Dear Readers, when I was getting ready to go out this morning, I called out to my husband.

“Looks like the sun’s coming out!”

And then I realised that it wasn’t the sun at all, as I could still hear the rain hammering down on the skylight.

It was buttery, sunshiny yellow of the leaves on the climbing hydrangea lighting up the bathroom. What a treat it was!

The plant has gotten pretty big, as you know…

And the leaves are at different stages of green-yellow exuberance.

I love the way that the grey, rainy days seem to make the autumn leaves glow even more. The cherry and crab apple trees here on the County Roads in East Finchley are putting on quite the show this year, although the slippery mush that the leaves break down into makes quite the challenge for those with dodgy ankles. Still, carefully does it! And I love the way that the red of the leaves highlights the red of the bricks…

But we need to make the most of these days, because before you know it, the leaves will be down and it will properly be winter, inasmuch as you can say that any season is reliable these days. Maybe it would be safer to say ‘it’s November’ and leave it at that.

And as I looked down at all the fallen crab apples, as hard and dangerous as marbles, I wondered if anyone had written a poem about them. And they had! I love this poem by Vicki Feaver. See what you think.

Crab Apple Jelly by Vicki Feaver

Every year you said it wasn’t worth the trouble –
you’d better things to do with your time –
and it made you furious when the jars
were sold at the church fête
for less than the cost of the sugar.

And every year you drove into the lanes
around Calverton to search
for the wild trees whose apples
looked as red and as sweet as cherries,
and tasted sharper than gooseberries.

You cooked them in the wide copper pan
grandma brought with her from Wigan,
smashing them against the sides
with a long wooden spoon to split
the skins, straining the pulp

through an old muslin nappy.
It hung for days, tied with a string
to the kitchen steps, dripping
into a bowl on the floor –
brown-stained, horrible,

a head in a bag, a pouch
of sourness, of all that went wrong
in that house of women. The last drops
you wrung out with your hands;
then, closing doors and windows

to shut out the clamouring wasps,
you boiled up the juice with sugar,
dribbling the syrup onto a cold plate
until it set to a glaze,
filling the heated jars.

When they were cool
you held one up to the light
to see if the jelly had cleared.
Oh Mummy, it was as clear and shining
as stained glass and the colour of fire.

An Aesculapian Snake (Zamenis longissimus) Photo by By FelixReimann – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7433690

Dear Readers, the UK has three native snakes species (the Grass Snake, the Smooth Snake and the Adder), but for a long time it’s been known that there is a population of a fourth species, the Aesculapian Snake, hanging around the Regents’ Canal in central London very close to London Zoo. The Zoo maintains that the snakes did not come from them, but from a local facility that bred the animals, from where they were either released or escaped. I have spent many cheery minutes surveying the undergrowth by the side of the canal to see if I could see a snake, but no luck so far. There are thought to be about forty individuals of these attractive snakes, and with climate change bringing warmer weather there’s every chance that they might thrive. They are about 2 metres long and live on small mammals, which they kill by constriction – the snakes are totally harmless to humans.

As you might have guessed, the Aesculapian Snake gets its name from the staff of Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine – because snakes shed their skins, and are hence re-born, they were thought to be a symbol of healing. A few isolated populations of the species are believed to have been taken to the location by the Romans, who used the snakes in some of the rituals in Temples of Aesculapius.

Aesculapius with his staff (and snake) from the Museum in Epidauros (Photo by By original file by Michael F. Mehnert – File:Asklepios – Statue Epidauros Museum 2008-09-11.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8718607

Anyhow, it turns out that the snakes on the Regent’s Canal are not the only ones in the UK. A population escaped from the Welsh Mountain Zoo near Conwy in Wales, and there are apparently some others hanging out in Brigend. The Conwy population has nearly 70 individuals. But how are these snakes, native to the warmer parts of Europe, doing in our still relatively-chilly climate? Apparently they are excellent climbers, and often find their way into outbuildings and attics for the winter, according to a study by Tom Major at Bournemouth University.

Aesculapian snake in a tree in Austria (Photo By Christoph Leeb – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6971873)

Major attached trackers to 21 snakes and then released them. He found that almost all the males preferred to hang out in gardens and buildings, while the females preferred woodland, although they liked to lay their eggs in compost heaps. Sadly, six of the snakes being tracked died during the study – three were run down by traffic, including two pregnant females – Major hypothesises that they were looking for somewhere to lay their eggs. Three snakes were taken by predators, with one tracking device ending up in a buzzard nest, evidence of how versatile these birds of prey can be.

Incidentally, the young snakes look very different to their parents and I suspect could be easily mistaken for adders by the unwary. As adders are venomous I fear that this might lead to casualties inflicted by those lacking knowledge of how shy and retiring all of our reptiles are.

Young Aesculapian snake (Photo CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=291070)

I take issue with the New Scientist’s headline that this is an ‘invasive’ species, however. The three populations are small in size, and haven’t increased worryingly in all the time that they’ve been here. There is quite enough animosity towards snakes, without stoking it further. In fact, I have written to New Scientist to complain. I shall be interested to see what they say. Harrumph!

Dear Readers, on Thursday night I was delighted to be able to attend the launch party for this extraordinary book and the accompanying exhibition at the Museum of the Home (you might remember it as the Geffrye Museum). It was my first big social outing since I broke my leg, and so I was a little nervous about all those people, but it was a truly splendid occasion, a chance to meet people ‘in real life’ who were previously only known to me via the blog. One was Mark Hamsher, whose book ‘The Balkans by Bicycle’ (about his father’s cycle journey from Leipzig to Istanbul) cheered me up no end when I could only travel in my head rather than in real life, He has a second book out now, so watch this space for a review! And it was wonderful to meet The Gentle Author again, without whom the book would never have been published. If you haven’t discovered his daily blog Spitalfields Life yet, high tail it over there now.

But to return to the book – it feels very special to me for a number of reasons. I remember many of the places that it documents – in particular I remember the animal market at Club Row. My Dad took me there when I was about eight, thinking that I would love to see all the puppies and kittens and birds in cages, but instead I was terribly distressed (the market was notorious as a place where sick, illegally imported and stolen animals were sold) and he had to take me home. Poor Dad! And on the way home I was riding on the front seat (no seatbelts in those days) when Dad slammed on the brakes because he’d seen the tiniest sliver of ‘something’ between two cars. It turned out to be a child of about four who was just about to step out. Fair enough, I catapulted out of the seat and nearly brained myself, but at least no one was killed.

Looking at the photos of Bangladeshi children, living in what would now probably be described as slums in Whitechapel, reminds me that kids will be kids wherever they come from – just as my Dad and his friends used to play in abandoned cars back in the 1940s, so these children are doing exactly the same. And it reminds me of the horrible and overt racism of the 70s and 80s, and how disturbing it was to see it surface again this year.

And finally, the photos of homeless people in St Botolph’s crypt shelter and in the early days of Crisis at Christmas remind me so much of my time working in the night shelter in Dundee, I love that Hoffman has interviewed some of the people that he photographed so that you can get an idea of their lives. And perhaps this is what i love so much about Hoffman’s photos – he brings out the innate character of the people he photographs, their personality and their dignity. He never turns them into caricatures. There is an empathy with the underdog that resonates very strongly through all of Hoffman’s work. But most of all, it feels as if the folk that he’s featured, varied as they are, are my people. I too am an East End girl, my parents were from Bow and Limehouse, and when I look at the ladies in the Pensioner’s club that Hoffman photographs I see the neighbours and friends and family that I grew up with. Just as the old-fashioned Cockney accent is becoming a rarity, so are these people. I am so glad that this book has captured these moments in the life of the East End, even as it was starting to change.

You can see some more of David Hoffman’s photographs here.

Harlequin Ladybird (Harmonia axyridis)

Dear Readers, I was sitting in the office upstairs, slaving away over my first Open University assignment, when I noticed something red zipping past the window. And then another ‘something red’. And then another. Eventually one of the ‘red somethings’ landed on the window, and I could see that it was a Harlequin Ladybird (it was much too big to be any other species). It packed its wings away, wandered about for a bit and then sat still, probably basking in the sun. After a few moments it was joined by another Harlequin Ladybird, and then another. 

What the hecky-decky was going on? It was a warm day with a light breeze, but I have never seen so many ladybirds on the wing at once. They continued to zip past for a couple of hours, but of course by the time I detached myself from my speciation calculations, there was not a single one to be seen.

Harlequins are fast becoming the most common ladybirds in the UK – they and their larvae are voracious eaters of aphids, and so I often find them, and their black spikey larvae, on the Buddleia. It used to be thought that they ate other ladybirds, but in fact they just outcompete them, which is almost as bad. Still, they’re here now – the first one was spotted in 2004, and twenty years later, here we are. This species comes originally from Asia, was introduced to North America to perform aphid control in the 1980s and was then introduced into mainland Europe, also for aphid control. Chances are that the first Harlequins just travelled across the Channel on a favourable wind.

Harlequin ladybird larvae

But what was happening yesterday? In North America, Harlequins are known as ‘the Halloween Bug’ (not that they’re true bugs but let it pass) because in October they take to the wing to look for places to hibernate. No one knows exactly what triggers it, but my money is on shortening day length and colder temperatures. In the USA there are cases of the ladybirds invading houses in vast numbers, and it’s true that they do like to hibernate together to preserve warmth – I found the little cluster below in the Ladies’ toilet at St Pancras and Islington Cemetery.

When a ladybird finds a good spot to hibernate, it produces a pheromone that attracts other ladybirds. Even when there are no other ladybirds present, a previous hibernation spot will retain some chemicals that tell the ladybird that this is a good place. A ladybird flying through the air will pick out light-coloured structures that are distinct from their surroundings, which means that they often find a building (that will be due to the Grand Designs penchant for white render, I’m sure). So I wonder when all of ‘my’ ladybirds were headed off to. If you suddenly find an aggregation of slightly irritated Harlequin Ladybirds in your shed or attic, do let me know! And be a little bit careful, as Harlequins can definitely give you a nip if they feel threatened.

So, Harlequins do a good job on my Buddleia aphids, but don’t leave much for lacewings/hoverfly larvae/other ladybird species. Yet again we’ve messed up. Still, these are very attractive insects, with a wide-range of colours and ‘designs’. One way to tell if you’ve got a Harlequin is to look for two small dents at the ‘bottom’ of the wing cases, plus a Harlequin is so much bigger than our native ladybirds. Let me know if you’ve spotted any lately, or have seen any on the wing. I wonder if this is just East Finchley, or a country-wide (even worldwide) movement?

Variations in Harlequin Ladybird colouration (Photo By ©entomart  Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=815107)

Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris)

Dear Readers, Groundsel (its name literally means ‘ground swallower) is one of the most widespread of ‘weeds’ – it pops up on the streets of East Finchley, the canals of East London, the Highlands of Scotland and more or less everywhere else in the UK and Ireland. You would think that we’d know everything to know about this vigorous little annual, but when I was reading my British Wildlife magazine today, I came across an article by Peter Marren, which made me consider what we know of even our commonest plants.

I’m currently getting stuck into the latest iteration of my Open University science degree, and for the first few weeks we have been much exercised by the whole idea of speciation, the process by which new species are made (once we can agree on what a species is, which is not as straightforward as you might imagine). Speciation in plants is even less straightforward – some of them can pollinate themselves, and this leads to high numbers of very local species – there are around 200 separate dandelions so far identified, and up to 400 species of bramble in the UK alone. But sometimes plants will create new species by hybridising with a closely-related species, and this has happened with groundsel.

Marren has identified two new species, both the results of crosses between Groundsel and Oxford Ragwort.

Oxford Ragwort (Senecio squalidus)

One species, the Welsh Groundsel (Senecio cambrensis), started life as an infertile hybrid, first identified in 1945 in Flintshire in Wales, and was known as Senecio x baxteri. At some point, a mutation occurred in this plant which meant that it was fertile, and could reproduce. Alas, Marren points out that it is not doing well – it seems to be particularly vulnerable to fungal disease. Like both of its parents, Welsh Groundsel is a plant of disturbed ground, cracks in pavements and brownfield sites, but these are precisely the areas that are often sprayed.

Welsh Groundsel (Senecio cambrensis) photographed near Chirk in North East Wales (Photo by By Alex Lockton – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115207330)

The second species, also a cross between Oxford Ragwort and Groundsel, is the York Groundsel (Senecio eboracensis). First discovered in York in 1979, it was last seen in the wild in 1991, another victim of weed-spraying. Fortunately, the plant had already been recognised as a new species and seed was collected – York Groundsel was reintroduced to York last year. There is a very interesting article about the discovery and subsequent cultivation of the plant here.

York Groundsel (Senecio eboracensis) – Photo by Andy Shaw of the Rare British Plants nursery, via https://botsocscot.wordpress.com/2024/03/17/plant-of-the-week-18th-march-2024-senecio-eboracensis-york-radiate-groundsel/

So, the discovery of these two new species, hiding in plain view, begs a number of questions. Firstly, how easy is it to lose a whole species because there aren’t enough botanists (or entomologists/mycologists etc) to spot it in the first place. Secondly, how interesting that two different species have arisen from a native plant (Groundsel) and a non-native (Oxford Ragwort, originally from Sicily) when they were brought into close contact. We have so many plants brought from other parts of the world in the UK that I wonder how often this hybridisation occurs (and goes on to mutate further to produce a fertile new species) without being noticed. Officially, only six new species of plant (including these two Groundsels) have been discovered in either the UK or North America in the past century, but I wonder how many we’ve missed. And finally, how sad it is that new species arise and disappear so quickly. It’s one thing for a plant not to be well-adapted enough to survive under normal circumstances, it’s another for it to be blasted out of existence by over-enthusiastic weed-spraying.

All this has given me a real taste for the book from which Peter Marren’s article was taken – ‘Rare Plants‘, due to be published very soon. I tend to think of wild plants as being Bee Orchids or some Shetland speciality hiding away in a cleft of rock, but I’d never thought of our ‘weeds’ as being rare. I wonder if there’s an East Finchley Groundsel lurking somewhere? I shall have to get out the hand lens.

For more on ‘ordinary’ Groundsel, have a look here.

‘Ordinary’ Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris)

Fleur Adcock – Photo by Jemimah Kuhfeld

Dear Readers, Fleur Adcock, internationally-renowned poet, has died, aged 90. She lived just a few streets away from my house here in East Finchley, and I must have passed her unknowingly many times; she did poetry readings locally, but she was also a reserved person as so many writers are. Born in New Zealand, she settled for good in the UK in 1980, and worked as a poet and as a poetry commentator and translator for the BBC. In 2006 she won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, only the sixth woman to do so in the 73-year history of the award.

You can get a fine idea of her character from this interview, I see a thoughtful, curious woman and her poetry reflects this – so many themes and interests! But the best way to get to know a poet is through her poems, and so I offer a few of my favourites here.

First up, I think we’ve all been here…..

Things

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

And as Bug Woman we have to have this one….

Blow Flies

If you liked them, how your heart might have lifted
to see their neat trapezium shapes studding
the wall like a newly landed flight of jet
ornaments, the intensity of their black
gloss, with secret blues and greens half-glinting through,
and the glass wings, not so unlike those of bees –

if you could bring yourself; if they occupied
a niche in creation nudged fractionally
sideways –
because it’s not their present forms, it’s
their larval incarnations that you can’t stop
heaving into view, white nests moistly seething
in a dead pigeon or a newspaper-wrapped
package leaking beside a path (but enough –
the others will kindly absent themselves, please!)

And wondering what, where – under the floorboards
or behind the freezer – suddenly hatched these.

And this one. I can imagine the scene, and the last line is a corker…

Leaving the Tate

Coming out with your clutch of postcards
in a Tate gallery bag and another clutch
of images packed into your head you pause
on the steps to look across the river

and there’s a new one: light bright buildings,
a streak of brown water, and such a sky
you wonder who painted it – Constable? No:
too brilliant. Crome? No: too ecstatic –

a madly pure Pre-Raphaelite sky,
perhaps, sheer blue apart from the white plumes
rushing up it (today, that is,
April. Another day would be different

but it wouldn’t matter. All skies work.)
Cut to the lower right for a detail:
seagulls pecking on mud, below
two office blocks and a Georgian terrace.

Now swing to the left, and take in plane-trees
bobbled with seeds, and that brick building,
and a red bus…Cut it off just there,
by the lamp-post. Leave the scaffolding in.

That’s your next one. Curious how
these outdoor pictures didn’t exist
before you’d looked at the indoor pictures,
the ones on the walls. But here they are now,

marching out of their panorama
and queuing up for the viewfinder
your eye’s become. You can isolate them
by holding your optic muscles still.

You can zoom in on figure studies
(that boy with the rucksack), or still lives,
abstracts, townscapes. No one made them.
The light painted them. You’re in charge

of the hanging committee. Put what space
you like around the ones you fix on,
and gloat. Art multiplies itself.
Art’s whatever you choose to frame.

And this one reminds me of what a relief it is to stop worrying about how you look. Not that I ever worried that much, having much more interesting things to think about, but no one is immune to societal pressure I suspect.

Weathering

Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face
catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes
with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:
that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young for ever, to pass.

I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty,
nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy
men who need to be seen with passable women.
But now that I am in love with a place
which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,

happy is how I look, and that’s all.
My hair will turn grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken,
and the years work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather-beaten as well

that’s little enough lost, a fair bargain
for a year among lakes and fells, when simply
to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion.

And here’s a very local poem. I know that feeling.

Londoner

Scarcely two hours back in the country
and I’m shopping in East Finchley High Road
in a cotton skirt, a cardigan, jandals —
or flipflops as people call them here,
where February’s winter. Aren’t I cold?
The neighbours in their overcoats are smiling
at my smiles and not at my bare toes:
they know me here.
I hardly know myself,
yet. It takes me until Monday evening,
walking from the office after dark
to Westminster Bridge. It’s cold, it’s foggy,
the traffic’s as abominable as ever,
and there across the Thames is County Hall,
that uninspired stone body, floodlit.
It makes me laugh. In fact, it makes me sing.

And this one. This one is stunning.

The Soho Hospital for Women (IV)

I am out in the supermarket choosing –
this very afternoon, this day –
picking up tomatoes, cheese, bread,

things I want and shall be using
to make myself a meal, while they
eat their stodgy suppers in bed:

Janet with her big freckled breasts,
her prim Scots voice, her one friend,
and never in hospital before,

who came in to have a few tests
and now can’t see where they’ll end;
and Coral by the bed by the door

who whimpered and gasped behind a screen
with nurses to and fro all night
and far too much of the day;

pallid, bewildered, nineteen.
And Mary, who will be all right
but gradually. And Alice, who may.

Whereas I stand almost intact,
giddy with freedom, not with pain.
I lift my light basket, observing

how little I needed in fact;
and move to the checkout, to the rain,
to the lights and the long street curving.

And finally (though there is so, so much more of Fleur Adcock’s poetry to love), this one, possibly her most famous poem.

For a Five-Year-Old

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

R.I.P Fleur Adcock. Thank you for your poetry.

Green Crab Spider (Diaea dorsata) Photo By André Karwath aka Aka – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=289458

Dear Readers, after my second fall last week I wasn’t able to go on Sunday’s Invertebrate walk in Coldfall Wood, led by spider expert Edward Milner. It’s so frustrating, but it is what it is, and so I have to enjoy such events vicariously. I was delighted to get an email from Edward this morning, saying that one of the spiders that they’d found was the little beauty above – a Green Woodland Crab Spider (Diaea dorsata). We don’t think of British spiders as being particularly colourful, but this is a splendid spider, a specialist of woodlands – it particularly favours yew, box and oak.

Photo by By André Karwath aka Aka – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=289462

As is often  the case with spiders, the male looks completely different – you can see one in a short film here. They compete for females by standing opposite one another, stretching their (very long) front legs  and dancing around one another. Well, it beats fighting. In some species of crab spider, the female can be sixty times larger than the male. One theory is that the bigger the female, the more eggs she can produce, while the smaller males are much more agile and can dash about to find females.

As with all crab spiders, these are ambush predators, hanging about on a flower or leaf or the trunk of a tree with their ‘arms’ wide open and ready to fold a passing fly into their deadly embrace. In the film you can see the spider extruding a line of silk – crab spiders often use this as an ‘anchor’ to prevent themselves from falling off if they grab an over-vigorous prey, and the threads can even act as tripwires, to slow up approaching (or more likely retreating) prey.

Although they can look pretty terrifying, these spiders only grow to about 6mm long, so they are on the small side for crab spiders, though even the  giant of the family only manages just over 11mm. In their habitat they are little tigers, though, waiting for passing prey with infinite patience. Our woodlands and gardens are full of drama on a miniature scale. It’s always good to be introduced to one of the actors.

Dear Readers, if you’ve been following me for a while you will probably know that I love squirrels, but also find them, well, a bit much sometimes. I put out feeders for the little birds and the squirrels will go to any lengths to eat every last seed, as you can see. I put out a supposed squirrel-proof feeder, which worked for a while, until the little devils not only took the lid off but ‘disappeared’ the lid somewhere in the garden. So I was intrigued to see that October is actually ‘squirrel-awareness month’ – the Squirrel Lovers Club was founded in 1995 by Gregg Bassett, who encountered a squirrel at the Grand Canyon who somehow melted his heart. It’s good to know that I’m not the only person distracted by the wildlife whilst at this wonder of the natural world – I remember being entranced by my first-ever mule deer, and amazed at the sight of a couple of chipmunks. It’s strange how much we take our ‘regular’ wildlife for granted – personally, I’m always seeing pigeons or squirrels doing something that I wouldn’t have expected.

There is actually a wealth of information on the Squirrel Lovers’ website. There’s information on care of infant or injured squirrels, along with a proviso that usually professional attention is best, if the mother is really absent. In many places, including the UK, it’s actually against the law to release a grey rehabilitated squirrel, which presents something of a challenge – I remember a programme about a Scottish wildlife charity who received some baby squirrels when their drey blew out of a tree and the mother couldn’t be found. It’s impossible to determine the species of very young squirrels, and the rehabber explained that if they turned out to be grey, rather than red, squirrels, they would have to be euthanised. What a dilemma! Fortunately they were all red squirrels, so they were eventually released back into the wild.

There’s also a very interesting article on keeping squirrels out of your attic. We don’t have an attic, so at least that’s one problem we don’t have, though I have friends who have heard the patter of tiny feet above their heads (which can sound rather like the squirrels are wearing hob-nail boots). I note that Mr Bassett thought that there was no such thing as a squirrel-proof feeder, and I have come to the conclusion that he’s right.

It sounds as if Mr Bassett was one of those people who fell in love with a creature that many people regard as vermin, and made it his life’s mission to help others to understand and appreciate them. And there are plenty worse things that one can do with one’s life. Personally, I think that the moment you see an animal as an individual (and heaven forfend you give it a name – I am still keeping an eye open for Harriet, the shower spider) you feel compassion for it – it’s no longer a category, it’s a living, breathing being. And then we start to care, and then we’re really sunk. Hey ho.

I also realised that I have never included a poem about a squirrel here on the blog, but I rather liked this one, which came second in the People Need Nature  competition set on the Young Poets’ Network. There’s a lot of keen observation here, and much admiration. See what you think.

Squirrel
by Finn Farnsworth

Swift and agile
Sleek and prehensile –
Skittering across bark
And as dexterously over brick –
Squirrel.
The arch survivor –
A thief in woodland
A bandit of suburbia,
Beautiful peanut pirate.
You skim the rigging of
Rotary washing lines
And old telephone wires:
Your sail-tail
A Spinnaker of balance –
A back garden acrobat.
Grey down of fur covers
The machine of sinew
Tendons tight
Like bowstrings
Wired to shoot across
Fence top,
Gate post, sign post,
Post box – post haste.
The highwayman of the high street,
Terror of the terraces
Ply your profession –
Livelihood in the manmade Landscape.
A narrow escape
With a clutch of grapes
Hijacked from garden vine
Jam-packed with sweet juice.
You make a getaway
Into ornamental spruce
Where you have your hideaway.

Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-Atlas, photographed from Mount Burnett Observatory, close to Melbourne, Australia (Photo By cafuego – https://www.flickr.com/photos/cafuego/54036127092/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153475979)

Dear Readers, as if the Northern Lights weren’t enough excuse to watch the skies (and yes, I did miss them yet again), for the rest of the month of October there’s a good chance of seeing a comet with the naked eye; the best views, according to NASA, will be from 14th to 24th October. The Tsuchinshan-Atlas comet was first spotted by the Purple Mountain Observatory in China in 2023, and was subsequently confirmed by the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS for short). Goodness, who knew that there was a system keeping a robotic eye open for possible impacts? Not me, for sure, though I did once go on a date with a man who was completely obsessed with such things, and who had ‘forgotten his wallet’ when the time came to pay for dinner. But I digress. Fortunately, this comet (which I will be abbreviating to TA for conciseness) will definitely not be crashing into the earth and wiping us all out like so many dinosaurs, but it may be thrillingly visible until about the end of October if the weather cooperates (tonight (Sunday 13th October) looks pretty good for the southern UK at least).

Time lapse of the comet by By Cpayoub – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=148265841

Where to look for it, though? I can only speak for folks in the UK, but it seems to have already been visible in many places worldwide. The advice here is to look westwards shortly after sunset, preferably where you have a view to the horizon (not so easy in a built up area, but there we go). Where there have been clear views of the comet, it seems to have a spectacular tail. It’s always worth digging out the binoculars to scan the skies too.

Comet as seen from Gran Canaria (Photo by By Victor R. Ruiz – https://www.flickr.com/photos/rvr/54030812988/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153379677)

The comet was ‘born’ in the Oort Cloud, a vast spherical dome-shaped cloud of icy objects that surrounds the whole of the solar system. This is thought to be the home of ‘long-period’ comets – TA will not return to the skies above the Earth for 80,000 years, and this is the first time in human history that it’s been documented. I rather like this image of the comet from the International Space Station. There’s something about that wandering spark above the blue arc of the Earth that I find very moving.

Photo by astronaut Matthew Dominick on the International Space Station in September (NASA)

Incidentally, did you ever wonder what a comet is made of? Apparently they’re more like ‘dirty snowballs’ than anything – they are remnants of our solar system when it was first forming, and this is why scientists are so fascinated with their composition. In 2014 Rosetta was the first spacecraft to orbit a comet, Churyumov–Gerasimenko, although the lander, Philae, got stuck in a crevice and was unable to communicate with Rosetta. Nonetheless Rosetta produced some extraordinary images, and collected extraordinary quantities of data during its mission, which included flypasts of other asteroids and comets. Have a look at these!

Image of Churyumov-Gerasimenko taken by Rosetta (Photo By Justin Cowart – 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko – Rosetta, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71790842)

Comet as seen from Rosetta’s NAVCAM (Photo By ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/16456721122/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40847079)

Space sometimes feels like unimaginable reaches of black, empty space, peopled by wandering rocks obeying their own physical rules, appearing and disappearing over the span of human history and causing wonder and speculation whenever they appear. Let’s hope that at least some of us will get a chance to view Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-Atlas before it heads off into the depths of the solar system again.

Photo by Sheila Holloway (thanks Sheila!)

Dear Readers, the Northern Lights appeared over East Finchley last night, and yet again I have managed to miss them (being sat on the sofa with icepacks on both legs, quite a performance). But how lovely to see all the photographs today – the one above is from Bounds Green/Muswell Hill, just up the road from me, and my Facebook feed today is full of photos from all over the southern UK. They’ll have to rename the Northern Lights to the North London Lights at this rate. I was planning on a trip to Iceland to see them at some point, but it sounds as if I could see them from the upstairs window.

But why are they appearing so far south? Normally, Auroras (Borealis in the north, Australis in the south) are seen at the poles, and in fact occur at the poles of other planets too – look at this amazing  photograph of the Aurora on Jupiter, published by Nasa and taken  by the Hubble Telescope.

Auroras are caused by the ‘solar wind’, usually defined as an emission of charged particles by the sun. When these bounce off of the gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, they release light at various wavelengths which form the colourful display. Normally these displays are limited to the poles, but the sun goes through cycles of activity which last for about eleven years. During the height of the cycle, gigantic geomagnetic storms occur on the surface of the sun, forming sunspots and causing a massive increase in the ‘solar wind’. Instead of just bouncing off the poles, the ‘wind’ forms a much broader band, bouncing off the atmosphere above a much wider range of countries. Here’s an image from the last ‘big’ aurora, in May this year, from Stirling in Scotland.

The aurora in May seen over Stirling in Scotland (Photo by Richard Sutcliffe at Aurora borealis © Richard Sutcliffe :: Geograph Britain and Ireland

And so, will this continue? The sun is currently at its peak, but there might be a few more opportunities before things return to ‘normal’. In the UK you can subscribe to Aurora Watch, which will give you a warning if an aurora is expected. I’d love to know if you’ve been able to see it! Has there been similar activity in the southern hemisphere, I wonder? Let me know in the comments!