Male Common Scoter (Melanitta nigra)(Photo By Jason Thompson – Flickr: eurasian common scoter, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30890885)

Dear Readers, there is a certain horrible irony when a bird described as ‘common’ ends up on the Red List of birds of conservation concern, but here we are, and here is this rather magnificent black sea duck. I have to bow here to the poetic description from the Crossley Guide, which never fails to amaze me:

‘Common and widespread sea duck, often seen in densely packed flocks offshore, inky spots on the water. Flies frequently in irregular lines, the flocks often densest at the front, like the head of a tadpole’. 

There’s that word again, ‘common’. The breeding population in the UK is down to less than 50 pairs of ducks in northern Scotland and the west of Ireland, although the coastal population is swollen to over 100,000 pairs in winter. At this point, you can spot Common Scoters more or less anywhere along the coast, if you’re lucky. However, the Red List designation is for the breeding population of the ducks, which is at a critical point.

Does it matter if a bird no longer breeds here, if it  survives in good numbers in other places? It’s a good question, and there can be numerous reasons why a bird doesn’t breed with us anymore. Some are within our control (agricultural degradation, pollution, building and development on breeding sites) but some are not – birds will sometimes change breeding site if they find something suitable nearer to home (the birds generally spend summer in various places, from the taiga of northern Europe to the South of France). But here again, this increased ‘suitability’ is sometimes a result of climate change, and is a signal of how everything is dynamic, and not always in a good way.

Personally, in this nature-depleted country of ours I feel that it’s worth trying to encourage creatures to breed here and to make their home here. There are certainly projects which aim to make perfect breeding sites for these ducks, and fingers crossed that they succeed.

Female Common Scoter (Photo Stefan Berndtsson, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Incidentally, the Common Scoter was re-designated as a fish for the purposes of Lent and fast days in eighteenth century France, so fisherman would catch them in their nets and munch upon them. As the ducks eat mainly shellfish they would probably have tasted fishy too.

And what do these ducks sound like? I knew you’d ask, so here we go…this was recorded by Uku Paal off the coast of Estonia. What a beautiful, rather haunting sound….

Dear Readers, I went for a walk along Lincoln Road here in East Finchley on Thursday, and it looks as if all the lime trees have been given a short-back-and-sides haircut. No wonder this one looks as if it’s giving the world a two-finger sign! Plus the ‘no dog poo here’ signs make me think that someone (or maybe several someones) haven’t been cleaning up after their dog.

The trees were last pruned in April 2023, which seems a bit recent, though some websites do suggest pruning lime trees every other year. At least it’s been done before the birds nest, and it will be interesting to know how quickly the trees recover.  I know car owners don’t like to get their cars sticky with all the honeydew that the aphids that live on the leaves produce, so maybe that’s the reason, and it’s also good to see that the trees are being looked after – lime trees (or linden trees as they’re known in Europe, probably to distinguish them from citrus trees) host lots of creatures apart from greenfly, including the caterpillars of the lime hawk moth.  Here are the trees in happier days….

…and here is the rather impressive lime hawk moth caterpillar with his/her little blue tail. These creatures are a lot more common than you’d think, so it’s always an idea to check out a lime tree if you happen to be passing.

Lime Hawk Moth caterpillar (Mimas tiliae) Photo By Photograph made by Jeroencommons (talk) and Klaas Haima – Photograph made by Jeroencommons (talk) and Klaas Haima, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4794960

And here is the adult moth. What a beauty!

Lime hawk moth (Photo Ben Sale from Stevenage, UK, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

So let’s hope the lime trees generate lots of fresh growth for these lovelies to munch upon. I shall have a look in a month or so and report back! As I’ve mentioned before, Lincoln Road has lime trees when, apart from a few on the High Street, everywhere else doesn’t, and they’re amongst my favourite trees. Fingers crossed the trees recover soon, and that the dog poop problem ends.

Dear Readers, I’m sure we’re all familiar with William Wordsworth’s poem ‘Daffodils’ (and if not, you can find it on a previous post here). But I had never come across this rather longer poem by Ted Hughes, with its typical touch of cruelty and eroticism (and indeed narcissism one could say, if one were a punster). I find it intriguing nonetheless, and the descriptions are extraordinary. See what you think!

Daffodils
Ted Hughes

I’d bought a bit of wild ground.
In March it surprised me. Suddenly I saw what I owned.
A cauldron of daffodils, boiling gently.

It was a gilding of the Deeds – treasure trove!
Daffodils just came. And they kept on coming –

‘Blown foam,’ I wrote. ‘Vessels of light!’
They ran under every gust
On the earth-surge, ‘their six-bladed screws
Churning the greeny yellows
Out of the hard, over-wintered cholorophyl.’

I was still a nomad.
My life was still a raid. The earth was booty.
I knew I’d live forever. I had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. I did not recognise
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera –
My own days!
Hardly more body than a hallucination!
A dream of gifts – opening their wrappers for me!

I thought they were a windfall. I picked them. And I sold them.

Behind the rainy curtains of that green April
I became intimate
With the soft shrieks
Of the jostled stems – the wet shocks, shaken,
Of the girlish dance-frocks –
Fresh-opened Dragonflies, wet and flimsy –

To each bright, scared look
I brought gentler cruelty. A thousand times
Slid my fingers down her slenderness
Felt deep into her chilly fountain of blades –
The watery flicker she peered from,
And nipped her off close to the bulb.

I piled their frailty lights on a carpenter’s bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens
(The buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered).
Propped their raw butts in bucket water
(Their oval, meaty butts)
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch. The whole lot went.
Yet they stayed. That night, on my pillow,
My brain was a chandelier of daffodils!

Dressed for Heaven,
Wings pouring light, faces bowed,
The souls of all those daffodils, as I killed them,
Had taken refuge inside me –

I could see right into their flame-stillness
Like seeing right into the eye-pupil
Of a person fast asleep, as if I’d lifted the eyelid –

I could study
That scarf of papery crinkle, fawn and perfunctory, at their throats,
And the tissue of their lips. I learned
That what had looked like a taffeta knot, undone
And re-tied looser, crumpled,
Was actually membrane of solid light.

And that their metals were odourless
More a deep-grave stoniness, a cleanness of stone,
As if ice had a breath –

They began to alarm me. Were these
My free girls, my Saturnalian nunnery,
With their bloomers of scrambled egg-yolk, their flounces,
Their core alive and kicking, their bare shoulders in frills,
That set the cold stars shaking
Loose and wetly
Inside walking, darkly-coated people?

I tried to picture them out there, in the grass –

These rigid, gold archangels somehow
Drank up my attempt.

With a grisly awe
Like the idea of atoms, or like the idea
Of white-frosted galaxies floating apart,
As I sank deeper, each towered heavier,

Cathedral interior lit,
Empty or all-seeing angel stare
Leaning through me –
it was Resurrection,
The trumpet,
The corpse-weight of nightmare!
I wrenched free
I flitted
With my world, my garden, with my unlikely
Baby-cries leached from the thaw –
my shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year –

Photo b By Private individual – A photo taken privately., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4337056

Dear Readers, it’s a new year so it must be time for a new medical procedure (in this case, one I’ve been waiting six months for, but better late than never!) So it was off to the Royal Free Hospital for a Nerve Conduction Study, to see if we can find out why my feet are so numb.

The Royal Free is actually a moderately awkward place to get to from East Finchley, so I got a cab. My cab driver was from Afghanistan originally, and was describing how his mother died of a heart attack aged 65 after the family were attacked by the Taliban. He himself is type 2 diabetic, so we had a great chat about neuropathy, and he recommended a juice made from apple, carrot, beetroot and orange that he’s knocking up for himself every morning. Then he told me that he’d failed a written English test that taxi drivers now apparently have to have in order to keep their minicab badge. Honestly? I can see why you’d want people to be able to speak sufficiently good English, and to read enough to understand road signs, but this chap’s spoken English was as good as any of the London-born cabbies that I’ve been driven around by during the broken leg months. Life just seems to hard for people sometimes.

Anyhoo, I got to the hospital, found my way to neurology, and was soon chatting to the consultant. What a strange experience a Nerve Conduction Study is! And what a reminder that we basically run on electrical signals. Before I knew what was happening my toes were jumping, and he also tested my hand as I was complaining that I seemed to have developed a tremor there. It’s not at all painful, I feel no side effects, and overall the whole thing was a slightly comic reminder of how easy it is to get us to make physical movements which are not under our control.

Anyhow, at the end of it all he diagnosed mild neuropathy in my feet, and no problem with my hands. The question is, why? I don’t appear to be diabetic (though I might see if the doctor will revisit that), and I haven’t got any of the things that I was secretly worried about (Parkinsons, MS etc) so that’s a relief. My B12 levels are fine (a shortage of B12 can cause neuropathy). So it’s all a bit mysterious, but at least I know I’m not imagining a problem with my feet. Apparently the results will be with my GP within a couple of hours, and I persuaded the consultant to give me a copy of the results. I shall follow up with the doctor and see what we do next. I can live with having neuropathy, but it would be good to know if there’s anything that can be done to stop it getting worse.

I’ve also been seeing a podiatrist, and that was very enlightening – I definitely have a) hypermobility (which explains why the smallest change in the pavement surface seems to trigger a major catastrophe where my ankle is concerned) and b) bunions and c) fallen arches, so I’m getting some orthotics to see if they will help to rebalance my walking. Plus there’s good old pilates for balance and strength as well.

One thing the consultant did say is that I need to be careful in the dark, because in the absence of adequate feeling in my feet, I need to use my eyes to help with balance, which I can’t do if it’s dark. So I will need to be a bit more careful if I do any more visits to caves, and I should also (apparently) be careful if I close my eyes in the shower.

Well, let’s see what happens next, Readers! And do shout if you have any advice/comments/experience in these matters, it’s always good to share knowledge.

Dear Readers, it’s been a very full-on week, what with my uncooperative magpies and endless quantities of cellular biology for my Open University course, but today was so bright and sunshiny that I had to go for a quick gallop around the County Roads here in East Finchley. First up, I always love the tiles on the inside of the porches that some of the houses have – there seem to be a few houses with one kind of tile, followed by another couple of houses with a different style.

I love them, and I’m sorry that my house doesn’t have them, but there we go! You can’t have everything!

And there was lots to admire on this walk, not least this intrepid bumblebee queen feeding on the mahonia in Hertford Road. I must definitely plant some in my front garden, the scent is delicious and it’s so useful for early bees. This one was collecting pollen, so she might be ‘incubating’ her first few worker bees in a nest somewhere. Fingers crossed that there isn’t another long cold snap.

Someone has very sensibly wrapped up their tree ferns, keeping them snug and warm until spring.

And I’ve always really liked this silver birch, especially at this time of year when the shoots are pale purple.

There’s some stinking iris ‘berries’ in a front garden…

…a little patch of snowdrops, positively glowing….

and some periwinkle, which seems to have some flowers more or less all year.

There is a newly-planted Midland hawthorn ‘Paul’s Scarlet’, which will have bright pink flowers in the spring.

And across the road there’s what looks like another hawthorn, but happy to be corrected! I’m amazed that the birds haven’t found the berries yet!

There seems to be a viburnum for every season, and the one below, which I think is Viburnum tinus, is in full flower. I love the way that the blooms change colour.

And so, it’s amazing what there is in flower here in early February, and the bumblebee makes me think that maybe spring is around the corner after all. Plus, if you have clear skies, there is a wonderful view of Venus just above the crescent moon at the moment, well worth a look. I might try to get a photo later.

Dear Readers, you might remember that I’m currently conducting an experiment to see whether the birds in my garden prefer orange or yellow doughballs, having ascertained two years ago that there was a definite preference for red. Well, all I can say is that the birds have been a lot less cooperative this year. In total I’m supposed to do twenty trails, ten where orange balls are in the majority, and ten where there are more yellow ones. This is to check that the birds are selecting by colour, not just picking out the commonest colour or in fact just choosing at random.

The tricky bit is that you have to end the trial when there are between fifteen and thirty five doughballs left. I have set my timer to check what’s going on every ten minutes (after all, I do have other stuff to do, like shower and eat), but the little devils either ignore the doughballs altogether or swoop down en masse and gobble the lot. So frustrating! At this rate I’ll have to make another kilo of doughballs.

Fortunately I have managed to get eight trials where orange balls were in the majority, so I’ve swapped to putting out trials with mainly yellow balls, so hopefully I can get at least eight trials of each colour. Then there’s some antsy-fancy statistical work, and then I’ll know whether they actually do prefer orange or yellow, or if they’re just hungry and not at all picky. My report has to be in by Monday 10th February, so it’s very tight.

And it’s not as if that’s all – I also have lots of genetics questions to answer (Transcription! Translation! Quaternary folding of proteins! Don’t ask! But then, it is year three so I’d expect it to be hard-ish, and I can feel my brain creaking open with all the new ideas, so it’s all good. And furthermore, there’s nothing riding on this except my own sense of accomplishment, so I should really relax and just enjoy it.

Now, where are those blessed woodpigeons?

European Rabbit (Photo Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

Dear Readers, teeth are one of those things that are taken for granted until they rebel, at which point they become the most important things in the world. Is there anything more infernal than bad toothache? And who looks forward to a trip to the dentist? I’m fortunate enough to have my father’s teeth (and I can hear him in my head saying ‘isn’t it about time you gave them back?), which means that I have exactly one filling, and that put in by a lunatic evangelical dentist over forty years ago when I lived in Dundee. Well I remember him asking me if I had a relationship with Jesus while I had a mouthful of dental swabs. But anyhow, I was amused to have come across a trio of tooth stories in New Scientist in the past week or so, so here we go!

First up, rabbits apparently eat their own teeth in order to supplement the calcium that they need to grow new ones. Rabbits eat a very coarse diet, and their teeth are constantly wearing down – if they get too short, the rabbit can’t eat anymore. So, it seems that their teeth produce a fine calcium dust as the rabbit chews, and this is absorbed back into the rabbit’s body and digested much more easily than calcium supplements. It seems like a very sensible way to recycle a precious mineral, and who knew? Maybe not rabbit keepers, some of who have been feeding their rabbits calcium supplements that it turns out are unnecessary, and could, indeed, cause kidney stones.

Wild Bottlenose Dolphin from https://whalescientists.com/barataria-bay-bottlenose-dolphins-march-2022/

Next up, there is some speculation that dolphins can hear with their teeth. For a long time, scientists have wondered why dolphins have so many teeth – most of them aren’t used for chewing, and in addition they sit very loosely in the jaw. Scientist Ryo Kodera, of Tsurumi  University in Japan, suggests that the teeth might act as antennae, helping the dolphins to echolocate under water. The cochlear nerve, which processes sound, extends right into the lower jaw in dolphins, suggesting that vibrations felt in the teeth could be passed on to the brain. The teeth also sit in spongy, porous sockets which are connected by a thick bundle of nerves.

Other scientists are sceptical about this, but that is their job – Kodera acknowledges that there needs to be further research in future. At any rate, it seems that that beaming ‘smile’ of Flipper the dolphin might be about more than just healthy teeth.

Sabre -toothed cat (Smilodon fatalis) reconstructed at the Natural History Museum in London (Photo John Cummings, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

And finally, why were sabre-toothed animals so successful, and why are there none today? When we think of such carnivores, we tend to think of the canonical sabre-toothed tiger, but actually these teeth evolved at least five times in different groups of animals. There were sabre-toothed reptiles some 270 million years ago, a sabre-toothed marsupial related to the extinct thylacine, and, of course, those cats.

Scientist Tahlia Pollock, of the University of Bristol, investigated the teeth of no less than 95 carnivorous mammal species including 25 sabre-toothed ones. The teeth were categorised, and then each set of teeth was 3D printed, and plunged into a block of gelatine that mimicked animal flesh.

The sabre teeth could puncture the block with 50 percent less effort than any other kind of teeth, and the Smilodon (pictured) had the most extreme teeth of all. However, there is a trade off to weaponry of this kind – the teeth were prone to breaking off, and some of the specimens found in the La Brea tar pits had lost teeth while they were alive.

Sabre-toothed predators were really designed to hunt giant prey, such as mammoths or giant sloths. But when these started to die out, the sabre-toothed animals were likely to have been outcompeted by carnivores with smaller teeth which were better adapted to smaller, more numerous prey, such as deer or rabbits.

So, today the sabre-toothed animals are gone, and instead we have smaller predators with smaller teeth to hunt smaller prey. Though if you’ve ever seen a tiger yawning, you might consider that the teeth are not that much smaller.

Links below:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2464105-rabbits-may-eat-their-own-teeth-to-boost-their-calcium-intake/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2461513-dolphins-may-use-their-teeth-to-hear-underwater/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2463406-why-sabre-toothed-animals-evolved-again-and-again/