Tyrannosaurus rex reconstruction By Nobu Tamura  CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72994785

Dear Readers, I am a bit of a one for perfume, although I am much more careful not to blast everybody with aroma these days – I well remember my Dad saying how, when he was a bus conductor, he dreaded going upstairs because of the fug of different scents from all the ladies on their way to work. I think we appreciate how much more chemically-sensitive a lot of people are now, and don’t want to cause coughing, spluttering, eye-watering or nausea. So, I am very careful about how much I apply, and try to make sure that it’s died down a bit before I venture out. Was it Coco Chanel who suggested that you spray some perfume into the air, and then walk through the mist for the optimal amount? Anyhow, one thing I have never, ever wondered was what a Tyrannosaurus Rex smelled like, but clearly I am behind the times, because there  is a developing science called archaeochemistry, which seeks to recreate the scents of yesterday.I suspect this all kicked off when museums became a bit more ‘immersive’. I remember visiting the Jorvik Museum in York, not long after it had opened. You jumped into a little train and were taken around a ‘Viking village’, complete with the smells of rotting fish on the harbour, or chamber pots in the streets. Lovely! But there is now a whole industry in creating the scents that scare people – one firm, Aromaprime, produces scents of everything from burning plastic to vomit. But to return to our T Rex theme, they also produce one called ‘Dinosaur Swamp‘, which apparently  ‘mimics that of the boggy, humid swamps and forests the T-rex may have lived in; within the vicinity of prey that fed off the plants and used the nearby water sources.’

And, in fact, this is the smell that’s used in dinosaur displays, rather than the actual smell of a T-Rex, which would probably be a mixture of rotting meat stuck between the animal’s teeth (presumably it couldn’t floss because of its teeny tiny arms), mud, blood and dung. Lovely.

One scent-maker described how he was asked to recreate the smell of a woolly mammoth, which the client wanted to smell ‘sweaty’. However, with a notable devotion to accuracy, the scent-maker discovered that mammoths didn’t sweat (and neither do elephants), so he went to visit a llama farm, and came up with the scent of ‘dirty wool and grassy poo’. Much better, I’m sure!

However, it’s not all trivial stuff. Aromaprime also develop ‘scent cubes’ to be used with dementia patients or the partially-sighted, containing the scents of everything from coal fires to toffee apples to a flower shop to a library. When I think about how evocative scent can be, I can well imagine how these might bring back memories and add a whole new dimension to teaching sessions too. We might not know how a T-Rex smells, but most of us can remember an apple pie, or the scent of candyfloss.

Lesser Celandine outside the MacDonalds building

Dear Readers, I’ve always loved the sunny faces of Lesser Celandine flowers, but had never noticed them in the beds alongside the MacDonalds building in East Finchley. Have they always been there, I wonder, or are they just a bit more obvious now that there’s been some cutting back? I imagine that they’ll now spread cheerfully through the bed, and good luck to them too. These members of the buttercup family are some of the first flowers of the spring, making the most of the lack of leaf cover to flower, multiply and then disappear in a matter of months.

And you might remember that we have a new street tree not far from my house in the County Roads. It’s a Prunus serrulata var Pandora otherwise known as a flowering cherry, and even though it was pouring with rain I stopped to take a quick photo of the emerging flowers. And what a lot of them there are, considering that the tree has only been here for ten minutes. Hopefully it will continue to do well.

This is one of those ‘in tearing haste’ posts, because by the time you read this I will have been to Sadler’s Wells to see ‘Mary, Queen of Scots’ by the Scottish National Ballet. I will be going with a blog-friend, J, and will report back – it sounds very interesting, and I am currently getting into dance and theatre in a big way. Have a look at the trailer in the post above to get the general idea!

Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers from the Crossley Guide

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, I’ve been hearing great spotted woodpeckers drumming away for the past few weeks, especially in our local patch of ancient woodland, Coldfall Wood, and indeed at our local garden centre. But listen as I might, I haven’t heard the higher-pitched drumming of the lesser spotted woodpecker. You might remember that there had been a very interesting project involving passive acoustic monitoring for the bird’s calls and drumming in the south of England, which indicated that there might be lots more of the birds about than we first thought. Fingers crossed!

Juvenile green woodpecker in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery

And let’s not forget that ‘flying dragon’, the green woodpecker. It rarely drums, as it spends most of its time tapping away at anthills, but you can still hear it ‘yaffling’ away at this time of year. And very distinctive it is too! Though possibly confused with that other green bird of North London, the rose-ringed parakeet.

Rose-ringed parakeet

Green woodpecker

And so, let’s see what I had to say about woodpeckers in 2024..

Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopos major)

Dear Readers, great spotted woodpeckers come and go in my garden – one will visit for a few days or weeks, and then there will be a gap for several months or even years. But you can be sure of hearing a woodpecker drumming if you take a walk in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, or Coldfall Wood. Woodpeckers were thought for the longest time to have shock absorbers in their skulls, to stop them from getting concussion, but last year it was discovered that this was not, in fact, the case. However, as Lulah Ellender points out in her piece in Nature’s Calendar, the idea had already inspired designer Anirudha Surabhi to design a cardboard cycle helmet based on the three-layers (bone, cartilage and foam) that were supposed to protect the bird’s brain. And very exciting it looks too! Sadly it was never brought to market – the cardboard would have to be waterproof, which would involve using some non-recyclable components. The company survives as Quin, which manufactures ultra-safe motorcycle helmets.

The internal design for a Kranium (woodpecker-inspired) helmet (Photo from https://www.quin.design/en-gb)

However, just because the skull of the woodpecker isn’t what protects it from concussion, it doesn’t mean that these birds are not superbly adapted to a life that involves ‘bashing your head against something hard’. Because they eat grubs that might be buried deep inside trees, woodpeckers have extremely long tongues that actually wrap around their skulls when not in use.

Image from ‘Food of the Woodpeckers of the United States’ (Posted on https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14749524544/)

But how about that drumming/drilling activity? Whenever I try to do any drilling I almost invariably get stuck at some point, and Ellender mentions that the same thing happens to woodpeckers – in fact, it’s been estimated that they get stuck approximately 36 per cent of the time. I’d be taking that beak back to B&Q if it was me, but as the woodpecker is rather stuck with its appendage, it’s developed a number of ways of getting around the problem, such as ‘walking’ their bills out of the hole a bit at a time.

And here for your delectation is an actual film of an actual woodpecker in Coldfall Wood here in East Finchley. It was recorded at maximum magnification, hence all the movement, so if you are of a queasy disposition you might want to give it a miss.

Woodpeckers are adapted in every way for their arboreal life styles, from the protective membrane and stiff nasal hairs that keep the dust out to their stiff tail feathers to enable them to stand ‘upright’ while drumming. They are both shy and bold, loud and elusive, as anyone who has ever tried to find the location of a drumming bird will know. They are the very sound of the woods at the start of the year. And how about this poem? Philip Gross is a poet that I haven’t come across before, but I’ll certainly keep my eyes open now…

A woodpecker’s
BY PHILIP GROSS

                                 working the valley
or is it the other way round?

That bone-clinking clatter, maracas
or knucklebones or dance of  gravel

on a drumskin, the string of  the air
twanged on the hollow body of  itself …

It’s the tree that gives voice,
the fifty-foot windpipe, and the bird

is its voice box, the shuddering
membrane that troubles the space

inside, which otherwise would be
all whispers, scratch-and-scrabblings,

the low dry flute-mouth of wind
at its  just-right or just-wrong angle,

the cough-clearing of moss
or newly ripened rot falling in.

But the woodpecker picks the whole
wood up and shakes it, plays it

as his gamelan, with every sounding
pinged from every branch his instrument.

Or rather, it’s the one dead trunk,
the tree, that sings its dying, and this

is the quick of  it; red-black-white, the bird
in uniform, alert, upstanding to attention

is its attention, our attention, how the forest,
in this moment, looks up, knows itself.

Dear Readers, you might remember that I was getting a new side door, and was worried about the impact on the foxes that pop in every night. Fortunately I have a trail camera, so I was able to track what was happening. The door went in on 25th February, and all we had that evening was cats, like Cosmo the cat-poodle above.

Just cats on the 26th February, including this tabby who is currently sitting next to the pond and playing whack-a-mole with the poor frogs.

But who is this on the 27th?

Yes, the foxes are back, having found a new route into the garden. I remember a talk that I attended about urban foxes during lockdown, which explained that they have excellent three-dimensional maps of their territories, and so it appears. It took these foxes just two days to work out how to get to a food source. Very impressive. And what a relief!

Photo By Yu Miyawaki – Imported from 500px (archived version) by the Archive Team. (detail page), CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74005710

Dear Readers, I love this. Image after image, until that last line….I hadn’t come across Mark Wagenaar before, but it’s worth looking for his other poems. A very singular vision, to be sure…

Meanwhile the elephants

Mark Wagenaar

have retired now that the circus
has closed, to their watercolors
& bowling leagues, their tusk-dug
rose gardens, their record collections,
their calligraphy—
say one has
begun a letter to you, peacock feather
gripped in the beautiful gray coils
of its trunk, & she dips it in the inkwell
& begins
darling, I have my dead &
I have let them go,

as the elephants walk thirty kilometers
to find the house of their keeper
who died last night, to keep a vigil,
an honor guard of fifteen-thousand-pound
bodies, they wait all night,

as she continues, the past is always
vanishing if we are good or careful,

as the elephants nurse their young,
wrap their trunks when they greet each other,
trumpet when they hear Miles’s Kind of Blue,

what is eternity but the shadows
of everyone who has ever fallen,

the languages of the dead are never more
than a breath away, darling,

as the elephants are drawn & painted
by da Vinci, by Max Ernst,
are reincarnated as Buddha,

our mouths are incapable,
white violets cover the earth,

remember the gates of Rome, linger
near pianos, near the bones & tusks of their own,

the greatest of the shadows are passing
from the earth, there was never a city brighter
than a burn pile of tusks.

Dear Readers, if you live in the south of England you might have noticed these little chaps whizzing about when the sun is out, as it is today. This is a male hairy-footed flower bee (Anthophora plumipes), and if you watch for a while you’ll see that they are feisty little critters – this one saw off a queen bumblebee who must have been three times his size. In this species the males emerge first, from eggs that were laid last year, and they set up a territory around a promising-looking patch of flowers. This hebe bush has been a favourite stopping off point for bees ever since we arrived in East Finchley more than fifteen years ago. Long may it remain, because it’s in a south-facing garden, and so the bees are drawn to its warmth. Plus, warm conditions mean  that nectar flows more easily, and so the bees can get the energy that they require quickly.

The males have distinctive white faces, and are very ‘buzzy’ – their flight has a high-pitched whine. But they aren’t just hanging around the flowers for food: they know that the females, who emerge later, will need to feed, and this gives the males a chance to mate with them. You would think (as I did initially) that the females are a completely different species: they are jet black and look more like bumblebees.

Female hairy-footed flower bee

But why are they described as ‘hairy-footed’? Well, have a look at the wonderful photo below, of a live bee taking off…’hairy-legged’ might be a better description.

Male Hairy-footed Flower Bee (Photo By gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K – Male Hairy-footed Bee. Anthophora plumipes, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50578878)

When people talk about bees, they tend to think of honeybees, or, at a pinch, bumblebees. But there are hundreds of other species of bee in the UK, some of them hyper-local, and with a very short flight season. I always think of the hairy-footed flower bees as the first to emerge, at least in these parts, and the ivy bees to be the last, but this year I shall be keeping an eye open for all the species in the middle.

Maybe the most endearing feature of the hairy-footed flower bee is its habit of flying around with its tongue out, as if hoping to just run into an obliging flower without making any effort at all. Keep an eye out for this zippy sign of spring.

Photo By Sunil060902 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3334220

Dear Readers, as someone who lives in somewhere called ‘East Finchley’ I’ve always been intrigued by the link between place names, and the plants and animals that live there. And it seems that I’m not the only one, as this month’s edition of ‘British Wildlife’ contains a fascinating article by Michael J.Warren about how bird names often pointed to the ecology of an area. Sadly, this is rarely the case nowadays – you might live in a new build on ‘Nightingale Close’ but it’s highly unlikely that it was named because there were nightingales there, and even if there were, you can bet your bottom dollar that they don’t now.

Warren points out that the names of most hamlets, villages and towns in England came from the Middle Ages, with the majority originating from the early period (450-1100 CE). Many of the names came from Old English or Old Norse, with a later scattering of Norman. He gives a compelling list showing the range of place names that come from plants and animals:

Cranbrook (cranes’ brook)
Ackton (Oak estate)
Snailwell
Nettlecombe
Ulgham (nook of owls)
Birch
Musbury (mouse-infested fort)
Troutbeck
Midgley (midge-clearing)
Hawkridge
Rockbeare (rook wood)
Ramsey (island where wild garlic grows)

Wild Garlic

Warren’s article concentrates on birds in place names, and  suggests that one reason  might be that the names give an indication of what resources there might be in a particular place. Cockshutt in Shropshire, for example, likely means ‘site where woodcock display and can be trapped), while Fulstow in Lincolnshire means ‘place where birds assemble’ (and can presumably be caught at particular times of year).

However, Warren believes that it wasn’t just about harvesting birds, but also about imagination – after all, birds are often not present all year round, and many birds represented in place names are not ones that are likely to be eaten. He mentions:
Finchampstead in Berkshire (the homestead frequented by finches)
Spexhall, Suffolk (woodpecker’s nook)
Dunnockshaw, Lancashire (dunnock copse)
Masongill, Yorkshire (from Old Norse rather than Old English – ‘titmouse ravine’)

Dunnock (not skulking for once)…

Warren makes the point that in the Middle Ages, people were truly ‘parochial’ – people often lived their entire lives in one small area, and would know the geography and ecology of the area intimately. He puts it beautifully here:

‘If a community’s place names reflected what was important to  them, somewhere in that scale of what mattered to our ancestors there was room for something as subtle as Dunnock … hedgerow skulking, as delicate as the filigree flight of a charm of  Goldfinch….as sudden as the yaffle of a Green Woodpecker….or as small as a tit flock’s weightless, tree-top roving’. 

There is something too of the notion of an insider’s perspective on their home, knowledge that can’t be understood or experienced by outsiders. Warren compares this to ‘patch-birding’, where someone will get to know the comings and goings of birds in a small local area, often over decades. I would add a similar feeling from watching the birds and other animals come and go in my garden. But what are we to make of place-names that reference fleeting visitors, such as the cuckoo or the swallow? Warren again gives some wonderful examples:

Cuckfield in Sussex (open land where cuckoos are)
Swallowcliffe in Wiltshire (escarpment frequented by swallows)

Warren speculates that, in the days before we understood migration, it might be thought that seasonal birds were actually bringing the spring and summer with them, and with it the time of fecundity. In the village of Gotham, there was an attempt to actually hedge in a cuckoo, in the hope that summer would continue as long as the bird didn’t leave. But even without such attempts to physically capture the bird, Warren wonders:

‘To capture the Cuckoo, were it possible, would  be to somehow distil summer essence:the name, made permanent as an identifier, pinpoints the most life-affirming, life-full moment of a place and keeps it intact and alive, even throughout those months when the bird is absent’

Eurasian cuckoo (Photo Cuckoo in flight (Photo By Vogelartinfo – Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12867547)

So, what of East Finchley? Finchley literally means ‘woodland clearing where finches are present’ and dates back to the Anglo-Saxon period. East Finchley was once heavily wooded, with ancient woodland such as Coldfall, Cherry Tree and Queen’s Woods all being part of one continuous wood. These days there are still chaffinches and goldfinches in the garden (or ‘fincs’ as our Anglo-Saxon ancestors would have known them). Did our ancestors once scatter crumbs for the birds, or cage them to hear their song?

If you are curious about the place name of your own home and wonder if it relates to a bird species, you can have a look at the Birds and Place website here. Warren has also written a book ‘The Cuckoo’s Lea: The Forgotten History of Birds and Place‘, which would be well worth a look.

Frog from 2025

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, as you’ll know from yesterday’s post, the frogs are back in the pond and the first frogspawn has appeared. Every year since we put  the pond in in 2010 this little miracle has occurred, and it makes me so happy! In her piece in Nature’s Calendar, Lulah Ellender describes some of the feats that frogs need to perform in order to breed, and very impressive they are too.

As I’ve described before, many frogs hibernate at the bottom of my pond – in my experience it’s mostly the males who do this, so that they’re ready when the females return from further afield. Earlier this week, a lovely neighbour asked if I could help with a frog that had turned up in her (currently pondless) garden. This looks like a very pregnant female to me. By the time I arrived, she’d popped under the fence to the garden next door, which has a recently-installed pond. It will be interesting to see if she stays there or heads back towards my pond – every pond has a distinctive smell caused by the glycolic acid in the algae, which acts as a ‘beacon’ for the frogs to return home.

I’d often wondered how frogs (and toads) survived under water during the winter. Frogs can absorb oxygen through their skin, but also drink via ‘drinking patches’ on their thighs and abdomen which absorb water. Ellender reports that while doing a sonar survey of Loch Ness, researchers found a toad cheerfully walking along the bottom of the loch, nearly 100 metres below the surface.

Sadly I’ve never had toads in my garden, but I always keep my fingers crossed. They can make journeys of up to thirty miles to return  to their natal ponds, and it’s estimated that a quarter of a million toads are squished on the roads en route. Hats off to the local people in many towns and villages who form ‘toad patrols’ and move the toads across the road.

Frogs tend to hibernate much closer to home (sensible creatures) and I’ve reported before how they arrive at the pond, look at the eager little faces of the males, who are all croaking their heads off, and then finally take the plunge. If the female is lucky, and isn’t drowned by all the enthusiastic males, she can lay up to four thousand eggs in one season, only a tiny proportion of which will survive. Everything seems to love a frogspawn breakfast, from the pond skaters who puncture the eggs to the dragonfly larvae who will also snare a tadpole, to the ducks who used to visit the community garden where I worked in Islington and eat it all up with apparent gusto. Somehow, some eggs survive, and will hatch in about three to four weeks. It takes about fourteen weeks for the frogs to turn into froglets, and on a wet day the garden can be alive with frogs the size of my fingernail, pinging in all directions.

Froglet on the move…

Ellender also mentions frog (or more specifically, toad) toxins in her piece. The glands behind the ears of a toad contain a toxin, which is hallucinogenic, and which can stop a human’s heart. No wonder that they are an active ingredient in fairy tale witches’ cauldrons – throwing a poor toad into boiling water would definitely cause the toxins to leach out and make a potentially damaging brew. Throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, women with knowledge of herbs and animals came under suspicion as witches, particularly if they were thought to have a close relationship with animals such as black cats, bats or toads. In 1582, a woman suspected of being a ‘witch’ had two toad ‘familiars’ called Tom and Robbyn. I could go on for hours about the fear that the male establishment had of women and women’s knowledge, but suffice it to say that there were 60,000 documented cases of people being executed as witches, the vast majority of them older women who were seen as acting ‘outside of social norms’. When we think about ‘kissing a frog’, many women might be better off if the animal stays as an amphibian rather than turning into a ‘handsome prince’.

A plethora of eager male frogs

It really cheers me up that more people are putting ponds/other water sources into their gardens. I have never for one second regretted giving up my lawn for my pond (though to be fair I’m unlikely to be playing football in the garden any time soon) – the pond has been a constant source of delight from a few days after it was created, when I heard a ‘splosh’ and the first frog turned up. If you have space, I would highly recommend it, even if it’s just a bowl sunk into the ground. You never know who or what is going to turn up!

Dear Readers, I’m planning to do a more extensive post on frogs tomorrow, but for now, here’s what’s going on in the pond (which has never been so high by the way)….

There are dozens of frogs in the pond, but they all pop below the surface when I put in an appearance, and today I didn’t have enough time to wait for them to re-emerge. Here’s one chap though, floating around in the water crowfoot without a care in the world. There’s a fair bit of spawn  already!

And in other news, the cyclamen that my friend MH gave me last year are doing very well.

Spring is definitely springing around here, how about where you live?