The entrance to Bluebell Wood in Bounds Green

Dear Readers, I was 65 years old on Monday (don’t ask me how that happened, last time I looked I was in my thirties), so what nicer way to spend the morning than with a walk in Bluebell Wood, followed by coffee and cake at the Sunshine Garden Centre? The wood was looking particularly lovely today, and was full of birdsong, though as we’ll see the delightful squawks of one bird somewhat dominated the sound scape.

There were Great Spotted Woodpeckers drumming, a Green Woodpecker yaffling away on the adjacent golf course, Blue Tits peeping, Great Tits singing ‘Teacher, teacher’, and even some Coal Tits and Long-tailed Tits with their high-pitched squeaks. And of course there was the inevitable sound of leaf blowers, also from the golf course. I don’t know if anyone saw Wallace and Gromit at Christmas, but the mechanical gnomes ‘pointlessly blowing leaves from place to place’ certainly made me laugh. How did we ever cope when all we had were rakes, I wonder? When I am in charge, leaf blowers will be banned for sure.

Anyhow, one Great Tit was combing over a dead tree, though whether looking for insects under the bark or a possible nest site I’m not sure.

And there were the usual squirrels sitting around, pretending  not to up to mischief…

But then there was this pair of parakeets. I mentioned yesterday that they nest early, and here is the evidence. They had found a tree hole, and were cheerfully doing some housekeeping, which mostly seemed to involve enlarging the entrance. I am hoping to have new windows this year, so I can relate.

And what’s the point of building a love-nest if you can’t have a little kiss?

And then  sometimes you just need to stretch your legs and admire your handiwork…

Well I think they’ve done a very fine job, and I’ll be interested to see if there is the patter of tiny claws later in the year.

And so we walked on, and admired the sweet woodruff and the daffodils and  the bluebells that are just starting to show their faces. And then it was time for cake (blueberry and lemon since you ask). What a nice way to start my birthday!

Dear Readers, I guess the word must have gotten out – this morning we had no less than nine Ring-necked Parakeets in the garden, and a right old racket they were making too! They seem to be unperturbed by whatever we put out food-wise – they’ll eat sunflower seeds or suet, and today they were also getting stuck into the buds on the lilac. I’ve seen them munching on my neighbour’s cherry tree buds too.

They really are handsome birds. This male, in full breeding colours (note the very black neck-ring) seems on the face of it to be in charge, but who knows? When he and the rest of the flock fly off, one of the adolescents takes advantage to continue to feeding without competition.

Adult male

Juveniles tend to be a bit ‘yellower’ in plumage than the adults. 

Juveniles

It’s thought that there are about 12,000 breeding pairs of this parakeet in the UK now – it’s the most northern breeding parrot in the world. From a population that was very much centred on two groups, one in south London and one on the Isle of Thanet, the bird has expanded its range to include Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham – this chatty, social bird is clearly an urbanite, and it may be that the warmer conditions in city parks and woodlands make them more conducive to nesting success. And they are remarkably successful in rearing their young – the British Trust for Ornithology estimates that 72% of broods survive to adulthood. I’ve noted previously that the parakeet nests very early, selecting a nest site (usually a hole in a tree) from January onwards. With an average of four eggs per nest, it’s no wonder that the parakeets are doing so well, but studies so far have not shown a detrimental effect on other tree-nesting birds. Parakeets are very domineering on feeders, however, apparently particularly to the detriment of starlings, who would otherwise definitely rule in our garden.

The little chap below has a very short and stubby tail – I’m wondering if s/he had a close encounter with a cat?

Anyhow, Ring-necked Parakeets are here to stay now – the birds have been genetically tested and are all part of the wild population that comes from India/Pakistan. Consensus now is that they are all descended from cage birds imported in the 1960s and 1970s, and that their ancestors escaped/were released on multiple occasions (so there goes the Jimi Hendrix releasing his parakeets while on an acid trip hypothesis). Whether they will prove to be a problem in future years is anybody’s guess, but for now I’m enjoying their cheekiness and the touch of the exotic that they bring to my East Finchley garden.

Classic lasagne (Photo by By jules / stonesoup – mum’s lasagne, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10755032)

Dear Readers, I am in tearing haste today as tonight we are having some friends over for dinner for the first time since I broke my leg, and I am rather out of the habit. So, I’m resorting to my old favourite, lasagne. What a forgiving dish this is! You can prepare most of it in advance, and provided you don’t burn it at any stage, it will sit happily in the oven for quite a while if anyone gets lost en route/the tube is playing up/etc etc.

Vegetarian lasagne (Photo by By FloGalsen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83272195)

Increasingly, though, I’m realising that what makes lasagne so delicious is its texture and the rich tomatoe-y flavour, combined with the white sauce, rather than the meat, and so it’s usually vegetable lasagne  these days. Tonight I’m going all out and using aubergine, plus a mixture of ricotta and parmesan. Vegan lasagne is slightly more challenging, but it’s only really about the cheese and there are a lot of umami-ish replacements, though I confess to not being a big fan of nutritional yeast. Let me know what vegan variations you’ve come across, if you have any favourites!

My Mum’s big dinner party dish, I remember, was beef stroganoff (well, this was the 70s), followed by Black Forest gateau (which she often knocked up herself). But she was really more of a party animal than a dinner party girl, which meant vol-au-vents, sausage rolls, and yes, pineapple, cheddar and cocktail onions on sticks. Still, I went to a funeral a few weeks  ago, and one of my cousins told me how fantastic he thought my Mum’s parties were. And, on reflection, he’s right – we’d grown up in a tiny house, and once we had a slightly bigger one it seemed as if all of Mum’s urge to provide hospitality and to entertain people came out. I remember one party which ended at five in the morning, with someone that Dad worked with who was in a choir leading a lovely singalong. Magical.

What are your food-related memories? There’s nothing like the taste of a meal to bring back so many recollections, and sometimes just a whiff of soup cooking, or the unmistakable smell of school dinners, acts like a time machine and I’m 9 years-old again, and pretending to be allergic to beetroot so that I don’t have to eat the stuff (though I love it now). Do share!

Colombian Tree Frog (Dendropsophus norandinus) Photo By Grupo Herpetologico de Antioquia, Universidad de Antioquia, Museo de Herpetologia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73774836

Dear Readers, I have been banging on about biosecurity and the importation of ‘pest’ species into the UK, in particular with plants destined for garden centres. Well, a very interesting paper has just been posted which looks at the various diseases and non-native creatures who have turned up, and one that piqued my interest was the discovery of a little Colombian tree frog in some roses at a florist in Sheffield. First up, who even knew that we imported roses from Colombia (via Ecuador as it happens). Presumably these are air-freighted so that they can arrive nice and fresh, and poor froggy survived the whole trip. Nor are they the only vertebrate ‘hitchhikers’ arriving – there are geckos from Greece, wall lizards from Italy, marbled reed frogs from South Africa and another tree frog from the Ivory Coast.

Marbled Reed Frog (Hyperolius marmoratus) Photo by By Ryanvanhuyssteen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37544823

What occurs to me is that if an animal as large as a frog or lizard can turn up alive in imported plants, what chance do we have of stopping invertebrates or fungi or invasive plants from arriving? Dutch Elm disease and Ash Dieback were both originally imported with saplings from overseas. But maybe we should all check a little more carefully into the origin of the plants and flowers we buy, and consider the implications of air-freighting, especially with Valentine’s Day coming up. Sigh. Nothing is straightforward anymore, but maybe it never was, and it’s just that we’re more aware these days.

Onwards!

In central France, a tiny wild boar piglet rescued by farmer Elodie Cappe has had the threat of euthanasia lifted. Rillette (oh dear) grew up with Cappe’s horses and dogs, but when the time came for her to return to the wild, she instead made her way back to the farm repeatedly, and so Cappe decided to keep her. Because the rules around keeping wild animals are so strict (and rightly so), Cappe was threatened with imprisonment, a fine of 150,000 euro and having Rillette put to sleep, even though clearly the boar couldn’t be rehabilitated as a wild animal. Fortunately, the higher court decided that Rillette could stay, and now she has her own basket and hangs out with the other animals.

Over 170,000 people signed a petition to save Rillette, including Brigitte Bardot, a long-term animal activist. It makes me think about how we can rally around an individual animal or person, but the mistreatment of literally billions of pigs, in intensive farming units all over the world, goes largely unnoticed. I suppose it’s easier for us to empathise with the story of one creature than to get our heads around the untold suffering of uncountable numbers. As with so many things, I suspect that the sheer scale of many current problems, from biosecurity to industrialised farming to climate change, are just overwhelming. Still, it’s always good to know that we can be moved to action by a story, and that so many people will try to help if they can.

Boar piglet (known as a ‘squeaker’ ) (Photo By 4028mdk09 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13139423)

Yellow Wagtail (Motacilla flava flavissima) Photo by Natural England from https://www.flickr.com/photos/naturalengland/14335939742

Dear Readers, you might remember how fond I am of wagtails generally, but this bright yellow bird is such a delight. You might think that you’ve seen one, but what you’ve probably seen is the much commoner Grey Wagtail – I’ve spotted this species at the Barbican, and one even spent a few moments in my garden, drinking from the pond. As you can see, the Grey Wagtail does have a citrus yellow vent area, but the bird is mostly grey. In the summer, an adult breeding male (the one in the photo is a female) is a pale yellow all over, but nothing like the sunshine hue of the Yellow Wagtail.

Grey Wagtail in Coldfall Wood

Yellow Wagtails (Motacilla flava) are birds of grassland, and are completely dependent on invertebrate food throughout their life cycle. They winter in the Sahel, and spend summer in the UK, swapping the dusty fields of Africa for the potato and wheat fields of England, but they are under pressure at both ends of their migratory route. The basic reason for their decline in the UK is agricultural intensification, which has affected the availability of insects and nesting sites, plus, interestingly, soil degradation – the birds probe the soil for worms and grubs, and if they can’t penetrate rock-hard soil, they will find it difficult to locate their food. These are versatile little birds, who can cope with seasonal change – in Red List Sixty Seven, published by the British Trust for Ornithology, Juliet Vickery, who has studied the species extensively, describes how they move from winter wheat to potatoes and field beans, and change prey from flies and beetles to damselflies. Vickery also points out that where winter wheat predominates, it may affect late summer nesting sites – they also like to nest close to drainage ditches or bodies of water, probably because of all those hatching midges and mosquitoes.

Whatever the reason, the breeding population has decreased by 74% since 1967. What a shame. Fortunately, some farmers are trying to support the birds by introducing a mosaic of different crops so that they can raise broods in one sort of crop in the spring and then switch to another for a second and even third brood as the year goes on.

Yellow Wagtail – Blue-Headed Morph (Photo by Risto Silaste at https://www.flickr.com/photos/50677435@N00/512526045/)

In the summer we are also sometimes visited by the blue-headed variant of the Yellow Wagtail (Motacilla flava flava). In the Crossley Guide, it’s pointed out that the tail of the yellow wagtail is noticeably shorter than  that of other wagtail species, though the bird still bounces up and down in a most endearing fashion.

Crossley, I note, says that the Yellow Wagtail has a ‘truly terrible song, haphazard, jolting series of brief scratchy notes’. Having  listened to this, I note that the song does have a certain ‘fingernails scraping down a blackboard’ tone to it, though apparently the sound is a good way to spot the bird when it’s feeding in a grassy field.

For a bird that is so dependent on invertebrates, a clear win would be to reduce the amount of pesticides being used for agriculture. Insects are an essential part of the ecosystem as we all know, so helping them to thrive would help to support not only Yellow Wagtails, but innumerable other species. When will we wake up, I wonder?

Snowdrops in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, 2022

Three poems this week! First up, Mr Wordsworth with ‘To a Snowdrop’. I find that I like Wordsworth more as the years go by, for his close observation and for the air of melancholy that often pervades his poems like the scent of jonquils (daffodils) mentioned here.

Lone Flower, hemmed in with snows and white as they
But hardier far, once more I see thee bend
Thy forehead, as if fearful to offend,
Like an unbidden guest. Though day by day,
Storms, sallying from the mountain-tops, waylay
The rising sun, and on the plains descend;
Yet art thou welcome, welcome as a friend
Whose zeal outruns his promise! Blue-eyed May
Shall soon behold this border thickly set
With bright jonquils, their odours lavishing
On the soft west-wind and his frolic peers;
Nor will I then thy modest grace forget,
Chaste Snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring,
And pensive monitor of fleeting years!

And how about this one by A.E Stallings? Goodness, what a dance of images, but not altogether very cheerful. This really reminds me of the snowdrops in our local cemetery.

Snowdrops
A.E. Stallings

Graveyard of St Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund Hall

For E.M.

Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:
what news of the underground,
the weather in Hell?

Your toes are tickled
by the beards of the dead, their
slanted stones deckled

and foxed with lichen-
rings of shaggy galaxies.
In flocks you beckon

me to read shallow-
graven names on time-thumbed tomes.
Soon you’ll sallow, snow-

drop: now so new, yet
your hair’s already waxed white
from that oubliette

you hunkered in, torn
between last year and this; or
is it a tricorn

hat you hold instead
in green-gloved hands, as you stand
shaking your bowed head?

But we can’t finish up on such a Gothic note, so here is something much more cheerful, from Alfred Lord Tennyson no less. I suspect that it has cropped up on the blog before, but you can never have too much of a good thing. Welcome indeed, February Fair Maid’. You can feel the hope and the exuberance in these words, and we could all do with a bit of both, I’m sure.

Many, many welcomes,
February fair-maid,
Ever as of old time,
Solitary firstling,
Coming in the cold time,
Prophet of the gay time,
Prophet of the May time,
Prophet of the roses,
Many, many welcomes,
February fair-maid!

Queen’s Wood Cafe – Photo by Faye Cooke

Dear Readers, today I went for a walk in Queen’s and Highgate Woods, and what a pleasure it was to be negotiating steep hills, slippery tree roots, muddy patches and all manner of other obstacles with a little more confidence every day! It was a little warmer today (Monday), and the woods were full of dogs in jumpers, in particular a pair of Airedales who looked very elegant. But the main purpose of the walk was to catch up with my god daughter, who I haven’t seen since I broke my leg, so there was lots to talk about. And where better to have a coffee and a piece of lemon polenta cake than in the Queen’s Wood Café? It always reminds me of a little hobbit-y house tucked away in the woods, and therein lies a tale. In the summer, someone did a TikTok/Instagram post about the café, and it went viral. This has always been a quiet place, beloved by locals as a place to stop off after a dog walk. Alas, suddenly there were queues out of the wood and along the road, and the place was full of folk taking photos of their food and generally being rather higher energy than everyone was used to. Plus the poor staff, used to a café where service proceeded at a gentle pace, were now run off their feet from opening time to closing time, seven days a week.

The organic garden behind the Queen’s Wood Cafe (Photo credit Faye Cooke)

Still, now it’s winter, and I suspect that lots of people have moved on to the next ‘new thing’. There is the usual collection of people with dogs on the porch outside, there are seats for everyone, and the lemon polenta cake is absolutely delicious. Plus the woods are rather fine too, so well worth a visit.

A fine use for old boots (Photo by Faye Cooke)

Meanwhile, back on the County Roads there seems to be some confusion about when exactly the council are going to pick up the Christmas trees. Apparently they were meant to be collected on either Saturday 11th or Saturday 18th January, but clearly they weren’t picked up on the 11th. Sometimes there’s a random midweek Christmas tree pick up, so people are obviously loathe to take their trees in and miss the collection. On the other hand, the trees do form something of a trip hazard and make it more difficult for wheelchairs and prams. The narrow side streets of East Finchley were never meant for wheelie bins/Christmas trees it seems.

Christmas trees waiting patiently on Huntingdon Road

What I’m having trouble finding out is what happens to all of those (presumably chipped) Christmas trees. Do they go to municipal parks and gardens as mulch, I wonder? That’s an awful lot of woodchip!

Dear Readers, this handsome young dog fox has been visiting us in daylight for the past few days – I imagine he’s really hungry (the ground is rock hard, and foxes often dig for worms/cached food at this time of year). So we’ve been throwing out a handful of dry dog food and then retreating indoors, so that he doesn’t get to associate humans with good things (not everyone is kind, sadly).

What a good-looking boy he is! He’s in pretty good condition, but he does have a sore back foot, which leads to a bit of a limp. However, it’s improving so I’m not worried about him at the moment.

He is very confident in the garden, but also very alert. I’m not sure what he heard here, but he was ready to run if necessary.

I have been blaming the squirrels for the mayhem in my pots, but maybe it’s not all them….

And everything is investigated.

He seems to know that the pond is frozen and will support his weight. I rather like to see him ‘walking on water’.

How do I know that he’s male? Well, he lifted a leg against one of the pots, whereas a vixen would squat, much as dogs do.

As always, it feels like such a privilege to have such a creature in the garden. I’m sure that the pond is a big draw – it’s thawed a bit at one edge, and the fox stopped for a quick drink there. Plus, at certain times of year there are lots of frogs, which provide the foxes with a new kind of food to try (poor frogs!) even if only once. I will be hoping to see him again.

Dear Readers, it must have been about nine months since I was last in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery – certainly I haven’t been since I broke my leg at the beginning of July 24. So it was wonderful to be back on this cold, bright day, and I managed a couple of miles in spite of the freezing conditions. It reminded me of the pleasures of a slow amble on a frosty day (if you’re well wrapped up) – every leaf, every puddle, every headstone and every stone angel has its intricate details picked out in a way that you can’t see under any other circumstances. So here are a few of the highlights. I hope you enjoy them!

First up, look at the sunbeams through the trees, here in the woodland part of the cemetery. I imagine that the water vapour arising from the melting ice makes the sunlight visible.

Photo Credit – John Bolitho

Photo credit – John Bolitho

Then there is the way that the frost paints foliage and brings out the details of lichen.

And then there are the frozen puddles – a trip hazard for the unwary, but they remind me of the layers that you sometimes see in quartz. How do they form this way, I wonder? I shall have to have a muse, but let me know if you have any ideas. The last one reminds me of a seahorse 🙂

And finally there are the angels. The cemetery has some very fine examples of statuary, none better to my mind than some of the angelic host above the Victorian graves.

Oh, and finally, how about ‘the dog’? I’ve written about this handsome chap before – his owner was one William French, who had encouraged the dog to go swimming in Highgate Ponds when it clearly didn’t want to (French was apparently drunk, which may help to explain the circumstances). The dog appeared to get into trouble, and so French waded in, whereupon the dog rescued itself, and French disappeared and drowned in only four feet of water. Apparently, according to the policeman who was called to the scene, all of French’s friends were drunk too. The dog seems to have been the only one to come out of this sorry tale with his reputation intact, and indeed someone else seems to think so too – the dog is currently sporting a very attractive white ribbon, and has a mug at his feet with ‘Mr Silly’ emblazoned upon it.

You can read the whole sorry tale, and the tales of many other of the ‘London Dead’ on this wonderful blog. Highly recommended!

And so, I’ve returned home intact, without slipping or falling over, and things leg-related seem to be improving all the time. What a relief after last year! And next week I am seeing a foot and ankle specialist to see if we can work out why my feet are so numb, and why my ankles are so dodgy. I shall keep you posted!