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?

Dear Readers, Jolene has been with us for a fortnight now, and she is doing very nicely – she has the run of the house, and I love that she chose to sit in front of her doppelganger cushion yesterday. Now all she needs is a hat!

As you might remember, she had fractured her hip, but I don’t think you’d know now – she doesn’t seem to favour either leg, and is only a tiny bit careful when jumping onto a chair or sofa. She tells us when she wants to play, and when it’s food time, and has also found a few favourite places to doze. Cats always seem to find the warmest places in the house, in this case the bed upstairs in the loft. The snake belongs to my husband, and is at least 25 years old. Jolene seems completely unafraid of being swallowed!

She really is the perfect kittie. I wonder if she would like another cat as a friend, she’s really playful, but she’s still vulnerable if there’s too much rough-housing, so maybe not. I could see her in a family situation with older, respectful children who’d play with her – my husband likes walnuts, and just lately Jolene has taken to chasing the walnut shells around with great enthusiasm, carrying them from one place to another like a little dog. She seems to particularly like the noise of them on the wooden floor. Yesterday I was on a call with my writing group and she was chasing the walnut behind the curtain with a lot of growling and miaowing. There’s nothing like a cat kerfuffle to take the edge off of a discussion about death, believe me.

Fingers crossed she continues to do well, and will soon be off to her forever home! When she’s ready, I’ll post a link.

Dear Readers, poems about spring can sometimes be a bit too full of all those nice things like ‘hope for the future’ and ‘rebirth’ and ‘gosh, isn’t it pretty’ and all these things are true, but I must admit that nothing gets me chortling quite as much as this poem by Edna St Vincent Millay. I love the last two lines in particular, though the line about the ‘uncarpeted stairs’ gives me a frisson since I broke my leg. See what you think.

Spring
BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Ash buds

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

Dear Readers, the fattening of buds is one of the first signs  that spring is on the way – one day there are those little fat protuberances on the twigs, and then you blink and the whole tree or shrub is covered in a green mist. I always wonder how the leaves fit themselves into those tiny packages but this is apparently the wrong way to look at the situation: the buds have developed to fit the leaves, not the other way round.

Horse chestnut leaves emerging…

I have my own favourite buds. I love ash buds, mainly because they look like the hooves of miniature deer. Horse chestnut buds are sticky, and the substance that they secrete is thought to protect them from frost.

Horse chestnut bud

In her piece on buds in ‘Nature’s Calendar’, Lulah Ellender describes how some plants have ‘spiral phyllotaxy’. Phyllotaxy is the arrangement of the buds on a stem – in the horse chestnut, the buds are ‘terminal’ which means that there is just one bud at the end of the twig. ‘Spiral phyllotaxy’ is where the buds are arranged in a spiral around the stem – they are arranged according to the ‘golden ratio’, which means that each is separated at an angle of 137.5 degrees. This means that as each leaf unfurls, it doesn’t block the sunlight from its nearest neighbour. The conjunction of geometry and nature is a truly wonderful thing! My flowering currant doesn’t have full ‘spiral phyllotaxy’ but the buds are ‘alternate’, again so that they maximise the amount of light that each leaf receives.

My beloved Flowering Currant

Flowers and leaves emerging on the flowering currant

The  timing of bud burst is critical: if the leaves emerge early, they’ll have more time to develop and photosynthesise, but they can get caught out if there’s a late frost. The timing depends on a host of factors, including the genetics of the particular species, temperature, day length and position. Many trees need a period of cold weather during their  winter dormancy – by some mechanism not yet completely understood, this can enhance foliation and seed production. But as we know, the climate is warming, and in a study based on Henry David Thoreau’s account of  his time at Walden Pond in Massachusetts 160 years ago, plants are coming into leaf eighteen days early. This can have complicated effects on the rest of the ecosystem – caterpillars may not be available for nestlings at the right time for example. There is a delicate balance that can be adjusted over time, but the climate is changing very quickly. So let’s take a little bit of time to admire the small miracle that a bud represents.

Buds on the whitebeam

Oh, and sorry, but I couldn’t resist. I feel the need to post this poem by curmudgeonly Philip Larkin every spring, because it reminds me of hope, and my Mum, and spring, and those are three good things.

The Trees (1974)

PHILIP LARKIN

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Dear Readers, I am in tearing haste today, as I have an assignment to submit for my End of Life Doula course. I have decided to proceed and take the Diploma, which will give me the skills I need to work with dying people and those that they care about, but first up I have to submit a case study for an imaginary person. Well, suffice it to say that this is a much more emotional trip than I had thought – although my person didn’t actually exist, I was very cut up when they ‘died’. However, I was somewhat cheered up by this rather splendid book on flies that has arrived from good old NHBS.

In my view, we don’t appreciate flies enough – even the bitey ones do a grand job of feeding birds and bats and clearing up all manner of putrescence. Plus I always learn so much from these books. I’d never even heard of a long-palped cranefly, but these guys are splendid – look at those tiger stripes!

I have written about soldierflies before, but have never seen an orange-horned green colonel, more’s the pity.

And how about a stiletto fly? These guys apparently stand around on their tippy-toes, when they aren’t ‘lekking’ (i.e. gathering in numbers to fly around and impress the females). The larvae are ‘large, elongated and predatory’. Just as well we’re not little defenceless maggots.

The great thing about flies is that even if there’s nothing else about, you can usually find a fly. Expect to hear plenty more over the next few months (now, that’s something to look forward to, I’m sure.

Well, Readers, the trail cam has been recording the usual over the past few weeks – the fox has visited every night, and so has Cosmo, the recently-shaved cat…

…but then we brought it inside and put it on the kitchen counter, and it’s spent the past few days capturing the most unflattering photos of me going about my cooking activity. Yes, I forgot to turn it off, so it’s caught me in all my glory.

Thinks: must remember my pilates posture when I’m doing the washing up…

….reaching for not one but two types of ice-cream….

…but the amaryllis is splendid, if I do say so myself.

And now on to my dilemma. Our house is end of terrace, which means there’s a door through to the garden on the left hand side of the building. For a long time, the underside of the door has been deteriorating, which means that foxes, cats, squirrels etc can come in and out of the garden relatively easily. Alas, the door has got to a stage where it would be easy for a human to also just come into the garden, so we’re having it replaced. My concern is, will the animals find a different way in and out, or am I going to have to shave some off the bottom? Or even put in a cat door? This is where the trail cam should be useful, as it will show if animals are still visiting. Our house (and the one next door, which has an intact door) is the only one for about sixty houses that has a side return, so it will be interesting to see what happens. I suspect that the critters will find a way, but nonetheless I feel a bit guilty, just as I did when the windows were replaced and whole families of spiders were made homeless. Sigh.  Am I getting more eccentric with age, I wonder, or am I just admitting it more? Anyone else worry about these things, or am I the only one?