21 Thursday Jan 2021
Posted in trees
They call them pussy willows,
But there’s not a cat to see,
Except the little furry toes
That stick out on the tree.
I think that very long ago
When I was just born new,
There must have been whole pussy cats,
Where just the toes stick through.
And every spring it worries me,
I cannot ever find
Those willow cats that ran away
And left their toes behind.
~ ‘The Willow Cats’, Margaret Widdemer (1884-1978), American poet, novelist, and Pulitzer Prize winner
12 Tuesday Jan 2021
These two fungi, found on Ash keys, were last week’s record of the week at my local biodiversity records centre, SEWBReC – not my record, that of another local recorder – but seeing this on Twitter last Friday reminded me to check the next Ash trees I saw. That opportunity came on Sunday’s walk and I found the fungi on just the second tree I passed by.
The two fungi are Diaporthe samaricola (the small black dots on the seed part of the key, on the left below) and Neosetophoma samarorum (the much smaller, black speckles on the wing part of the key, on the right in my photo). Both fungi are under-recorded in my area, so I’ll now be checking all the Ash keys I find.
01 Friday Jan 2021
Posted in trees
A new day, a new year, new life, new hope! One of the first things I noticed during today’s long New Year’s Day walk was these Hazel flowers, the tiny pink female flower and, nearby, the long droopy male catkin. And it made me feel hopeful. Though we humans enter 2021 beset by the devastation and grief of a global pandemic, the looming disasters of climate change and environmental destruction, and, in the UK, the self-inflicted damage of Brexit, yet Nature continues its cycles of life, shining a little glimmer of light in the darkness and gloom. Let’s cling to that light and let it inspire us to make 2021 a greener, more environmentally friendly year, for the future of our planet and ourselves.
18 Friday Dec 2020
Back in December 2016, I blogged about Alder brackets (Fungi Friday: Alder bracket) and showed then the gorgeous golden globules of liquid that ooze out of them when they’re young. Today’s Alder brackets (scientific name Inonotus radiatus), found in the woodland at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, have a longer history.
There is certainly some newer growth amongst these brackets but most have been on this Alder tree a long time, as you can tell from the luxuriant growth of moss on the top bracket of the tier.
15 Tuesday Dec 2020
Tags
Alder, birding, birdwatching, British birds, Carduelis spinus, Grangemoor Park, Siskin, Siskin feeding on Alder cones
Siskin (Carduelis spinus) are not finches I see very often so, when I heard their high-pitched whistles at Grangemoor Park last Saturday, I immediately looked up to try to spot them.
And there they were, perhaps six birds, feeding on Alder cones, high above me. There were other trees in my sightline and the light was shocking so it wasn’t easy to watch or photograph them.
Still, I lingered on the muddy path for 20 minutes or so, enjoying their upside-down feeding techniques, listening to their noisy interaction, enjoying the fleeting glints of yellow when the sun lit their feathers. What a treat!
10 Thursday Dec 2020
At first I thought this incredibly tiny creature was the early instar of a shield bug but, when I couldn’t find any pictures that resembled it on the British Bugs website, I turned to Twitter for help. Luckily, a botanist I know, Karen, had seen something similar posted recently in a Facebook group and very quickly supplied me with a name, Crypturaphis grassii, the Italian Alder aphid, so named because it’s only ever found on Italian Alder trees (Alnus cordata).
I found online a report published in 2011, on the first records of this species in Cornwall, which provides some interesting detail about these aphids. Apparently, Crypturaphis grassii is ‘native to southern Italy and Corsica and [was] first recorded in the UK in 1998’. Intrigued, I returned to the tree I’d found my first specimen on and found many more of these creatures, with variations in colour and markings. The report explains that:
Viviparous individuals [those able to birth live young] are yellowish-green to yellowish-brown, with brown spots extending along the dorsal surface, around the edge of the abdomen and on the head. Compound eyes are reddish in colour. … Immature apterae [wingless individuals] are similar but smaller, paler and lacking in dark spots, more translucent and slightly more elongate in shape. Oviparous apterae [wingless individuals that are able to lay eggs] are similar in size and shape to viviparous apterae but are brown in colour, with transverse darker abdominal stripes, rather than spots.
The Italian Alder, on which the aphid feeds, was ‘commonly planted as a roadside, waterside and/or windbreak species’ during the 1980s, and, by 2011 when the report was published, the aphids had already spread widely throughout Britain, including having established colonies in the Vale of Glamorgan, which is where I found the aphids in my photographs.
Citation: Luker, Sally. (2011). CRYPTURAPHIS GRASSII (STERNORRYNCHA: APHIDIDAE): FIRST RECORDS FOR CORNWALL. British Journal of Entomology and Natural History. 24. 205.
09 Wednesday Dec 2020
Do you see the small stick sitting on top of the big fallen branch, in the centre left of the photo? Well, that stick was the absolute highlight of my seven-and-a-half-mile walk yesterday.
And below you can see why. This is the fungus Cobalt crust (Terana caerulea), an incredible colour to find growing on a stick in the middle of a now mostly brown woodland.
This is the first time I’ve found Cobalt crust locally and I was/am just so excited to see it. I might just have to go back next week for another look (and, also, to get photos of the red elfcups that were just beginning to appear nearby).
30 Monday Nov 2020
In his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Keats wrote of a ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’ singing of summer in ‘some melodious plot of beechen green’. The beechen green has now become beechen gold and brown, but I can still imagine Dryads singing of the beauty of mighty Beech trees, in all their autumnal finery, and even performing paeans in praise of their statuesque forms once those golden leaves have fallen.
21 Saturday Nov 2020
Tags
beech, leaf mines on Beech, moth larvae in leaf mines, moth leafmines, Parornix fagivora, Phyllonorycter maestingella, Phyllonorycter messaniella, Stigmella hemargyrella, Stigmella tityrella
Five species of Lepidoptera larvae can be found in the leaves of Beech (Fagus species) and, with a lot of searching, much head-scratching, some rejections, and the much appreciated assistance of our county moth recorder Dave, I’ve now found and positively identified all five in my local area.
Stigmella tityrella: This moth’s larval leaf mines featured in last week’s post about green islands. The gallery (like a corridor) mine is usually compact and angular and, in particular, the larva stays between the veins when creating its mine – that is the feature I find helps most with its identification. As you can see from the two mines below, the galleries are very narrow to begin with, then broaden as the larvae grow.
Stigmella hemargyrella: These larvae also create a gallery mine, but the mine is most often wider and longer than that of S. tityrella, and the larvae have no issue with crossing over the leaf veins.
Parornix fagivora: This is the mine I’ve found least in my local area, though I’m not sure if that’s a reflection on the moth’s rarity or my finding skills. Look for a blister, where the larva lives at first, and then a folded leaf edge, which it inhabits a bit like a cave.
Phyllonorycter messaniella: Both Phyllonorycter species on Beech create blisters; this one is usually an oval shape, almost rectangular, and quite broad. I’ve found the upper side of the leaf can be almost featureless but the blister on the underside is quite obvious so, if recording these, it’s best to include a photo of both sides of the leaf.
Phyllonorycter maestingella: This blister mine is long and quite narrow, and often placed between leaf veins. By spinning silk, the larva draws the leaf together to create a cosy tunnel, which looks a bit like a crease on the upper side of the leaf.
I’ve attached to each of the moths’ names a link to the species description on the British Leafminers website, which is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to learn more.
11 Wednesday Nov 2020
Tags
beech, gall causing midge, galls on Beech, green islands, green islands on Beech leaves, Hartigiola annulipes, leaf mines, leaf mines on Beech, Stigmella tityrella
It’s late autumn, nearly winter, and, as you would expect, the leaves on this Beech tree have all now changed from vivid summer green to autumn brown … or have they? If you look more closely at this image, you’ll notice that some of the leaves have what entomologists, moth-ers and others in the know call ‘green islands’.
Butterfly Conservation’s Associate Director of Recording and Monitoring Richard Fox explained the reason for this most succinctly in a recent post on Twitter: ‘Thanks to Wolbachia bacteria in its body, the caterpillar uses cytokinin to maintain a green island of plant tissue in which it can feed in autumn.’
Fox was referring to leaf-mining moth caterpillars, like the Stigmella tityrella moth larvae that produced the mines in the leaves shown above, but other insects also manipulate the physiology of leaves so they can continue feeding. Another example from the same Beech tree can be seen below – here the larvae of the gall-inducing midge Hartigiola annulipes have also caused green islands to form in the leaves.
If you want to read more on the science behind this process, I found a paper entitled ‘Plant green-island phenotype induced by leaf-miners is mediated by bacterial symbionts‘, on the Royal Society website.
