Dear Readers, I have long been a fan of Stock Doves – they go about almost unnoticed, and yet they are very attractive birds, with their ‘kind’ dark eyes and iridescent patch on the neck (no white on these guys, which is one way to tell that they aren’t Wood Pigeons). In Coldfall Wood they hang about in pairs, and are very shy, often flying away when I am within a ten metre radius. The population of the bird has fallen by about 50 percent in the UK over the past fifty years, but  recently it’s been making something of a comeback, which as we know is unusual for birds that are usually associated with farmland. And could it be that they’ll soon be back in some numbers? Have a look at this photograph of a roosting site in the Marais de la Vacherie regional nature reserve in Vendée, where no less than 12,800 Stock Doves were recorded back in 2024.

Stock Doves heading for their roost (Photo from https://www.ornithomedia.com/breves/un-mega-dortoir-automnal-record-de-pigeons-colombins-dans-la-reserve-naturelle-regionale-du-marais-de-la-vacherie-vendee/)

Previously, many European Stock Doves would head south when the weather got too cold, but a lot more are now staying put or migrating for shorter distances. Might some of them hop over the Channel to swell our Stock Dove numbers? I have no idea, but they would be most welcome. I had a Stock Dove in the garden back in 2023, and it hung out with the squirrel very nicely. Fingers crossed for a few more.

Pudding and Sunrise demolishing an egg box

Dear Readers, you might remember that I said goodbye to my foster cats Pudding and Sunrise last week. You might also remember that they were completely addicted to food when they arrived: we suspected that they hadn’t had a reliable source of food in their previous home, and so were constantly anxious about where their next meal was coming from. To keep them occupied, I hid a small amount of dry food in an egg box, in the hope that this would keep them busy for half an hour. Within ten minutes they’d ripped it to bits and eaten everything.

Butter wouldn’t melt….

Well, they settled down a bit and spent time playing and snoozing as well as rushing out to the kitchen every time I stood up. On  Thursday they went to their forever home, and I tearfully wandered out to the kitchen after they’d gone, dabbing my eyes with a bit of kitchen roll, when I noticed this….

I’d heard peculiar noises coming from the kitchen, but hadn’t gone out to investigate. At least the eggs are still intact. Clever kitties! They’d previously broken into a loaf of bread, so I assume they just wanted an egg butty.

Russel Wills with a mole fortress

Dear Readers, most of us are familiar with the little raised ‘molehills’ that you can see when walking in the country – the soil on the top is apparently perfect for seedlings, and moles do a great job of aerating the soil and recycling nutrients. They can dig 4.5m of soil every day, and in addition to munching on earthworms they also eat leatherjackets and chafer grubs. Their velvety coats help them to slip through the soil in a network of tunnels that can be the size of two tennis courts.

Normal molehills (Photo By I, PRA, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2304758)

Occasionally, though, moles build something even more impressive: a mole fortress, a small hillock which can be up to 1.6 metres across.  Scientists aren’t exactly sure why they do this, but fortresses  often occur in areas which flood, or where the soil is particularly thin. At the top there’s a worm store – moles can eat up to six big fat earthworms today, and the largest worm store ever found weighed two kilograms, which is a lot of worms. Furthermore, they bite the tips off of any surplus worms so that they can paralyse them and keep them nice and fresh. Beneath the worm store they make a cosy nest, well above the water table, where they can wait out any flooding. Three mole fortresses have just been discovered in the RHS Garden Bridgewater, near Manchester, and Dr Robert Atkinson, a mole expert, is delighted. He explains that the amount of energy required to build a fortress is the equivalent of a forty-year-old woman walking for fourteen hours, a somewhat curious metric. Is it therefore the equivalent of two twenty-year-old women walking for seven hours? Or even a sixty-six year-old woman (ahem) walking for 18.86 hours? I think we should be told. But, pedantry aside, that is a lot of calories for a small velvety insectivore to burn, and apparently only the ‘fittest moles’ are capable of building a fortress.

Hopefully a very fit mole (Photo By I,Stanislaw Szydlo, CC BY-SA 3.0,as if https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6433426)

Moles are very common mammals in the UK, but because they live underground they are very rarely seen. But if you meet a female mole, you should be respectful – according to the RHS, female moles have a ‘rare masculinised biology’ and produce high levels of testosterone, which means that they are aggressively territorial. Personally, I feel as if a little better hormone balance between the human sexes might help things along – if women had a smidge more testosterone, and men a whole lot more oestrogen maybe things would balance out more nicely. Or not. But at any rate, I have acquired a new-found respect for the mole, small and inconspicuous as they are. And here is a poem by Michael Bazzett, which I rather like. See what you think.

Pudding on the left, Sunrise on the right…

Dear Readers, being a cat fosterer is always bittersweet – it’s lovely to see cats blossom in a home environment, but it’s sad to say goodbye to them. These two cats hadn’t had a great start in life: Pudding spent her first two days hiding behind the books on the bookshelf with just her ears showing, her fur bare on her stomach and back legs where she’d been overgrooming from stress. But just look at her now!

Instead of being constantly on the lookout for food, she and her sister spent time lazing about on the furniture, chasing one another and demolishing my knitting…

When the people who adopted them came to collect them today, both cats ran up to them to say hello, and then chased one another around the house as usual, like normal playful cats. They’re three years old, but I do wonder what kind of kittenhood they had – it sometimes feels as if they’re making up for lost time. And I know that they’ll do really well when they have a garden to play in, though the birds will have to watch out. One reason why I foster, and why if I did adopt it would need to be an indoor cat, is because I spend a lot of time trying to attract birds and other animals to the garden, and it seems unkind to have a pet that might massacre them.

It seems very quiet as I sit on the sofa writing this: a few hours ago I’d have had a cat ‘helping’ me to type. I always have a little cry when the cats go. But honestly, the satisfaction of seeing animals rehabilitated and going off to loving homes, with people who will adore them, is more than compensation. Charities are always looking for people who can foster cats or dogs, and I really recommend it. Every animal is different, you learn so much, and for me, a house isn’t a home without an animal or two (not counting the spiders and the clothes moths, obviously). If you’ve been thinking about it, do give it a go – you might love it!

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

Dear Readers, a frosty morning presents a great opportunity to have a look for lichens: they are everywhere but, like mosses, they are often overlooked, because they are not as colourful or as showy as flowering plants. Hah! They are complicated, multi-faceted organisms, as we shall see below. They can give an indication of how clean the air is – look at this headstone from Milborne St Andrew, the sheer variety of lichens tells you something about both which species can survive, and how old the stone is.

Headstone in St Andrews’s churchyard, Milborne St Andrew

Plus, unlikely as it seems, lichen is the food for the caterpillar of the Marbled Beauty moth, as I described here

Marbled Beauty caterpillar

Marbled Beauty (Cryphia domestica)

Sometimes we just need to slow down a bit to admire what’s under our noses. And if not now, when? We haven’t got forever, you know.

And now, let’s see what I had to say about lichens back in 2024.

In her piece in Nature’s Calendar, Kiera Chapman tells us that there are 2,300 species of lichen in the UK. They vary enormously, from flat crusts like the ones above to organisms that look more like coral. They live in habitats as varied as deserts and rainforests, and can vary in size from less than a millimetre to two metres.

What is a lichen, though? It’s not a single organism but an association between at least two organisms – the mycobiont, which is a fungus, and the photobiont, which gathers energy from light via photosynthesis and can be an alga or a bacteria. The relationship between the two has been debated for a century and a half. The whole idea of mutualism between two species (where both benefit from the association) was pooh-poohed at first, with the hypothesis being that the fungus ‘captured’ the alga/bacterium and held it captive, like an ogre sequestering Rapunzel in a tower. In fact, there is still some discussion about how to classify the relationship: it may appear that the fungus is parasitizing the other organism, but some photobionts can’t now exist without the fungus. It’s clearly a complex relationship that varies in emphasis from species to species.

Ash trunks with lichen (probably black apothecia)

Chapman discusses two different artworks that are based on lichen. First up is a monumental work by Klaus Daven on the Vouglans Dam in the Jura region of France. It was created by a process known as ‘reverse graffiti’, whereby a pressure washer blasted off most of the lichen and algae in order to create an image of a forest. It was sponsored by the electricity company and a company that makes power washers. For Chapman, and for me, it feels slightly uncomfortable – destroying one set of lifeforms to make images of others seems the opposite of environmentally friendly, however impressive the final results are.

The Vouglans Dan with Dauven’s image of the Jura forest (Thilo Parg, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

The second work is by German artist Hubert Fenzl, who uses sustainably harvested Claydonia lichen to make artworks that will live indoors for years. His ‘Rainforest’, shown below, uses the lichen to form a birds-eye view of a forest, surrounded by a menacing red area that seems to surround and encroach upon it. As Chapman points out, the combination of a human artistic vision and this natural material asks questions about our care of the forests. There is also none of the grandiosity of the dam project. I know which I prefer.

Rainforest by Hubert Fenzl (From https://www.hubert-fenzl.de/informationen/gestaltungsmaterial-cladonia-stellaris-flechte/)

I was also very heartened to learn from my RHS magazine this week that biology studen Lottie Cavanagh-Sweeney has been commissioned by the British Lichen Society to make a Lichen Trail at the RHS garden at Rosemoor in Devon. Magnifying glasses are provided to examine some of the smaller lichens, and you can download the trail to a smartphone. One of the featured lichens is the rare Tree Lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria) which Fay Newbery, a plant pathologist, describes as ‘green when wet, brown and crinkly when dry.’

Just look at this gorgeous organism!

Tree Lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria) Photo By Bernd Haynold – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3320107

The elephant in the room, however, as with so many other things, is climate change. An article in New Scientist in 2022 suggested that it had taken a million years for the algae that form the photosynthetic part of the lichen partnership to evolve to cope with 1° Centigrade of warming. They are also not fond of air pollution – the variety of lichens on the headstone at the top of the page indicates that it’s in a rural area with relatively clean air. Still, let’s not become too downhearted just yet – lichens have been here a long time, and who knows how resilient they might prove to be? In the meantime, let’s keep our eyes open for these overlooked organisms.

This poem reminds me so much of some of the people that I grew to care about when I worked at the night shelter in Dundee – one young lad was schizophrenic and a heroin addict. This is for you, Jamie. I hope that, somehow, you pulled through.

It Was the Animals
Natalie Diaz
1978 –

Today my brother brought over a piece of the ark

wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag.

He set the bag on my dining table, unknotted it,

peeled it away, revealing a foot-long fracture of wood.

He took a step back and gestured toward it

with his arms and open palms—

It’s the ark, he said.

You mean Noah’s ark? I asked.

What other ark is there? he answered.

Read the inscription, he told me.

It tells what’s going to happen at the end.

What end? I wanted to know.

He laughed, What do you mean, ‘What end?’

The end end.

Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled.

His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters.

He held the jagged piece of wood so gently.

I had forgotten my brother could be gentle.

He set it on the table the way people on television

set things when they’re afraid those things might blow up

or go off—he set it right next to my empty coffee cup.

It was no ark—

it was the broken end of a picture frame

with a floral design carved into its surface.

He put his head in his hands—

I shouldn’t show you this—

God, why did I show her this?

It’s ancient—O, God,

this is so old.

Fine, I gave in. Where did you get it?

The girl, he said. O, the girl.

What girl? I asked.

You’ll wish you never knew, he told me.

I watched him drag his wrecked fingers

over the chipped flower-work of the wood—

You should read it. But, O, you can’t take it—

no matter how many books you’ve read.

He was wrong. I could take the ark.

I could even take his marvellously fucked fingers.

The way they almost glittered.

It was the animals—the animals I could not take—

they came up the walkway into my house,

cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips,

marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother,

tails snaking across my feet before disappearing

like retracting vacuum cords into the hollows

of my brother’s clavicles, tusks scraping the walls,

reaching out for him—wildebeests, pigs,

the oryxes with their black matching horns,

javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelots

with their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat.

So many kinds of creature.

I wanted to follow them, to get to the bottom of it,

but my brother stopped me—

This is serious, he said.

You have to understand.

It can save you.

So I sat down, with my brother ruined open like that,

and two by two the fantastical beasts

parading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles,

built itself up around me, filled my coffee cup

before floating it away from the table.

My brother—teeming with shadows—

a hull of bones, lit by tooth and tusk,

lifting his ark high in the air.

Procoptodon goliah.  Image by By Nobu Tamura – https://spinops.blogspot.com/2020/07/procoptodon-goliah.html, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99474302

Dear Readers, an adult red kangaroo is quite scary enough when it decides that it doesn’t like you: Roger the red kangaroo went viral after a video of him crushing a steel bucket as if it was a paper cup highlighted the strength of these animals.

Roger the ‘ripped’ red kangaroo from the Kangaroo Sanctuary in Alice Springs (Photo from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/10/death-of-roger-the-ripped-kangaroo-sparks-outpouring-of-grief-on-social-media)

Imagine, then, meeting up with one of their ancestors. Procoptodon goliah became extinct about 40,000 years ago. Although they were only a little taller than Roger, at 2 metres, they weighed a gob-smacking 240 kilograms (Roger was 89 kilograms). And that caused something of a problem for scientists. Was this massive animal actually able to hop around like today’s kangaroos?

One of a group of extinct animals known as the sthenurine or short-faced kangaroos, Procoptodon was thought to have been unable to hop, because the impact of landing would have broken their legs, but more importantly their Achilles tendons would have snapped. Scientist Megan Jones, at the University of Manchester here in the UK, notes that the tendons in kangaroos alive today are often dangerously close to snapping, but this is because the Achilles tendon holds a lot of the elastic energy that enables the kangaroo to power itself through a series of hops – in fact, this is a very energy-efficient way of getting around.

However, Procoptodon is not just a scaled-up version of a red kangaroo – their feet are shorter, and their calcaneus, or heel bone, is wider. Jones believes that because of this, the bones of this ancient kangaroo would have been more resistant to bending, and could have accommodated a larger Achilles tendon.

While hopping probably wasn’t Procoptodon’s main method of getting around, it could certainly have thundered across the outback when needed (though goodness knows what was brave enough to chase it). Current day kangaroos also use a range of different  ways to get about: they wander around on four legs, sit up like a tripod using their tail and, of course, speed around the place when necessary. I always think that kangaroos travelling at speed are extremely elegant animals, and sometimes wonder why more large animals didn’t choose this as a method of locomotion (although it’s very popular in small animals, with jerboas and springhaas both choosing to boing about the desert/savannah). All in all, I am delighted to think of these massive animals crashing about, and am only sorry that there aren’t any left for us to witness.

You can read the whole article here

Procoptodon hopping – image by Megan Jones

Ring-necked parakeets

Well Readers, on a dank and dismal Sunday morning I sat down at the kitchen window with my checklist, shut the cats out of the kitchen (because believe me there was no other way they were going to let me get any peace), set my timer for an hour and off we went. First up were two ring-necked parakeets, who have become regulars. I thought they’d prefer the sunflower seeds, but they’ll eat anything.

Starling

Maximum starling count was eight birds, and very fine they’re looking too, with their full breeding plumage. This one was clicking and chattering away. They even managed to scare off the parakeets but then started fighting amongst themselves.

Blue tit

A pair of blue tits were very daring and swooped down on to the bird table to take a single suet pellet before darting back into the lilac bush. The pair of great tits also did a ‘grab and run’.

Of course the squirrels put in an appearance, scaling the bird table like the free climbers that they are.

Four goldfinches came for a visit, which was great to see – they’ve been noticeable by their absence this past month or so. Three chaffinches dropped in as well.

Two woodpigeons visited the bird table, but spent more time beating one another up than feeding, as is their way…

Four collared doves rocked up, and waited patiently for their turn…

and then in the last minute (literally) two magpies smashed onto the bird table, scattering suet pellets and birds in all directions, followed  seconds later by a jackdaw.

So all in all I saw 29 birds. Some were sadly absent – no blackbirds, and there haven’t been any for months. No robin, but I have seen one around. No coal tit, ditto. No house sparrows! There’s usually a little flock, I  hope they’ll turn up soon. No dunnock, no long-tailed tits. But an hour is a short period of time, and hopefully most of these birds were just elsewhere.

Very pleased with the starling numbers though, definitely up on last year.

Did you do the Birdwatch? How did you get on?

Dear Readers, you might remember that in 2022 there was a lot of excitement when an American Robin turned up in a back garden in Eastbourne and hung around for days, causing quite a stir.

Photo from The Argus (https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/19916682.rare-american-robin-brings-twitchers-flocking-eastbourne/)

However, this is as nothing compared to the surprise of one of ‘our’ robins turning up in Montreal in Canada on 7th January this year. This is a first for Canada, and is a tremendous surprise – while American Robins are migratory, and so are sometimes picked up by storm winds and deposited in Europe, European Robins tend to stick close to home. So, the question arises: did this Robin hitch a lift? Many sailors, and indeed many ship passengers, have noted the presence of small birds resting on board, so it’s not unlikely that this little chap did the same. The bird has attracted hundreds of birdwatchers, and as with the American Robin in Eastbourne, it gives bird enthusiasts.a chance to see a species that they’d have to travel thousands of miles to see otherwise.

Interestingly, rare birds arriving by ship are more common than you might think – the few European Robins that have arrived on the Eastern Seaboard of the US have all been discovered in close proximity to ports, and so are thought to have hitched a lift. However, the status of a ship-assisted bird depends on whether it was also ‘human-assisted’. If a bird is fed or otherwise looked after while on board, it’s considered to have arrived on land with human help, and so won’t be counted as a rarity. However, if the bird arrives without anyone assisting it, it’s thought to have arrived as if it had landed on a bit of flotsam (or possibly jetsam, I’m sure someone will put me right on that one), and so it can be counted as a rarity. Of course, it’s not always clear whether a bird has been fed or not, but one notable example was a Grey Catbird, native to the US,  that landed on the QEII and was befriended by the crew. When the ship docked in Southampton it stayed onboard –  It liked its new quarters so much that it subsequently toured the Mediterranean with the ship, no doubt well-fed all the way, though I have no details about whether it ever attended the Captain’s Table.

Grey Catbird (Photo by By Rhododendrites – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123382664)