Dear Readers, I wrote a while back about the Willow Tit, a bird that looks so similar to the Marsh Tit that for ages they were thought to be one species (indeed the Willow Tit is the last native British bird to be discovered, in 1900). However, the Marsh Tit too is on the Red List, and deserves a whole separate entry to itself. Never was a bird so poorly named, as the Marsh Tit is actually a bird of deciduous broad-leaved forests, preferably with lots of holly in the understory: the Willow Tit likes damp places such as alder carr.

You can see why these two species would be hard to tell apart on sight – although they inhabit slightly different habitats they are both shy, and both are mostly found in pairs rather than in larger groups. The Marsh Tit generally takes over nest holes frequented by other birds, but the Willow Tit excavates its own nest, though you’d have to catch a bird in the act for this to be useful.

My Crossley Guide suggests that the Marsh Tit is much perkier than the Willow Tit, ‘noisily drawing attention to itself’. Let’s listen to the calls and see what we think.

First up, here’s the Marsh Tit, recorded in the North of England by Peter Stronach. There’s a definite touch of the ‘chick-a-dee’ call of the bird’s close relations in North America, the chickadees.

And here’s a Willow Tit, recorded in Yorkshire by David Pennington. Sounds a little higher and sweeter to me.

How I envy people who have a really good ear for bird song! I can probably identify ten to fifteen species now, but that’s my lot.

Marsh tits are unusual amongst tits because they cache their food, hiding it in tree stumps, under lichen, in leaf litter and under the soil. The birds seem to remember where they’ve left the seeds, finding the oldest cache sites first and then searching systematically rather than randomly. The part of their brain that’s concerned with spatial mapping, the hippocampus, is 31% larger than that of the Great Tit, even though the Great Tit is larger, and has a bigger forebrain.

So, what’s the story with the Marsh Tit? In other places in Europe it seems to be doing well, but in the UK its breeding population has declined by 80% since 1967. This could well be linked to the loss of its woodland habitat, particularly woods with a well-developed understory. When I think about our local patch of ancient woodland here in East Finchley, it’s clear that when coppicing of the woodland stopped way back in the 1930s and 40s, the tree cover grew to make the wood too dark for all but the most robust of plants to survive. In this wood, as in many others, when coppicing was done in a few places in the 2000s the understory regenerated from seed left in the soil from all those years ago. It’s been found that Marsh Tits will gravitate towards woodland areas with a healthy understory, that chicks raised in these conditions are heavier and have a better survival rate, and that more adults survive the winter.

Overgrazing by deer can destroy forest understory, and without predators to keep herbivores in check this can also change the nature of a forest, as has been seen in other places such as the classic story of Yellowstone, where wolves were reintroduced and kept the deer population moving, preventing overgrazing (though later studies have shown that things were a bit more complicated than this). Still, a superabundance of a large plant-eating mammal is bound to change the balance of a habitat, be it sheep or deer.

Surprisingly for such small birds, each pair of Marsh Tits needs a whole half hectare as a territory in order to raise their young, and so fragmentation of woodland can also be a problem.

Finally, it’s thought that increased competition from Blue Tits and Great Tits at feeding stations where these birds co-exist with Marsh Tits is also to the detriment of the smaller, more subordinate Marsh Tit. The Marsh Tits can choose to come to feeding stations when the other species are not about, but they can’t avoid the other birds altogether. It’s a conundrum that is being increasingly talked about – there’s no doubt that more Blue Tits and Great Tits are surviving because we’re feeding them, but is this at the expense of smaller, rarer, shyer species? The jury is currently out, but it will be interesting to see what emerges from studies over the next few years.

Dear Readers, Northern Irish poet Michael Longley died a few days ago at the age of 85, after complications following hip surgery. Seamus Heaney called him ‘a custodian of griefs and wonders’, and so he was. He was a man who loved the classics, and who wove them into his work with consummate skill. His most famous poem, ‘Ceasefire’, was published just days after a ceasefire was called in Northern Ireland.

Ceasefire

Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.

II
Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king’s sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:

IV
‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’

Michael Longley Saturday, July 23, 2016

And I love this poem – the recitation of the ice cream flavours, the carnations left on the doorstep, the recitation of plants.

The Ice Cream Man

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,
Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.

But the poems could also be tender and deeply personal.

The Pattern

Thirty-six years, to the day, after our wedding
When a cold figure-revealing wind blew against you
And lifted your veil, I find in its fat envelope
The six-shilling Vogue pattern for your bride’s dress,
Complicated instructions for stitching bodice
And skirt, box pleats and hems, tissue-paper outlines,
Semblances of skin, which I nervously unfold
And hold up in snow light, for snow has been falling
On this windless day, and I glimpse your wedding dress
And white shoes outside in the transformed garden
Where the clothesline and every twig have been covered.

I think this is my favourite, written for Longley’s grandson. It makes me teary, and I love, yet again, the classical illusions – pram as chariot, baby as hoplite.

The Leveret

This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.
The Owennadornaun is so full of rain
You arrived in Paddy Morrison’s tractor,
A bumpy approach in your father’s arms
To the cottage where, all of one year ago,
You were conceived, a fire-seed in the hearth.
Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?
Do you hear the wind tonight, and the rain
And a shore bird calling from the mussel reefs?
Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to the sea,
Little hoplite. Have you been missing it?
I’ll park your chariot by the otters’ rock
And carry you over seaweed to the sea.
There’s a tufted duck on David’s lake
With her sootfall of hatchlings, pompoms
A day old and already learning to dive.
We may meet the stoat near the erratic
Boulder, a shrew in his mouth, or the merlin
Meadow-pipit-hunting. But don’t be afraid.
The leveret breakfasts under the fuchsia
Every morning, and we shall be watching.
I have picked wild flowers for you, scabious
And centaury in a jam-jar of water
That will bend and magnify the daylight.
This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.

If you would like to hear Michael Longley read these poems, skedaddle over to The Poetry Archive here. Highly recommended!

Dear Readers, first up a round of applause for the folks at the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) for getting the results of all the plant surveys that were done for the New Year Plant Hunt collated and analysed within a few weeks of the event closing. Well done! No mean feat. But with the results in, what does it show?

As usual, daisy was the plant most often seen in flower, followed by dandelion and groundsel – out of a total of 1,499 surveys, these plants were seen in 1,000 of them. In total, 647 species of plant were found in flower. Of these, 340 species were flowering later than expected, with about half of the remaining species flowering early. It seems that the effects of climate change mean that many plants find conditions conducive to a longer flowering season, rather than bringing them into flower early. The remaining plants, such as the ‘top three’ listed above, flower all year round, whenever conditions are suitable.

There were a few surprises in the plant count, though. First up, Little Robin, a rare plant usually associated with Cornwall, was found blooming in Peterborough. Any resemblance to Herb Robert is completely understandable, as this little plant is another wild geranium.

The traffic wasn’t just from the West Country to east though: a specialist plant from East Anglia, Bur Chervil, was found in flower in Cornwall.

Annual Buttonweed is a rare non-native plant (from Australia originally), but it appears to have jumped over the wall and was found in Lincolnshire this year, only the second record for the county.

In general, during the Plant Hunt coastal areas (which tend to have less frost) had longer plant lists than inland areas, southern locations had more plants than northern areas, and urban areas had more exotic non-natives in flower, largely due to the wide range of novel microhabitats that can be found in cities, and the heat island effect, which keeps things warmer. But all in all, the trend is definitely for longer flowering seasons for many plants, and early flowering for some. How this will play out with the rest of the ecosystem, finely balanced as it is, only time will tell.

Dear Readers, last week my friend L, an accomplished naturalist and all-round nature nerd like myself, took me to see an exhibition at the Linnean Society. I’d been to the Royal Academy many times, but there are lots of other organisations in Burlington House too, all with splendid names – The Society of Antiquaries, The Royal Astronomical Society and The Geological Society to name but three. But the Linnean Society, founded in 1788 and with members including Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace felt like a very special place – it was here that Darwin gave his first exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection back in 1858. Current members include David Attenborough, and indeed I saw him wandering past a few years ago.

L and I were here to see the current exhibition, which is in the splendid library.

The current exhibition is on depictions of nature on paper – the Linnean has a collection of books and specimens dating back to its inception, and you can go on a behind-the-scenes tour which includes the collections of Linnaeus himself. Included in the exhibition were some of the original prints taken from Durer’s image of a rhino. It always amuses me that the little unicorn horn on the shoulders of the rhino carried on being depicted in images for centuries after the original illustration was made, even though a real rhino has no such appendage.

We know that people used to press flowers, but at various points there were also pressed fish, and indeed a pressed bat, although the body of the animal was probably drawn on later.

There are also some lovely cyanotypes – this was a camera-less way of capturing images on light-sensitive paper. Anna Atkins is considered to be the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images, and some consider her to be the first woman to create a photograph. I love these images – somehow the lack of colour (except that beautiful blue) means that I can concentrate on the structure of the plant.

To get into the Linnean, you simply have to ring the doorbell – they have a whole range of talks, and it’s a pleasure just to browse in the library. At the moment they have a facsimile copy of a book by Maria Sybilla Merian (1647-1717) – she was one of the first people to illustrate the different life stages of insects, which were very poorly understood at the time. She made a trip to Suriname and the book Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium was the result. Just have a look at these extraordinary illustrations!

 

So if you’re passing the Linnean on a Tuesday to Friday, do ring the doorbell and have a look around. There are magazines to browse, illustrations to look at, and a whole sense of history to soak in.

 

 

Dear Readers, after I posted about my Open University doughball experiment yesterday, someone very wisely asked me about what happens if it’s not just magpies who eat them. Well, that turns out to be a very interesting point, as today the squirrels discovered that they have a taste for bright orange suet (though we have since topped up the bird feeders, so they’ve reverted to eating the sunflower hearts instead).

The point of the experiment is really to interpret the results – I’m pretty sure that the magpies, who can see not only all the colours that humans can but ultra-violet as well, may have a preference for orange or yellow balls (my guess is probably orange as it’s closer to the colour of ripe fruit). Squirrels, on the other hand, have dichromatic vision, which is closer to colour  blindness in humans – they therefore can’t distinguish between green and red, but should in theory be fine with telling the difference between orange and yellow. Will they care though? Only time will tell. And they’d better get a move on, as my assignment is due on 10th February, only two and a bit weeks away.

Anyhow, onto the Great Garden Birdwatch. There was a flurry of excitement at the start after the feeders were filled up, followed by a visit from a cat, and then the squirrels rampaged around the garden like lunatics, flicking their tails at one another and generally being manic. As usual I saw a reasonable range of birds, but I’m still convinced that they don’t come when it’s the hour of the GGBW just to be annoying.

Anyhow, the total count was:

2 Blue Tits

1 Coal Tit

1 Long-tailed Tit (I’m sure there were others but I just caught the tail-end of the visit)

1 Collared Dove

1 Robin

3 Great Tits

1 Woodpigeon

3 Starlings

and

2 Ring-necked Parakeets (who managed to fend off the squirrels for a surprising amount of time, and who had great fun mobbing the cat who walked along the top of the new 6-foot fence with a feigned nonchalance that reminded me of me walking into a party with a lot of people that I don’t know).

Anyhow, that’s that for another year! I saw only 16 individual birds, which was less than the average of 27, and makes me feel rather inadequate (irrational, I know), though my Starling and Great Tit numbers were above the national average, as was my parakeet count. I note from the count so far that the House Sparrow and Blue Tit are still number one and two respectively, with the Woodpigeon up at number three, the Starling down at number four, the Blackbird holding steady at number five and the Robin up at number six. Still, there’s a whole day of counting yet to come, and the results are due in mid April.

Which reminds me that the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland has just reported on the New Year Plant Hunt (very speedy!) – I shall have a look, and report back soon.

Dear Readers, this weekend is the Big Garden Birdwatch here in the UK – as usual we’re being asked to record the birds in the garden for an hour, and I’ll certainly do it at some point, probably on Saturday before another wave of heavy rain comes in. But the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) is particularly keen for people to do it this year, for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, the long cold spell may well have impacted smaller birds, such as wrens and long-tailed tits, so it will be interesting to see how they’ve done compared to last year, when the winter wasn’t so harsh.

Secondly, the RSPB want to check up on how many winter visitors such as fieldfare and redwing are still about – again, the cold conditions might either have chased them away or kept them in the UK for longer.

Interestingly, at the same time as we’re being encouraged to top up the bird feeders, the RSPB has actually stopped selling bird tables because they can be such vectors for disease, in particular trichomonosis, which has been responsible for a huge fall in the numbers of greenfinches. The disease is passed in bird saliva, so it’s a problem where birds pick up seeds, husk them and then let them fall, hence the more expensive sunflower hearts, which have no husks, are less dangerous. All in all, I’d agree that having a garden full of plants with berries and seeds is probably the healthiest way to go, but not everybody has the luxury of that much space. Plus, there is also little doubt that feeding and providing water in the most difficult seasons of the year probably aids bird survival, so it’s a tough decision. There was a very interesting talk on the whole subject at the Wildlife Gardening Forum Symposium a few days ago which I haven’t caught up with yet, but will report back when I do.

In the meantime, I just looked at the results for the first day of the Garden Birdwatch and the house sparrow is at number one, for the 21st year in a row. Even so, this species has declined by sixty percent since the very first Birdwatch in 1979, and we have lost an estimated 38 million birds from the skies in the past sixty years. Terrifying numbers, and citizen science projects such as this one provide a snapshot of what exactly is in our gardens and parks over one January weekend. It provides a picture of changing numbers, not just for this year but over time, and without information, scientists can’t help to deduce what is going on for each species. So if you’re in the UK, and you’ve got an hour to spend, you know what to do…

Dear Readers, you might remember that a few years ago, I was performing an experiment on my local magpies for my Open University degree. On that occasion, I was trying to determine if they preferred red or yellow doughballs, and the answer was a resounding ‘yes!’ to the red ones. This year, I’m hoping to see if the birds have a preference for orange balls over yellow ones and I suspect that the outcome might not be quite so straightforward.

This year I used my brain and used my food processor to make the dough – it’s a lot quicker than messing about rubbing the lard into the flour and then trying to get an even colouration. But the real test will be whether the magpies are as enthusiastic as they were last time, or if anybody else will get stuck in.

What we’re trying to distinguish is whether the birds are taking the balls purely based on their colour, or if they’re just taking the ones that are commonest. So, to start off with we do ten trials with 45 orange balls and 5 yellow ones, and then ten  trials with 45 yellow balls and 5 orange ones. To make it all even more complicated, we have to record the trial when there are between 15 and 35 balls left, so you have to keep an eye on what’s going on. Last time the magpies were so fast that they’d scoff the whole lot in ten minutes, so woebetide somebody coming to the door or ringing me up mid experiment. If there are fewer than  15 balls left you have to start the whole thing all over again. Sigh.

Once all the trials are done, you do some antsy-fancy statistical work, to try to prove that your results are not random, and then  I need to write a report. All by 10th February! But I’m not complaining. Sciencing is one of my very favourite things to do, and it certainly keeps me busy!

Stop Press One

I put the doughballs out on Tuesday, and not a single one was eaten on by Thursday morning. Then I went to see the podiatrist on Thursday morning and the whole lot had gone when I came back. Hopefully the magpies have rediscovered them, and things should run smoothly from now. Fingers crossed….

Dear Readers, I have been following Alaskan poet Erin Coughwell Hollowell for years now, and as this week saw the US being pulled out of the Paris Climate Change accord by That Man, it seems appropriate to feature some of her exquisite poems about the ephemerality  of the natural world (and much else besides).  See what you think.

These three poems are online here.

Cycles and Limits

Nothing is consumed whole. Nothing.
We put the bread, the nuts, the sweet apple

into our mouths and chew. Standing at
the counter, I take care to chop the carrots

into equal sized pieces as the potatoes
so that it might all cook together. Be taken

along with a chopped onion for savor
and digested. The cottonwood tree

that leaned for so long finally falls. Impact
shatters the rotten trunk, the branches

scatter across the forest floor. Then moss
and beetle and rain get to work. After

a few years, after the hares have sheltered
beneath and dug among, the tree becomes

soil. Becomes mushroom that I gather
and add to the soup. It becomes impossible

to imagine any other end point. Some day
I will be alone. If there is singing, I will not

hear it. If someone is saying words about
my life, parsing out the good things I tried

to do, I will not attend. My atoms uncoupling.
My consumption, my alchemy, already under way.

Alaskan dirt road duet in a minor key

In the grey morning, I find beside the road
two large footprints coupled with two small

and I worry. Grandmother hare, now arrayed
white for the winter and the snows delayed,

you are trying to tell me something. Stillness
in the deep alder thicket that was shattered

by unseasonable rain followed by wet snow
followed by rain. Golden hare eye the only

thing tilting toward me as I walk. A season
of rain in a place that signifies snow. Six

diesel trucks with empty beds and a single
occupant rattle by each morning on a road

that has only eight houses. As soon as
it is light, I walk the edges and hope not

to see you. You keep living if you live
small. Alongside me, your prints are

a dancing. I keep you living if I live small.

After the dissolution

When we tell of this, the we that remains
five hundred years from now, our storied glacier

will be so small. Who could imagine this
great being of ice scored with huge crevices?

We’ll say that glaciers were white, because
we won’t imagine that ice becomes blue

as the weight of it presses out centuries
of air. We won’t remember gray moraines

comprised of stones rounded by the rolling
of so much power advancing and retreating.

We won’t tell of rivers a shade of turquoise
that stuns the eyes, carrying glacial flour

and ice’s breath to the sea. And those huge
boulders left in the middle of fields, we’ll

imagine that men put them there for some
reason. We’ll have forgotten how the tongues

of glaciers could rearrange the earth. We’ll
have forgotten how a glacier could tell a story

that reminded us of how small we are,
how brief our lives that misunderstood forever.