Dear Readers, I have been watching the aphid colony that is slowly developing on my Cosmos plants with some interest. It started with a group of about a dozen black bugs, but as you can see, the numbers are growing, and this is because they are being ‘farmed’ by the black ants (Lasius niger) who live under the doorstep.

A high proportion of the food of a black ant colony is not chopped-up insects as you might expect, but honeydew (up to 92% of a wood ant (Formica sp.) colony for example), and this is secreted in abundance by the aphids. To get the protein that they need, these bugs have to drink prodigious quantities of plant sap, which is mainly sugar and water – it contains  only about 1.8% protein. The result is that aphids are more or less continuously producing honeydew. Sometimes they flick it away from their bodies and it rains down in a sticky shower – my buddleia were particularly afflicted earlier in the year to the extent that my green wheelie bin,  which was under the shrub, had its lid stuck shut. But some aphids have made a relationship with ants: the ants ‘tickle’ the aphids with their antennae, and the aphids secrete a globule of honeydew. In the little film below you can just about make out an ant walking amongst the aphids and ‘tapping’ them in search of food.

The relationship with the ants is not altogether benign: the ants sometimes also ‘cull’ their herds, eating the new young aphids. Interestingly, in his book ‘Ants’, Richard Jones explains  that ants are more likely to ‘milk’ aphids that have already been milked by a colony mate, and to eat one that has not: ants may place a chemical marker on an aphid, to indicate productivity or even ownership.

Overall, though, the aphids benefit greatly from the presence of the ants, who will pick them up and move them to a new stem or even new plant if the supply of sap seems to be drying up. I dead-headed some of the Cosmos and as a result, the stem that one flowerhead was on started to dry up. There are far fewer aphids on it now, and far more on a juicier, productive stem. As these black aphids cannot fly, I suspect that the ants have been relocating them. Furthermore, the ants are ferocious predators of hoverfly larvae, ladybirds and lacewings, and indeed any other invertebrate that threatens their ‘herd’. In some species of aphid, the relationship between them and their ‘farmers’ has become so tightly-knit that the aphids can’t survive without the ants.

Perhaps the most sophisticated form of aphid ‘farming’ occurs between the Japanese ant (Lasius japonicus) and the Japanese Mugwort Aphid (Macrosiphoniella yomogicola ). As per usual, the ant ‘farms’ the aphid for its honeydew, but it goes a step further. The aphid comes in two colour forms – green aphids and red aphids. The green aphids produce more honeydew, but the red ones produce a chemical that inhibits the mugwort on which they feed from flowering. Once the plant flowers, it will die, and so will the aphids. The ants ‘cull’ the aphids until they’re at a ratio of 2 green aphids for every red aphid. In this situation, the ants get enough honeydew, but the flowering of the plants is delayed or prevented, which means that the aphid colony will survive. This is an extraordinary manipulation, almost akin to selective breeding.

Japanese ant (Lasius japonicus) (Photo by By IronChris – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1543680)

I have been fascinated by ants ever since I was a child, when I used to try to mark individual ants with a blob of paint, much to their irritation. I love the way that they can communicate so effectively with one another when there’s a food source – they discovered the tinned food that I put down for our cat earlier this year, with the result that about 300 ants turned up every feeding time. Now the cat is being fed upstairs, and I’m just hoping that the ants can’t work out how to get to the first floor. They are tidiers-up par excellence, and their lives are complex and compelling. I am really enjoying Richard Jone’s book ‘Ants’, in the Bloomsbury British Wildlife series, and I recommend it to myrmecophiles everywhere.

The Rose Garden at East Finchley Cemetery

Dear Readers, I have always had a bit of a strained relationship with roses. They are so much hard work, what with the pruning, the black spot, the feeding, the greenfly, and for most of the year they are just spikey stumps. And yet, today I was in the memorial rose garden at East Finchley Cemetery, and for once I could see why people love them so much. It was a warm day, and the roses were in full bloom in all their myriad colours, but what struck me most was the extraordinary heady scent.

We think we know what roses smell like, and yet there are a wide variety of different scents. David Austin is credited with reviving the interest in old-fashioned roses, with their heady fragrance and blowsy, loose-petalled blooms that just beg you to bury your nose in them. The roses below are just ones that looked particularly fine, rather than being illustrative of the scent type – if you are interested in seeing what’s what, you can see rose varieties organised in this way on the website (linked below).

The David Austin website describes five main categories of scent:

Fruity –Found across all colors of English Roses, fruity fragrances are diverse in nature, ranging from zesty citrus scents to rich berry and exotic fruit aromas. With notes such as apple, mango and elderflower, fruity fragrances are fresh and uplifting, each with their own delicious twist.

Myrrh – This distinctive scent holds a majestic spiciness and the aromatic warmth of sweet anise. Found almost exclusively in English Roses, it can be an acquired taste due to the medicinal character of the licorice notes.

Old Rose –Seen as the classic rose fragrance, it is traditional in nature, with warm, heady notes, often softened with a dash of sweetness. Unique in its character; and reminiscent of rose perfumes, it is arguably the most delicious of all the rose fragrances and can be found almost exclusively in pink and red roses 

Tea – True to its name, the Tea Rose scent is often said to resemble a freshly opened packet of tea. In English Roses, the aroma most frequently appears in the yellows and apricots. A complex fragrance , it can have sweeter elements of violets and fruitiness mixed with spicy, tar-like qualities of the dominating tea notes.

And finally Musk –The musk scent, resembling the old musk used in perfumes, is a warm, rich fragrance that can be both sweet and spicy and, at times, is dominated by the scent of cloves. Unlike other fragrance types, musk is produced in the stamens rather than in the petals of a rose. Musk is often found in ramblers, where the sheer abundance of flowers produces a heady blanket of perfume.

Taken altogether, the roses in the cemetery produce a symphony of perfume  – there are lemon notes, distinctively ‘rosy’ notes, chocolate, violet, creamy softness and even a note of bitterness. And so many loved ones, celebrated in so many different colours and styles of rose, from little shrub roses with tight buds to looser flowers that attracted hoverflies and bees.

And of course it reminded me of Dad and Mum, and how Dad delighted in making sure that the roses were beautiful every year. They were Mum’s favourite flower, and when she managed to buy a silver rose bowl in my local East Finchley charity shop she was delighted. When I visited Dorset earlier this year, I wandered around past their bungalow (the first time I’ve felt emotionally strong enough to do this) and I was pleased to see that the roses are still thriving.

Roses cut from Mum and Dad’s garden in 2017, just before they went into the nursing home.

And so I think that maybe I’ve been way too dismissive of roses. It’s true that they aren’t always the best plants for pollinators (though the more open-flowered, natural-looking ones do attract bees) but maybe I could find space for one or two. I find it impossible to look at the David Austin website without getting excited. Any views, Readers? Who has roses in their garden? And are they worth it in your view?

Me with my Nan, aged about 4

Dear Readers, as I passed through Camden Passage in Islington today, I paused for a moment to look at one of the last few stalls that is still selling antiques (mostly it’s cafés and hairdressers and delicatessens these days). There was a very fine china elephant, mostly white but with green and blue and orange details, and for a second I was tempted. But then I heard the voice of my Nan in my ear.

“Don’t have an elephant in the house! They’re unlucky!”

Well, clearly a full-sized live elephant would be a problem, but I remembered that Nan had an aversion to elephant representations of any kind. I’d never thought about it before, but today, as I walked to Angel tube, I wondered why a woman who lived in the East End of London for her whole life was convinced that a china elephant could be unlucky. Had she heard about the story of the white elephant given by the Emperors of India to people that they wanted to bankrupt? A white elephant was a sacred animal that demanded the finest food and special care, and so it was, to mix a metaphor, a poisoned chalice of a gift. Nan was not so picky though. She loathed elephants of any colour.

But it wasn’t just elephants. The colour green was unlucky too, to the extent that when Mum bought me a green corduroy coat with faux fur trim (well, I was twelve, and it was 1972), she shook her head, closed her eyes and sighed deeply.

“I just hope you don’t both regret it”, she said, which rather took the pleasure out of it for both of us.

And holy moly, here it (more or less) is. It’s now trendy. You just have to wait long enough.

Practically the same as my coat when I was 12 (From https://beffshuff.com/2022/03/03/penny-lane-cord-coat/)

Nan also worried about putting new shoes on the table (even still in a shopping bag, in their box), and bringing lilac into the house. Many plants are supposed to be unlucky if brought indoors ( I still need to do my list of ‘unlucky blooms’ that I promised a long time ago) but Nan was singularly unpleased with lilac. On one occasion some poor soul brought her a bunch of the stuff, and she grabbed it and threw it straight to the dustbin, while the visitor looked at her slack jawed.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” she  asked brightly, as if nothing had happened.

There was a whole palaver about what to do if someone dropped a knife. The dropped knife should never be picked up by the person who dropped it, which meant that if you were on your own you had to skedaddle round the object until someone else came in, or you could risk your future and the future of all your loved ones and pick it up yourself. I was often not sure if Nan had the psychic equivalent of CCTV though, because she’d often fix me with her beady eye, Ancient Mariner-style, and ask if there had been any ‘accidents’.

And finally, the worse thing that could happen was for water to be spilled, because that meant as many tears as the volume of water that had been wasted. On one occasion the twin tub washing machine backed up, resulting in a flooded kitchen, and I remember my poor mother shedding plentiful tears in a kind of superstitious terror.

My Nan was a very persuasive woman and although this all sounds completely irrational now that I’m 63, I remember how strongly Nan believed in her superstitions. How anxious and fearful she was if someone did something that she believed would incur the wrath of those malicious factors that hovered around, waiting to pounce! And, to be frank, she had had a desperate life: her two little boys died at less than two years of age, one of scarlet fever and one of diptheria, she had had a late miscarriage, she had nearly died giving birth to my mother who was less than 3 lbs at birth, her husband had left her, her mother was in a wheelchair, her sister was learning disabled, and her other sister had gone mad. Superstition is a way of trying to negotiate with powers that are beyond our control, and I know that Nan was just trying to protect us from the terrible things that she knew happened in the world.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Nan was also thought of by the wider family as a bit of a white witch – she could charm warts, and she was said to have healing hands that could take away pain. She believed that she knew when storms were coming, and, when we finally got a telephone, she would often tell us who was about to ring before the first trill. We accepted all this, as we did all of the superstitious ‘rules’ that we were supposed to abide by, and even when, as a teenager, I started to get a lot more sceptical, I would still hesitate before I put my platform shoes on the table, and might reject a green teeshirt in favour of a blue one because who knows? Better not to tempt the devil, and definitely don’t upset Nan.

I have no idea where these superstitions came from, and I would love to know if you’ve come across them in your own families, or if you have any extra ones to add. Do you ever still falter in the face of a superstition, even though you know it’s ridiculous? If so, you’re not alone. My house is still elephant-less.

Dear Readers, I have been trying to get to this exhibition for ages, but as it finished on Bank Holiday Monday (28th August) it felt as if I really needed to get a move on. So today I visited with my good friend A. We’d picked a day when it wasn’t too busy – British Library exhibitions tend to feature books (not surprisingly) and it can be a nightmare if too many people are huddled around a 15th Century manuscript or are shouldering one another out of the way of the drawings of dissected turtles.

The exhibition comes in four sections: Darkness, Water, Land and Air. As you’d expect, each section features items from the collection in each section. In the Darkness section there are illustrations of bats, including these Funereal Vampire Bats, illustrated by John Gould. They aren’t vampire bats at all but fruit bats. They were included in Gould’s ‘Mammals of Australia’, which was quite the undertaking.

From the British Library Collections.

The exhibition is, as you’ll have noticed from the title, about sound as well as image. In this section there were some interesting nocturnal noises, including the all-too-familiar yipping of a fox. Incidentally, my friend A and I have both noticed how few foxes there are around in North London at the moment – has anybody else noticed? Normally the cubs would be leaving their parents and  there would be all manner of fighting and general shenanigans. Let me know how your visitors are doing…

And here, just to get you in the mood, is a recording made by A.J Williams back in 1975. Seven minutes of red fox, traffic noise, planes going overhead! And a general reminder of how the fox brings a touch of wildness to the most domesticated of settings.

The Water section had some of the Blaschka’s glass sculptures, including an octopus and a squid.

A glass model of an octopus (Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka) (Photo Derbrauni, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

And it had this picture of a ‘monkfish’, from Pierre Belon’s De Aquatibilus (Of Aquatic Species) from 1553. This is what happens when you go by description, rather than actually observing something for yourself. Fake news!

‘Monkfish’ from https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2023/04/animals-art-science-and-sound.html

This part of the exhibition also featured a tardigrade going about its business, and a recording of a walrus, which sounded rather like someone thrashing a tree with a cane.

Then onto the ‘Land section’. One of my favourite things was this picture of a tree with red squirrels in it, by Abu’l Hassan (1605-08). I adored this painting – the more you look at it, the more you see. There are birds everywhere, ibex in the field below, and plants painted with great exactitude. I love the squirrels looking quizzically at the man climbing the tree – there is no chance that he will catch them, and they know it. Interestingly, the squirrels are European red squirrels, not found in the wild in India (where the picture was painted), and the ‘hunter’ is wearing European clothes, so there is probably more going on here than meets the eye. With its gilded background and astonishing detail, there is a good chance that this painting was made for the Moghul emperor Jahangir, who had a very fine art collection.

Sadly, there was also this film of the last known thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. It’s been colourised and it shows the animal in a bare compound in Hobart Zoo, as recently as 1933. I find it almost unbearably sad.

Finally, we’re on to the Air section, with its birds of paradise. Again, it’s clear that when illustrations were based on reports or on dead specimens, the results weren’t always true to the original.

Bird of paradise illustration by Conrad Gessner (1551-58) from Historia Animalium

Mind you, when you watch this film of actual birds of paradise, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone who hadn’t seen them would have got it right.

And finally, there’s this recording of the O’o A’a bird of Hawaii, by John Sincock. This is what is thought to be the last male, who lost his mate in Hurricane Iwa in 1983. The species had been driven to extinction by habitat loss and the introduction of non-native animals such as the rat and the mosquito. The sound of him calling out, with no one to hear him, moves me greatly.

O’o A’a bird (Moho braccatus), now extinct

This was a very interesting and varied exhibition, enhanced by the short films that you have the opportunity to watch at the end – one on hedgehog conservation, one on the crustacean collection at the Natural History Museum (with some more of those extraordinary Blaschka glass creations), and one on a piece of music made from the sound recordings at the British Library. Well worth watching if you have time, and very pleasing to see women scientists and museums, and London’s diverse range of people, celebrated.

Finally, I’m not sure how long it’s been there but there is a very fine new restaurant and café, with outside space and lots and lots of seats, as opposed to the rather hugger-mugger space that was there before. And don’t forget that you can get a free readers pass if you want to research anything at this extraordinary institution – I’m planning on renewing my readers pass asap, for when I retire. Did I mention that I was retiring :-)?

You can book tickets for Animals: Art, Science and Sound here, but hurry, it finishes on 28th August.

Dear Readers, I was plugging through my project reports yesterday when the little moth on the right hand side of the photo above appeared and started to trot across my copy of ‘The Journal of the British Arachnological Society ‘ (hence the enormous, and fortunately printed rather than real, hairy leg). I am easily distracted, as you know, and so of course I had to take a photo and call on my good friend Leo, moth expert extraordinaire, to see if he knew what it was.

Not only did he know, but he got the same species of moth in his moth trap that very evening.

Marbled Beauty (Cryphia domestica) Photo by Leo Smith

This is a Marbled Beauty, and is one of the most well-camouflaged moths that I know – on a white wall (or indeed a glossy magazine) you can see the extraordinary complexity of its pattern, but when plonked on a tree trunk, preferably one with lots of moss and lichen, it disappears completely. It is unusual in that its caterpillars feed not on plants, but on lichens, particularly ones that grow on rocks. The caterpillar feeds at night and overwinters as a larva, spending the day hiding out amongst the rubble, before finally pupating and emerging as an adult moth in late summer, so ‘my’ moth was right on time!

Marbled Beauty Caterpillar: by Mark Skevington, photo from https://ukmoths.org.uk/species/bryophila-domestica/larva/)

I love the way that the moth looks almost as if it’s corrugated, and the one in my office was a very busy little creature, eager to be off and about its business. Of course, when I opened the window it hid under my in-tray (full to overflowing as you can imagine) but eventually it snuck out and hid in a corner of the windowsill. Let’s hope that it managed to evade the many, many spiders that are appearing at the moment.

Photo by Entomart

What’s also interesting about this moth is the wide range of colours that it comes in – the one in the photo above is distinctly grey, but there are yellowish ones and beige-ish ones and even green-ish ones. No wonder moths are such a tricky bunch to identify. In the photo above, I love that you can see the individual overlapping scales on the wings and the crisp variations in hue – this one looks very wintry to me, as if wearing some cloak made out of smoke and cloud.

Compare the one below, which is much more of a brown and cream and beige individual.

Photo by By 10 aug. 2008 – http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/view?imglic=commercial&psc=G&q=noctuidae&filter=1#5419862129469904306, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10118375

Or this one, which looks almost leopard-spotted…

Photo by Ben Sale from UK, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

So, all in all this is a splendid moth which is on the wing right now, is common and widespread, and is well worth a closer look. Give me a shout if you’ve seen one!

Greenwich Park Sweet Chestnut (Photo from Woodland Trust/Ruby Harrison)

Dear Readers, this year the Woodland Trust’s ‘Tree of the Year’ competition features urban trees, and about time too – trees in streets and parks are sometimes majestic and long-lived examples of their kind, and if ever we need trees in our cities it’s now, for the shade and cooling that they produce. There are twelve trees on the list, and all of them would be worthy winners. You can see the whole lot here, but here are my four favourites. Do vote if you have a minute! Anything that helps people to pay attention to their environment can only be a good thing.First up is the Greenwich Park Sweet Chestnut (pictured above). This is the only London tree on the list, but it was planted at the request of King Charles II, 360 years ago. Trees were planted in the formal avenues that Charles admired so much when he was in France. Nowadays all the original trees are looking a bit gnarled and twisted, but, like people, they are so much more interesting for having lived a bit.

Next up is the Chelsea Road Elm from Sheffield. What a story this tree has!

Protestors with the Chelsea Road Elm (Photo from http://www.nesstsheffield.org/the-story-of-the-chelsea-road-elm-tree/)

This is a Huntingdon elm, a hybrid between a Field elm and a Wych elm. As such, it is resistant to Dutch Elm Disease, and hence survived the worst depredations of the disease, which killed an estimated 60 million elm trees during the 70s and 80s. Furthermore, it’s host to the White-Letter Hairstreak butterfly, which breeds only on elm trees.

People in the UK will remember that a few years ago, Sheffield City Council embarked on one of the worst spells of tree destruction seen for years, and one of the trees earmarked to be felled was the Chelsea Road Elm. A four year fight ensued: campaigners hired an open-top bus so that people could admire the butterflies, held a street party in its vicinity and, when the chainsaws turned up, bodily blocked the tree. I am full of admiration for the campaigners, who just wouldn’t give up, and there were many of them. Finally, in 2019 the tree was saved, and some New Horizon elms (a variety which is completely immune to Dutch Elm Disease) have been planted nearby, in the hope that the White-Letter Hairstreaks will colonise these new trees too. What a story!

White-letter Hairstreak (Photo by By Ian Kirk from Broadstone, Dorset, UK – White Letter HairstreakUploaded by tm, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30182755)

Third is the Crouch Oak at Addlestone in Surrey. Thought to be over eight hundred years old, Queen Elizabeth I is thought to have picnicked underneath it (presumably when it was a bit less urban than it is now), and preachers John Wycliffe and Charles Spurgeon have spoken under its boughs. Alas there are always idiots, and in 2007 someone tried to set fire to the poor thing. Fortunately, the Fire Brigade were able to put the blaze out, and it’s hoped that the tree will continue for at least another two hundred years.

The Crouch Oak at Addlestone (Photo by 80N, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

And finally, how about this magnificent walnut tree, standing in the car park of Inveralmond Retail Park n Perth, Scotland? It’s a mere youngster at about 300 years old, but it’s known as the Highland Gateway Walnut as it stands en route to the Highlands. There’s something so incongruous about this magnificent tree standing in such urban surroundings that I am tempted to give it my vote.

The Highland Gateway Walnut (Image from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-66466766)

In the end, though, I have to go for the Sheffield Elm tree. Urban trees are under such constant threat, and the tale of how this one survived is inspirational. Furthermore, it illustrates how important street trees are not just to humans, but also to the many other species that we share our cities with. Do have a look at the full list, and let me know what you think! So many great trees, and so many great stories.

Woodland Trust Tree of the Year 2023

And if you’re inspired, you can look at the Tree of the Year 2022 and the Tree of the Year 2021!

Garden Centre Spider (Uloborus plumipes) (Photo by By AJC1 – January Sales, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95888851)

Dear Readers, some of my favourite toilet-side reading is the journal of the British Arachnological Society – it had that wonderful story about the lady who rescued spiders that fell into her swimming pool, and this month it has introduced me to the concept of the Garden Centre Spider (Uloborus plumipes). As you might expect from the name, this rather dashing little critter lives in heated greenhouses and yes, garden centres – it originates in Africa and southern Europe and so it finds our winters rather too cold for its liking. It’s thought to perform a role in hunting down and gobbling up whitefly, which is a very good thing if you’re growing, say, orchids, and came to the UK originally from the Netherlands, probably in a potted plant.

The species name ‘plumipes’ means ‘feather-footed’, and if you look closely at the photo above you can see that there are ‘hairs’ on the ‘front legs’. But the subject of the article in my magazine was not so much the little spider itself (and it is little, maxing out at about 6mm long). The web is usually horizontal, and is unusual because the spider has an organ called a cribellum, which enables them to comb the silk into fluffy, fuzzy threads that can catch prey without the need for stickiness. Furthermore, the spider dangles underneath the web, and the whole impression is of a web long neglected and dusty, a perfect lure for some unsuspecting insect.

Garden Centre Spider with web (Photo by Sarefo, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

The article was particularly interested in structures in the web known as stabilimenta – these are areas of dense, opaque silk that, in spite of the name, are not thought to add to the stability of the web. I’ve seen these ‘designs’ in the webs of tropical spiders, and I wondered if they served to make the spider look bigger and protect it from predators,  though this would probably make the web and the spider more visible. Another theory is that these patterns serve to make the web more visible to birds who would otherwise fly through them and destroy them. Whatever the reason, the Garden Centre Spider often makes them, and the author of the piece, Geoff Oxford, was interested in whether there were more or less stabilimenta in wild spiders (the data on these was from a similar but not identical species) as opposed to garden centre populations, and if so, were they different in design? Well, after many hours of standing in Dean’s Garden Centre near York with binoculars raised (the spiders tended to build their webs in the most inaccessible corners), Oxford came to the conclusion that the ‘indoor’ spiders built far fewer webs with these features than wild spiders did. Furthermore, while the ‘indoor’ spiders built lots of linear structures, like the one in the photo below, they were much less likely to build circular ones (see Argiope spider in second photo below) than their wild cousins.

Garden Centre Spider web with linear stabilimentum – Photo from https://www.insecte.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=230515, byH. Dumas: France: La Ciotat

An Ariope spider with a circular stabilimentum (Photo by By Muhammad Mahdi Karim – Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7164693)

One thing to bear in mind is that the ‘cost’ of producing these structures is very expensive to the spider, so it must be worth their while. Maybe there’s an advantage if you’re living ‘in the wild’ where you stand more chance of being predated or having your web damaged? And if you’re living in a comfy, centrally heated garden centre, with whitefly on tap and only an occasional trapped robin to contend with, you don’t need to bother?

The questions raised beg for someone else to go and stand in their local garden centre with binoculars raised, while ‘normal’ folk edge past with gritted teeth. That could be me, readers!  It’s all very intriguing. I can (almost) feel another post-retirement project coming on.

Garden Centre spider – side view (Photo by Olei, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

Nile Crocodile(Crocodylus niloticus) swimming (Photo by By MathKnight and Zachi Evenor – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36133676)

Dear Readers, while ‘crocodile tears’ are usually thought to be false tears, emitted without any actual emotion, it turns out that the Nile Crocodile, which can grow to a maximum of 20 feet long, is highly attracted to the cries of primate infants, including humans. It is even better at detecting distress than humans are, which is quite something.

You might think that the sound of an infant in pain or under stress might be appealing to a crocodilian because it indicates an easy meal, and largely you would be right. Scientist Nicolas Grimault, of the University of Lyon, played the distress calls of young bonobos (in European zoos) and wild young chimpanzees from Uganda to a group of 25 captive Nile Crocodiles. The calls of the bonobos and chimpanzees were recorded in a variety of circumstances, mainly when there was conflict within the group, or the babies found themselves some distance from their mothers. Grimault also played the cries of human babies, varying from low-level distress at bathtime to more anguished sounds from visits to the doctor for vaccinations.

The sounds were played to the crocodiles after the park where they lived had closed – each call lasted 30 seconds, with at least ten minutes between each recording

On hearing the calls, many of the crocodiles turned their heads and swam towards the sound, sometimes even biting the speakers. As crocodiles are usually such immobile animals this was a very strong reaction. The strongest reactions seemed to come when it sounded as if the call was outside the normal vocal range of the animal that made it, so the crocodiles were reacting to the degree of distress. Humans seem to react to the pitch of a call – the higher the pitch, the more urgent the call seems to be – which means we aren’t as good at gauging the distress of non-human primates as a crocodile is – they seem to know when a bonobo call is outside its normal range, whereas we don’t account for the normal higher pitch of their ‘voice’. A crocodile can listen to a cry of anguish and make up its mind in an instant whether there’s a potential meal or not.

But wait! One female crocodile didn’t seem to be quite so food-orientated as the others. When she heard the distress calls, she positioned her body between the speaker and other crocodiles – male crocodiles are cannibalistic on baby crocodiles, and female crocodiles often have to put themselves between their babies and adult crocodiles. Baby crocodiles also have very high-pitched calls, so perhaps the sounds are a trigger, regardless of species.

Interestingly, Grimault suggests that there is evidence of crying babies being used to lure crocodiles into shooting range in Sri Lanka during the colonial era of the 19th Century, so although not studied scientifically before, the way that crocodiles react to the distress cries of primates seems to have been known for a very long time.

You can read the whole article here.

Dear Readers, I was meeting my friend S at Blackhorse Road on Monday, but somehow the stars aligned and I arrived early, so I took a little walk around the station to see if there was any artwork of note. Blackhorse Road Station is on the Victoria Line, which opened in 1968, and this work was made by David McFall, who made the design for the horse, first in clay and then in fibreglass, while the mosaic that surrounds it was made by Trata Maria Dreschna, who also made the mosaic floor in the Chapel of Unity in Coventry Cathedral, which was designed by Swedish artist Einar Forseth.

The Chapel of Unity Floor (from https://www.coventrycathedral.org.uk/locations/chapel-of-unity)

Around the corner, though, are some very interesting mosaic roundels. Each individual tile was made by a local person, over 500 people in total, including some of the workers on the railway and their families. These were then combined into steel frames made by the local Blackhorse Workshop. They were created in a collaboration between Maud Milton and Artyface Community Art. I love them! If you’re ever twiddling your thumbs at Blackhorse Station, come around the corner and have a close look at these roundels – there are so many elements, and  so many details to pick out.

Harry Beck, in case you’re wondering (as I was) was the creator of the London Underground map, to my mind one of the best topographical maps of any transport system.

And of course, the one that I love most is the Nature one. I love all the tiny portraits of plants and animals.

And on that note, it was off to see some actual nature at Walthamstow Wetlands. I was very happy to see a Great Crested Grebe with one of his/her stripey offspring. It’s been a good year for birds at the Wetlands, with several families of Kingfishers, a Barn Owl, some Alpine Swifts and a Great Egret. When I retire (in only five weeks!) I shall be spending a lot more time here with my binoculars at the ready.

Planning for my retirement is taking up a bit of headspace at the moment, but one project that I’m very attracted to is attempting to visit all of the London Wildlife Trust  reserves during the next year. There are 33 in all, including 4 with restricted access, so that shouldn’t be too much of a push, though I do notice that many of them are in Hillingdon, which is a bit of a slog from here. No matter! Fresh air and a bit of walking can only  be for the good, and it’s good to have a plan. Let’s see how we get on.

Brambles sold at Fitzroy Florist in Primrose Hill (Photo by Gayle Selby Bradley)

Dear Readers, a bit of a schmozzle has broken out in Primrose Hill, the leafy former home of Kate Moss and dwelling place of many luminaries. A visitor from Warwickshire was astonished to see a florist selling bunches of brambles for £9.95 a pop, and took to the airwaves to complain that you could pick them yourself, for free, any old day of the week. The owner of the florist involved retorted that these were no ordinary brambles but florist’s brambles, imported from Holland and hence she had to cover her costs. There was an undertone of ‘stupid Londoners with more money than sense’ on one side, and ‘I’ve got a business to run and people like to buy these brambles’ on the other.

It is clear that these are particularly fine brambles – the fruit is large, the leaves aren’t ratty like they often are ‘in real life’ and I suspect that they don’t have any of those skin-tearing thorns for which they are famous. And they do look very pretty, I must say. Personally I wouldn’t pay a tenner for them, especially as they don’t even have flowers, something you might expect to see in a florist’s shop.

I wonder if there’s something deeper going on here though, to do with both a disconnect from nature and a yearning for it. Does anybody look at these plants and think, “hmm, they look familiar from my childhood, maybe I’ll buy a bunch and remind myself of years gone by”? The berries look like something that could feature in a children’s book, preferably with an attractive harvest mouse reaching up to grab one of the fruit with its little paws. And don’t brambles just reek of autumn, of falling leaves and horse chestnuts and hot chocolate sipped while reading a good book?

And yet, I suspect that the berries on these plants will never ripen, and even if they did they will never taste as good as a blackberry snaffled from a bush lit with late August sunshine, the warmth bringing the juice to the surface so that you can’t resist gathering handfuls and getting the juice over the white teeshirt that you so rashly chose to wear. The florist’s berries are a kind of simulacrum for an experience that so many people no longer know how to have. During the lockdown, I saw parents and their children out gathering blackberries for what looked like the first time, and looking around sheepishly as if they weren’t sure if it was ok. And this year the berries are early, and fat, and look juicy, and there are lots for everybody – birds, foxes, mice, grubby small children, ladies who still remember how to make jam, people who are just learning about how sweet a wild berry can taste.

When I was in Walthamstow Wetlands last week there was a sign next to one bramble bush, saying ‘no foragers – please leave for the birds’. And right enough, we have to ensure that there is enough for the migratory birds that will soon be passing through, and for our native birds as winter comes. But in many places the excess berries will just rot, untasted by any sentient being, and that is a shame. Can we learn to reconnect with nature without taking too much? Can we learn that there are some experiences that money can’t buy, without shaming the people who look at a bunch of brambles in a florist’s shop and find themselves inexplicably drawn to them, even at £9.95 a pop? How hungry we are, and how difficult it is to find something that satiates us.