Sicilian Honey Garlic

Dear Readers, I can’t believe that it’s autumn already, but at the weekend I spent a couple of hours planting out some bulbs. This year I was a little more sensible than I’ve been in previous years, and have tried not to over do it, but let’s see how that works out. First up is some Sicilian Honey Garlic, actually a kind of Allium, which I fell in love with a few years ago. I’ve planted one pot with just this plant, and in another I’ve tried a ‘bulb lasagne’ – a layer of deep-planted Sicilian Honey Garlic, which flowers in May/June, and some early flowering grape hyacinths, which should be March/April flowering. Let’s see how all of that works out! My success with bulbs is very hit and miss, so do let me know what’s worked for you, especially if your bulbs are in pots, as most of mine are. I’m sure I should be feeding the poor things at some point, though I do always top dress them.

I’ve had various grape hyacinths over the years, but this time I’ve gone for just two – the absolutely standard blue grape hyacinth, and a two-tone one which I think might be Muscari pseudomuscari (which is a bit of a mouthful). Let’s see how I get on! I often find that you can’t beat the original varieties of some of these plants.

Muscari pseudomuscari or Pseudomuscari azureum, I’ve lost track 🙂 Photo by By Meneerke bloem – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9811729

And then, in spite of many years of having the squirrels eat every one that they can find, I am growing some crocuses. Last year I bought some in pots, intending to pop them into my windowboxes but the squirrels got there overnight.

And they often dig them out of the pots at their leisure. They don’t like Alliums ( I guess it’s the garlic/oniony taste) and they don’t like daffodils (or at least in my experience) but they do seem to like nearly everything else. We planted some squill last year and when I got up the following morning, the bed looked like a miniature version of the trenches of Verdun. But I have topped the pots this year with a thin layer of gravel, in the desperation borne of hope.

Anyhow, we have some ‘Tommies’ (Crocus tommasianus) and some slightly later Dutch crocuses (Crocus vernus).

Crocus tommasinianus

Crocus vernus

And in my magpie-like search for novelty, I have also planted some bulbs that profess to be bright orange crocuses. Goodness! My whole front garden is themed around blue, purple and dark pink, and now I’ve stuck in something orange. So much for discipline.

Orange Monarch crocus (Photo from https://en-gb.bakker.com/products/25x-crocus-crocus-orange-monarch-orange-black)

Anyhow, lovelies, tell me what you’re planning for your garden/pot/windowbox, if you’re lucky enough to have any such thing, or if you’ve seen anything unusual in the garden centre/park/municipal planting lately. I love that a few hours work now can reap such pleasure in the spring. Of course, I’m largely obsessed with finding something for the bees to feed on, hence all the pollinator-friendly bulbs, and the lack of tulips and daffs which I find are not usually that interesting to the critters, but do tell me if I’m wrong, and you’ve found some that the bees love! Now that I’m retired I have no excuse not to make the garden the most splendid human and wildlife sanctuary that I can imagine. Onwards!

‘Ordinary’ grape hyacinths and windflowers from last year.

Tawny Owl chicks from Kensington Gardens

Dear Readers, there is something magical about owls, and they are often nearer to us than we think. The two chicks above were photographed in Kensington Gardens, of all places, and there are Little Owls there too (which I hope to photograph at some point this month). I had a very excited reader who lives close to the North Circular Road contact me a few years ago with a recording, and she asked if I thought she was hearing owls, because she couldn’t believe her ears. She was! And there are tawny owls in both of our local cemeteries (St Pancras and Islington and East Finchley) and probably in Coldfall Wood too.

More tawny owl chicks, because I for one can’t get enough

The prime time for owl ‘conversations’ is in the spring, but there is something particularly spine-chilling about hearing them at this time of year, as the nights draw in and Halloween approaches. Of course, for the owls themselves the calls are many things, but mostly, as Kiera Chapman points out in ‘Nature’s Calendar‘, they are a way of helping the male and female owls to establish their territories in preparation for the spring breeding season. The ‘tu-whit, tu-whoo’ call is the two owls duetting, and typically it’s thought that the ‘tu-whit’ is the female’s soliciting call, the ‘tu-whoo’ part the male answering. However, Chapman reveals that male owls can also make the ‘tu-whit’ call (though at a lower pitch than the female does), and both sexes can answer. Which just goes to show that just when I think I’ve gotten something about the natural world nailed down, it turns out to be more complicated, which is a source of some pleasure.

Let’s have a listen to some tawny owl calls.

Here is a single owl making the ‘soliciting call’ (recorded by Huw Lloyd at Bagmere Nature Reserve in Cheshire). Chapman points out that this call actually sounds much more like ‘Ku-Wick’ than ‘Tu-whit’ and she’s definitely right.

And here’s an ‘answering’ call, recorded in Queen’s Wood in Highgate by David Darrell-Lambert

And here, also by David Darrell-Lambert in Queen’s Wood, you can hear the call and the answer.

Here is another ‘soliciting call’, and you can hear how different it is from the owl in the first recording above. Owls can tell a lot from one another’s calls, not just the sex of the caller but their size, weight, health and level of aggression. These are all important factors in choosing a mate – will they be able to defend and hold a territory? Are they good hunters? Chapman points out that the males with the highest levels of testosterone call more frequently and for longer, and this is often related to the size and quality of their territories. This recording was made by Paul Driver, in Northaw in Hertfordshire.

Adult Tawny Owl (Strix aluco) in flight Photo by By BVA – Tawny owl at night, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74644057

The combination of the two owl ‘voices’ is a signal to other owls that the partnership is working, and that they are cooperating in defending their territories. It’s hard work providing for owlets, and so this teamwork is essential. Although the cry of the owl has been seen as a harbinger of doom since at least Shakespeare’s time, and probably long before, for me it signals that something in the ecosystem is working – if it can support two tawny owls, then the rest of the food chain is likely to also be relatively healthy.

So, finally, here’s a rather impressive selection of calls, with at least one duet and some other males trying to get in the action. The woods at night are an interesting soundscape, for sure, but note that at this time of year you’re most likely to hear the owls just after sunset, rather than at the dead of night. It’s definitely worth going for a dusk walk, just to see what you can hear and see.

These calls were recorded by Ilkka Heiskanen in Finland.

Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris)

Dear Readers, as you know I have long been a champion of weeds: I’m often driven to stand up for the most maligned members of our community, and that includes the botanical ones. So I was most intrigued to read about this exhibition at RHS Wisley in Surrey. Called ‘What is a Weed’ it features the work of young people from King’s College, Guildford, who are 14-15 years old, and 17-18 year-olds from St John the Baptist School in Woking. They have created a whole range of artworks,  from comics and magazines to interactive works in the show. What intrigued me most was hearing how the young people really ‘dug down’ into the whole concept of what a ‘weed’ actually is, and how strongly they identified with the plants. Many of the young people recalled either being called ‘a weed’ or feeling left out and rejected, and this seems to have given them empathy for these misunderstood and vilified plants.

The two facilitators, artists Ada Rose and Linden McMahon, seem to have done a great job in drawing out the bigger picture of the role of ‘weeds’. Ada explains below:

“There were two main areas that I knew it would be fruitful to explore. First, young people have a much more egalitarian perspective on the human relationship with plants: they don’t believe that we have a right to control or dictate the plant world. The second area is the concept of weeds and how that extends into their own lives. We looked at beauty standards and hierarchies of value and judgement, and how these have shaped their own existence, affecting their mental health and shaping wider society”.

All this heartens me greatly. The generation who are coming up largely seem to have an environmental awareness that many people lack, and a recognition that the lives of humans are deeply intertwined with those of plants and of the rest of the living world. Many of them feel passionately that we can’t keep doing things in the same old way, and this extends from ecological concerns to how we treat one another. After all, who gets to decide what’s beautiful and what’s not?

Lesser Celandine (Ficaria verna)

I remember being young, and full of rage at how unjust the world was, and how so often the weakest and most vulnerable were disregarded and trodden down. I’m still angry now, but it’s tempered by having less energy than I used to have, and being aware that it’s sometimes better to focus that rage rather than having a scattergun approach to every wrong that I encounter. But these young people should be listened to. Our binary thinking (good/bad, right/wrong, black/white) is not fit for what we’re facing. We need more nuance, to recognise that creative solutions are needed, and that, most of all, we need to work together.

As Ada says,

“What I think people might be most surprised by is the depth of their (the young people’s) compassion – not just for each other, but for everyone. They’re so invested in a society and an ecosystem that works for all of us. They inspire me so much”.

“What is a Weed” is on at The Old Laboratory, RHS Wisley, from now until 23rd January. 

Cartoon from the ‘What is a Weed’ exhibition

Pink-footed geese in flight (Photo by Steve Garvie, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/rainbirder/8083466318/)

Dear Readers, I have been thinking a lot about wild geese since our discussion yesterday, and I was delighted to find the poem below, by American poet Rachel Field. I love the simple charge of it, and the sense that sometimes you have to leave before you really want to, which I find strangely moving. See what you think.

Something Told the Wild Geese
by Rachel Field

Something told the wild geese
It was time to go.
Though the fields lay golden
Something whispered,—‘Snow.’
Leaves were green and stirring,
Berries, luster-glossed,
But beneath warm feathers
Something cautioned,—‘Frost.’
All the sagging orchards
Steamed with amber spice,
But each wild breast stiffened
At remembered ice.
Something told the wild geese
It was time to fly,—
Summer sun was on their wings,
Winter in their cry.

And I suppose that it’s impossible to talk about wild geese and poetry at the same time without mentioning Mary Oliver? This one is so familiar to me that I could (almost) recite it, and yet it seems fresh at every reading, to me at least.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

And how about this one, by Martín Espada, a Bostonian poet. I was moved when I read it, but for a real treat, listen to it here. You won’t regret it, I promise.

After the Goose That Rose Like the God of Geese
Written by Martín Espada

Everything that lives is Holy.
—William Blake

After the phone call about my father far away,
after the next-day flight cancelled by the blizzard,
after the last words left unsaid between us,
after the harvest of the organs at the morgue,
after the mortuary and cremation of the body,
after the box of ashes shipped to my door by mail,
after the memorial service for him in Brooklyn,

I said: I want to feed the birds, I want to feed bread
to the birds. I want to feed bread to the birds at the park.

After the walk around the pond and the war memorial,
after the signs at every step that read: Do Not Feed The Geese,
after the goose that rose from the water like the god of geese,
after the goose that shrieked like a demon from the hell of geese,
after the goose that scattered the creatures smaller than geese,
after the hard beak, the wild mouth taking bread from my hand,

there was quiet in my head, no cacophony of the dead
lost in the catacombs, no mosquito hum of condolences,
only the next offering of bread raised up in my open hand,
the bread warm on the table of my truce with the world.

Over to you, lovelies? Any favourite swan/goose poems out there? Do share!

Mute swans in flight (Photo by Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Dear Readers, many years ago I lived in Chadwell Heath, in the London Borough of Redbridge. It was a good mile to the station and as I was working in Farnborough I often had to set out very early in the morning. So one October morning, as it was just getting light, I was heading off with my laptop in my rucksack when I heard a strange, unearthly sound, and three mute swans flew over my head, no doubt en route to Havering Country Park. It says something for the almost supernatural quality of the encounter that I still remember it 30 years later: the sound of my footsteps on the silent street, the strange sound of the wings, and that glorious sight of the three white birds as they passed by. I stood open-mouthed and watched them pass, their wingbeats audible for long seconds. At that moment I could believe in portents and omens.

Have a listen here. You’ll see what I mean. Mute swans might be ‘mute’ in terms of calls (though they are not silent, having a fine variety of grunts and cries) but this is their special music. This particular recording was made by Johannes Dag Meyer, in Germany.

For more evocative and haunting swan music, it’s hard to beat the Whooper swan in flight, here recorded by Tomas Berg in Sweden. Whoopers actually are migratory birds, arriving in the UK from Iceland every year.

But let’s not forget the sound of geese. When I lived in Dundee, I would sometimes hear the sound of the geese arriving (so unfamiliar to a London girl) and would look up to see them flying in a V-formation, usually against a curdled, blood-red sky. They seemed impossibly exotic, and reminded me of how far away I was from home and everything that was familiar. To this day, I can’t hear them without feeling a little melancholy. It wasn’t helped by the fact that my boss at the time was a shooting man, who would lay in a boat in the Tay estuary waiting for the poor tired geese to arrive. He’d describe how they’d ‘whiffle’ on landing, rocking from side to side to make themselves less of a target for predators. It was much harder to evade a bullet, however. What made it worse was that he didn’t even like to eat goose.

Pink-footed geese in flight (Photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/blondinrikard/)

And here is the sound of Pink-footed geese, recorded in the UK by David Darrell-Lambert

This is a great time of year to get to your local RSPB reserve if you’re in the UK, or to visit some local wetlands if you’re in North America – so many winged creatures are on the move, heading to safer places to sit out the winter. There are some of the most spectacular sights in nature to be seen in spite of the dwindling days and extending nights, the colder temperatures and the falling leaves. What have you seen?

Raywood ash trees in St Pancras and Islington cemetery

Dear Readers, clearly this retirement thing has made me too relaxed because I managed to forget about my October update, and now it’s October, but at least there are another 28 days to go….

Dear Readers, October can be a glorious month, full of crimson and gold and rust and scarlet, or it can be a grey, drizzly month. Whichever it is, it’s important to make the most of it, before the clocks go back in the UK at the end of the month and we start to hunker down for the winter. There is a lot to see – fungi springing up, migrant birds arriving, leaves turning – but for Bugwoman it marks the last month when I’m likely to see our invertebrate friends in any numbers. Still, the season turns, and we’re none the worse for it.

Things to Do

• 8th October marks the World Conker Championships, held annually in the grounds of the Shuckburgh Arms in Southwick, near Oundle (the closest big town is Peterborough). The event raises money for charities that work with the visually impaired (over £420k so far), and also for the local church and village hall in Southwick. It sounds like a lot of fun, but no doubt the contenders take it very seriously.
• On 12th October, NASA will (hopefully) be launching the Psyche mission. The plan is to visit and orbit an asteroid where the metal-rich core is exposed – this may give useful information about the history of the Earth and of other planets in the Solar System. You can read more about it here, and keep an eye open for when the livestream of the launch will be shown. Arrival at the asteroid is likely to be about 100 days after launch.
• Our old friends Rosemoor Gardens in Torrington, Devon, have courses on autumn photography and autumn gardening (on 14th and 12th October respectively). For autumn colour, many sites recommend Hyde Hall in Essex, Winkworth Arboretum in Surrey and Stourhead in Wiltshire but I’m sure there are many more, and even your local park or woodland (or cemetery) should be wonderful at this time of year.
• The London Natural History Society are planning a Geotrail walk (along with ecology and entomology) in Bedfords Park in Havering . However, if you fancy taking yourself off on a walk to discover the geology of various London areas, you can download a map and details from here.

Plants for Pollinators

• One of the very best plants for pollinators at this time of year is flowering ivy – I’ve spent lots of time scanning the wasps and bees, and if you’re lucky you might see some ivy bees (Colletes hederae), stripey little chaps who first arrived in the UK in Dorset in 2001, and who have been moving north ever since.

Ivy bee

Other RHS – recommended plants include devil’s bit scabious, bistort, our old favourite Bowles’s Mauve perennial wallflower, Abelia x grandiflora and the strawberry tree. I am definitely planning on getting some of the first two to try in the garden, especially as bistort is said to be shade-tolerant. This is also the season for Japanese anemones which seems popular with some bees.

Abelia x grandiflora ‘Confetti’

The flowering season for wild plants is definitely coming to an end, but the Michaelmas daisies are often still going strong, and you might see holly in flower, along with yarrow, cyclamen, daisies and brambles, so there is still food around for any laggardly pollinators.

Bird Behaviour

• Redwings and fieldfares should be starting to arrive by now, attracted by the crop of berries. If you stand outside on a cold, crisp night you might hear them calling as they migrate overhead – listening for the sounds of nocturnal migration (or nocmig as it’s called) became a very popular pastime amongst birders during the lockdown. There is something magical about hearing the flocks of birds pass overhead when you can’t see them.

Redwings have a very piercing, high-pitched call…(recording by Paul Kelly in County Meath, Ireland)

The call of the fieldfare at night is much more of a chuckle (recorded by Irish Wildlife Sounds in County Wexford, Ireland)

• You might be lucky enough to spot a waxwing, especially if you live along the north-east coast of Scotland and England – the birds irrupt from Scandinavia and will drift west and south over the coming months
• Starlings and other birds, all animosity dropped, will start to gather in huge flocks. If you’re lucky, you might spot a starling murmuration
• If you are even luckier, you might see a Palla’s warbler – these tiny birds are rare but they are being seen more often in the east and south of England, and October is the prime month for them to arrive. They move from China to south east Asia for the winter, but there are about sixty records in the UK every autumn, and probably lots more that go unnoticed. It’s hypothesised that either they get blown off course during their migration, or simply that they are enlarging their range.

Pallas’s warbler (Photo By 孟宪伟 – 个人拍摄,)

• This is also a great time of year to spot goldcrest – the resident birds are joined by birds from mainland Europe. In my experience you can often find them foraging for tiny insects in yew hedges and trees, though they’re so fast that you’ll have to be patient to get a good view. I’ve been trying to get a photo of the ones in the cemetery since I started the blog in 2014 and haven’t managed a good one yet.

Plants in Flower

• In addition to all the pollinator plants mentioned above, keep your eyes open for all the prairie favourites who really come into their own in October – rudbeckia, helenium, single dahlias, chrysanthemums.

• But really, October is the month for foliage and berries – Japanese acers will be at their best, smoke bushes (Cotinga) may be covered in fluff, and every plant, shrub and tree that produces fruit, from crab apples to cotoneasters, from the acorns on the oaks to beech mast, from rowan to sloe, should be bursting with energy-rich food for birds, small rodents and even foxes.

Other Things to Watch/Listen Out For

• It’s the height of the deer rut, so whether you live close to the Scottish Highlands or within walking distance of Richmond Park, stags will be full of testosterone and up for a fight. Well worth observing from a respectful distance.
• Wildfowl start to arrive from Russia – our native populations of teal, wigeon, pintail, tufted duck and pochard are all boosted by great flocks from further east. Scaup visit in the winter, as do the common and velvet scoters, though they are largely sea ducks, unlikely to turn up on a pond. A visit to the coast or to local wetlands is highly recommended at this time of year.
• This is also a great time of year to hear tawny owls – this recording is lovely, it’s a male and female calling to one another from opposite sides of a lake. The recording is by Regina Eidner, and it was made in Brandenburg, Germany.

• Having said earlier that there weren’t many invertebrates around, you might still see shieldbugs (the juveniles change colour from bright green to brown before overwintering as adults – the colour change means that they’re better camouflaged against the twigs and dry leaves. Some bush crickets are also around, and are attracted to light, so you might find one of these surprising insects in the house as late as November.

Hawthorn Shield Bug

Southern Bush Cricket

• Another late-flying insect is the batman hoverfly (Myathropa florea), so named for the pattern on its thorax that looks like the bat signal in the films. What a handsome creature it is! Well worth looking out for, and often found on ivy or on sedum/hylotelephium.

Batman hoverfly

• October is also the start of fungi season, check your local parks and wild places to see if there are any walks or ID sessions. Depending on the weather, the fungi can be spectacular – below are just a few from my local cemetery last year.

• The October full moon is on 28th October and is known as the Hunter’s Moon or the Blood Moon

Holidays and Celebrations

• 1st October – Harvest Home/Ingathering (Traditional)
• 1st October – Start of Black History Month
• 1st October – Start of English pudding season (I have no idea what this is, but it sounds worth celebrating)
• 11th October – Old Michaelmas Day, when the devil is said to spit on the blackberries so they shouldn’t be eaten after this date
• 21st October – Apple Day
• 29th October – British Summertime and Irish Standard Time end, and the clocks go back one hour
• 31st October – Halloween

Male jumping spider

Dear Readers, I have been writing this blog since 2014 (on a daily basis since lockdown in 2020) and I feel as if I still haven’t cracked two related stylistic problems when I write about animals.

First up, how do we describe the sex of an animal when we don’t know whether it’s male or female? I remember when I was a young woman I had a huge poster of a blue whale on my wall.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” I enthused to a friend.

“How do you know it’s female?” my friend asked.

“How do you know it’s not?” I replied. And herein is the problem.

We have a tendency, probably enshrined in the way that English has developed, to regard all animals as male unless they are definitely known to be female, and to me this doesn’t feel right. After all, in most species there’s a roughly 50:50 split. Take the case of Community Vole, for example. It’s hard to sex little rodents at the best of times, and so I ended up with my usual workaround – the vole was described as s/he or they according to the context.

I do appreciate that I am not consistent on this (I keep trying things out to see what seems the least clunky/the most elegant), but it does address this particular problem, for me at least. Because it matters to me that we at least acknowledge that the animal that we’re looking at has an equal chance of being female or male.

Sometimes, of course, it’s clear that an animal is male (as in the jumping spider above – the pedipalps (little boxing gloves) at the front are only possessed by males) or female (the fox in the photo below showed herself to be a vixen when she squatted to pee, rather than lifting her leg as a male would).

But Bug Woman, I hear you say, surely the easy answer is to call animals ‘it’, in the time-honoured tradition? Well, this is my second stylistic problem, because to call something ‘it’ denies it all individuality and personhood, and designates it as an object. I am sure many of us remember ‘Silence of the Lambs’, and the particularly creepy bit where the serial killer is trying to persuade his captive victim to put some skin lotion on, for reasons too dreadful to contemplate here.

“It puts the lotion on its skin” he intones.

Once something is an ‘it’, you can do whatever you like to it, and there is far too much ‘it-ing’ going on in the world.

And yes, I have sometimes used ‘it’ in my pieces when I’m in a rush and have no idea how to work around whatever problem has been thrown up by the story I’m trying to tell. But it always feels lazy to me. My cat is not an ‘it’. The birds in my garden are not ‘it’. Even the spider on the web in my living room window, being buffeted by the wind as I write this, is not an ‘it’ (in fact I’m 99% sure that she’s a she).

And so here I am, trying to be respectful and tying myself in knots, but I do think there is a serious point here. In various places in the world, rivers, mountains and other natural features are being considered for the status of legal personhood, as a way of protecting them, because persons have certain inalienable rights. It feels more important than ever that we celebrate the uniqueness and individuality of an animal and that we recognise that it, too, has personality and a way of being in the world. Because as the story of Community Vole showed us, it’s easier for people to care about one animal than about animals in general, just as the story of one homeless person or one refugee can make us feel an empathy that statistics and generalisations never can.

Let me know what you think, Readers! Do all these convolutions get in the way of enjoying the blog, or do they make the blog feel more thoughtful and inclusive?

Dear Readers, I like to think of myself as pretty immune to fear when it comes to insects, though obviously I have a healthy respect for those that can bite and sting and will give them the space that they need. But as a child I had a completely irrational terror of the common-or-garden cranefly, or daddy-long-legs as they’re known in the UK. There’s something about the way that they fly so erratically that still gives me the shivers, though I’m much more under control than I used to be. After all, these creatures are harmless and, once hatched, have vanishingly short lives. For me they are the quintessential sign of autumn, as they bask in the sunshine or search for places to lay their eggs. Mum and Dad’s bungalow walls in Dorset were often covered in them, and it was a rare evening when a daddy-long-legs didn’t fly in and bash itself half to death against the ceiling light.

These are a very ancient type of fly: they were probably bumbling around 245 million years ago, and there are over 15,000 species of cranefly, in 500 genera. I was delighted to hear that scientists describe them as ‘deciduous’, not because they lose their leaves easily but because their legs detach very easily from their bodies, presumably as a way to thwart predators. In my more unenlightened days I would sometimes attempt to swat craneflies, and was always horrified at how easily their legs would come off. Furthermore, sometimes I would assume that the insect was dead only to hear it rustling some hours later, finally lifting off out of the wastepaper basket where its supposed corpse had been deposited and flying around the room like some zombie invertebrate. These days, I will carefully catch an errant cranefly in a glass and take it outside, which is much kinder. Mostly craneflies cannot feed as adults, and are really just waiting to mate, lay their eggs and die. I am pretty sure that the one in the photo is a gravid female.

While most baby animals have a kind of charm, it’s hard to find find anything cute about a larval cranefly, or leatherjacket. In many of those 15,000 species, the larva is a detritivore, helping to tidy up rotting vegetation. Alas, the commonest UK craneflies (Tipula sp.) include some species where the larvae feed on the roots of living plants – you will sometimes dig up a leatherjacket when trying to sort out a lawn, for example. Fortunately, the larvae are also a juicy snack for many birds, including crows, magpies, jackdaws and especially rooks. There was one famous incident in 1935 when there were so many leatherjackets under the wicket at Lords cricket ground that the groundstaff were tasked with digging them up and burning them (surely putting them on a bird table would have been a more ecological way to deal with the situation, but these were less enlightened times). Our old friend Wikipedia notes that ‘the pitch took unaccustomed spin for the rest of the season’.

This was clearly a problem across the country in the mid 1930s, and for your delectation, here is a 1936 article from The Guardian, which is a pure delight. As a sample, here is a description of a leatherjacket from the piece in question:

‘a horrible thing like a midget concertina, more or less the same at both ends, without any legs‘.

I have no idea what Paris Green is, but I do like the idea of turning over the soil to expose the grubs to their natural enemies.

Leatherjacket (Photo by Rasbak, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

I really do want to work on my attitude to craneflies, though. Their lives are short, and they can’t help having detachable legs and little aeronautical skill. Their heads look rather like those of miniature carousel horses, and I find that that helps a bit, though you could argue that it would be a roundabout from hell.

Head of a cranefly (Photo by By Thomas Shahan – Crane Fly – (Tipula), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8998257)

However, the largest cranefly in the world was recently discovered in China, and has the scientific name Holurusia mikado.

Horusia mikado, the world’s largest cranefly (Photo from https://www.chinadailyhk.com/articles/38/140/76/1524561317187.html)

Sadly, many newspapers recorded the species as a mosquito, even though the insect barely feeds, and only eats nectar when it does. Poor cranefly! I can feel my empathy winning out over fear, as it so often does. It can’t be a lot of fun being a cranefly. To end, here’s a rather sad summing up of the life of the daddy-long-legs, written by Craig Brown at the height of an ‘explosion’ of craneflies in 2006, and included in ‘Bugs Britannica’ by Peter Marren and Richard Mabey.

“It is, I suppose, this sense of their utter uselessness that makes us pity them, and perhaps even, in our more downhearted moments, identify with them. Their life is all such an effort – and to what purpose?….Swarms of male daddy longlegs dance around like drunken morons on the lookout for lady friends. Copulation sounds like a grim affair for both parties. ‘The male genitalia include a pair of claspers which grip the female genital valves’, says one encyclopedia, ‘but in order to do so the male’s abdomen has to be twisted through 180 degrees’. Their only pleasure in life seems to be cleaning their legs, which they do obsessively after each meal, pulling them one at a time through their jaws. After all this, they bluster into a light-bulb, have a pot-shot taken at them, lose half their legs, crawl around for a bit, lose the other half, and then die. It’s not a life to be envied, I think, as I reach for the dustpan and brush”.