Category Archives: nature

Herb-Paris

14 Sunday May 2017

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Paris quadrifolia is its scientific name and you’d think quadrifolia would mean this plant had four leaves but no one told the plant that! Herb-Paris, as it’s more commonly known, can actually have between 4 and 8 leaves. It’s not its leaves that Herb-Paris is most admired for though, it’s its stunning solitary flower, a true masterpiece of Nature.

170508 Herb-Paris (1)

Herb-Paris is a perennial plant and can be found in both cool and temperate areas of Europe. In Britain you’re most likely to find it in the damp shade of ancient woodlands on calcareous soils, though sadly it has declined significantly over the last century due to the destruction of many broad-leaved woodlands in favour of conifer plantations. As Herb-Paris has proven to be very slow at colonising replanted woodlands, the only hope for its survival is the conservation of those ancient woodlands that still exist.

Though all parts of this plant are considered poisonous, it was used in various ways in traditional medicine: it was considered to be an antidote for mercury and arsenic poisoning, its root was used as an emetic, and the juice of its berry as a treatment for inflammation of the eyes. I think I’ll stick to conventional medicine and leave this beautiful herb to be admired by all who are lucky enough to see it.

170508 Herb-Paris (4)

A bumper day for butterflies, and a moth

13 Saturday May 2017

Posted by in insects, nature, parks

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Blue skies, warm temperatures, wildflowers in bloom – what more could a butterfly want? Not much it seems as they were out in force at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park and I spent several happy hours following them around, trying to get photographs but also just intrigued by their flight patterns, the food plants they were choosing and their general behaviour. The Whites, large and small, eluded my lens, as did several Orange-tips and one Red Admiral but I did manage to snap these six.

The first is a Brimstone butterfly (Gonepteryx rhamni), not to be confused with the moth of the same name. I saw two flying together, land together and then the male heading purposefully towards the female. Turns out though that her spreading her wings and raising her abdomen in the air was not a ‘come hither’ signal but rather the opposite. She was indicating that she had already mated and was rebuffing the male. I saw several Common blues (Polyommatus icarus), also easily confused with other very similar small blue butterflies. They are so vibrant! And seeing a Peacock (Aglais io) is always a treat, though this one was looking a little battered.

Speckled woods (Pararge aegeria) seem to be the butterflies I see most often wherever I go but I love their pretty dappling of brown and cream. The next was a new one for me and I saw two of them – it’s a Dingy Skipper (Erynnis tages), a butterfly whose caterpillars feed on Bird’s-foot trefoil so it’s often found on the short impoverished grasslands of former coal tips, rubbish tips and quarries. I’ve just learnt that it’s called Dingy because ‘it loses scales alarmingly as it get older so looks, well, dingy’ (thanks, Steven). The last is not a butterfly but a moth and rather a special moth, The Mocha (Cyclophora annularia). This moth is nationally scarce but more frequent in the woodlands of southern Britain so I was well pleased with this sighting.

Primrose x Cowslip = False Oxlip

12 Friday May 2017

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Where Primroses (Primula vulgaris) and Cowslips (Primula veris) grow in close proximity they will occasionally hybridise to produce the False Oxlip (Primula vulgaris x veris = P. x polyantha). Though this is not really clear from my images, the hybrid is usually a larger plant than the Cowslip, and I think it combines the prettiest traits of both parents to produce a real stunner!

Good things come in small packages

11 Thursday May 2017

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They say ‘Good things come in small packages’ and you couldn’t get much smaller than these tiny packages, the eggs of the Gorse shieldbug (Piezodorus lituratus) sitting on a gorse flower in Lavernock Reserve. I’ll be heading back soon to try to find the hatchlings.

170511 Gorse shieldbug eggs

Whistling a merry tune?

10 Wednesday May 2017

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You might be forgiven for thinking that a bird with the name Lesser whistling duck (Dendrocygna javanica) could sing a merry tune but apparently its song is only a two-note wheezy call. Instead, and rather remarkably, its outermost primary wing feather has a rather unusual shape and is said to produce a prominent whistling sound when the bird is flying. As I only saw this duck looking rather drowsy and sitting perfectly still, I can neither confirm nor deny its musicality.

170510 Lesser whistling duck

Lesser whistling ducks can be found throughout the wetlands of Southeast Asia and lowland parts of the Indian subcontinent. I photographed this one in Cambodia, at the Angkor Centre for Conservation of Biodiversity about 60 kilometres outside Siem Reap. (You can read more about the conservation, rescue, rehabilitation and educational work of the ACCB here.)

More from Merthyr Mawr

09 Tuesday May 2017

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As I wrote yesterday, with very little fungi to be found our Glamorgan Fungus Group foray on Saturday developed into a more general nature ramble. I’m afraid I wasn’t writing down the names of all the various critters and plants we saw so I can’t identify everything in these photos but I can name some.

The first is a Red-headed cardinal beetle (Pyrochroa serraticornis), a very pretty beetle though this one wouldn’t keep still for me. The centipede was the same and I’m afraid I don’t remember its name, though I was told it’s not particularly common. It tickled! I think the little yellow dots are the eggs of the Green dock beetle (Gastrophysa viridula) as we saw a pair mating nearby. The tiny moths on the buttercup flower are Micropterix calthella. The plant with the pink flower is one I actually remembered from my botany walk on Thursday – a miracle! It’s Common Stork’s-bill (Erodium cicutarium). Then we have two different species of snail cosying up together. Once again, I was told the names but didn’t write them down and have forgotten (must do better next time!). This very pretty plant was a new one for me and it has two common names, so you might know it either as Wall pennywort or Navelwort (scientific name Umbilicus rupestris). Next is another beetle, this time a Poplar leaf beetle (Chrysomela populi). It was a gorgeous wee thing, with metallic green thorax and dark red body, almost like an oversized ladybird. And, last but not least, was this rather angry Blood bee (Sphecodes sp.). It was trying to lay its eggs in the holes of mining bees when it was netted and potted up for a quick close-up look.

170509 (1) Millipede Pill bug Slug

My favourite moment of the day, though, was when I turned over this log. I particularly loved the little grouping of millipede, pill-bug and slug but these were only a few of the various creatures to be seen. It was just nice to see such biodiversity co-existing happily together. A lesson for us all, I think.

Fungi foray: Merthyr Mawr

08 Monday May 2017

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Saturday dawned fine and mostly sunny, good news for most but not such good news for fungi enthusiasts, who are already bemoaning the recent lack of rain. Still, keen-eyed fungi fans can always find something and our Glamorgan Fungus Group has some of the keenest in ‘Eagle-eyes’ Emma. Though we were just a small group of six and a half, we enjoyed a splendid day searching the woodland areas of Merthyr Mawr National Nature Reserve, and our limited numbers were, in fact, a bonus, as we had amongst us the county recorder for Orthoptera (grasshoppers and related insects) and an experienced botanist, so we were able to enjoy, discuss and identify a broad range of flora and fauna. As expected, our fungi finds were limited but we finished the day with a very respectable total of 21 species and had a great time along the way.

Here are some of our finds: the rust Melampsora populnea on Dog’s mercury; another rust Kuehneola uredinis, on Bramble; Microbotryum silenes-dioicae, a smut that occurs on the anthers of Red campion flowers; another rust Melampsora epita var. epitea on Spindle; fungi enthusiasts inspecting the one group of cap fungi (‘real mushrooms’) found this day; the ‘real mushrooms’ that must remain unidentified as they were much eaten and turning gloopy; likely one of the Mollisia species of Disco fungi; Phellinus hippophaeicola on Sea buckthorn; Phylloporia ribis on Spindle; a rather old and faded Blushing bracket Daedaleopsis confragosa; a Puccinia species of rust on Common ragwort – this needs microscope work to positively ID; and the pimple-like growths of Dandelion wart Synchytrium taraxaci on one of the gazillions of Dandelion species, so Taraxacum officinale agg.

Botany 101: Status = scarce

07 Sunday May 2017

Posted by in nature, plants, seaside

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I would normally walk right over these tiny plants but, after my outing with my botany mentor on Thursday, I now know to look more closely at what’s growing under my feet. These two plants may not look like much but they are nationally scarce and just as fascinating as the more colourful and showy flowering plants that most easily catch our eye.

170507 Trifolium suffocatum Suffocated clover (1)

Trifolium suffocatum Suffocated clover
Suffocated seems an apt name for this little beauty, surrounded and almost overpowered as it was by the species-rich grassland in which it was living. Luckily, it seems to thrive on a good stomping by humans, in places like picnic sites and car parks, as this was growing in a much-trampled area of the south Wales coastline. Luckily, too, we visited at the right time, as this little clover does not hang around long: its seeds usually germinate in the autumn, it flowers between March and May, and then ‘disintegrates’, according to the Online Atlas of British and Irish Flora. The flowers, which are white and tiny, are contained in the burr-like clusters you can see in the photo above.

Poa bulbosa Bulbous Meadow-grass
The exceedingly dry April weather meant we didn’t get to see this second scarce plant at its best: though we counted 27 flower heads, the plants themselves had mostly dried up, though you can still see the bulbous bases that give it its name. Though it’s called a meadow grass, it actually seems to prefer rather infertile sandy soils, living, according to the Atlas, in ‘open sparse grassland’ and even ‘on bare sand in dune systems’. We found ours in a car park adjacent to a beach and dune systems but it wasn’t actually growing in those dunes.

Though this grass can spread through the wind blowing the bulbs around, the plants that live in south Wales are also all viviparous: the flowers are ‘replaced by tiny plantlets which are capable of rooting and becoming established as individual plants’. I thought the flower heads (inflorescences) were particularly lovely with their shades of purple, green and cream.

Botany 101: sore knees and sniffy nose

06 Saturday May 2017

Posted by in nature, plants, wildflowers

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You’ll recall I blogged recently about my first outing as a botany mentee. Well, on Thursday I took my second tentative step on the road to learning more about the incredible variety of plants that surround us. This time it was just me and my mentor Julian, though we were joined by another enthusiast David for the morning part of our jaunt. This time also I was better prepared, with a notebook to write down plant names and, though I somehow managed to lose my pen around lunchtime, I’m proud to say I remembered the names of all but one of the afternoon’s plant finds.

170506 Ogmore-by-sea

The ‘grass’, the view and a nice spot for morning tea

One thing I hadn’t expected was a condition I will describe as botanists’ knees. The plants we spent the morning looking for and at, in a ‘grassy’ area on the south Wales coast (I now know ‘grassy’ is a hopelessly inadequate adjective to describe the incredible number of plants growing in those areas I would once have called grass), were never more than an inch or two high so we spent most of the morning on hands and knees, bums in the air. One further unexpected result of that was full sinuses (and the accompanying drippy nose), though perhaps there was an element of hay fever in the mix as well – with my poor eyesight the easiest way to see the finer details of some plants was to take my specs off and get my face within an inch or two of the plants, so I’m sure I breathed in plenty of pollen and dust in the process.

After lunching on a nearby river bank (a couple of specialist plants there too), Julian and I headed to another coastal site nearby, to inspect a car park – it has a rare grass – and to wander amongst some large sand dunes. I’ll blog separately about a couple of the special plants we saw but here is a selection of the more common but no less lovely: (above) Anthyllis vulneraria Kidney vetch, Arenaria serpyllifolia Thyme-leaved sandwort, Erodium cicutarium Common stork’s-bill, (below) Medicago lupulina Black medic, Polygala vulgaris Milkwort, and Sherardia arvensis Field madder. Needless to say, in spite of my sore knees and sniffy nose, I enjoyed the day immensely.