15 Friday May 2020
This is the one that didn’t make it. It’s a Blackbird’s egg, I think, and it looks like a hole’s been pecked in it, probably by another bird, like a Magpie or a Crow. It’s always a little sad to see things like this but it’s just the way the natural world works.
13 Wednesday May 2020
When I spotted a pair of Mute swans and their six cygnets on an inlet of the River Ely on yesterday’s exercise walk, the old song ‘Way down upon the Swannee River’ immediately came to mind. The song has nothing to do with swans, of course (it’s about an African slave longing for ‘de old plantation’), and most of you are probably too young to even remember the tune – I think it was just the combination of swans and river that made it pop into my brain. But enough of the strange workings of my mind during lockdown…. Isn’t this little family just gorgeous?!
10 Sunday May 2020
Posted in nature, spring, wildflowers
Tags
Bittersweet nightshade, British wildflowers, Common milkwort, Cut-Leaved crane’s-bill, Flax, Goat's-beard, Spring colour, Wood avens
Here are this week’s newly flowering wildflowers …
Bittersweet nightshade (Solanum dulcamara), also known as Woody nightshade and Deadly nightshade, though my Flora Britannica assures me this is actually one of the less poisonous members of the nightshade family.
Cut-leaved crane’s-bill (Geranium dissectum), one of the many lovely members of the extended Geranium family.
Flax (Linum usitatissimum), a small delicate plant, with beautiful pale blue flowers. This is rather different from the plant I, as a New Zealander, usually associate with this name – see my September 2018 post Flax.
Goat’s-beard (Tragopogon pratensis). As well as producing these glorious large sunny flowers, this wildflower, also known as Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon, has the most wonderful seedheads.
Wood avens (Geum urbanum) – you may know this wildflower by its alternate name of Herb Bennet.
Common milkwort (Polygala vulgaris). Discovered during my walk to Lavernock Nature Reserve earlier this week, this was the first time I’d seen this pretty little plant, though it’s very small and was almost hidden amongst the other wildflowers and grasses so it may be that I had simply overlooked it on previous visits.
One theory behind its common name is that the flowers of milkwort are shaped like udders and so medieval herbalists, following the ‘signature’ belief (that body parts can be treated by plants that resemble them), used to prescribe this plant to nursing mothers to increase their milk flow.
09 Saturday May 2020
At first sight, from several feet away, I thought this splodge on the side of a building was a dollop of bird poo … but then I noticed it was moving. So, of course, I immediately got out my camera and peered closer.
They were spider babies, hundreds of them, of the species Araneus diadematus, commonly known as Garden spiders. Both as spiderlings and as adults, these are completely harmless, though, as so often happens, several of the trashy daily newspapers have, in the past, vilified these bunches of babies with such headlines as ‘Woman’s horror as hundreds of tiny yellow spiders erupt from a nest in her back garden’ and ‘Millions of “exploding” yellow baby spiders invade Britain’.
When they’ve grown to adult size, these little cuties will look like those I photographed for my November 2017 blog post Wearing a diadem. You can read more about the Garden spider on the British Arachnological Society’s website.
05 Tuesday May 2020
I know I already posted about seeing my first Orange-tip butterfly of the year (The ostentatious Orange-tip, 15 April) but, for those not familiar with this lovely springtime butterfly, I thought it might be useful to see a bit more detail. So, here is a typical male Orange-tip, from the top and the side. The speckling on the lower wings looks green but that’s an optical illusion – the colours are actually yellow and black.
And here’s a female from both angles. If you only see her from the top, you might confuse her with one of the other white butterflies, though the dark patches are different in all the whites, and the Orange-tip also has a distinctive wing shape.
I managed to find several eggs during a recent walk – the newly laid eggs are white but turn orange very quickly. You’ll find them on the caterpillar food plants: Cuckooflower, Garlic mustard and Honesty are three wildflowers this butterfly favours. And, for the first time ever, I found a caterpillar. This is a 2nd instar (i.e. stage) – the larvae proceed through 5 instars, progressively growing larger, until they are ready to pupate.
You might be wondering why I gave this post the title of ‘the Lady of the Woods’. Well, according to Peter Eeles’s superb publication Life Cycles of British & Irish Butterflies (every home should have one!), this is the name given to the Orange-tip by Benjamin Wilkes in his Twelve New Designs of English Butterflies, published in 1742.
04 Monday May 2020
During the past couple of weeks, it’s been fascinating to watch two Lesser black-backed gulls – presumably, the same two who nested amongst a group of neighbouring chimney pots last year – renewing their pair bonds and practising their seduction techniques. The process goes a bit like this …
They circle each other, beaks thrust towards the sky in unison, and there’s some low bird-speak (as opposed to gull shrieking) …
One bird (the female, I think) begs the other for food, as if it is a chick, and the second bird regurgitates a niblet of food …
There’s more circling and beak thrusting and chatter …
Finally, the males jumps on the back of the female, though it takes them a couple of minutes to spread their wings, tails, feathers to reach the right angle to achieve copulation …
And this happens more than once, the male remaining on the female’s back until they’ve copulated three times during this one session …
Once finished, he jumps off, she puts her head down and waggles her rear end, and there is more low chatter, and a little beak bumping, before they both fly off.
03 Sunday May 2020
Posted in nature, spring, wildflowers
Tags
Bee-fly, British wildflowers, Grangemoor Park, Lychnis flos-cuculi, Ragged robin, Silene flos-cuculi, Spring colour, spring flowers
At Grangemoor Park on Friday, I spotted my first flowering Ragged robin for the year.
This gorgeous wildflower was formerly known as Lychnis flos-cuculi, but is now Silene flos-cuculi – from a scientific article I browsed, this seems a complicated story of almost constant reclassification of the species! You will still see both names used in books and on line, which is why I’ve mentioned both here.
According to a couple of books I discovered on the ‘language of flowers’, Ragged robin’s symbolic meaning is ‘wit’, and it is dedicated to Saint Barnabas. The ever-informative First Nature website says:
Lychnis, the genus name, comes from the Greek noun lychnos, meaning lamp; it refers to the use of a plant in this genus as the wick of an oil lamp. The specific epithet flos-cuculi means ‘flower of the cuckoo’ and was probably chosen because the first flowers of Ragged Robin appear just as the first cuckoos are being heard (in Britain and Ireland at least) in May.
A special moment: to try to stop it swaying in the breeze so I could get a sharp photo, I was holding one of the blooms when a bee-fly decided to zoom in for a feed of nectar. That super long proboscis comes in handy for long narrow flowers like these.
30 Thursday Apr 2020
Some days we all need a dose of cuteness!
26 Sunday Apr 2020
Posted in nature, spring, wildflowers
Tags
British wildflowers, Bush vetch, Common bird's foot trefoil, Common vetch, Grass vetchling, Red campion, Spring colour, spring wildflowers
You know the summer’s not far away when members of the extensive Pea family start to flower and, during this week’s exercise walks, I’ve spotted four Pea species newly come in to flower. The first were three of the vetches …
Bush vetch (Vicia sepium)
Common vetch (Vicia sativa) … and friends.
Grass vetchling (Lathyrus nissolia)
And, also, one of my all-time favourites – possibly because it’s also a favourite with a lot of the butterflies and day-flying moths I adore so much, Common bird’s-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus).
Oh, and this week’s new blooms also included one not-a-pea wildflower, the always lovely Red campion (Silene dioica).
20 Monday Apr 2020
First, the sunbathing – sometimes alone …
… sometimes with a friend.
Then, later, the sex!
Credits: Today’s post has featured the Green shieldbug (Palomena prasina) and the Dock bug (Coreus marginatus).
