I have for some time tried to find and photograph the Brilliant Emerald dragonfly. It ‘s a Ronseal insect, doing exactly what it says on the tin: it is brilliantly emerald. So, since the weather has finally graced us with something other than rain, I thought I’d give it another go. It’s an acid pool lover, so if you want to see it your options are limited to Scotland, or to a cluster of small colonies in the heathlands of the southeast. Having tried Warren Heath, the nearest location to my home, last year, this time I went to the Basingstoke canal. It’s unusual for a canal to be both placid and acidic, but the Basingstoke canal between Aldershot and Farnham is exactly that – very slightly tea-coloured, and peaceful and serene in the gaps between the whining, thundering roars of aircraft taking off from nearby Farnborough Airport.
I have never seen so many fish in a canal, including at one point a foot-long young pike who look spoiled for choice in the meals department. I kept looking for kingfisher, but like so many canals, this section lacked the high muddy banks that the birds need to nest in, and there was not some much of a tweet of one – much to the relief, I expect, of the local anglers.
I saw the Brilliant Emerald with moments of arriving, out over the water, a jewel hanging from glittering golden wings. It’s one of those species, like the Kingfisher, that makes you wonder about evolution. Bar strapping an anti-collision light to it, you couldn’t make it more obvious, and I was suddenly grateful for the relative lack of birdsong along the canal sides, because I expect they would takes these beautiful insects at once. Or maybe it’s a double-bluff: many brilliantly-coloured insects are that way to act as warning that they are toxic or poisonous. Perhaps the BE is bluffing and hoping that such an obviously bright dragonfly will be left alone.
brilliant emerald dragonfly
Either way, here it is: a male Brilliant Emerald dragonfly pausing for breath, the result of three years of effort for me. Was it worth it? Oh yes.
I hear it long before I see it. A high bubbling call, that loops up in pitch like a referee with one of those old-fashioned pea-whistles getting increasingly annoyed. It’s a song of desolation and loneliness, a haunting sound that I associate with moors and estuaries, with vast skies and open spaces. It’s the call of a curlew.
It makes me pause. Seventy years before, Blakehill Farm would have throbbed to the sound of wartime Dakotas taking to the skies. Now it’s a nature reserve, home in winter to short-eared owls, and in the summer to whinchat, yellowhammer, corn bunting, and the skylarks who even now englobe me in sound, warbling as they parachute slowly back down from an achingly bright sky into the waving sea of grass that surrounds me. But curlew is a new sound for me here. It calls again, and even the skylarks seem to pause to admire it.
Through the wobbly heat-haze I spot it, a hundred yard ahead of me. A pheasant-sized bird in mottled camouflage of cream and chocolate, with a long neck, and an absurdly long, gently curving bill, fully two-thirds of the length of its body, which is uses to probe soft ground for invertebrates. It walks unhurriedly, fading in and out of the long grass stems, probing the soil left and right, a hunting tiger. I am so astonished by the encounter that I don’t spot the second bird at first. The curlew population nationally has dropped 80% in fifty years, and I realise that I am now looking at twenty percent of North Wiltshire’s curlews, a breeding pair, a small hope for the future.
The curlew fade away in the haze as if I had imagined them, a metaphor for their species, but then I hear that call again. It sweeps out, over the expanse of grass and the unending sky, demanding to be heard. If nothing else, the curlew won’t go quietly into the night.
The glade smells of baking ground and dried bracken, cut with the faint sweetness of end-of-year-sale bluebells. Their last few nodding heads are just visible between the unfurling green shepherd’s crooks of new ferns, and the squat purple flowers of bugle. Spindly birches cast ripples of dappled shade across the ground, but in this glade, surrounded on all sides by taller, more mature forest, the heat of this beautifully sunny day is trapped. It is uncomfortably warm.
As I stand and watch, sweat beading on my forehead, I finally spot the movement I have been looking for. It is a butterfly, flying low to the ground, moving unpredictably from spot to spot like a pinball in play. In flight it looks orange, but occasionally it pauses, wings still fluttering, and I can glimpse a spattering of dark brown markings on its upper wings, as if someone has flicked a paintbrush at it. It’s one of our most endangered butterflies, although that is a strongly competed title these days. It’s named after the silver-white patches on its underwings which gleam like pearls when caught in the right light: the pearl-bordered fritillary.
I turn, and see butterfly after butterfly, all in constant motion. Occasionally, just occasionally, one will stop for a few seconds at a bugle flower to fuel up, like a motorway driver grabbing a quick latte, before taking to the air again. It’s a peaceful, bucolic scene, except that it has a darker undertone: every butterfly I can see is male, and their flight is not random. They are following invisible pheromone trails and will investigate anything – a dried bramble leaf gets particular attention – that is the right shade of orange. Such is the competition here that the males hatch first, then spend their time desperately seeking newly hatched females that they can mate with before the female’s wings are dried out and she can fly away. I am witness to an orgy.
In the end the heat is too much, and I move to cooler, shadier woodland nearby. The relentless, desperate males fly on.
You know the moment, when you stand on your doorstep in the morning and breathe in, then breathe in a little further because the air smells so good. There’s something about a sunny morning after a long period of rain that makes the world seem full of promise, more hopeful somehow than the damp night before. And it’s not just imaginary. It turns out that you’re being turned on.
In the soil around me, Streptomyces bacteria are busy. These bacteria act like fungi, producing networks of filaments that spread through the soil. Untold billions of them produce a chemical, Geosimn (literally, ‘the smell of the earth’) that is the smell we associate with associate with wet ground. The morning sun lofts this chemical into the air, and voilà, the perfect start to a day.
Surprisingly, that smell also depends on springtails, tiny 6mm-long micro-beasts who live in the soil. They are not insects but hexapods, a different branch of the tree of life, and they have a distinct fondness for Geosimn because they eat Streptomyces bacteria. Streptomyces bacteria also like springtails, because their spores stick to the springtail’s otherwise remarkably non-stick surface, and are carried by them throughout the soil, taking the bacteria to fresh new feeding grounds.
The dew has turned my shaggy, uncut lawn into a field of diamonds, and curl of hot coffee vapour rises from the cup in front of me. The sun is warm on my face, the wren in the next-door hedge is singing his heart out, and up on the garage wall a dozen feet away, the bluetits are in-and-out, in-and-out of the nest box I put up, feeing a growing batch of chicks that I can hear twittering faintly. I raise my cup in salute – to springtails, to Streptomyces, and to the summer that has finally, perhaps, arrived.
There’s a certain smugness involved when you can say that you’ve actively contributed to the recovery of a threatened species. Most conservation measures involve plain hard work – laying hedges, trimming encroaching bushes, digging out invasive plants. Mine involved finding a chair and a good book. It’s the easiest contribution to nature conservation I’ve ever made.
There’s nothing like being stuck indoors much of the time to help you see the jobs you’ve been putting off for years. I’ve been busily focussed on removing 25-year-old wallpaper, and in consequence I’ve rather let my small garden go. I had always intended to do this, as a nod to the honeybee and the other animals and insects which welcome a touch of un-manicured wilderness, but it’s gone further than planned. Bindweed and brambles have taken hold beneath unpruned roses, and I appear to be growing dandelion as a cash crop. The wee mad Victorian in me wants to pull it all up and restore order, but there’s a growing beauty in its wildness, as the seed heads of unmown grasses start to resemble a field of barley in the breeze.
Last night, I was woken by a sound like someone repeatedly whispering “work”. I thought it was a cat, but wobbly torchlight revealed instead two hedgehogs circling each other. It’s the start of a mating dance that can (and did) last several hours. The Germans have a delightful word for it: an ‘igelkarussel’. Hedgehog populations are in steep decline, and in July last year it was officially classed as vulnerable to extinction. It seems that my laziness has inadvertently given this pair exactly what they need: plentiful slugs and snails (we haven’t used slug pellets for years) and mounds of rotting vegetation to hibernate in over winter. Now somewhere in my garden, in just over a month, a desperately-needed batch of hoglets will be born.
All of which means, of course, that I can’t start mowing now. Can anyone recommend a good book?
“Biodiversity gain” is the latest buzzword in Government conservation policy. The new Environment Bill has the very laudable goal of trying to ensure that habitat loss is matched by habitat gain to excess elsewhere. It’s a clever idea, one that is aimed at helping to ensure the restoration of Britain’s deeply impoverished fauna and flora. But here’s the thing: it may not work.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change”.
This quote was not made by Darwin as is often claimed (It was made by a business professor at Louisiana State University) but it is a quote that Darwin should have made, because it is bang on. Give a species a thousand generations to adapt, and it can overcome pretty much anything. It is rapid change which denies a species the time it needs to adapt. Evolution may be clever, but it isn’t fast. And so here we have the heart of the problem: if we are restoring habitat elsewhere, where does the wildlife live while it matures? It’s bad enough for birds which can fly off to somewhere more amenable, but rip a mammal’s or a reptile’s habitat away and there is no great chance it will survive. This is part of a fundamental blindness of conservationism: the tendency to think about species, not ecosystems. You can’t just relocate a species, you have to relocate the entire food web upon which it depends. And species, as much as humans, have individual tastes and preferences. I’ve watched common lizards lying side-by-side where one completely ignored the ants that its neighbour ate with relish, and it’s not an uncommon behaviour. Relocation can be a little like taking me and dumping me in the central reservation of a motorway with curry: I’d starve to death as I can’t stand curry (sorry) and I couldn’t cross the road to get something I could eat.
I’ve first hand experience of this (no, not being stranded on the M4 with a curry…) when my local council bulldozed the nest tree of some barn owls. They explained they’d set up some alternate land for the owls – on the far side of the motorway. When I told them that fast roads are the biggest single killer of barn owls, they seemed quite surprised. But the point here is that you can restore to excess by all means, but leave as much of the original habitat intact as possible and ensure that there are transit corridors, so that any displaced creatures have at last some chance of making it to your new location. But in many cases, even this may not help. Species like robins and adders and water voles are highly territorial, and if dumped together in a new location, even one with plenty of food, may fight acquire the best spots. Astonishingly, there has been little or no research done on following up on large scale relocations to see if the populations have survived their trauma.
So, while I’m not suggest we should kill the new Environment Bill, I think we should be cautious about hailing a dramatic improvement until we see the real-world impact of its policies.
Whether or not rules of language matter is open to debate. Some, like lawyers, doctors and priests, will probably tell you that accuracy and stability in language is important. There’s some merit in that: you don’t want your surgeon whipping out this bit instead of that bit because someone forgot to update his textbook. But equally, language is a living thing, constantly evolving by adding new words(whoever heard of “lockdown” until recently?), re-assigning old ones, and sometimes making things become their exact opposite (which is why “hot” and “cool” can mean the same thing to different generations).
Why this obsession with language? Because I want to change it. Specifically, I want to change capital letters. We Use Capitals To Denote Things That Are Important. The rules of grammar tell you that people’s names have capitals because people are important. Names of locations – towns, counties, regions – have capitals because they are important. Even company names have capitals because they are important.
What’s missing from this list? Plants. Animals. Birds.
So according to the grammar lawyers, I can’t write ‘Red Kite’ or ‘Killer Whale’. Except if one is a pet, of course – capitalising the name of a species if they are your pet is fine. Fido is important because I am important. But Fido’s brother the generic spaniel is not. Unless, of course, his name includes a reference to something else important. Thus is the Alsatian exalted, while the German shepherd at least partially elevated over the poor, unimportant poodle.
This may all sound trivial, but it isn’t. We capitalise the things that matter, and apparently only the world of Mankind matters. Keeping our fauna and flora relegated to lowercase helps to keep them relegated in importance, and if there is one things that Covid has taught us, it is that the non-Human world can bite back. So I’m starting a one-man campaign to give the biological world the respect it deserves. It’s Red Deer and Aardvark all the way from now on.
It’s just after dawn on a freezing cold April morning, and at the side of the track I’m standing on, the flailed edge of a grove of coppiced hazel has formed a deep, jumbled jackstraw layer of faded brown stems and splintered sticks. It’s a common sight in nature reserves at this time of year, yet from within it I am hearing a sound that seems utterly alien to the British countryside.
It starts familiarly, like the high trilling of a wren, but then changes into a slowly rising scale of deep, bouncing ‘boings’ and an astonishingly loud machine-gun ‘dadadada’. It is a tropical sound, and I can imagine a large, brightly coloured bird with exotic tail feathers singing it in the depths of the jungle. Yet it comes from a bird lightly larger than a robin, with a rufous back and cream-grey chest, which is so British that it even features in our songs. It is part of our culture, but these days most people have never heard it. It’s the nightingale.
Three months earlier, the song would not have been out of place. The nightingale I am hearing would have been five thousand kilometres away in equatorial Guinea. It is a male, and has arrived here within this last week to defend a breeding territory with its astonishing voice. And it is not alone: I can hear another competing male a hundred or so yards away.
Several hours spent watching, and I am convinced that nightingales are also ventriloquists. The sound is so loud at times that the bird must be close enough to touch, yet the only time I see it is when a pair of males rise and fly around me in a raucous, bad-tempered territorial dispute. Nightingales have a well-earned reputation for being elusive, singing in deep cover and rarely being seen. But in the few weeks, before the hazel groves erupt into their large, dancing leaves, I still have a chance, so I’m going to try again. But even if I never photograph this fast-declining, red list bird, the early morning start will be worth it. In the midst of lockdown I can close my eyes on a small patch of English woodland, feel the heat of the sun on my back and hear the sound of the tropics.
I know how to make a sound: a groan, an “ooooh”. If I take a roomful of people and say one word, it always happens. Shall we try?
Adders
See?
I spent last Saturday watching adders. These small-to-medium sized snakes are wrongly billed* as Britain’s only venomous snake, but are certainly the only one with a bite that can hurt humans. And “hurt” is the right word here. An adder bite can be painful – a bee sting is often used as a comparison. If you are unfortunate enough to be allergic to the venom then (just as with a bee sting) things can get more serious. But in the last century, only 14 people have died from adder bites, as opposed to Africa, where eleven thousand people die every year from snakebite. In fact, you are sixty times more likely to die from a bee or wasp sting than an adder bite. The few bites we have every year in this country are usually the result of accident or outright stupidity, like the man who found a cold, torpid adder one morning and picked it up, putting it in a tin. Later that day, after things had warmed up, he shook the tin, then put his hand in it to get the adder out. Guess what? It bit him. So a reasonable amount of perspective is that adders are, on balance, harmless. Treat them with respect and you’re very unlikely to have a problem. In fact, you’re very unlikely to see an adder. They are exquisitely sensitive animals, feeling the vibrations of footsteps on the ground and disappearing before you can get near enough. Only a cold adder moves sluggishly: like all reptiles they need to bask to bring their body temperature enough to function. A cold adder can’t move quickly. Indeed, it can’t even digest its prey. A warm adder is zippy enough, but they tend to rely on their superb camouflage as a first line of defence, disappearing into undergrowth only when that isn’t enough.
two male adders guarding a (just visible) female
I’d gone to a site where I’ve seen adders before, in fact I was hoping to see a particular adder I’d seen there before: a melanistic or “black” adder. I find adders in a range of habitats. One place I know is wet and waterlogged, with mounds of decomposing logs; but this place is a more typical habitat It’s an old quarry, whose spoil heaps of fractured rock have been covered over with grass and moss and tangled stands of gorse and bramble. Near the top of a hill, it is open and sunny. I saw my first adder within moments of arrival, a large brown female showing the characteristic pattern down her back of black linked diamonds on a brown background(or if you look at her in the negative, as it were, a pattern of brown zig-zags bordered in black). She was coiled at the base of a bracken stem and was simply the biggest adder I’ve ever seen – perhaps two feet or more in length. I watched her using binoculars, knowing that any closer approach would see her slide off into the centre of the bramble and out of sight. There was a second female about six feet away, coiled into the base of a tussock of grass. For adult adders, colour and size are pretty reliable indicators of gender: males are smaller and usually a silvery-grey colour with the black diamonds, females much larger and generally brown. But juvenile adders all routinely look like females, and even on the older snakes, the body and zig-zag colour isn’t definitive
Further up the slope was a small, stunted gorse bush, perhaps two feet high. And coiled at its base was a male adder. It was newly shed, its scales glistening as if recently polished. At this time of years, the male adders shed their skins- and then they fight. If you are a venomous snake, then the annual ritual of fighting to see who is strongest and so should mate with the female, is a little tricky. Venom takes time to work, and if both male adders in a fight managed to envenomate each other, there would pretty soon be no more adders. So instead the adders fight by wrestling. It’s called “the dance of the adders”, but the term is misleading. If posturing doesn’t work, the two males adders will fight by rearing up, with each trying to push the other down using their body strength. The fight may last for several minutes with the adders moving quickly through the grass alongside each other. Even though it happens every year, I’ve never seen it. I though on this occasion my luck was in, as the male adder suddenly took off after another. The two snakes zipped very quickly along side by side – but the second snake wasn’t a male: it was a female, and the mal wasn’t about to leave her side if there was a chance of mating. To do so would have ruined his chances and opened the door to another male. Indeed, not long after, with both adders deep inside a grass tussock, I caught a glimpse of the pulsing movements in the male adder’s body as the pair copulated.
adder pair
The mating pair, just after the event – the male on top, the female below
Wrestling is a neat adaptation for adders, a way of selecting the fittest and strongest males without ending the species. Yet you have to remember that it is, in a way, a completely voluntary exercise. There is nothing stopping competing adders from biting each other. Doing so is more like a social taboo. Nobody has taught adders not to bite each other: it is an instinct, but one so strong that it overrides ever other. Even if it means that the losing snake may not mate that year, it will not bite its rival.
If only humans were so civilised.
*grass snakes are venomous, too. But their venom isn’t dangerous to humans and their fangs are placed so that it is hard for them to bite people. What they will do is slime you with an anal secretion that smells just as bad as you think it does. And after rescuing a female grass snake trapped in some pond netting, I can tell you it takes weeks to wash off, too.
Yesterday, I heard a cuckoo for the first time this Spring. Which was hardly surprising, because it was sat about fifteen feet away from me at the time. This was no captive bird, however: this was a truly wild bird, newly arrived from Africa.
Colin, as he is known, is undoubtedly the UK’s most famous cuckoo. He has been arriving at the same site in Surrey for years. Estimates wary: some say he has been here for seven years, some say four. Either way, Colin is a methuselah, an old bird in cuckoo terms who is still flying the four thousand miles from the Ivory coast in sub-Saharan Africa, back to Surrey each year to woo the ladies. He is, if I may say so, looking particularly fine for a bird that must be absolutely knackerred. Colin has become a firm favourite because he willingly trades up close encounters for offerings of live mealworms that his army of fans are all too willing to provide. Like a movie start of old, Colin preens and poses for the camera, before guzzling down so many mealworms that it’s hard to see how he gets into the air again. He then heads off to a distant tract of woodland to start calling to the ladies.
We don’t know if Colin is successful. He’s never been seen in the company of a female, and certainly never brought one back to face the cameras. Perhaps he is simply too old for all that now, or perhaps like many celebrities he doesn’t want his private life papped. If he isn’t breeding, that would be a tragedy, because we need all the cuckoos we can get. When I was a child, the call of the cuckoo would be heard regularly, but numbers have dropped by half in just the last 20 years. The reasons aren’t clear, but the impact of climate change on their crossing of the Sahara is one likely culprit. Cuckoos come here to breed, so inevitably the decline in numbers here is a decline in the numbers who are breeding. In fact, the Cuckoo only says “cuckoo” here: it is a mating call and not something the cuckoo says when overwintering down in Africa. Colin is the first cuckoo I have heard this year and given his age, this may be the last time I hear him. The tragedy is that there may soon come a time when the call of the cuckoo is something that our children will never hear at all.
