29 Wednesday Nov 2017
Rampike: Noun, meaning ‘A dead or dying tree, especially the bleached skeleton or bleached trunk of a tree killed by fire, lightning or wind; an upright stump, especially a burnt one’.
The Oxford Dictionary lists the word as being common in Irish English, English Regional, North American Regional, and Northern, though what Northern means is unclear. The rampikes in my photos are English (above) and Welsh (below).
22 Wednesday Nov 2017
Feuillemort: adjective, meaning ‘having the colour of a dying leaf’, from the French feuille morte, meaning dead leaf.
15 Wednesday Nov 2017
Tags
#WildWords, canopy disengagement, Canopy shyness, Crown shyness, Intercrown spacing, tree behaviour
Who would’ve thought that trees value their personal space? Well, they do … or, at least, some trees, particularly those of the same species, do.
Next time you go walking amongst trees, look up and you may notice gaps in the tree canopy, where trees appear to be avoiding touching each other. This phenomenon is known as crown shyness (sometimes also called canopy shyness, intercrown spacing and canopy disengagement). There have been various hypotheses to explain crown shyness: these include ‘reciprocal pruning’ caused by the trees rubbing together in windy conditions; ‘photoreceptor-mediated shade avoidance response’, a long-winded term for trees adapting to the shade caused by their neighbours; and the idea that trees are actively limiting the spread of insects by not touching each other (though, presumably, insects could simply crawl down one tree, across the ground and up the next!). Whatever the true reason, crown shyness can create some lovely patterns in the canopy and I’ll be looking up more often from now on.
08 Wednesday Nov 2017
Tags
#WildWords, Andricus kollari, gall wasps, hymenoptera living in Marble gall, Inquiline, Marble gall, oak galls, Oak Marble gall
I learnt this word the day a mystery wasp hatched out of an Oak Marble gall I’d brought home. Though I thought it must be the gall-causing wasp, it turned out that it was not and could, in fact, have been any one of 29 other species of hymenoptera that can, potentially, make their home in a Marble gall. According to an article I found on the Natural History Museum website (‘Oak-galls in Britain’ by Robin Williams), 21 of those other gall inhabitants are parasitoid (their larvae consume the original gall wasp’s larvae) and 8 are inquiline, which is to say that they are simply ‘exploiting the living space of another’ creature. And the Oxford Dictionary online actually gives the instance of ‘an insect that lays its eggs in a gall produced by another’.
Of course, if I’d been smart and compared the size of the holes in other Marble galls I have to that of the newly emerged creature, I would’ve twigged that they must be quite different. I’m afraid my curiosity then got the better of me and I sliced in half one of the Marble galls I had, which means that the little creatures I exposed will not survive. The larva (and large hole) in the centre is the gall wasp Andricus kollari, and the little larvae and holes are representatives of the other 29 possibilities.
Lesson – and new word – learnt, I have now returned to the wild the other various galls, of several kinds, that I’d brought home thinking they were empty, in case they also have little creatures growing inside them!
01 Wednesday Nov 2017
There’s a whole new lingo to learn when you move more seriously into birdwatching. There’s dipping (missing out on seeing a particular bird), confiding (used to describe a bird that allows good views), twitching (chasing rare sightings, a pursuit that can get obsessive), LBJs (Little brown jobs, describing small brown birds that can be indistinguishable one from the other; interestingly, also applied to fungi), as well as the shortened names for the birds themselves (Blackwit for Black-tailed godwit; Mipit for Meadow pipit but Rockit not Ripit for Rock pipit).
The word I like best, though it provides the biggest challenge – indeed, this will be a rest-of-my-lifetime challenge, is jizz, ‘the characteristic impression given by a particular species of animal or plant’. Let me give you an example: I see a bird flying overhead and, though the bird is distant and its exact features difficult to see, I can recognise which bird it is from its silhouette and the way it is flying. I had a moment of great jubilation just this week when I was able to identify a Sparrowhawk flying over a local field, from its outline and its distinctive flap-flap-glide flying pattern.
25 Wednesday Oct 2017
Posted in flowers, nature, wildflowers
Here’s one from my volunteering on the Mary Gillham Archive Project. According to the Oxford Dictionary, nyctinasty is ‘the periodic movement of flowers or leaves caused by nightly changes in light intensity or temperature’, though I have also read that these movements, particularly the opening and closing of flowers, don’t always occur at night. When the weather is very dull due to thick cloud, or when the weather changes dramatically, as with the onset of a sudden storm, from a bright sunny day to a dark, grey, heavily cloudy sky, some flowers react by closing up. The word nyctinasty comes from the Greek and is a combination of nux or nukt meaning night and nastos meaning press or squeeze together.
earthstar 
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