dung.

Its a shame that most people see no more than a pest - but if it's chomping its way through your garden I suppose that's fair enough. What is maybe less well known is that is a vital element in the ecosystem of the Caledonian pine forest, clearing up dead plant and faecal material, recycling nutrients, distributing seeds and spores and providing a key food source for badgers, foxes, hedghogs, slow worms and birds.

The iPod and the iVy

2009-12-15T23:38:00.000Z

I've been pondering on ivy again. We have a fence that is completely covered in it which I haircut from time to time to produce an ivy hedge. This year it has been absolutely smothered in flowers with their late-season nectar bonanza. I didn't think too deeply about this really - other than enjoying the insect life that brings the fence alive in the late summer and autumn sun. These photos are from late September.

Meanwhile, (and there is a connection here if you hang on for a moment) I think podcasts are brilliant. They have transformed my daily drag to and fro work from mind-numbing misery to mind-broadening pleasure. Today's highlight was twenty two engrossing minutes with an ivy buff. How glad I am that such people exist.

He recalled that it is only within recent times that ivy has flowered so prolifically here. It's down to mild frost-free weather in early winter. It struck me that this must be in some way connected with the spread of the ivy bee in southern counties of England that a number of NH bloggers have featured this year.

Something else new for me was that there are two types of native ivy in the UK and Ireland. None of my plant field guides refer to this at all. Its all a bit confusing due to cultivated varieties but I think that what were previously regarded as two subspecies - common ivy Hedera helix helix and the rarer Atlantic ivy Hedera helix hibernica that clings to the western edge of the UK and Ireland - have now been given separate species status. They can be told apart by smell apparently with the Atlantic ivy having a pleasant resinous niff.

There's more. Why does it flower in autumn? Because its genetic origins are in arid areas where all growth is held until the summer is over and the rains come. And it has a very short time period from flower to fruit for similar reasons. It also cannot self pollinate which is why it works so hard to attract insects I guess. I could go on but.....for all ivy fans who missed the broadcast it is still to be found here on the BBC web site. I thoroughly recommend a listen.

Art naturel: 2

2009-12-06T00:01:00.002Z

The abstract patterns to be found in natural objects have inspired artists and photographers for long enough but the age of digital photography makes finding intriguing and appealing examples so much easier. So, I've decided to run an 'art naturel' theme for a while and, after the technicolour toadstools of my first post, here is a monochrome image by way of contrast.

But what is it? Answers on a postcard please.....

Art Naturel : 1

2009-12-04T23:33:00.001Z

I did think about Christmas shopping - for a millisecond - before heading off into the bluebell woods. As I climbed a footpath up the wooded escarpment of Great High Wood on the outskirts of Durham city, I noticed a tiny little fungus growing at the base of one of the wooden step risers. It didn't look much but then, in one of those magic moments, the low sun came out from behind a cloud, sliced through a holly bush and lit the fungus like a spotlight on a dancer. As the colours burst out, the beauty of this perfect antidote to the grey gloom of recent days made identification seem an irrelevance.

Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night.

2009-11-29T20:18:00.003Z

4.17am  is such an annoying time to wake up. A blustery wind was irritating the trees and something on the side of the house was flapping. As my brain slowly engaged, the wind dropped and the unmistakable sound of a blackbird floated through the curtains.  Although not the full throated ease of its Spring/Summer song this was undoubtedly a blackbird and it was singing in the dead of a November night.

This so called 'sub-song'  is a quieter and incomplete winter version of the full monty and is a well documented feature of some songbirds and blackbirds in particular. It is commonly attributed to young male birds practicing for the real deal to come in their first Spring.  I rather prefer the anthropomorphic notion that it might just be adult males twittering on for the fun of it. After all, male Homo sapiens do this all the time. As you'll have noticed, there's always a phantom whistler tootling away somewhere.

Night singing has some other intriguing aspects. For example, people at Sheffield University did some research that seemed to suggest that robins sing more at night in cities than in rural areas so they don't have to compete with daytime traffic noise. (You can read more details about this here ).

Night singing does makes some kind of intuitive sense. For blackbirds, for example, the main purpose of the song is to attract and keep a mate (rather than territorial defence). So, why not take advantage of the quiet hours and sing a bit? Your voice travels further so you can conserve energy as you don't have to belt your song out so loudly to be heard by potential mates.

You would think that an additional contributing factor in trying to explain urban night singing must be street lighting. I don't know what its like where you are but our local council has been replacing the city's old sodium lights with new ones that are astonishingly bright and give a whiter light more closely matched to daylight.   Its like dawn all night long and this must have some effect on the species that respond to daylight in the dawn chorus. The Sheffield researchers, however, say that the effect of light pollution, to which nocturnal singing in urban birds is frequently attributed, is much weaker than that of daytime noise.

On the other hand, maybe my blackbird singing in the dead of night was only waiting for the moment to arise...

A Mote of Dust

2009-11-19T00:02:00.001Z

Photo from NASA

By way of marking my 50th blog post, I thought I would get a little deep. If anyone out there is reading this, then I guess you, like me, enjoy the natural world in all its bewildering complexity and beauty, from tiny details of form and behaviour to grand landscapes and skies. Engrossed in the detail, its easy to forget the universal perspective.
I was stunned into silence a few months ago when I heard, for the first time, a 1994 recording of the late Carl Sagan talking about a photograph taken of Earth by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990 when it was 4 billion miles away on its way out of the solar system. Having been mesmerised by his Royal Institution Christmas TV lectures in 1977, inspired by his Cosmos tv series and impressed by his writings, I cannot understand how this wonderful piece passed me by.

If you missed it too, you can listen to it here (just ignore the cheesy Cosmos background music!)

And if you can't spot the earth in the photo above go to the NASA site where there is a higher resolution TIFF format picture.

If you have been, thanks for tuning in

Allan

Shedding light on a Shelduck

2009-11-14T12:20:00.001Z

The wing of this freshly dead shelduck I found on the shore looks unremarkable. Until, that is, you shed some light on it from the right angle and watch as it is transformed into the most beautiful of structures.

The colour is not really there in the feathers. Its all down to physics apparently - an illusion created by the effect the fine structure of the feather has on light that hits it at the right angle. The shiny barbs act like miniature mirrors that reflect light and tiny prisms that split it into its component rainbow colours - some of which get absorbed and some reflected back. Ducks in particular have this effect on the upper surfaces of the secondary wing feathers producing a specific coloured panel - the speculum. Why particularly there, I've no idea, but it certainly contributes greatly to the beauty and appeal of ducks. Now who was it again that said, 'From the troubles of the world I turn to ducks'? Sensible person whoever it was....

Goldfinch clincher

2009-11-13T22:47:00.001Z

When I found this feather lying on the pavement I was sure it was from a goldfinch but its always good to have it clearly confirmed by a reference. And if its a bird (or even just a bit of a bird) you're in luck because the level of detail that's available is truly impressive. This book is 'Tracks and Signs of the Birds of Britain and Ireland' by Roy Brown etc.

Not only does it confirm that this is a primary feather from a goldfinch but, by its length, it is the 9th primary of 10 (i.e. the second one in from the tip of the wing) and its from the left wing. Furthermore you can find out when the adult moults its feathers. Mid July to mid October if you must know - unlike the juvenile which moults in August and September. (Note the wear and tear at the tip, by the way.)

Just about everything about birds has been inspected and detected, but you try and find out what the larva of the common or garden noon fly eats or how a tiny insect makes an oak leaf produce such weird and wonderful galls and you might as well give up now.

On the merits or otherwise of head banging

2009-11-11T23:28:00.001Z

After a head-bangingly frustrating couple of weeks without the means to recharge my camera battery I am at last back in business. The charger had not in fact disappeared off the planet. Rather, it was in the first place I looked, if only I had seen it. Its reappearance coincided with that of a great spotted woodpecker in the back garden. I watched it hop up the poplar tree banging away at the bark, chips flying in all directions. You can see the individual chisel marks on the left hand side of the gash as it worked away looking for edibles.

It reminded me of a gannet. Yes, I know that gannets don't climb trees but the link is to do with how both birds protect their brain against the force of an impact - the gannet as it hits the water and the woodie as it thumps the tree. I pontificated on the gannet a couple of posts ago but what about the woodpecker?

Some research done with high speed cameras showed that the pecker's beak hitting the wood generates forces one thousand times that of gravity. If that was you you'd be in trouble. Apparently, the bird survives because it has a small smooth brain, tightly fitted into a skull cavity with very little fluid filled space around it, unlike us, and a more spongey bone structure. Also key apparently is that it always pecks in a straight line thus avoiding twisting or rotational forces that brains don't like.

The piece I read about the high speed camera research explained that the bird closes its eyes a millisecond before each and every hit (up to 20 times a second), going on to ponder whether that's to keep the wood chips out or the eyeballs in! Nice one.

Bits on Bats 4: A Chiropteran comes to Congress

2009-10-25T10:29:00.002Z

If you've read my earlier post - Bits on Bats 2 - you'll be familiar with the size of a pipistrelle. Over the years I have been called out many times to deal with bats that end up inside houses and other buildings and then can't find their way out. The responses of apparently rational human beings who find a bat flying round their room can be astonishing. In one case I attended after a frantic call to the police was routed my way, I rang the door bell and this Giant Haystack of a man answered the door, white as a sheet. He took me into his living room and showed me the bat. It was on his hearth and was not well. Worse- it was dead - a pip well and truly squeaked. Eventually he confided in me that he had panicked and when the bat landed on the brick chimney breast, he wacked it with a full size builder's shovel. This man, who looked like he could bend iron bars with his teeth had been reduced to a quivering wreck by an inch long pipistrelle.

I have tried all sorts of techniques to remove bats from inside buildings but, thanks to a brilliant piece of film going round the internet at the moment, I now realise where I've been going wrong. What you need to do is convene a committee and have a heated debate.

Tune in here if you missed the day the bat came to congress.

A bad case of lungwort

2009-10-20T22:24:00.000+01:00

This post links to a piece on Stuart Dunlop's Donegal Wildlife blog about the lungwort. The first time I ever really noticed this impressive lichen was on the west coast of Scotland in May this year. Mistakenly I had the idea that there was just one 'lungwort' and so didn't check it out properly. From Stuart's post, I see that there are at least two species - which leaves me wondering which one I was looking at. I'm hoping that Stuart, or indeed anyone else, can help me out here.

Do gannets get headaches?

2009-10-18T23:35:00.002+01:00

I spent an enjoyable half an hour watching a juvenile gannet fishing just off-shore today. You know the routine I'm sure....glide about a bit on your long narrow wings looking for a decent fish, then jink and start the dive, pulling your wings in and back until they form a point behind you and then....hit the water like an arrow. Choomph..straight in.

I use the memory of the pain I felt last time I did a belly-flopper dive into the swimming pool from a couple of feet up as a measure of just how much damage potential there is in hitting the water from gannet height.

Unlike me of course gannets have evolved to do this and unlike me, nothing sticks out as they pierce the water surface.

The first thing that strikes you when you look at a gannet's skull is just how steamlined it is - whichever way you view it. From above, the beautiful smooth sweeping lines are very noticeable but from the side too everything is wonderfully sleek, guaranteeing the smoothest possible entry.

There is a one further trick. Examine the forehead closely and you can see that the front of the skull is reinforced with extra thick bone forming a protective plate.

In spite of all of this....I do still wonder if gannets ever get headaches.

Bent-billed Curlew

2009-10-06T22:07:00.015+01:00

I watched a curlew feeding on the tidal flats at Budle Bay at the weekend. When the bird withdrew its bill, I thought I had a new species for a moment .......

..until the protruding worm wriggled before being swallowed.

After the bird poked its bill into the mud, I watched as it moved its head from side to side and front to back. It was clearly 'feeling' for food and therefore must have some sort of sensitivity in the bill tip. In fact, if it is able to detect a soft-bodied worm, it must be very sensitive indeed.

Reading around to find out more about the design of the bill, I discovered that it is full of sensory organs located in small pits in the bill structure (as are other waders such as snipe for example). This prompted me to go and root about in the garage for a curlew skull that I collected from a dead bird and cleaned up some years ago.

If you look closely at the tip of the bill (and note that this is the underlying bone structure without the bill sheath that overlies this), you can see lots of small holes - presumably the location of these sensory structures.

The common perception of a bird's beak as hard, dead material probably derives from the painful experience of a budgie peck. In reality, the bill of the curlew is a delicate and complex structure.

Later, the bird wandered off into the distance and beyond my compact camera range. As I followed it in the telescope it found a small crab, picked it up by one leg and shook it vigorously. The leg broke off - as it is designed to do (there is a line of weakness designed-in as a predator escape mechanism). The curlew discarded the leg and picked up the crab again by another and did the same. Although I couldn't be sure, it looked like all were similarly treated until the hapless, and by now, legless, decapod was swallowed. A neat trick, but was that learned or inherited behaviour? Somebody somewhere must know....

Geese Gathering Goose Pimples

2009-10-05T17:23:00.022+01:00

Even though I have seen it all before, a sky full of wild geese remains as mesmerising and exciting a sight as ever it was and the autumnal goose fair at the Lindisfarne NNR has to be one of the region’s greatest wildlife spectacles. Goosepimples guaranteed.

A few weeks ago I watched the high tide push a large group of light-bellied brent geese my way. (This distinct race Branta bernicla hrota is the Lindisfarne speciality). Last year I happened to be there on the very day that thousands of pink-footed geese arrived. From first light and throughout the day I watched and listened as small groups appeared in the northern sky honking loudly, before dropping into Budle Bay. By late afternoon thousands were resting and feeding in the bay. Then something spoooked them and the whole lot took to the sky in a blizzard of wings and a cacophony of noise.

This year’s undisputed highlight has been the barnacle goose.

Mixed in with the flock were some pink footed geese - the browner birds in the photo below.

There are three distinct communities of barnacle geese. One breeds in Greenland and winters on Islay and the Irish coast. Another group breeds in arctic Russia and winters in the Netherlands. The third group breeds on islands in the Svalbard archipelago about half way between the north coast of Norway and the north pole. This group (over 20,000 birds last year, I read) winters exclusively in the Solway Firth at the National Nature Reserve at Caerlaverock and at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust centre where they manage their land to provide important feeding areas for the geese.

The 1,500 km migration route follows the Norwegian coast and crosses the north sea with many of the birds gathering and lingering for a while at Lindisfarne before heading off to complete their journey to the Solway Firth. This is great as it means we get to enjoy them for a few days en route.

Finally, though blogger video quality leaves much to be desired, here is a flavour if you have never been lucky enough to witness large goose gatherings. Turn up the sound, then plan your trip to the Solway....

Variable vipers

2009-10-01T22:34:00.018+01:00

Rambling Rob recently posted a photograph of a beautifully coloured female adder (click here) which reminded me of the occcasion when my daughter nearly rode over this adder while cycling in the College Valley in the Cheviot hills. She thought it was a stick but when it suddenly moved she jammed on the brakes and managed to stop just in time. She got such a shock she adder viper brow. (groan...sorry).

The colour variation betweeen males and females is well documented (try here) but I also wonder if there is a geographical variation too? I admit that I have not seen that many adders but all that I have seen in Northumberland have been much darker than Rob's example.

Postscript: A monograph in the Shire Natural History series on the adder (by Peter Stafford) explains that infant and juvenile adders are much more brightly coloured and, particularly in females, can be a quite bright, orange or even reddish shade. In fact they are so differently coloured that at one time they were thought to be a different species - the dwarf red adder. It takes about 4 years to attain the final adult colouration and so there will be quite a broad variation in any population. Furthermore, the dark markings are very variable too. In some individuals the zig zag can even be replaced by a perfectly straight line of marks broken up into blotches.

Spider rider spied

2009-10-01T20:42:00.021+01:00

A car wing mirror is a splendid place for a spider to live. Safe from predators in its plastic castle (unless it is unlucky enough to choose an arachnaphobic owner with a spider-sucking dyson), it can just sit there while the car sweeps its web through the air, scooping flies like an entomologist's net.

So it was that I set off to work today with two perfect orb webs, one each side. No sign of the spiders, as usual. My journey took 40 minutes with 20 of those on the motorway at 70mph. When I arrived, I still had two perfect orb webs. Not a thread out of place on either of them even after a 70mph battering. Still no sign of the spiders.

Then, as I returned to the car to set off home, the nearside spider was just in view, sitting there with a foot gently resting on a thread waiting to detect movement from a trapped insect. At last. I grabbed the camera and got this rubbish photograph just before it shot out of sight - which reminds me, I must try and find that long lost pooter.....

I'm no spider expert but my guess is plain old Araneus diadematus. Any offers?

Araneus rearviewensis

2009-09-24T23:41:00.008+01:00

Have you got spiders in your wing mirrors? I have - one in each and always have done.

This set me thinking. There are 34.2 million vehicles on UK roads (and they are all in my way when I am trying to get to work). That makes over 68 million wing mirrors. Now, even if only half have spiders, that is still a lot of spiders. I googled 'spiders in wing mirrors' and was amazed at the number of 'how can I get rid of them please' pleas. All over the land people are trying to blast them out with hose pipes and jet washers, suck them out with their dysons and exterminate them with a full range of chemical weapons.

Trying to identify the species is a frustrating business. Every time I look they remain steadfastly hidden. The only time I see them is when I'm on the move. Last time was at 57 mph - photography not recommended.

I think we need a wing mirror spider survey. Do you know what you've got in yours?

Hedera headache

2009-09-24T21:47:00.006+01:00

Greenfingers' Daily Sportish headline 'The Plant that Ate a House' resulted in an interesting discussion about the ins and outs of ivy (boston or otherwise) that reminded me of this place near Bettyhill on the north coast of Scotland. Woe betide anyone inclined to ignore that nice little ivy seedling at the foot of the wall.....

Dunlin Delight

2009-09-23T21:32:00.016+01:00

Old Law at the northern end of Ross Links in the Lindisfarne National Nature Reserve is an island for but a few fleeting moments on the highest tides. The gap, known as the Wide Opens, gradually fills with water from Fenham flats to the west (left) and spills over to join the North Sea.

As the tide gradually flowed to fill the gap, I listened as a thousand pale-bellied Brent Geese, barking like dogs, filled the air with sound. The arrival of the geese is one of those landmark annual events. Although they draw Summer to a close, they herald the appealing prospect of the wild, bright winter days to come on the shore here.

Standing for a moment and staring out across the slowly filling gap, a ringed plover moved and drew my attention. Lifting the binoculars I saw that there were dozens of little waders going about their frantic feeding business across the peebled sand.

I stayed put and they gradually moved closer and closer until the nearest birds were no more a couple of metres away. The majority were dunlin, Britain's bog-standard small wader, often given scant attention by birders other than a quick squint to make sure they are not something more 'interesting'.

But take a closer look and you wonder what the field guide is on about when it says 'rather dull'. Dunlins are fascinating and very attractive once you get to see them close to. Hugely variable in size, bill length, bill curvature, leg length and plumage they can be quite tricky but they have that certain dunliness about them. I reckon that this one is a juvenile moulting into its first winter plummage (the white 'v' effect on the back and the remnant of spots on the sides).

This bird shows the remnant of the breeding plumage - the dark patch on the flanks.

This one is further on with its moult into the greyer back of winter and white underparts.

The icing on the cake was that throughout their clockwork feeding bustle, the flock kept in touch with each other with lovely low volume chattering calls - something that you just don't hear normally. Great birds, dunlin.

On Track

2009-09-23T20:10:00.009+01:00

Interpreting tracks is an enjoyable addition to any shore walk and much can be deduced from sand prints. In the first photo, a lesser black backed gull stood and stared for a while, before being disturbed, shedding some dead weight then taking flight by running as it took off, dropping a feather in the process.

By contrast, the photo below is made by a bird that, when disturbed didn't run as it took off but hopped as it flapped, keeping both feet side by side - a cormorant by the size of the prints.

The next example is a pigeon-toed carrion crow, leaving foot prints showing separate pads as well as claw trails in between as it waddled up the beach looking for anything interesting.

And finally, a feeding frenzy of small waders - both dunlin and sanderling - were feeding here on sandhopppers and flies amongst the seaweed.

Developing these Mears-ian tracking skills is of course a slow process requiring long hours of meticulous field observation ......

you can do it my way - watch the birds take off then walk up and check out the tracks.

Autumn Spring

2009-09-20T23:14:00.008+01:00

Around the autumn equinox, low spring tides expose kelp beds normally hidden to landlubbers like me and slippery visits to this weird world are always worthwhile. Of all the things to be found here, the diminutive blue-rayed limpet has to be amongst the most beautiful.

If you can catch them in sunshine, as I did yesterday at the north end of Embleton Bay in Northumberland, the irridescence of the streaks is impressive and the colour switches from green to blue according to how the light falls (the camera doesn't really capture it fully). These little molluscs are short lived apparently - no more than a year or so - and they move about after they first settle, from the fronds of the larger kelps such as Laminaria digitata down into the holdfasts, where they lurk and graze significant holes which weaken the structure. A fact that I hadn't fully appreciated is that it is only in their earliest stage that they have these beautiful irridescent lines. Those in the photograph were only about 5mm in length.

A semipost on semibalanus

2009-09-15T22:45:00.005+01:00

Oh no I hear you sigh - he's on about barnacles again. True, but just a quickie.....

Next time you tramp on top of a load of barnacles, thinking only of the welcome underfoot grip they give you on slippery rocks, you might just like to ponder their fascinating life cycle.

For a great introduction and a couple of wonderful pictures of the nauplius and cypris larval stages try this... and find out along the way why 13 is unlucky for some.

Trapped by the Barnacles

2009-09-14T22:10:00.006+01:00

Standing and staring at barnacles the other day set me off on another puzzler. Barnacle larvae settle out of the plankton onto a substrate they think is just the job and grow into barnacles proper. They pick up chemical clues from barnacles that have already settled - hence their appearance in tightly packed colonies. If the rock they settle on is actually a limpet I don't suppose they notice the difference, and anyway it will be of no detriment to the barnacle as it gets piggy-backed about. But what about the limpet? Well, I guess a few barnacles on your back are neither here nor there and may even be useful camouflage against a passing oystercatcher. Perhaps it's the ones around you that you need to worry about?

Limpets are grazers and when the tide comes in they meander slowly off from their home base rasping off algal growth from the rock surface as they go before returning to exactly the same home spot. They have nowhere else to go but that spot as it's the only place on which their shell is a perfect fit for the rock shape, enabling them to batten down the hatches when the tide goes out and avoid drying up.

What is puzzling me is how the limpet in the photo makes a living as it is almost completely hemmed in by barnacles with its grazing territory severely compromised.

I reckon it's doomed in a barnacle prison and wonder if the barnacle-free spaces nearby are where its mates have starved, died and dropped off. If I am right then eventually the barnacles should see off all the limpets and take over the whole patch.

This could all be complete rubbish of course! I await your pearls of wisdom...

Harebells, re-visited

2009-09-09T19:00:00.000+01:00

Although I have waxed on about harebells before, I need little excuse to do so again. Walking one of the footpaths that cross Bamburgh golf course the other day I came across a small patch with pure white flowers in the rank rough between the fertilised fairways.

So, (he says, looking in the general direction of Greenfingers....), is this unusual? Is it a variation in the wild harebell or might these be a different species or variety given that this is a heavily managed golf course?

Another Angle on the Spangle

2009-09-09T09:09:00.001+01:00

Catching up on various blogs after being out of circulation for a while, I've been enjoying the various posts (eg by Greenfingers and Rambling Rob) on plant galls.

By coincidence, I must have been taking my blurry close-up of galls on oak at about the same time as Greenfingers was taking his sharp ones (see his post of 17th August) except that my measly oak leaf had but one type of gall on it - the spangle gall - not the four that he found.

That apart, it set me reading up about the life cycle of Neuroterus quercusbaccarum, the small-wasp-big-name that causes this, and its a fascinating story.

Phil explains that the oak tree is induced to produce the spangle gall around the wasp larva by insects that appear in the summer, lay eggs and inject a chemical into the leaf. What follows next is intriguing. The gall, with its tiny grub inside falls off in October. The larva completes its growth during the winter and pupates. Adults emerge in Feb/March but they are all asexual females. They lay eggs but this time the larvae that come from these grow inside a different type of gall - the currant gall - on leaves or on male catkins.

This time, in May/June, it is both male and female adult gall wasps that emerge, mate and the eggs laid in the oak leaves produce the next asexual generation via the spangle gall.

Questions: Why such a tangled life cycle and why are two different generations per year, one asexual and the other sexual, of benefit to this and other insects?

Grabbed by the Barnacles

2009-08-29T21:47:00.027+01:00

After a holiday pounding the London streets with the family, what better way to unwind than to ponder the barnacle.

From a distance, the intertidal rocks to the north of Bamburgh are a lovely caramel colour but get close up and you see that the rock is in fact almost black. The caramel effect is made by barnacles - millions upon millions of them. What particularly grabbed me though, is that when you look more closely, it is mainly the upper parts of the bigger barnacles that have the colouration.

The bases of the shell plates are white, as are the smaller ones. Why?

I have to say that I have struggled to find a definitive answer but a passing reference (in a google hit that frustratingly wouldn't actually open) hinted at colouration due to 'algal infection'. If this is true, why white at the base and why only the larger barnacles?

Here's my theory then, for what its worth. As a barnacle grows so the external shell plates have to enlarge to accommodate the bigger beast inside. In this species, new shell material is secreted along the base of each shell-plate. Perhaps then, the new stuff stays white for a while until the algal colouration takes effect, by which time its been pushed further up the shell by more new (and white) growth below. Hey presto, white bottoms and caramel tops. If this is true then the young barnacles -the smaller ones- should be all white (they are - see photo) and a barnacle that has finished growing should be all caramel (see the larger barnacle at the bottom of the photo). I rest my case.

This species is Semibalanus balanoides, the most widespread and successful intertidal barnacle in the British Isles. Until the mid 70s it was known as Balanus balanoides until cut down to size and renamed by the barnacle boffins.

Stood on and ignored by many a beach visitor it may be, but I reckon that any creature that spends the first part of its life floating about as a piece of plankton, then one day sticks itself by the head to a rock, turns itself into a hermaphrodite crustacean in a rock-hard shell stuck down with one of the toughest natural adhesives there is, catches its dinner with its feet and has, proportionately, one of the largest male appendages in the animal kingdom (which incidentally drops off and then re-grows each year) is worthy of a bit more attention than that.....