Monthly Archives: October 2016

Happy All Hallows’ Eve!

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in autumn, nature, plants

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I couldn’t find any big orange pumpkins to carve up to make Jack o’lanterns for today’s Halloween celebrations so I improvised and took photos of Chinese lanterns instead. Though the carving of pumpkins has its roots in ancient harvest celebrations, I don’t much care for the modern commercialisation of seasonal celebrations like All Hallows’ Eve anyway, whereas I do very much like the beautiful Chinese lantern plant (Physalis alkekengi) (particularly in the autumn when it produces such a wonderful display of vivid orange seedpods), so for me this choice was a no-brainer.

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As a garden plant, the Chinese lantern can be invasive, sending its roots out far and wide, so you do need to keep it in check a little, but the effort is worth it. When most of the summer colour has faded from the flower bed, this plant’s bursts of brilliant orange are a visual delight. And the ‘lanterns’ are just as pretty when the papery covering falls away from the seedpod, making its intricate lacy structure visible. The stems of orange pods make a lovely addition to a dried flower arrangement, retaining their colour for a long time, and, even without their orange skin, the seedpods look pretty in a bowl or mingled with other ingredients in a potpourri.

Once was a tree

30 Sunday Oct 2016

Posted by in fungi, nature, trees

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It’s always sad to see a mighty old tree fall, no more to see its bare branches flush with green in early spring or hear the blackbird singing in the evening dusk from its high branches.

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This huge old tree came down one wild and stormy night last winter and was soon sawn into manageable, though still huge logs by council staff. Fortunately, those logs were not removed, but merely hauled off the woodland path so, though the tree is dead, its wood is now home to an amazing display of fungi.

I suspect fungi may have contributed to its demise as there is an enormous amount of wood-rotting Honey fungus spouting forth around its roots. It’s a little difficult to separate out this tree and its branches from the surrounding small trees and old stumps but the whole small area is now awash with fungal growth, including Burgundydrop bonnet, Hairy curtain crust and Turkeytail, the Porcelain fungus that I blogged about recently, a species of Oysterling and another of Brittlestem, as well as at least one slime mould, Trichia varia. The poor old tree lives on by providing nutrients to all these other living organisms.

Fungi Friday: Stump puffballs

28 Friday Oct 2016

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I’m a dedicated wildlife recorder, inputting my sightings of flora and fauna into the database of my local records centre, SEWBReC (the South East Wales Biodiversity Records Centre). Each month the team at SEWBReC nominates a species that is poorly recorded in their system, in that hope that recorders like me will search high and low to help augment their records. The reason is that if record numbers are low, you can’t tell whether a species is endangered or just under-recorded, so it’s important to record even the most common things.

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The October species of the month is a case in point. The Stump puffball (Lycoperdon pyriforme) is really common throughout Britain, yet the SEWBReC database had only 167 records at the start of the month. Well, I can tell you it will have a whole lot more by the end of October, because I’ve seen them almost everywhere I go and I’ve been photographing and recording them all. It’s the only British puffball to grow on wood so it’s easy to identify, and it often grows in large colonies – as one fungi expert put it, it’s ‘the banana of the fungi world, its bunches create impressive vistas’.

For more on SEWBReC’s species of the month, see here. If you live in the area, or even if you’re just visiting, you can help by recording your sightings.

Nature’s bounty

27 Thursday Oct 2016

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If I were more domesticated, I would be even busier at this time of year than I normally am, making jams and pickles and chutneys, freezing and drying, and doing whatever I could to preserve the bounty Nature provides in the autumn. (I have begun keeping glass lidded jars – it’s a beginning!)

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Out front of the house where I live there’s a tree, which I think is a type of crab apple, though its fruit have ripened to a golden yellow colour rather than red. (My photos here are actually of another tree and its fruit, found in a local park, but they’re exactly the same.) Crab apple jelly is the recipe that appears most often when I google, though the huge quantities of sugar in those recipes horrify me just a little. Crab apple cider seems to be another possibility – and I do quite like a nice glass of cider – but that requires lots of fancy equipment. I think you can tell that taking photos is as far as I’ll get to doing anything with the crab apples this year but at least that means the birds get to enjoy them instead. (If you have some suggestions for what to do with crab apples for next year, do feel free to share them in the comments.)

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Lizards of Machu Picchu

26 Wednesday Oct 2016

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When most tourists explore the magnificent Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru, they focus on the breathtaking mountain-top location, the stomach-churning near-vertical drops on every side, the precision of the stone work, the enormity of the human effort involved in the city’s construction, the hundreds of steep potentially ankle-turning steps, the cuteness of the grazing llamas …

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I saw all those things but I also saw lizards! As far as I can work out, these are Spiny whorltail iguanas (Stenocercus crassicaudatus), a species of lizard that is only found in the 13,000 km2 region around Cusco. According to the ICUN Redlist website, it is a species of least concern ‘because the agricultural activities that are taking place in its distribution do not fragment or affect in major ways its population’, understandable when the land in this region ranges from 1060m to 6260m above sea level. Very wisely, the Spiny whorltail is not known to venture above 2500m. I found them basking in sunny spots on the stones of Machu Picchu – I imagine they spend most of their days sun-basking as it can get very very cold there, even in the summer months!

One year, one month, one day

24 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in autumn, nature, parks, seasons, trees

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I enjoyed a lovely long meander around Cardiff’s Bute Park on the weekend, strolled the riverside paths, strode along the towering lime avenue, and scuffed through the occasional deep drift of autumn leaves. It was magical! I took a ton of photos, as I always do, and when I was editing them later that evening, I realised I had one scene that was almost a perfect fit for an image I took last year. In fact, it was exactly one year, one month and one day ago. These are those two images, the oldest first.

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A wagtail but which?

23 Sunday Oct 2016

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I’m sure you’ve all seen wagtails of some description. They’re those cute little birds with the long tails that continuously bob up and down, seemingly not able to sit still – my mother would’ve said they had ants in their pants! Wagtails come in several varieties; on the left below is a Pied wagtail (Motacilla alba yarrellii) and on the right a Grey wagtail (Motacilla cinerea). Nothing unusual here. But then …

This little birdie was on the rooftop of my neighbour’s garden studio a couple of days ago.

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It sat, bobbing and calling, for about 10 minutes, so I was able to watch and get some photos (though it was distant and through double glazing, so my images are not the best). Though the colours of both wagtail species vary as the birds mature and through the seasons, this little one appeared to have the head of a Pied wagtail and the body of a Grey wagtail. So, I tweeted photos to the RSPB (The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) and they responded that it was ‘either a partially leucistic Grey wagtail or colour variation due to being between plumages or a geographical variation and the Grey wagtail has flown over from a different continent.’ It’s one of Nature’s little mysteries …

Happy International Sloth Day!

22 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by in animals, nature

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I had another post lined up for today but, when I found out it was International Sloth Day, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to share these photos with you. Now, I know this is not environmentally correct. I know I really shouldn’t have had a sloth hanging off me. But, when it was offered, I just couldn’t say no, and I think you can see how hilariously happy I was for this short five minutes.

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These photos were taken when I was managing an NGO near Cusco, Peru, back in 2011-2012. The British charity I was working for, Globalteer, runs an after-school programme at Picaflor House in the small town of Oropesa, near Cusco. On this day in August 2011, we were about to farewell a fabulous group of people who had been volunteering at our project and who all chipped in to give our children an extra-special treat, a visit to a local wildlife refuge and sanctuary.

The children were overjoyed, the refuge were very happy for the financial support of the entry fees and, just as we were leaving, one of the rangers brought this sloth to show us, offering to hang it off me as they looked. I wasn’t allowed to touch it – human germs! – which is why my arms are constantly outstretched, but it truly was one of the most incredible experiences of my life!

International Sloth Day was the brainchild of The Sloth Institute, in Costa Rica, one of many environmental organisations helping to research, rescue and release back into the wild these magnificent creatures. I don’t know enough about the organisation to endorse them but I would urge everyone to do what they can to help preserve the sloth and its environment all around the world.