Bittersweet (Solanum dulcamara)

Dear Readers, our next door neighbours are putting in a new fence, which will be fence panels about six feet high. They have agreed to leave some gaps in/underneath the fence for hedgehogs/frogs etc which is great, though I will miss chatting to them over the much lower fence that we currently have. Still, no judgement here! They are lovely neighbours, and everyone does what they think is best with regards to privacy/light etc.

It does now present me with an opportunity – another vertical surface to use for wildlife! It is west-facing, although parts of it will be in shadow from trees and the hedge. So, I’m touting around for suggestions – I have a few thoughts myself, but as usual I’m throwing myself on the Bug Woman hive mind for your experiences.

First up, I want to reinstitute some bittersweet – it planted itself a few years ago, and then died. But a few months back, I found that some berries had germinated in a bucket (go figure) and so I’d like to plant it again. It’s such fun to hear the bumblebees buzz-pollinating, and to see the purple flowers and red/green berries.

Then, I’m thinking dog rose, another splendid plant for pollinators, plus who knows who will appreciate its thorny recesses once it gets going?

Does anyone have any experience with traveller’s joy, /old man’s beard, our only native clematis?

Traveller’s Joy/Old Man’s Beard (Clematis vitalba)

I already have ivy in the garden, but I guess this would be another wildlife-friendly choice, particularly in the darker areas….

Ivy bees on ivy

Anyhow, the plants don’t have to be native, provided that they have wildlife value – increasingly I’m thinking that our native plants are going to come under increasing stress with climate change, and some botanists are suggesting that we plant things that are ‘adjacent’ to our current plants – some insects are already adapting to red birch as well as silver birch, for example, and something that can survive and that produces nectar or pollen is going to be a better choice than something that can no longer survive. Tricky questions for sure, and no absolute answers, but this is a topic for a future blog. Anyhow, over to you readers!

Nerine(Nerine bowdenii)

Dear Readers, I have a special affection for plant that bloom in the autumn, when  everything else is closing down, and this Nerine, otherwise known as the Cornish Lily, Cape Flower, Guernsey Lily or Bowden’s Lily, is a truly spectacular plant. Although it looks like a lily, it’s actually much more closely related to the Amaryllis. As pointed out in a previous post, it comes from South Africa, as do the other 20-30 species (scientists don’t seem to be able to come to a consensus on the number), so Cape Flower is probably the most accurate vernacular name.

Nerines are named for the Nereids, sea-going female spirits who rescued drowning sailors – there was a story that the plant first arrived in Guernsey after being washed ashore from a shipwreck. This particular species (Nerine bowdenii) was named after Athelstan Cornish-Bowden, surveyor-general in South Africa in the early 1900s, who first sent the bulbs (apparently shaped like ‘old-fashioned Chianti bottles’) to the UK in 1904.

Nerines are apparently fairly hardy (down to -15 degrees Celsius), grow best when crowded and hate being disturbed. It doesn’t like tropical or humid conditions, but does like heat. It sounds like a bit of a handful to be perfectly honest, but clearly the ones that I saw here on the County Roads in East Finchley were very happy. The owner of this house also has great success with Agapanthus, another South African bulbous plant, so clearly they have skills! I am very impressed.

Nerine bulbs contain a chemical called ungeremine, which is being investigated as a possible medicine for Alzheimer’s Disease, and as a bactericide. It also seems to have potential in the treatment of malaria and sleeping sickness.

In the wild, Nerine bowdenii is a plant of mountainous terrain with heavy summer rains and cold winter temperatures – note that any rain runs away, hence this plant’s hatred of having ‘wet feet’. It is pollinated by the long-tongued fly Prosoeca ganglbaueri, which has a tongue long enough to get to the nectar at the base of a nerine flower. What an astonishing creature – its tongue is actually longer than its body. And let’s not forget how important flies are in pollination – we all love the bees, with their furry bodies and (usually) cheerful dispositions, but let’s give credit where it’s due to our other buzzy insect neighbours.

Proseoeca ganglbaueri – look at the length of that tongue! Photo by Harroi de Moor at https://pollinationresearch.wordpress.com/2017/06/

I was surprised that I couldn’t find a poem on nerines, or Guernsey Lilies, or Cornish Lilies, so in the end, I searched for the colour pink, and came up with this, by Siegfried Sassoon. I have read a lot of Sassoon’s poetry, but this one was new to me. ‘In the pink’ means ‘being in good health, having reasons to be optimistic’. Plenty of irony here. See what you think.

‘In The Pink’ by Siegfried Sassoon

So Davies wrote: ‘ This leaves me in the pink. ‘
Then scrawled his name: ‘ Your loving sweetheart Willie ‘
With crosses for a hug. He’d had a drink
Of rum and tea; and, though the barn was chilly,
For once his blood ram warm; he had pay to spend,
Winter was passing; soon the year would mend.

He couldn’t sleep that night. Stiff in the dark
He groaned and thought of Sundays at the farm,
When he’d go out as cheerful as a lark
In his best suit to wander arm-in-arm
With brown-eyed Gwen, and whisper in her ear
The simple, silly things she liked to hear.

And then he thought: to-morrow night we trudge
Up to the trenches, and my boots are rotten.
Five miles of stodgy clay and freezing sludge,
And everything but wretchedness forgotten.
To-night he’s in the pink; but soon he’ll die.
And still the war goes on; he don’t know why.

Dear Readers, before I start complaining and rolling my eyes, here is some good news: Lily and Margot, the Blue-throated Macaws who went missing from London Zoo nearly a week ago, are home. They were found nearly sixty miles away from the Zoo, in Cambridgeshire. They apparently flew into the arms of their Keepers, and were soon munching away on pumpkin seeds, walnuts and pecans. They’ll be kept in quarantine for a few weeks, and will then be reunited with their parents. It’s so nice to know that they’re now safely ‘home’.

And now, back to the complaining and eye-rolling. Dear Readers, I hope you’ll forgive me having a rant here, but with four days to go until Halloween I am already seeing hedges locally garlanded with this stuff – artificial spiders’ web (in the image above also with some artificial spiders). The webs are made of plastic, which will never break down, but they also entangle everything from real spiders, late-flying bumblebees looking for somewhere to hibernate, hedge-roosting birds and even foxes. I am in general something of a Halloween sceptic – whilst I can see the point of a mid-winter festival to keep the demons at bay, I am less impressed with the volume of plastic tat, palm oil and sugar involved. I can see the fun in wandering the streets dressed as a vampire (something that I did to raise money for charity many moons ago), and generally people are very respectful of those who don’t want to be opening their door to werewolves and witches every five minutes for three or four hours, but I do draw the line at garrotting the wildlife. If people absolutely have to use this stuff, can they pop it on on 31st October and take it off on 1st November? Or come up with some more wildlife-friendly way to make an impression?

To be fair, I think a lot of people don’t even know about the impact of these things, but maybe that’s the problem. Until we really do consider our animal neighbours as part of our community, we’ll carry on thinking we’re the only important creatures on this planet. And yes, it’s absolutely true that habitat destruction, window-strike due to lights being left on in skyscrapers and global warming are far greater risks to wildlife of all kinds, but choosing not to use artificial spider web is an easy choice available to all of us, not something that requires a massive change in our habits.

Oh, and pumpkins. Make soup, roast the seeds, use the hollowed-out pumpkin as a bird feeder. Just don’t dump the blooming things in your local woodland, and don’t put them out as ‘food for the hedgehogs’, as it gives them (and many other animals) diarrhoea.

Rant over. What do you think? Curmudgeon or not?

Golden Retriever puppy (Photo By Golden Trvs Gol twister – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18521767)

Dear Readers, anyone who has ever owned a dog knows that they will often let you know when they want something (cocked head, raised paw, that thing they do with their eyebrows), but it is interesting that puppies as young as six weeks old will come and ask humans for help when confronted with something complicated or frightening. To see how this worked, scientist Stephanie Riemer at The University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna worked with 83 puppies, aged between 41 and 52 days, and of eight different breeds. All  the dogs were raised by small-scale breeders in their homes, which meant that they were very familiar with humans from birth.

Riemer (who was familiar to all the puppies, and what a wonderful job that must be) took the dogs into an unfamiliar room in their houses, and presented them with either an ‘impossible’ task (in this case, an upside-down plastic container with food inside, but which was glued to the floor) or a slightly scary toy. She then watched to see if the puppies looked at the toy/cup and then at a human within two seconds – this is how human babies try to let their caregivers know what they want, although they are generally ten months old when they start this behaviour. 69 percent of the puppies did this when confronted with the scary toy, and 46 percent did it with the upturned cup. Often the puppies would look at the toy/cup, then at the human, and then back at the toy/cup, as if trying to reinforce exactly what they wanted help with, and often accompanied this routine with whimpering. Could the message be any clearer?

The puppies could be asking for help from the humans, seeking reassurance, or asking for additional information, but whatever they’re doing, this will come as no surprise to dog owners (although I was surprised at how early the behaviour starts). I’m sure we’ve all got stories about how our dogs managed to tell us something,

However, how about cats? Many of the cats I’ve fostered or ‘owned’ would come to let me know that something wasn’t right – on one occasion my cats Bonnie and Clyde wouldn’t leave me alone until I went to look in the kitchen and found that the washing machine was blocked and the floor was awash with water. My dear recently-departed Willow would sometimes lead me to where I’d absent-mindedly left an open umbrella  which was frightening her when she wanted to use her litter tray.

And does it even stop there? My grandmother had a tortoise that would bang on the garden door with his shell when he wanted to go in or out.

The animals that live with us are usually totally dependent on humans for food, shelter, medical care and all those intangible things – love, reassurance, education in what to do and what not to do. No wonder they try to find ways to tell us what they need, or what they’re frightened of, or to ask us what the hell is going on. Dogs are the absolute masters and mistresses of getting their message across, with their expressive faces and attunement to our moods and habits, but I wonder what we miss with our cats, let alone our rabbits or other animals. Still, our relationships can be so much richer if we’re able to pay attention and try to understand why on earth the animals we share our homes with are doing what they do.

I’d be willing to bet that we’ve all got stories about animals trying to tell us ‘stuff’, so share away! I’m ready to be amazed.

You can read the whole article in New Scientist here, and the research paper is here.

Dear Readers, now that the trees have been ‘pruned’ and the clocks have gone back, it’s past time to think about getting some bulbs into the ground. Now that I have someone to help me with the hard work I’ve been planning to sort out some more woodland bulbs – the area that they’re in has gotten rather overgrown of late, but it used to be lovely in the spring. I was a little disappointed with the selection at the garden centre, but then I am later than usual, so I’ve only got myself (or at least my ankle) to blame. I’ve also ordered some ‘bog-standard’ grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum) and some snakeshead fritillaries (Fritillaria melagris), which, with their chequerboard pattern and nodding flowers are amongst my very favourites.

At the garden centre there was a bit of a push on something called ‘bulb booster’ – has anybody used it? I can see the point if you’re planting up tubs, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it in the garden. Thoughts, anyone? I might buy some if anyone thinks that it’s helped their bulbs. I could even conduct an experiment 🙂 .

Incidentally, I couldn’t resist the big bag of crocuses, which were much cheaper than the price on the packet, but I can’t plant them at the back of the house – it’s not sunny enough and the squirrels will have a field day. But, they did seem to work in pots at the front of the house provided I planted them under a thick-ish layer of gravel. Let’s see how they do this year.

I am also planning to buy some bluebells and snowdrops ‘in the green’ next year, to see if I can finally get more than my single bluebell and single patch of snowdrops.

My one patch of snowdrops

I should have gotten some more Cyclamen coum corms, they seem to do rather well in the garden, but everyone is now sold out, so that will have to wait until next year. Sigh.

Cyclamen coum, aka sowbread

Anyhow, what’s happening in your gardens? Do you have plans for the spring, or are you happy with how things are currently? Or has life rather overtaken everything, much as it did for me in  the summer? It’s always interesting to see how everyone is doing, up and down the country.

Blue-throated macaws (Ara glaucogularis) PhotoBy David Friel – originally posted to Flickr as More Blue-throated Macaws Ara glaucogularis, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6641684

Dear Readers, you might have read that two Blue-throated Macaws named Margot and Lily have gone AWOL from London Zoo during one of their regular flights. They have been out and about since Monday, which is really quite a long time for a pair of tropical birds to be away from their heated quarters (and their parents, Popeye and Olly). I am very surprised that they haven’t been sighted – after all, they’re about three feet tall and turquoise and yellow, so they won’t be easily mistaken for anything else.

The macaws are flown daily, to give them a chance to stretch their wings and to give them a glimpse of the world outside their cage. In the past they’ve sometimes headed for the trees and stayed there for a couple of hours, but today their journey has clearly taken them off on an adventure.

Blue-throated macaws are vanishingly rare in the wild, with possibly only 300 birds left. Fortunately they breed well in captivity, but as with so many animals, the question becomes ‘where is safe for them to be released, even if they could be rehabilitated?’ The forests of Bolivia, where they live, are being encroached on from all directions. They are reliant on the tall palm trees of the region for both food and nest sites, and these too are often cut down. Fortunately there are conservation measures now in place in Bolivia, with the support of local people, vital to the success of these programmes – nest sites are monitored for predators, both animal and human, and the health and well-being of individual birds and chicks is noted. Whether this will work remains to be seen with such a small wild population, but it always warms my heart to know that people are trying to protect a species after such a history of doing it harm.

Blue-throated macaw (Ara glaucogularis) in flight – Photo By Carsten Steger – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107017523

A few other birds have ‘wandered off’ from London Zoo in the past few years – a Barn Owl went ‘flyabout’ during another routine flying exercise, but was brought back within a few hours. More excitingly, a Waldrapp Ibis escaped from the Snowden Aviary in 2022 after lifting some slack wire and making its escape. It was later recaptured in Camden, after quite a lot of excitement. Waldrapp Ibises are also critically endangered, and in one conservation exercise, were taught to migrate by conservationists using hang gliders.

Waldrapp Ibis (Geronticus_eremita) PHotoBy Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77678707

And there were incidents involving the Crested Caracara, a Mexican bird of prey, in 2018, 2019 and 2022. One bird, Jester, gave keepers quite the runaround in 2022 – she was spotted in Regent’s Park but then headed south and west, and was seen in Barnes and on Streatham Common before being recaptured after a week.

Crested Caracars (Photo By Andreas Trepte – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43914003)

In 2019 and 2018 Louie, a Striated Caracara from the Falkland Islands, also made a bid for freedom, again after a free-flying event. The keepers attempted to lure it back with a dead rat on a stick. Louie was quite the character. I hand you over to the South Atlantic News Agency for the full story. I suspect that somebody has paid in full for their dramatic licence. First up, the reaction of a parent who was in Regent’s Park and witnessed the keepers’ attempts at recapture.

“Parent Illy Montefiore, who was in the park, said: “This was particularly disgusting for people having picnics and had not wished to see this spectacle. Imagine if you were walking your dog, and someone came along swinging around a bit of carcass? You’d this was really out of order.”

She added that other park birds had been “flocking in mass and responding loudly” to Louie’s arrival on the tree, adding: “It was like Alfred Hitchcock. It was surrounded by crows in the tree. There wasn’t a pigeon in sight. We spoke to a zookeeper and they said it had been spooked from what had happened in a show. It didn’t seem at all interested in coming down. Then it just flew off, prehistorically.”

The bird eventually flew back into the zoo on Tuesday morning after two days as a fugitive.

In January 2018, Louie spent ten days on the run after fleeing a similar exercise. It was later seen swooping for scraps from a butchers on the Kilburn High Road before tucking into a whole cooked chicken in Grange Park. It was caught by rangers while sitting on a tree in the park later that day.”

So, Lily and Margot the macaws are not the first birds to leave the comfort of their quarters at London Zoo and head for the hills. But the nights are drawing in, and the temperatures are dropping, so I hope they find their way home soon. It’s one thing being a fugitive in the summer when you’re a species that is adapted to life in the UK, it’s quite another when you’re a tropical macaw.

Striated Caracara (Photo By The joy of all things – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149611693)

Dear Readers, as I wandered home from seeing my friend A this evening I thought again about how lucky I am to live where I do. There is always something to see in the front gardens of the County Roads here in East Finchley, but since breaking my leg I have only rarely been out after dark. But today, with the sun setting and just a short walk home, I decided to take out my camera and see what I could see.

One front garden has agapanthus in the summer, and nerines in the autumn. They always cheer me up! Also known as Guernsey Lilies, they aren’t from the Channel Islands, nor are they lilies, but are actually related to that favourite Christmas bulb, the Amaryllis, and come from South Africa. It occurs to me that they have never featured as a Wednesday Weed. Watch this space!

Nerines

Several people have Japanese Maples that are coming into their full glory at the moment. Just look at those exquisite leaves!

And this fine red hydrangea could give the maples a run for their money.

I haven’t quite gotten over the novelty of having ginkgo trees as street trees – this seems like a new one (or maybe I just haven’t noticed it before). It amazes me to think of these trees living alongside giant dragonflies in the Permian era. All the other species of Ginkgo have become extinct over the millennia, leaving us with just this one species. And now here it is, outside a Victorian house in East Finchley.

And it’s not the only one – here’s one on the High Street…

A few weeks ago I noted that some Verbena bonariensis had hopped over the fence and were growing through the paving stones. One clump has been crushed during the building of a new wall, but the other one is still in flower, and still going strong.

And then there’s the familiar sound of a pair of magpies surveying their kingdom.

Today was a good day – I’m still a bit slow, but it means that I notice things. And I got very good news from the Cardiology department at the Whittington Hospital – you might remember that I’ve had a 24 hour blood pressure test and an echocardiogram recently. Well, the results are in and there’s nothing to worry about at the moment – my blood pressure is fine, and my echocardiogram is showing only the slightest of abnormalities, so all is good at the moment, and they’ll call me back for another echocardiogram in a year’s time. Hooray! Time for a tiny celebration, I think.

Cabbage Palm in full flower

Dear Readers, today I was wrestling with my different theories of speciation (yes, it’s Year Five of my Open University Biology/Environmental Science degree) when I saw a small flock of starlings nibbling the seeds from the cabbage palm next door. What a surprise! They were getting well stuck in, and I suspect that half the seeds were gone in a matter of minutes. I am always amazed at how animals are able to recognise different kinds of foodstuffs, even if they’ve never seen them before – it’s not as if a London starling would have a wide familiarity with a plant from New Zealand.

The starlings were way too quick for me to hobble downstairs to collect my camera (which is inevitably on the wrong floor), but I wondered if any of you had seen anything similar? Birds are often endlessly adaptable, so it would be good to know  if your local birds had found unusual food sources.

Sparrows eating aphids from the buddleia

In other news, I am  slowly getting back to where I was before my second fall, though it’s tricky walking about when both legs are sore. On the other hand, I managed to get all the way to Holborn yesterday, to meet a friend at the Royal Opera House, and after some fortifying  coffee I made it all the way to Leicester Square for the tube home. Admittedly, I had to sit on the sofa with my legs raised for the rest of the day, but it feels like progress. And I have an incentive – we’re hoping to head to Ravenna for a few days in a few weeks, for my long-suffering husband’s much belated  birthday celebration. Sadly northern Italy has been hit by horrendous floods, so we’re waiting to see how things turn out.

I had a word with my GP about this falling-over thing, and she is going to send me off for a nerve conduction test – there seems to be some neuropathy in both feet (nothing to do with diabetes in this case, though this is the most common cause). In the meantime I’m doing my physiotherapy and pilates, and have bought myself some barefoot shoes just to try – they are meant to help with neuropathy, balance and various other things, so we’ll see how we go. I think I’ll look like MInnie Mouse, but elegance is the last of my worries at this point. Has anyone else tried anything similar? Do tell!

Minnie Mouse?

Eurasian Hoopoe (Upupa epops) Photo By Arturo Nikolai – originally posted to Flickr as ABUBILLA (Upupa epops), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3914305

Dear Readers, there have been no sightings of this exotic bird in East Finchley yet, but I note with some excitement that a number have been spotted in the southeast recently – there was one at Rainham Marshes and one in Sevenoaks. About a hundred Hoopoes turn up in the UK every year, after getting confused during their northern migration – the first Hoopoe ever spotted was in the City of London in 1666 (the year of the Great Fire) and I imagine that it caused quite a stir. But actually, Hoopoes live right across mainland Europe, North Africa and Asia, and they regularly hop across the Channel in spring and again in autumn. We could actually do with a few more of them here, as they have a taste for Processionary Moth pupae, which they dig out of the ground, or eat when they find them on trees.

Photo by By Gunjan Pandey – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132620264

When Hoopoes used to arrive in the UK during Victorian times they were regularly blasted out of the sky or trapped for their feathers. Fortunately these days people are a little kinder, though individual arrivals might find themselves with rather more interest from photographers than is strictly good for them. A pair of Hoopoes came to the UK and bred in 2023, the first confirmed breeding since 1996. As global warming continues to make our winters milder and wetter, particularly in the South, we might see more of these birds breeding here.

Young Hoopoe in a nest box in Hungary (Photo By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81895148)

Why are they called Hoopoes, you ask? Well, have a listen to this recording by Esperanza Poveda, in Spain. It’s possibly more of a ‘hoo-hoo-hoo’ than a ‘hoo-poo’ but you get the idea.

When feeding, Hoopoes generally behave rather like Green Woodpeckers by feeding in short turf- in the UK they are said to have a taste for ‘vicarage lawns’, and the birds have special muscles in their jaws which enable them to open their beaks once embedded in the soil.

Photo by By J.M.Garg – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3049206

These are undoubtedly attractive and exotic-looking birds, and it would be real treat to spot one – I once saw one from a distance in Madagascar, and it made my day every bit as much as the lemurs. However, they are notoriously smelly birds during the breeding season – the female’s preen gland starts to produce a secretion that is said to smell of rotting meat, and she adorns herself, and her chicks with this. Rather than attracting predators, this stink is thought to deter them, and it may also act as an anti-microbial and/or anti-parasite agent. As soon as the breeding season is over, the gland goes back to its normal job of producing an oil to keep the feathers in good condition. To add to their protection, nestlings can also squirt a stream of faeces at a predator, and they hiss like snakes. Well, if you’re a small, apparently defenceless bird stuck in a nest hole without any way to escape, it makes sense to use everything at your disposal. Interestingly, in the Indian state of Manipur the feathers of a Hoopoe are considered to be able to get rid of fleas and other insects, so as usual there may be good reasons for a folk remedy.

Photo by Antony Grossy at https://www.flickr.com/photos/atony/7488393872

It’s no wonder that the Hoopoe is a bird that is in the top ten species to appear on postage stamps, that it’s the national bird of Israel, and that it’s the mascot of the University of Johannesburg. You really can’t ignore a Hoopoe, but people are often surprised by its size – it’s not much bigger than a song thrush. What I rather like is that unlike some storm-tossed little waifs who turn up on British shores following thunderstorms, and which often rapidly die, Hoopoes seem to make themselves at home while they’re here, eating our insects and ignoring our photographers. I wonder what will happen over time? It will be interesting to see.

Photo by By Iamranabd – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=129865168