Dear Readers, it’s surprisingly hard to find beech trees here in East Finchley – it’s very much oak and hornbeam in the areas of ancient woodland, and the large street trees tend to be London plane or lime. And yet, in Hampstead Garden Suburb, just off of Ossulton Way, I discovered a cul-de-sac which is planted with nothing but beech trees. If you didn’t already know, you could tell by the crunch of the beech nuts (otherwise known as mast) that crunch underfoot.

Beech mast

Beech (Fagus sylvatica) are very muscular trees, with silvery-grey bark that can be smooth as silk, or criss-crossed with horizontal etchings and multiple ‘eyes’.

The leaves look a little like those of hornbeam, with distinct veining, but those of the beech are less ‘toothy’ at the edges of the leaf.

Mast, though, is one reason why beech trees are not planted along our streets as often as trees such as London plane. The trees produce their ‘nuts’ in vast quantities every two to three years, and at these times the pavements can be carpeted with brown seeds. However, this isn’t the only thing that people find to complain about.  As I was taking my photographs, a woman emerged from her house.

“I’m just photographing the beech trees”, I said, just in case she thought I was a grey-haired burglar’s sidekick, ‘casing the joint’ in advance of a robbery.

“They’re a nuisance!” she said. “At this time of year you can be sweeping up your front drive two or three times a day”.

Oh well. It’s easy to forget all the shade that the trees provide during the summer, and their wildlife value, which is extensive: finches, in particular visiting bramblings, find the nuts irresistible. But I wonder how it was decided that the whole of this small road (Holyoake Walk in case you’re ever in the vicinity) would be planted with beech, when it’s such an unusual tree locally?) Hampstead Garden Suburb is very protective of its historic nature, and so the council’s current policy is to replace damaged or diseased trees with one of the same species. I suspect that the lady will be sweeping up leaves for many years to come.

Brambling (Fringilla montifringilla) Photo by Mike Pennington

A variant of beech that you’re more likely to see is the purple variant, the copper beech. These trees can look stunning with the sun behind them, though not much sun today. But although this is a more well-behaved tree, I still find the ‘true’ beeches irresistible. They seem to be native to southern England and Wales, but have been planted throughout the rest of the country. Folklore has it that the King of the Forest is the oak, but the beech is the Queen. Long may she reign.

Dear Readers, I know I promised that I wouldn’t mention ivy bees again, but last week I was contacted by reader Phillip Buckley. Here’s what he said:

“We’ve had hundreds, nay, thousands of these bees in our front lawn for 4 or 5 years around this time of year, and I now know what they are thanks to your post.  I always thought it odd that I never saw one on any of the many nearby flowers (and thought they were being pretty rubbish ‘bees’ as a result) but never thought to look at the ivy encrusted old stone wall at the front of our road.  Right now, there are so many cruising all over our lawn at a height of just one or two inches that it is frankly scary to walk through them and even more impossible to mow the lawn!  I read that the males don’t or can’t sting but the females will if annoyed – my wife isn’t prepared to test that theory and has had them climb up inside her trouser legs so now always tucks her trouser bottoms into her socks when gardening.  In previous years they’ve mainly built their nests in the vertical cut edge of the lawn but this year they’re also all over the surface of the lawn as witnessed by the hundreds of piles of sifted soil.  They also spend a lot of their time exhibiting the frenzied mating behaviour you describe.  This all lasts for a few short weeks and then, suddenly, they’re gone for another year.  I have a few photographs although it’s difficult to capture the shear density of them and can’t put them up on this reply panel anyhow.  We won’t be removing the ivy anytime soon as we think it’s all that’s holding our stone wall together so I guess we’ll be sharing our space for a few more years yet!?”

Well, clearly I had to investigate further, and Phillip kindly sent me some photos. He and his wife are obviously great friends to nature, because what they have going on in their garden is a scene of bee-abundance that is vanishingly rare these days.

Below you can see a fine bank of ivy that no doubt the bees will use for nectar and pollen.

These are the nests at the edge of the lawn…

Here is the lawn itself….

And here are some male bees forming a mating ball in their excitement…

Ivy bees going about their business…..

And most wonderful of all, here’s a short film that gives you some idea of their abundance.

Honestly, who needs to go to the Serengeti when there are wildlife spectacles like this? As Phillip says, in a few weeks it will all be over for another year, and trousers can be untucked and lawn-mowers taken out of the shed. If only we could all be so understanding of the needs of the creatures that we share our space with, the world would be a much nicer place.

Dear Readers, you might remember that one of my many ambitions when I retired was to visit all the London Wildlife Trust nature reserves, so I thought I’d start with an easy win. Camley Natural Park is a few tube stops down the line from East Finchley, and is one of the most urban of the reserve sites, with the Eurostar and LNER trains whistling past in one direction, the canal running alongside and the shops of Coal Drops Yard and Granary Square just minutes away.

The view from the bridge over the canal next to Camley Natural Park

Still, once you’re past the café and into the reserve itself, peace reigns. There’s an area of marshy land and a pond that feeds directly from the canal, and dragonflies and other water insects flit past.

There’s lots of hemp agrimony but looking at it, I’m aware that the plant in my garden is a cultivar, rather than the wild plant – the seed heads here are much fluffier. Autumn really is a time for texture, and from the spikiness of the teasels to the softness of this plant everything begs to be touched.

And how about this Old Man’s Beard/Traveller’s Joy next to the bridge into the reserve? Our only native clematis, this plant produces what my mum would have called ‘hair do’s’.

The reserve is usually pretty quiet during the week, and I’m always impressed by the sheer variety of people who visit – an elderly man was reading his paper and sipping a cup of coffee by the main pond, toddlers rampage along the paths, friends wander and chat, and yet there’s something about the place that inspires calm as soon as you step through the gate.

I’ve seen  heron here before, but today there were some coots at one end of the pond, and some moorhens at the other. The coots were feasting on the water plants beneath the duckweed (I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one fighting a losing battle with the stuff), and the moorhens had two well-grown chicks. They kept them  close to them, though, and I wondered if the coots were sometimes as aggressive to other species as they are to one another.

One coot was standing on what was probably once a nest site. I love coots’ feet! The extra surface area means that they can shovel their way through the water at some speed, as anyone has ever watched the shenanigans during the breeding season will have noticed.

Eurasian Coot (Fulica atra).

Coot munching on water weed.

The moorhens (Gallinupa chloropus)  are much smaller, daintier birds. This family had two chicks, one of which was developing the red beak which is one way to distinguish between the two species, though the coot’s white ‘crash helmet’ is probably the most diagnostic feature.

And then it’s off along the path again.

At this time of year, the only birds that really sing are the robins and the wrens, but what the reserve lacks in variety it makes up for in quantity – there was a robin singing about every ten metres, and when they weren’t singing they were ‘chinking’ at one another. Such territorial little birds!

Here’s an example of a robin singing, by David Darrell-Lambert and taken from Xeno-Canto (David has led dawn chorus walks in Coldfall Wood in the past)

And here’s an example of that ‘chinking’ call, this time by a Swedish robin and recorded by Lars Edenius

It was good to see lots of wood piles too, which are great for fungi and for all manner of invertebrates and small mammals.

And finally, it was good to see some cyclamen in flower: it’s easy to forget that, although these plants are not strictly native, the autumn-flowering species (Cyclamen hederifolium) has been in the UK since 1596, and has been seen in the wild since 1597. It can be surprisingly popular with bees looking for a little late summer nectar and pollen, and I love how delicate the flowers are.

So, if you’re stuck in Kings Cross and are desperate for a little taste of nature, I can very much recommend Camley Natural Park, for its peace and for its variety of plants and animals. And the coffee at the café isn’t too shoddy either.

The Kingfisher Cafe (from Architecture Today magazine (https://architecturetoday.co.uk/camley-street-natural-park-learning-centre-erect-architecture-london/)

Dear Readers, the brown and distorted leaves of the horse chestnuts on Hampstead Heath tell their own story of how things have changed during my lifetime, and particularly during the last twenty years. If you had a look at the short film in the blog that I did a few days ago, you’ll have seen that loveliest of things, a horse chestnut in full leaf. These days, we’re lucky if they get past flowering before the leaf miners and the various fungi that attack the tree have turned those big palmate leaves into a patchwork of brown and yellow, before they shrivel and fall.

Horse chestnut leaves, July 2022

It’s said that these various ‘pests’ won’t kill the trees, but I do wonder if the leaf damage over successive years weakens them. After all, most of them are relatively recent. The leaf miner, a tiny moth whose caterpillars actually live between the layers of the leaf, was only sighted for the first time in 2002. Since then it has been working its way steadily across the country, until most of our horse chestnuts are a tatty mess long before they should be losing their leaves. The trees are also producing fewer and smaller conkers, which is a shame for any remaining children who like to play with them. However, there is evidence that blue tits are starting to get the hang of feeding on the larvae, and it’s hoped that parasitic wasps might recognise this handy food source, as they often do. Let’s hope it’s soon.

In ‘Nature’s Calendar’, Rowan Jaines tells the story of how the horse chestnut first arrived in the UK. It’s been here long enough for many people to think that it’s a native, and to be honest I thought it was another one of the things that the Romans had done for us, but no. The first record of the Horse Chestnut in Europe is from 1576, when the tree was planted in the gardens of the imperial palace in Vienna. It was so impressive that it spread across the gardens of the continent, with two trees arriving in France in 1615. One of the trees lived in the grounds of the Hotel Soubise in Paris until its death in 1840, while a second lasted until 1767 in the Jardin des Plantes. Louis XIV loved the tree so much that he ordered avenues of the trees to be planted at Versailles, assuring that the tree would be fashionable, and would spread across the estates and gardens of the rich throughout the eighteenth century.

However, its place of origin was something of a mystery. The first trees planted came from Turkey, and horse chestnuts were thought to be of Asian origin right up until the nineteenth century, when it was found that their home range was actually in the Balkans, in the mountains of Bulgaria, Albania and Greece.

Horse chestnut bud

However, what’s very interesting to me is how the tree got the name ‘horse chestnut’. I always wondered if it was something to do with the shape of the bud, which could possibly look like a horse’s hoof (if you squint). However, it appears that the conkers were ground up and used as medicine for coughs and chest complaints in horses as far back as the sixteenth century. In fact, chemical compounds in conkers have been found to control inflammation and swelling and reduce the accumulation of the fluid that causes the horses to cough, so there is scientific evidence for centuries-old practices. I always find it heartening when the skills of generations stand up to twenty-first century scrutiny, as many often do. Let’s celebrate the horse chestnut, that most impressive of trees, and let’s hope that nature soon finds a way to balance the effect of its parasites.

Horse chestnut flowers

Frogs in the pond in 2022

Dear Readers, this has to be my favourite New Scientist headline so far this year. See what you think:

Frogs have attempted sex with other species for millions of years.

Well, I don’t know about you but this seems like a pretty rubbish life strategy, though my observation of the frogs in my garden strongly suggests that this could be true. At the height of the breeding season, the frogs attempt to mate with other male frogs, they mob the females and if there were toads or goldfish in the pond I’m pretty sure that they’d try to mate with them as well. Frogs have been observed engaged in sexual congress with boots, turtles, dead frogs and frogs of a completely different species. 

One theory is that in situations of explosive breeding, where lots of males emerge from hibernation at once and there are relatively few females, grabbing whatever you can find and hanging on like billy-o would usually pay off. Frog mating involves amplexus, in which a male grabs a female and hangs on with a specially adapted ‘thumb’. He then waits until the female lays her eggs and fertilises them as they emerge, but a female might take hours, or even days, to be happy enough to lay, so he has to be capable of staying with her, and fending off other males, for that whole period. Possibly the occasional male grappling a stick or a goldfish is a small price to pay for the chance of successful reproduction.

What is interesting, though, is that even frogs that have different mating strategies from the ones in my pond also display what scientists call ‘misdirected amplexus’. Tree frogs, for example, sit around and call to attract a female, who comes to them, and who gives the male a little pat on the shoulder to indicate that she’s happy to mate, and yet even these species occasionally mate with the wrong species. What’s going on? Evolutionary biologists have studied the behaviour across 159 frog species, and have concluded that even the earliest frog species, dating back to some 220 million years ago, also made these kind of mistakes. It could even go back further, to the ancestors of frogs, salamanders and a type of amphibian called a caecilian.

Presumably if this behaviour was catastrophic, frogs wouldn’t have become the extremely successful and widespread species that they are today, but there is bad news. The incidence of frogs getting it wrong seems to be more widely reported in the 21st Century than previously, and scientists are concerned that habitat destruction, drought and noise might all be contributing to frogs not meeting enough females, and becoming more generally confused. Add this to the chytrid fungal disease which is causing the decline and even extinction of many frog species, and what can seem like a harmless quirk of behaviour could have serious implications for these fascinating animals.

Dear Readers, I was journeying home to East Finchley on the 263 bus today when I noticed how many of the London Plane trees that line the route had been in effect ‘pruned’ by the double-decker buses that pass under them. Nowhere is it clearer than with the trees in the photo above, where the ones to the left have all been ‘topiaried’ to the exact height of a London bus. However, while the smaller twigs and leaves are presumably safely removed by a bus roof, there must surely be a more managed programme of tree maintenance to make sure that passing omnibuses aren’t ‘scalped’ by the branches.

In the olden days (i.e 1943) there was a special open-topped tree-lopping bus. Have a look at this short film. What is a marvel is not only the low-tech tools used (I have most of them in my garden shed), but that the horse chestnut being pruned is in such excellent health. And I love the bit at the end where the ‘tree-loppers’ throw conkers to the waiting urchins.

Lopping Trees for London Buses (1943)

You may sometimes see signs on the trees lining the road, saying instructive things like ‘Tall Trees’. Some of the Plane trees that line North Hill in Highgate really are tall.

Travelling at speed on a bumpy road on the 263 bus.

However, signs are not always enough: in 2015 a double-decker managed to collide with a Plane tree on the Kingsway, close to Holborn, and the roof was neatly sliced off. Five people were injured, fortunately none of them seriously, though I imagine that they didn’t travel on the top deck for a while. Apparently there was a sign saying ‘Overhanging Trees’ on the tree in question, but clearly it wasn’t enough.

Photo by Stuart Coates (Twitter)

In 2012 there was a similar incident in Croydon, where again the roof was ripped off. I wonder if double-deckers are actually designed in this way? Presumably taking the roof off is better than it collapsing inwards on to the passengers. Any bus nerds out there who would care to enlighten me (and I use the word ‘nerd’ with the greatest of respect, being a bug nerd myself).

The 119 bus that was de-roofed in 2012 in Croydon (Photo from https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/tree-rips-roof-off-london-bus-6847204.html)

There is a regular programme of pruning, pollarding etc for London’s street trees, with the condition of the trees assessed, and rotten branches and other dangerous protuberances removed where necessary. This does leave the question of how drivers manage to drive into trees, though I imagine that a branch at the height of the roof is not easily assessed from the point of view of the driver’s cab, especially as they have to do everything these days – on a one-person bus the driver is expected to take fares, sort out any passenger nonsense (of which there is plenty) and drive through the streets of London which often resemble nothing so much as one of those live action video games where people jump out into the road, throw their car doors open without looking, and occasionally stop dead in the middle of the road to check something on their mobile phones. Thinking about it, I’m amazed at how rarely buses collide with trees. It’s something of a miracle.

The avenues of London Plane trees and Limes are a cool and welcome sight as the 263 crests the hill at Highgate and heads towards East Finchley station, and long may they remain so, even if their lower branches have to be trimmed to a convenient height. What venerable trees some of these are!

Dear Readers, I was visiting a friend in Walthamstow today when I passed a wall covered in ivy flowers, and I thought I’d stop and have a quick look just in case there were any ivy bees. And indeed there were! The ivy was abuzz with honeybees, hoverflies, bumblebees, ‘ordinary’ flies and a few wasps (of which more later). But of course I was looking for these little stripy critters, and there they were. In comparison to honeybees they are slightly smaller, and somehow ‘zippier’ – they can also stand up for themselves very ably, and weren’t the slightest bit fazed by the presence of a queen bumblebee about four times their size.

If you look closely at the photo above, you can see a) that the stripes on the abdomen really are very distinct. But I think an interesting diagnostic feature might be those little hairy back legs. In social bees, you often see all the pollen bundled together in a structure called a corbicula (literally ‘little basket’), but solitary bees like Ivy Bees don’t have these, and so they have to collect the pollen on their tummies (as in leaf-cutter bees) or on their legs.

In the photo below, if you look at the top left you can just see the backside of a honeybee – note that the stripes on the abdomen are not as distinct as in the ivy bee at the bottom left. You can also see a bright orange ball of pollen attached to one of the honeybee’s legs.

Don’t ask me who the critter on the bottom right is. S/he rather photobombed the scene.

So as you can probably tell I am very excited about finding these attractive little bees again, and to see them foraging so urgently. They must be making their nest tunnels somewhere fairly close by, probably in a garden that doesn’t even know that they’re there. This is the joy of having the time to stop and observe the goings on in nature, even if it’s just for five minutes (and even if it involves blocking the pavement and attracting strange looks from passersby).

Finally, I mentioned wasps, and there are a few about this year. The nests are starting to break up, and the wasps are footloose and fancy free, which is why they’re turning up at picnic tables. But some nests must still be in operational order because some of the wasps were still hunting for protein (which they feed to their larvae) rather than just snacking on the sweet stuff. One wasp was cruising around when it spotted some unfortunate fly trussed up in a spider’s web that was strewn across the ivy. The wasp not only approached and tried to cut the fly out of the web but, when it was unsuccessful, it flew through the web, making quite a kerfuffle of buzzing in the process, and then tried to extract the fly from the opposite side. It was only the sudden appearance of the spider that deterred it and sent it on its way. You might remember that I spotted a wasp actually going into an ants’ nest to remove larvae a few years ago, but this was new behaviour for me. Have you spotted wasps doing anything surprising? I suspect these insects are much more adaptable and opportunistic than we give them credit for.

And I promise to move on from ivy bees tomorrow. If I can tear myself away.

Ivy Mining Bee (Colletes hederae)

I am following the 72 microseasons in Nature’s Calendar as inspiration for the next twelve months – let’s see what we can find!

Dear Readers, I spotted my first Ivy Mining Bee in 2019, on some mature ivy in the gardens of the National Archives in Kew. How exciting it was! These little bees first arrived in the UK in 2001 and have made themselves very much at home. Although they look rather like honeybees, ivy bees have a much clearer set of yellow and black stripes on the abdomen and ginger hairs on their thorax. I took the photo above with my phone (and this is an indication that you should always have your proper camera handy – you never know when something exciting is going to pop by)

Here is a much better photo. If you have ivy, and if it ever stops raining, have a look and see if you can spot some Ivy Mining Bees. They are currently only found in Southern England, but are travelling further north every year.

Male Ivy Mining Bee (the female is very similar) (Photo by By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51348998)

When you notice ivy bees, you can be sure that autumn  is underway: this species is the very last to emerge from the nest each year, and the adults will only live for about six weeks. As the name suggests, they feed almost exclusively on ivy flowers, and use the pollen to feed their larvae. Ivy Mining Bees are solitary, with each female bee making a tunnel in soft or sandy soil, and laying a single egg in each one, which will be provisioned with the pollen. Once complete, each tunnel is sealed and the female, her job done, will die. Although the bees are solitary (inasmuch as they don’t make a communal nest) there can be many individual tunnels at a suitable site.

In August, the larvae start to hatch as adult bees, with the males hatching first. The males hang around waiting for the females to emerge a few weeks later (they time their emergence for when the ivy is starting to flower). When the females appear they produce a pheromone so overwhelming that many lust-crazed males may pounce upon a female, forming a mating ball. This reminds me of the frogs in my pond, where again the males emerge (this time from hibernation) first, and hang around waiting for the females (who seem to hibernate elsewhere in the garden) to turn up. Again, a number of males may try to mate with a single female.

A mating cluster of Ivy Bees (Photo by By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51349000)

I’ve written before about how invaluable ivy is, in spite of its reputation as a destroyer of trees and buildings. There is a clump of it in a front garden just up the road from me, and I noted 6 species of insect feeding from it even on a blustery day like today. So I wanted to mention another insect that, if you’re lucky, you might see on ivy flowers: the golden hoverfly (Callicera spinolae).

Golden Hoverfly (Callicera spinolae) Photo By Barry Walter – https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/34871549, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132624690

This is a very handsome fly, and sadly rare too, so you will  be lucky to see one – in the UK it’s mainly confined to East Anglia. The adults feed on ivy, as the name suggests, but the problem is that the larvae (like the larvae of so many hoverflies) need wet rot holes – areas of damaged and decaying wood that hold water. The larvae develop in these miniature pools, feeding on bacteria. This kind of habitat is found largely in ancient deciduous woodland, where fallen trees are allowed to remain, and where there isn’t an urge to cut things down and tidy things up. As we all know, these places are becoming rare in the UK. The Golden Hoverfly has only been seen in four locations in the past ten years, but it could be that it is under reported because it spends most of its time either in the canopy or trying to find places to lay eggs. Your best chance of seeing one is to keep an eye on those ivy flowers. Fingers crossed! And if you don’t see a Golden Hoverfly, there are a whole host of other pollinators (including Red Admiral and Holly Blue butterflies) that make good use of the late pollen and nectar that ivy provides. It’s always worth stopping at flowering ivy to have a look.

Honeybee on ivy

Wasps on ivy