Greenfinch in the garden in 2014

Dear Readers, the greenfinch was always a rare visitor to my garden – I made this post in 2014, and that’s the last time that I actually saw one so close to home. I described the greenfinch as the ‘cargo planes’ of the finch world, compared to the Concord-like elegance of the chaffinches, but how I wish that one of these chunky birds would would pop in!

Greenfinches were already in trouble in the countryside – there aren’t so many scattered seeds about as there used to be, which has impacted on a whole range of small birds. And just as they were becoming a frequent sight in gardens they fell prey to trichomonosis, which has contributed to a fall in population of about 70% across the country. The British Trust for Ornithology has detailed advice, reproduced below – this is every bit as important to prevent the spread of bird flu.

Follow sensible hygiene precautions as a routine measure when feeding garden birds and handling bird feeders and tables. Empty and air dry any bird baths on a daily basis. Clean and disinfect feeders and feeding sites regularly. Suitable disinfectants that can be used include a weak solution of domestic bleach or other specially-designed commercial products. Carefully rinse all surfaces with clean water and air dry before using. Clean your feeders outside and maintain careful personal hygiene, including wearing gloves and making sure that brushes and buckets are not used for other purposes, as some diseases can affect human and domestic animal health.

Rotate positions of feeders in the garden to prevent the build up of contamination in any one area of ground below the feeders. If you see birds of any species that you suspect may be affected by disease in your garden, particularly if you see multiple sick or dead birds, we recommend that you stop feeding for at least two weeks in order to encourage birds to disperse, thereby reducing the chance of birds infecting each other at your feeding stations. Only reintroduce feeding as long as you are no longer seeing birds with signs of disease, and closely watch for any further signs. If you see further signs of disease, once again stop feeding. We also recommend leaving bird baths empty until no further sick or dead birds are seen. (BTO https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/gbw/gardens-wildlife/garden-birds/disease/trichomonosis)

Some farmers are also trying to help seed-feeding birds in general (many countryside birds, from yellowhammer to corn bunting are also on the Red List). They are doing this by providing winter feeding, and by enhancing the quality of the hedgerows where the birds nest, plus cutting down on herbicides and pesticides.

Greenfinch in spring in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery

Although greenfinches have a definite khaki-colour, in the right light they can glow a greenish-yellow, like the bird singing in a tree in spring in the photo above. In the right light, they can look like miniature parrots. They are feisty too, scaring off other birds at feeders and generally ruling the roost. Their heavy bills indicate that they can eat quite hearty seeds, unlike goldfinches with their delicate beaks. The song of the greenfinch rather sounds like someone running their finger over a comb, to me at least. See what you think (recorded by Stephan Risch in Croatia). It’s a very distinctive sound, and certainly made me look up when I heard it in the cemetery.

Poet John Heath-Stubbs (1918 – 2006) wrote six poems about British birds, one of which was about the Greenfinch, and specifically its song. Have a read, and then a listen. I think it’s rather good. Let’s hope that we’ll soon be hearing these birds singing in our gardens again.

THE GREENFINCH

On a May morning,
In the greening time
I heard a greenfinch in a college garden
Set to his jargon in a leafy tree;
The long flat call-note, which will be repeated
Through all the hot and dusty days of summer,
Subsumed in a desultory twitter:
The lazy greenfinch, thick-set country cousin
Of the trim, suburban, caged canary –
Green, green, green he calls through the green leaves.

Fruit of the Armenian Bramble (Rubus armeniacus) Photo by By Daderot

Dear Readers, when I saw an article headed ‘Beware the Armenian Bramble’ by Roger Morris in my British Wildlife magazine in October, I knew that I would have to do some further investigation. After all, brambles are a tricky bunch at the best of times, with our ‘normal’ blackberry, Rubus fruticosus, having more than 324 microspecies, all clones of one another and extremely local. But this ‘new kid on the block’ is a whole new species, imported originally because of its large, tasty and profuse fruit.

Armenian Bramble is sometimes called Himalayan bramble, though it is actually from Iran and, as its name suggests, Armenia. It is described by Stace and Crawley in ‘Alien Plants’ as ‘very robust, deliciously fruited and wickedly spiny’, and so it appears to be. Morris reports that the canes can extend 20-30 feet from the crown, much further than most of the native microspecies, and that the canes ascend to quite a height before descending vertically to root. The canes can be in excess of 25 mm at their base, and are strongly ribbed and reddish in colour, especially at the base.

Now, I am a great fan of brambles, for all sorts of reasons. They provide cover and food for many species of birds and small mammals. The flowers are a favourite with all kinds of pollinators, and of course the fruit is delicious and free. Morris thinks that while the birds who take blackberries as an autumn treat are the main reason for the spread of this plant, foxes, who seem to love the fruit, might also be doing their bit, especially as the Armenian bramble is often seen along railway embankments and in urban areas. And I remember seeing Canada geese munching on berries of ‘ordinary’ bramble in Walthamstow Wetlands. So, is this bramble really a problem?

It’s certainly become a ‘noxious weed’ in parts of the Pacific Northwest, particularly in British Columbia. It spreads quietly and almost unnoticed, but it is so vigorous that it can easily outcompete other plants, particularly for light and nitrogen. Morris has noticed that it also seems to enrich the soil beneath it: this might sound like a good thing, but many plants depend on nutrient-poor soils in order to survive without being swamped. In a note that will strike terror in the hearts of many of us, Morris mentions that:

‘Railway embankments once filled with Japanese Knotweed are now a tangle of invading brambles that are every bit as robust and persistent‘.

On the other hand, when Armenian bramble was flailed on Mitcham Common, there were concerns about the impact on the hedgehog, rabbit and fox populations, and local people regretted the loss of the berries, especially as the coming winter is expected to be so financially difficult for so many people.

So, what to do? It’s clear that Armenian bramble can be a problem, and that where it appears it’s easier if it’s tackled quickly, but how many of us could tell an Armenian bramble from a ‘normal’ one until it was too late? And as control seems to involve a lot of digging, cutting, flailing and even spraying, it’s likely that cash-strapped councils and hard-pressed wildlife organisations are going to find it difficult to control. Maybe it will be another of those plants that, except in the most delicate and well-protected of habitats, we will have to live with.

Armenian blackberry bush seen in Canada (from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/himalayan-blackberry-invasive-species-yarmouth-1.6564940)

And of course, as it’s Wednesday, it must be time for a poem. How about ‘Blackberry Picking’ by Seamus Heaney? You’re welcome…

Blackberry-Picking
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
for Philip Hobsbaum

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

Dear Readers, my science experiment proceeds apace, with my two magpies popping down to feed on my red and yellow doughballs every time no one is watching. They’ve given up calling, and instead it’s like being visited by ghost birds – I turn my back for five minutes and half the food is gone.

I’m now in the actual trial stage of the experiment, offering first 45 red dough balls and 5 yellow ones ten times over a few days, and then reversing the colours so there are 45 yellow balls and 5 red ones. As I mentioned last time, I have to record the details once there are between 15 and 35 balls left. As I write this, I am 6 trials through the 45 yellow/5 red stage, so should hopefully have all the data that I need to analyse in the next day or so. But what is the point of the whole thing?

What we’re looking at is the preferences of our predators, in this case the magpies, though the experiment isn’t particularly concerned with species (alas). Predators have a variety of strategies, which break down roughly into (bear with me) frequency-dependent selection, and frequency-independent selection.

In frequency-dependent selection, the predator chooses its prey by what is commonest, without any concern about physical features. In this scenario, when there are more red balls, you would expect the magpies to choose them, and when the yellow ones are in the majority, they’d go for them. When a predator chooses the commonest ‘morph’ (as different colourways are called), they will gradually change the make up of the population. Let’s take our balls as an example, and imagine that they are little animals who can reproduce and make lots of little doughballs. If, when the red balls are in the majority the magpie eats lots of them, fewer will survive to breed, and gradually the yellow ones, who are largely left alone, will become commoner, until they are in the majority. Then, if all the magpie cares about is easy pickings, it will start eating the yellow ones, and the red ones will get a chance to multiply. In other words, there’s a constant trend towards equilibrium, and although the doughballs might change in ratio of red to yellow, there will always be doughballs.

In frequency-independent selection, though, the magpie is more of a gourmand, and has particular things that s/he likes, even if they are harder to find. Also, it might be that the bird is more attuned to particular colours – red signifies ‘tasty’, while yellow means ‘bitter’,  for example. So, maybe the magpie will choose red for preference, even when it’s rarer. In this case, you would expect the poor red doughballs to become rarer and rarer, until they’re so hard to find that the magpie has to turn to the yellow ones to get something to eat, giving the red ones a chance to recover. The red doughballs will never be as common as the yellow ones, because as soon as the population recovers, the magpies will shift to eating them again.

Real life is much more complex, of course – it’s not just magpies and doughball-insects, there’s a whole range of other plants and animals in a complicated ecosystem. But I am really looking forward to seeing what my results actually show. Plus the magpies are now my friends, and as I still have about a kilogram of dough (currently in the freezer) to get through, I can imagine that they’ll be my friends for quite a long time yet.

Dear Readers, ever since I was a little girl, I have been aware that my feet are not ‘normal’. For a start, they are large: I was a size 8 when I was about nine years old, and Dad used to joke with the assistants in the shoe shop, saying they should just give me the shoeboxes to wear rather than trying to find shoes that fit.

Then, there was the fact that I had fallen arches – flat feet to you and me. I forget who first referred to my feet as ‘flippers’ but the name stuck. At sixteen years old, in yet another shoe shop, the owner, a man of doubtful hygiene and a likely foot fetish, told me that I had ‘ugly’ feet, and practically threw a pair of black lace-ups at me. In the end, I bought a pair of black and red platform shoes from another shop (Dolcis if my memory serves me), and wore them with pride even though, with my skinny legs, I was told that they made me look like Minnie Mouse.

At some point during all this, I was referred to the podiatry clinic at the local hospital, where a lovely young woman gave me exercises to do to strengthen my arches. They involved revolving my feet around, clockwise and counterclockwise, bending my foot up and down, and even trying to write my name on a piece of paper with a biro tucked between my toes. I idolised the person who was trying to help make my feet more flexible, less of a liability, but at some point she moved on, and I stopped doing the exercises.

It didn’t really help that I also had very flexible joints. You’d think this was a boon, but in fact I tore ligaments and sprained my ankles at least half a dozen times in before I was thirty, sometimes so badly that I was bruised and swollen for days. All too often I would leap into the air while playing badminton like some humanoid gazelle, only to come crashing down like a sack of potatoes when my ankle went from under me. These days, I seem to be capable of tripping over a displaced molecule on a path, a millimetre-deep incline on a pavement. My husband is used to me chatting away and then suddenly disappearing as if poleaxed.

For a while, I had plantar fasciitis, which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy (if I had one). The membrane on the sole of the foot becomes inflamed, so that every step is agony. It went on and on, and then, suddenly, it went away, and I was heartily glad to see the back of it.

And then, during lockdown, I noticed that my feet were becoming numb and sometimes tingled, especially at night. This raised real alarm bells, because my poor mother had untreated peripheral neuropathy in her feet for almost twelve years before she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I tried to ignore what was going on, but I could hear her voice in my head, as clear as day.

“It feels as if I’ve got a block of wood under my toes”, she’d say. “I wish I’d gone to the doctor before it got so bad”.

And so last week I had a whole range of blood tests at Whittington hospital. And on Friday I got the results.

“All normal!” said the receptionist. “No action needed!”

And I could have kissed her, because I was already reading articles about blood sugar and neuropathy management, and was wondering if a more extreme version of the intermittent fasting that I’m already doing (5:2 in case you’re interested) would help.

Instead, it feels like a reprieve, but it does mean that the cause of the numbness is probably structural, and so I need to find myself a podiatrist. Wouldn’t it be funny if I ended up doing the exercises from my youth again? I’m already working with the people that I do pilates with to get some more movement into my feet, and some strength into my ankles, but let’s see what else comes up.

I am also reminded that my Mum, in spite of her foot problems, became a qualified reflexologist when she was in her sixties. She had a terror of exams, but managed to get through them, and practiced for a decade before the neuropathy that had made walking so difficult started to take the sensitivity from her hands too. I remember her saying that so many people seemed to be repulsed by feet, and yet they were key to everything, not only our physical stability and wellbeing but our mental health too. They literally ‘ground’ us, and yet we ignore them and mistreat them. I hope that I am finally listening to my poor, unloved, derided feet, and can give them the care and attention that they deserve.

So, lovelies, do any of you have foot problems? I’m all ears if you have any suggestions or insights, or any stories to tell. Over to you!

Barberry Carpet Moth (Photo by Ian Hughes, taken from https://www.dorsetbutterflies.com/2019/11/help-us-conserve-the-barberry-carpet-moth/)

Dear Readers, you will remember that although I am definitely a Londoner, my second allegiance is to the County of Dorset, which was home to my Mum and Dad for almost twenty years, and which I have fallen in love with. So, it gives me great pleasure to report on the success of a project to bring back the Barberry Carpet Moth (Pareulype berberata). The caterpillars of the moth feed only on the leaves of the Barberry plant (Berberis vulgaris), which could have been introduced to the UK in Neolithic times, and which was once widely used as hedging. Sadly, the plant was found to harbour a species of rust which could infect cereal crops, and so Barberry was dug up all over the country. As the plant went, so did the moth. Some insect species feed on many different types of plants, but some, like the Barberry Carpet Moth, were extremely specific.

Butterfly Conservation included this species in its ‘Back from the Brink’ programme. By the time it was featured, there were only ten small populations in the whole of the UK. Most cereal varieties are now rust-resistant, and so the danger to foodstuffs from Barberry was minimal. So, the charity set itself the aim of planting nearly 4000 Barberry plants over a four year period, as close to the Dorset population as possible – this included Blandford Forum, one of Mum and Dad’s favourite spots for a bit of shopping. Local people were invited to get a plant for free and plant it in their garden, or in a local community amenity such as a churchyard or school garden. Volunteers also planted Barberry in various sites agreed with landowners, at the edge of forests or in other suitable sites.

UK stamp featuring the Barberry Carpet Moth

And a few weeks ago, it was reported that Barberry Carpet caterpillars had been found in much increased numbers in one of the planted sites, Blandford Forest. 50 caterpillars were found, up from 14 in 2018. This is a very hopeful sign, although clearly more needs to be done. It does go to show what can happen when communities recognise a problem and start to do something about it, which always cheers me up. Fingers crossed that the Barberry Carpet continues to re-establish itself, with a little bit of help from us.

Barberry Carpet Moth caterpillar (Photo by By Hectonichus)

The Waverley yew (Photo from the Woodland Trust)

Dear Readers, this year’s UK tree of the year is the Waverley Yew, which grows over and around the ruins of the first Cistercian monastery founded in the country over 900 years ago. The monastery was dismantled after the Reformation of 1536, and it appears that this tree was just a seed then, as its age is estimated at no more than 480 years. The roots appear to ripple like lava before plunging back down into the ground, while above the many limbs reach out from the trunk like arms. It really is a stunning tree, elegant and poised.

The Waverley Yew will now go forward to represent the UK in the European Tree of the Year 2023.

The trees are selected from a range of ancient and veteran trees by experts from the Woodland Trust, and are chosen to highlight the vulnerability of trees, few of which have any formal protection in spite of their age, value for wildlife or position as venerable elders in the community. Here are a few more of the shortlisted trees:

The Escley Oak (Photo by Woodland Trust)

The Escley Oak is one of the largest and oldest oaks on the Ancient Tree Inventory, and is thought to be at least 400-500 years old. It stands beside a public footpath in Michaelchurch Escley, Herefordshire.

The Holly on the Hill, Hawnby, North Yorkshire (Photo by Woodland Trust)

The Holly on the Hill is a most unusual broad rounded crown, which implies that it might have been harvested for its foliage and berries for many years, maybe to decorate nearby churches and houses. It could be up to 300 years old, but experts believe it probably dates to the mid-nineteenth century.

One of the Twelve Apostles lime trees from St James’s Church, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire (Photo by Woodland Trust)

As you know, I have a great fondness for lime trees, and 12 of them were planted along the path leading to St James’s Church in Chipping Campden to represent the twelve apostles. The original avenue was probably planted in the 1770s, but five of the trees have died and been replaced. The one in the photo is the oldest of the original trees.

The Langley Park Chestnut, Angus, Scotland (Photo from the Woodland Trust)

And finally, I rather like this battered tree, which looks as if it has been in the wars but has survived, nonetheless. Just look at the size of it! It has a girth of 7.81 metres, and the central trunk is hollow at the top. Langley Park House, which overlooks the Montrose Basin between Dundee and Aberdeen, was built in the 18th Century, and it’s thought that the tree possibly predates it.

So, let’s see how ‘our’ tree does in the European competition next year. At a time when trees are being cut down willy nilly to appease insurance companies and homeowners, to clear plots for development and roads and just because they’re seen as ‘messy’, anything that highlights their importance, and gets people involved and thinking about them, can only be a good thing.