Category Archives: animals

Welsh biodiversity: Forest Farm

09 Thursday Jun 2016

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I’ve sung the praises of Forest Farm in previous blogs (here and here) and enjoyed many conversations with robins during my walks there but today, on day six of Wales Biodiversity Week, for the wildlife at Forest Farm it was all about procreation.

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Male damselflies were flashing their colourful wings trying to impress the females; male dragonflies were patrolling their territory to warn off any potential interlopers; damselflies were copulating as they flew along the canal and around the pond, and I saw two female dragonflies depositing their eggs amongst plants and reeds in the pond.

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The birdlife was a little more advanced – there were chicks and fledglings everywhere: ducklings, baby coots and moorhens, young robins and dunnocks, to name just a few. Perhaps cutest of all, though, were the baby rabbits, happily frolicking and nibbling on the grass near the bird hides. It was like a scene from Watership Down!

‘Dedicated Naturalist’: The Rabbit

15 Sunday May 2016

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A snippet from my volunteer work on the ‘Dedicated Naturalist’ Project, helping to decipher and digitise, record and publicise the life’s work of naturalist extraordinaire, Dr Mary Gillham.

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From Mary’s 1935 Form IIa Biology exercise book:

The rabbit is covered with a soft greyish coloured fur. The teats or milk glands of the mother sometimes range over the whole of the ventral side of the body. Rabbits have flat feet with fur on the underneath. Their claws cannot be drawn in as can those of a cat, and so if it wasn’t for the fact that they usually run on grass they would make a noise when running. As it is easy prey for other animals it has large ears so that it can hear the slightest sound. The rabbit has a prominent white tail, so that when one runs away the others may see it and know there is danger at hand, then they can make good their escape. The three most formidable enemies of the rabbit are the stoat, weasel and fox. Sometimes when the rabbit sees any of these it is so overcome with fright that it seems paralysed and cannot move while its attacker comes up and kills it. The rabbit has three eyelids instead of the usual two, it also has sensitive whiskers like those of a cat growing from the sides of its face. The ventral side is a much lighter grey that the dorsal side. Rabbits are very common in England and in almost any field you go into you can see either the rabbits or their burrows.

My rabbits were photographed this week at Forest Farm Nature Reserve, where they are certainly very common!

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You can follow our progress with this project on Facebook and on Twitter. A website will follow soon.

Have you ridden a camel?

11 Wednesday May 2016

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From left, camels in Tanzania, in Turkey and in Morocco

I have, and I can tell you it is the most uncomfortable animal ever invented! Even with padded seating, the camel’s back bones soon make your body sore in unmentionable places and, without any kind of stirrups, your feet very quickly go numb from hanging down the camel’s sides.

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My camel safari was part of an overnight trip into the desert in Morocco. It was a novel experience, and being in the desert was magical, but I have no desire for a repeat performance.

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Camels were not an animal I expected to see in Tanzania but they were introduced from neighbouring Kenya in the 1990s and quickly became an important stock animal in the arid northern parts of the country. Not only are they used for transport, they are also an important source of milk, helping to combat malnutrition in some Maasai tribal areas. They are also used in the tourism industry for camel safaris, though I did read that, while you will undoubtedly see many of the special birds that live in the area, ‘if you are lucky, you can also see some game running away’! Perhaps not the ideal vehicle for a wildlife safari then.

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I saw camels awaiting willing tourists in Turkey some years ago as well, but camels are not native to Turkey and these were not for safaris. It seems the canny Turks discovered tourists like to be photographed sitting on or simply standing next to camels, and thus was a new tourism business created.

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It’s Hedgehog Awareness Week!

04 Wednesday May 2016

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My photos here are of a New Zealand hedgehog, though it is, in fact, the European species, Erinaceus europaeus, which British colonists introduced in the 1870s, partly to remind them of ‘home’ and partly to control garden pests like slugs and snails. As often happens when humans interfere with Nature, their introduction was not a wise move, as the hedgehog preys on some New Zealand native creatures and competes with them for food. It is considered a pest by many.

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In Britain, their home, hedgehogs can be found almost everywhere, except in bogs and up mountains, and they are mostly certainly not pests. I’m sad to say I’ve never seen a hedgehog in Britain, neither in the six months I spent in Cheshire, nor since moving to Wales nine months ago. This may be an unfortunate side-effect of living in a first-floor flat with no garden access but it may also be because hedgehog numbers have declined rapidly in recent years, from an estimated 30 million in the 1950s to around 1.5 million in the 1990s.

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Hedgehogs need our help. The British Hedgehog Preservation Society runs Hedgehog Awareness Week each year, to ‘highlight the problems hedgehogs face and how you can help them’. Check out their website for more information, and please help. After all, where would Britain be without its Mrs Tiggy-Winkles?

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The cats of Morocco

27 Wednesday Apr 2016

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One of the reasons I love Morocco is because it’s a country crawling with cats. Moggies can be found everywhere, sleeping in mosques and medinas, lurking in the corners of market squares, and soaking up the sun near fishing boats.

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Due in part to their cleanliness, cats are revered in the Islamic religion. According to tradition, Muhammad prohibited the persecution and killing of cats, and Islam teaches that cats should not be sold for money or other goods, and must be treated well.

These are some of the furry felines I found in Morocco.

The laughing hyena

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

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‘A sense of humor is good for you. Have you ever heard of a laughing hyena with heart burn?’ ~ Bob Hope

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‘HYENA, n. A beast held in reverence by some oriental nations from its habit of frequenting at night the burial-places of the dead. But the medical student does that.’ ~ Ambrose Bierce

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‘There’s always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.’ ~ D. H. Lawrence

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‘Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyena, and you’re a bone!’ ~ Lewis Carroll

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‘We slander the hyena; man is the fiercest and cruellest animal.’ ~ Henry David Thoreau

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‘Dedicated Naturalist’: Brown rats

14 Thursday Apr 2016

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A snippet from my volunteer work on the ‘Dedicated Naturalist’ Project, helping to decipher and digitise, record and publicise the life’s work of naturalist extraordinaire, Dr Mary Gillham. 

Love them or hate them, you have to admire Mary’s poetic description of the brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) she saw during a walk along the banks of the River Taff, between the Queen and Wood Street bridges in Cardiff city centre, on 27 October 1979.

Sleek brown rats obviously well fed can be viewed from a little riverside grandstand where the human scent above the expected level instigates only momentary peering of beady eyes and twitching of whiskers. Rats have acquired their inauspicious aura only by being carriers of human diseases and frequenters of human sewers. Whose fault? Ours or theirs? Viewed dispassionately here their weavings between the straight sturdy canes of Japanese knotweed resembles that of a jaguar in a primeval forest, their more intricate passage through tall cocksfoot like lions in elephant grass. There are pickings in plenty, both local and river-borne.

I have retraced Mary’s path along this river bank many times in 2016 and not seen any rats. Good thing or bad thing?

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Mary Gillham was also a talented artist – this is one of her drawings

Bottoms up!

11 Monday Apr 2016

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One thing about animal photography: your models don’t always co-operate, and you often end up with photos of the less flattering parts of their anatomy. I thought a selection of my photos of these might at least bring a smile (and, actually, the zebra photo is one of my all-time favourites).

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‘Froth at the top, dregs at the bottom, but the middle excellent.’ ~ Voltaire

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‘I know up on the top you are seeing great sights, but down at the bottom we, too, should have rights.’ ~ Dr Seuss, Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories

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‘Bottoms up or bottoms down, / Either way no one will frown.’ ~ Mike Anderson

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‘My mind is trouble, like a fountain stirred; / And I myself see not the bottom of it.’ ~ William Shakespeare

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‘My bottom is so big it’s got its own gravitational field.’ ~ Carol Vorderman

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‘One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.’ ~ Gustave Flaubert

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‘When you’re average, you’re just as close to the bottom as you are the top.’ ~ Alfred North Whitehead

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‘The artist needs to understand the truth that lies at the bottom of an enigma.’ ~ John Maeda

The rock hyrax

06 Wednesday Apr 2016

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On safari in the Serengeti even the places where we stopped for lunch had amazing wildlife, some of them lazing around in the sun as if just waiting for the animal paparazzi to show up. These critters are Rock hyraxes (Procavia capensis), also known as Cape hyraxes and rock badgers. Incredibly, though they look a bit like huge hamsters, their closest living relatives – cousins many times removed – are elephants and sea cows. Just like their cousins, they have prominent (though obviously much smaller) tusk-like upper incisors, and the males’ testes are permanently enclosed inside their abdomens.

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Their bodies do not regulate heat very efficiently so, though they look rather fat and lazy, they are more active in the early morning and in the evening but need simply to bask during the hottest hours of the day. Hyraxes live in large social groups, using sentries to warn of danger when foraging for their favourite food plants, and communicating through a series of at least 21 different vocalisations which can, apparently, inform other hyraxes of their age, size, body weight, social status and hormonal condition. They can be found in most of the sub-Saharan countries in Africa, and are just plain cute!

Not just a load of bullocks!

05 Tuesday Apr 2016

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I was a little surprised last Saturday to see bullocks grazing in the Merthyr Mawr National Nature Reserve but it’s all part of the Countryside Council for Wales’s management plan. Research and monitoring have shown that the sand dune ecosystem needs to be dynamic – the dunes need to be exposed, the sands able to move with wind, tide and storm, in order to function as effective flood defences and to maintain the right environment for the rare plants and invertebrates that live there.

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So, some of the grasses and shrubs that had previously stabilised the dunes have been removed by earthmoving equipment and, to prevent the dune system developing into woodland, cattle are being allowed to graze parts of the reserve at certain times of the year. The plan is to maintain sparsely vegetated dunes and open grassland so that the rare species that were being choked towards extinction will be rejuvenated.

One additional benefit for the photographer – the bullocks are very photogenic, and I’m sure the Yellow dung flies I saw on Saturday are pretty happy with the plan as well.

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