Dear Readers, at this time of year it’s very easy to keep our heads down, what with all the shopping/decorating/visiting/cooking, but even in the middle of winter it’s worth looking up and stopping occasionally. Look at the extraordinary colour on these lime twigs! I suspect the trees are a variety of our native broad-leaved lime (Tilia platyphyllos var Rubra) – this is a smaller, better behaved variety than the native tree, which can grow up to 40 metres tall and wouldn’t be ideal for a narrow residential street.

Plus, my winter-flowering honeysuckle is living up to its name…

And it’s always worth keeping your nose on high alert for Christmas box – someone locally has a whole front garden full of it, and every winter I make a deliberate detour to get a nose full of its sweet scent.

It’s always worth keeping an eye open for alder, with its cones and catkins…

And then there’s the silver birch, which has these wonderful magenta twigs.

And today is the Winter Solstice (technically it’s at 3 p.m. here in the UK) – so Sunday night is the longest night of the year, and from now on, the days will gradually get longer until suddenly spring is here. When I used to work, I loved the first time that I left the office only to notice that it was still just about light. The year turns, and soon the buds will be bursting again.

 

Dear Readers, I first published this in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, but it feels as appropriate in the run-up to Christmas/Chanukah/ other celebrations as ever. Sending any of you who need it a hug. I see you, doing your best in difficult times. Let’s be kind to one another. You never know what’s happening in other people’s lives. 

Dear Readers, it’s 6.30 a.m. on a Saturday morning and I’m sitting in the office, listening to the thin, sweet song of a robin. Outside it’s still dark as pitch, but a runner has trudged past, taking advantage of the quiet street to jog up the middle of the road. And I have been thinking about Christmas, and how different it will be this year, not just for me but for many of us. This is my first Christmas as an orphan, and the idea is taking some getting used to.

Until a few years ago, the weeks before Christmas were frantically busy for me as I tried to get everything in place for Mum and Dad’s visit. We already had the stairlift so that they could get upstairs, but there was the commode and the reclining chair to get, the temporary registration of the pair of them with my doctor, not to mention the food and the presents and the cleaning. The wheelchair had to be rented and popped into the hall, ready for action. The night before they arrived I would be nervously eyeing up everyone who parked outside our house – we don’t have a car, but it’s a long tradition that you can ‘save’ a parking space by popping a couple of wheelie bins into the road, and with Mum and Dad unable to walk very far it could save a lot of worry.

And then they’d arrive, usually driven down by my brother, and the work would really begin. Everything had to be perfect, of course, just as it had to be perfect when Mum used to be in charge. I wonder why I didn’t learn from the way that she often had a migraine on Christmas Day from sheer stress? I remember one day when Mum was in a particular tizzy about something. Dad was sitting in the armchair with a purple paper hat slightly askew on his head, a gin and tonic in one hand and the cat on his lap.

‘Syb’, he said, patting the chair next to him, ‘Just come and sit down for Gawd’s sake. The brussel sprouts can wait for half an hour’.

‘No they can’t!’ she said, and burst into tears.

And so by the time Christmas was over, Mum was worn to a bit of a frazzle. So maybe it’s no surprise that I remember the days after the big event with particular fondness – the days of eating cold turkey, hot potatoes and pickle, playing Trivial Pursuit and watching the obligatory James Bond film with Dad.

And, strangely enough, it’s not the big things that I remember about the Christmases that I hosted either.

It’s the afternoons when Mum and Dad both had a doze, Dad in his recliner, Mum on the sofa, both of them snoozing along peacefully.

It’s the morning that the great spotted woodpecker turned up on the feeder and I gave Mum my binoculars so that she could see him properly.

It’s the night that the International Space Station went by on Christmas Eve, and Mum and I watched it go sailing past.

This year will be the first Christmas in a long, long time where I don’t have anywhere to go, or anyone apart from my husband to cater for. I am lucky to have him, I know.

The losses pile up, and the difference between the Christmas gatherings on the television advertisements and my quiet, subdued bittersweet Christmas could not be starker.

But I know that I am not alone – for so many of the people reading this, there will be an empty space at the Christmas table that can never be filled. And so this is to say that I see you, and I’m holding you in my heart. Grief is the tax that we pay for loving people deeply, but  bereavement is a bitter path to walk, and attention must be paid to what we’re feeling at this time if we’re to bear it. There is a time for distraction, and a time for weeping, and only you will know which you need at any given time, but my advice would be to make room for both.

And unlike so many, many people, I don’t have agonising choices to make about who to see and how. I have not spent the year worrying myself sick about elderly relatives that I can’t see, children who haven’t been able to go to school, or who have gone and then been sent home because of a Covid outbreak. I’m still in work, and still housed. I see you too, trying to make this very different Christmas work because other people are depending on you. Please be kind to yourselves. The brussel sprouts will wait for thirty minutes while you have a cup of tea and watch something ridiculous on the television.

Outside there’s the slightest hint of a lightening sky, and the robin has stopped singing, duty done for another morning. In a few days time we’ll reach the winter solstice, the longest night for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, and the light will gradually come back, until one day we wake up at our usual time and hear the dawn chorus, not a solitary robin. The world turns whether we want it to or not, the bulbs are already starting to stretch and yawn in their loamy beds and life will carry on. Let’s take things both lightly and with deep seriousness, with a sense of fun and with a sense that what we do matters, because it does, more now than ever.

 

 

Dear Readers, a few years ago the Shadberry/Amelanchior just up the road from us was blown over in high winds. Judging by the angle at which it was leaning, this wasn’t surprising…

..and in July 2023, the inevitable happened.

Since then, we’ve had the very welcome implementation of some EV charging points along the road, so I wasn’t expecting to see another street tree. Imagine my surprise, and joy, to see a new tree planted. This is a cherry tree, variety ‘Pandora’, and it’s actually a cultivar of the native Bird Cherry. In the spring it should have pink-flushed white flowers, and deep crimson leaves in the autumn, so although it doesn’t look very exciting at the moment, it should be lovely once it becomes established. As it has several seasons of interest, it’s the perfect street tree, and hopefully the bees will like it just as much as they do its older relatives, as documented here.

Street trees bring so much joy and interest to our towns, and if chosen wisely can provide a biodiversity boost as well. Fingers crossed that this one has been planted properly and does well.

Dear Readers, it’s dark at 7 a.m. and then it’s dark again by 4 p.m. here in London, and it can all get a bit wearing and depressing. I seem to spend great swathes of time putting on layers of clothing and then taking them off, and although the Christmas lights are cheering it’s still a strange time of year. But then I remember that from the Winter Solstice on Sunday 21st December, the days will gradually get longer. Spring will be here before we know it. But in the meantime, here are a few winter poems, all new to me. See what you think.

This poem, by Scott Cairns, is so atmospheric – it captures the way that winter seems to dampen down all the high spirits of spring and summer, as if everything is just about hanging on.

Early Frost

By Scott Cairns

This morning the world’s white face reminds us
that life intends to become serious again.
And the same loud birds that all summer long
annoyed us with their high attitudes and chatter
silently line the gibbet of the fence a little stunned,
chastened enough.

They look as if they’re waiting for things
to grow worse, but are watching the house,
as if somewhere in their dim memories
they recall something about this abandoned garden
that could save them.

The neighbor’s dog has also learned to wake
without exaggeration. And the neighbor himself
has made it to his car with less noise, starting
the small engine with a kind of reverence. At the window
his wife witnesses this bleak tableau, blinking
her eyes, silent.

I fill the feeders to the top and cart them
to the tree, hurrying back inside
to leave the morning to these ridiculous
birds, who, reminded, find the rough shelters,
bow, and then feed.

I like the gentle melancholy of this poem by Michael Ryan.In Winter

By Michael Ryan

At four o’clock it’s dark.
Today, looking out through dusk
at three gray women in stretch slacks
chatting in front of the post office,
their steps left and right and back
like some quick folk dance of kindness,
I remembered the winter we spent
crying in each other’s laps.
What could you be thinking at this moment?
How lovely and strange the gangly spines
of trees against a thickening sky
as you drive from the library
humming off-key? Or are you smiling
at an idea met in a book
the way you smiled with your whole body
the first night we talked?
I was so sure my love of you was perfect,
and the light today
reminded me of the winter you drove home
each day in the dark at four o’clock
and would come into my study to kiss me
despite mistake after mistake after mistake.

And, actually, I do know this poem: it always reminds me of my Dad, up every morning to get the fire going when we were children, though the ‘chronic angers’ in our house were more likely to be acute, short and sharp. The last two lines always make me pause.

Those Winter Sundays

By Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

And here’s a rather fine poem about Winter Solstice itself…

The Shortest Day by Susan Cooper

So the shortest day came, and the year died,

And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world

Came people singing, dancing,

To drive the dark away.

They lighted candles in the winter trees;

They hung their homes with evergreen;

They burned beseeching fires all night long

To keep the year alive,

And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake

They shouted, reveling.

Through all the frosty ages you can hear them

Echoing behind us—Listen!!

All the long echoes sing the same delight,

This shortest day,

As promise wakens in the sleeping land:

They carol, feast, give thanks,

And dearly love their friends,

And hope for peace.

And so do we, here, now,

This year and every year.

Welcome Yule!

And here’s the last word, by Wendell Berry. He’s not wrong, you know…

To Know the Dark by Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

 

and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.

 

Dear Readers, the humble parsnip cropped up (no pun intended 🙂 ) when I did The Twelve Plants of Christmas a few years ago. I am aghast to realise that with Christmas only a week away, I have no idea what my theme is going to be for the Twelve Days this year. I am sure I am going to be every bit as surprised as you are, but I’m sure inspiration will strike soon. In the meantime, all opinions on parsnips welcome!

Dear Readers, I’m not sure when roast parsnips became a part of our Christmas feast in the Bug Woman household, but it feels like a relatively recent thing. I’m pretty sure that we didn’t eat them when we lived in East London, so we would have been parsnip-less until about 1975. Then when we moved to the dizzy heights of Seven Kings (still in London but very slightly more Essex-y) parsnips started to crop up when we had roast beef, debuting at Christmas in about 1978. What about you, UK readers? Were parsnips ever a Christmas thing for you or was it just us?

At any rate, the parsnip is a member of the carrot family, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in flower. From the photos, it looks as if it could have a future as an ornamental, with very pretty umbels of yellow flowers which would no doubt attract clouds of hoverflies. As the gardeners amongst you already know, parsnip is a biennial like so many of the umbellifers, producing a rosette of leaves in year one, followed by the flowers in year two.

The parsnip comes originally from Eurasia, but has been in the UK since the Romans brought it (though there is some confusion between carrots and parsnips in Roman literature). Its sweetness meant it was used as a substitute for sugar before sugar beet came along, and indeed there are still lots of recipes out there for parsnip cakes. Don’t do what I did and try to make a swede (rutabaga) cake though – the one that I created had a kind of satanic sulphurous undertone that no amount of cream cheese icing could disguise.

In his column in The Guardian, Nigel Slater mentions a dish called ‘parsnips Molly Parkin’ –

“The recipe sounds somewhat unlikely, as it involves layering browned parsnips and tomatoes with brown sugar and cream, and baking it slowly till the sliced roots have softened and the cream is a rich, sweet sauce. In fact, the result is much less sweet than you would suspect. I have recently done the same with beetroot and it works a treat.”

Well, I’m not sure, I have to say. Maybe one for if you have a glut on your allotment?

This spiced orange and parsnip cake looks as if it could work, though, and it’s by no less a a personage than Nadiya Hussain, probably my favourite Great British Bake Off winner of all time.

Here at Schloss Bug Woman though parsnips are generally roasted (no pre-boiling, they’re fine as they are). While watching Masterchef The Professionals this year I was astonished to hear Monica Galetti say that you didn’t need to cut out the core, which I have been doing religiously since 1978, as my mother taught me. Turns out that Monica is correct, and the core cooks down to softness in the same time as the rest of the vegetable, plus less waste, which can only be a good thing. You live and learn, as they say. The ones below have been roasted with honey and mustard, which sounds a tad too sweet to me, but who knows?

Not everybody appreciates the ways of the parsnip, however. In France I believe that they are considered only fit for animal food, and in Italy they are fed to the pigs that are used to make parma ham. There’s a saying on the island of Guernsey (one of the Channel Islands) that ‘the little pig gets the biggest parsnip’, meaning that the youngest child is the one who is most spoilt. It also points up that it’s not just Italian pigs who get to feast on this root vegetable.

The ancient Romans considered parsnips an aphrodisiac, and the Emperor Tiberius accepted part of his tribute from Germania in ‘white carrots’.  On a more domestic note,  my Uncle Roy used to make the most migraine-inducing cloudy wine with them. Every Christmas we were given a glass of his latest brew, and I regret to say that most of it ended up in the pot that the rubber plant lived in, lest we return home in no state to eat our Christmas turkey. Strange to say, the rubber plant thrived, which just goes to show what ideal plants they are for dysfunctional households.

Interestingly though, who would have thought that the  humble parsnip could be dangerous (and not just in my Uncle Roy’s wine?) Like many umbellifers (Giant Hogweed comes to mind), the wild parsnip plant contains compounds which are phototoxic – they cause blisters when skin that has been in contact with parsnip sap is exposed to the sun (photodermatitis). They can also cause these effects in poultry and other livestock, so hopefully the Parma ham pigs don’t ever get the chance to eat the leaves or stems of the plant. Nigel Slater also mentions that old, woody specimens of parsnip were thought to induce madness, and that one time it was known as ‘the mad parsnip’.

The harmful chemicals don’t, however,  deter the caterpillars of several rather lovely moths and butterflies that feed on parsnip leaves, who instead use the toxins to deter predators.  In North America we have the parsnip swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes)…

and in Europe there’s the Common Swift moth (Korscheltellus lupulinus) and the Ghost Moth (Hepialus humuli), where there is a marked difference between the sexes. The male Ghost Moth performs an aerial display coupled with pheromones to attract a female.

And here, to finish, is a proverb and a very short poem. First up, ‘fine words butter no parsnips’ – this dates back to about 1600, and even then it had the sense that ‘talk alone won’t improve anything’. Here’s no other than Sherlock Holmes expounding on the statement:

“I tried to reason with her, but she insists she will be at her wits’ end until she knows the truth about her husband,” Lestrade sighed.

“Fine words butter no parsnips,” Sherlock replied. “While your intentions are admirable and your speech no doubt soothing, it is no substitute for the truth she seeks. That is why it is imperative for us to find that truth, and as quickly as possible.”

And here is Ogden Nash, on the parsnip:

The Parsnip

The parsnip, children, I repeat
Is simply an anaemic beet.
Some people call the parsnip edible;
Myself, I find this claim incredible

Clearly Ogden has never had Parsnips Molly Parkin.

 

Dear Readers, I am an avid reader of British Birds magazine, so I was fascinated to see an article about sparrowhawks in this month’s issue. A study of sparrowhawks in Edinburgh has shown that the prey taken by these predatory birds has changed over the past thirty years, in line with changes in the garden bird population. Sparrowhawks take more wood pigeons, feral pigeons and (gulp) magpies (I’d have thought it would be an ambitious ‘sprawk’ that took on a magpie, but there we go). These are all birds whose populations are increasing, in part due to supplementary feeding by humans. Sparrowhawks take fewer starlings, greenfinches and chaffinches, all of which have declining populations. This has led to an increase in the number of sparrowhawk eggs laid per clutch of one egg, which probably indicates that the females are well-fed, but this doesn’t translate into additional surviving nestlings: feeding an additional hungry mouth may put too much pressure on the parent birds. I did wonder if there’s a ‘chicken and egg’ thing going on here (sorry) – only the larger females are able to take on a bird the size of a wood pigeon, so maybe nature is favouring birds that are bigger, who are in turn able to take larger prey. At any rate, it’s good to see that sparrowhawks are so adaptable – having one in the garden is the North London equivalent of hosting a tiger, so, sad as it is for the victim, it’s always good to see one.

The second article that caught my attention was about one of our rarest forest birds, the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker. This is a fiendishly difficult bird to locate, and has been something of a conundrum to conservationists: if you can’t find the birds, how can you get an idea about numbers, and whether their populations are stable, declining or even growing? This is where passive acoustic monitoring comes in. In the blogpost linked above, I mention the Woodpecker Network, a group of dedicated volunteers who have collected data on the bird since 2015. This year, they used recording devices which were placed in known Lesser Spotted Woodpecker territories and left to record for 5 days at each site. Then, each memory card was lovingly analysed manually – the spectrograms from the cards, plus the sound, would show a distinct pattern for each time the woodpecker drummed.

This was far from a straightforward exercise. The birds are most active in March and April, but this is of course a windy, wet time of year, and ‘weather noise’ can completely obscure the drumming sounds. Plus, LSWs drum very early in the morning, at the height of the dawn chorus. It was clear that the researchers needed something to help them, so they ‘trained’ some software to pick out anomalous sounds, using our old friend the Xeno Canto website. This has over 1100 ‘foreground’ recordings of the bird, and 478 ‘background’ recordings at last count, and so it provides a rich and varied selection of drumming sounds for the software to learn. By the end of the ‘training’ it was 95 percent accurate in identifying sounds, and picked up over 90 percent of the LSW sounds.

But what does it sound like? Have a listen below…

This is a French LSW, recorded by Stanislas Wroza….

And here is a rather closer Swedish LSW recorded by Lars Edenius….

And finally, here’s one from the UK by Jason Anderson, recorded in Burley, Hampshire

Anyhow, after all the recordings were analysed, it’s clear that the LSW is probably more widespread in Hampshire, Sussex and Somerset than was previously realised, and they were detected at sites where they hadn’t been observed for many years. This may mean that the population of the bird is better than was thought, but further investigation is needed: the authors of the report suggest a wider survey, to include a number of woodland sites where LSWs haven’t been recorded recently. They also point out that the devices could be used to detect other birds that are difficult to observe, including the Hawfinch, a notoriously tricky bird and another Red List species.

All in all, this sounds like an excellent way of gathering data on elusive species, with the minimum of disturbance. My only concern would be people stealing the recorders, otherwise I’d see if we could put one in Coldfall Wood. When we did our last bird survey, a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker was detected, but as far as I know, no one has heard them since. Or have we simply not known what to look for? There is always much more going on than we notice.

Dear Readers, on Saturday we went to the Tower of London for a concert of Christmas music by the Choir of the Chapels Royal. What a treat it was! And what a treat it was to walk the streets of London, my favourite city in the whole world. You might have read that it’s a hellhole descending into anarchy, or you might have heard that it’s under Sharia law. Need I say that neither is true? It always impresses me how people from all over the world just rub along together enjoying what the city has to offer. Unless you stand on the left-hand side of an escalator, obviously.

It always surprises me how large the Tower of London complex is once you get inside. The oldest part of the Tower was built in Norman times, but many other monarchs cheerfully knocked things down and put up new bits, until we get the hodge-podge that we have today. It was very exciting to be going into the Tower just as everybody else was getting thrown out, and I took advantage of being in the queue to take a few photos.

Once inside we headed for the Church of St Peter ad Vincula – the list of people buried here reads like a who’s who of Tudor England. They include Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas More (though his head is buried in Canterbury, apparently). We had little time to admire the building, however, as the seating was ‘first come, first served’, and the area where the choir was to sing is slightly off  centre, meaning that those who came last probably wouldn’t be able to see them.

The choir sang a wonderful selection of Christmas songs, from ‘Puer nobis nascitur’, written in the fourteenth century, through to a Puer Nobis written by Richard Rodney Bennett who died in 2012. I have a great fondness for Vaughan Williams’ ‘Fantasia on Christmas Carols’, so was glad to hear it being performed by such an exemplary choir. The songs were interspersed by readings by Henry Goodman, best known as Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister – he did a masterful job of reading the end of ‘A Christmas Carol’, the part where Scrooge wakes up and discovers that he can do good in the world. He also read John Julius Norwich’s ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, in which the ever increasing panoply of unlikely gifts from her suitor drives a young woman to legal action.

What a treat the whole thing was! And then we were out into the Tower of London again, and darkness had fallen. What a magical city London is.

Dear Readers, I’ve had my latest foster kitties, Sunrise and Pudding, for a few weeks now, and I’m delighted to report that they’re settling in very nicely. They’re two three year-old girls, and, from being extremely timid, they’re now ruling the roost as cats so often do.

Sunrise, the tortoiseshell, is the most confident of  two, but both of them are now endlessly curious. During the week I arrived home to find a loaf of crusty bread knocked off of the worksurface, the paper torn off and one end slightly gnawed. I have no idea which of the miscreants was responsible.

Then yesterday, we heard some rustling in the corridor, which we foolishly ignored. When we eventually went to investigate, it turned out that the cats had broken into the shopping bags full of food for the food bank. We foolishly assumed that because there was no meat or fish, it would be safe, but one/both of the cats had eaten through three layers of cardboard and wrapping to be almost through to the mince pies. Who knew that cats like mince pies? Maybe it’s the suet. Anyhow, we rescued the  mince pies before any harm was done, though clearly we’ll have to eat them now (such a hardship).

Both Pudding and Sunrise are, as you might have guessed, obsessed with food, to a greater extent than any cats that I’ve ever dealt with (and these will be my 80th and 81st foster cats respectively. I know little about where they came from, but my guess is that that wherever it was, they weren’t fed regularly, and so have become very anxious about food. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel – for the past few days they’ve been leaving a little bit of dry food in their dishes for a few hours, rather than hoovering everything up within minutes of it being put down. I hope that as they become more relaxed, they’ll start to trust that food will be available regularly. They’ve started to play and sleep downstairs, a sign that they’re starting to feel at home, so fingers crossed.

If you or anyone you know wants to find out more about the girls, and if you live in London and have a garden, have a look here.

https://www.rspca.org.uk/local/friern-barnet-adoption-centre//findapet/details/PUDDING_SUNRISE/275341/teaser

Well Readers, I don’t know about you, but I generally have at least two, and sometimes three books on the go, so that whatever mood I’m in I have something to match. First up is ‘Vermeer – A Life Lost and Found’ by that bloke off of the telly, Andrew Graham-Dixon. What a pleasure this book is! I’ve learned so much about the history of the Low Countries, the Thirty Years War, and the growth of religious tolerance in what is now the Netherlands. Graham Dixon manages to make all of this interesting rather than dry, and at the heart of it is the mystery of why most of Vermeer’s paintings were bought by just one couple. I have always loved Vermeer – there’s something of the transcendence of the every day in his paintings, a moment captured and somehow shot through with a divine light. I am loving Graham-Dixon’s insights into the paintings themselves as well. This is a hefty book, though, and so it’s for bedtime reading rather than for lugging around in my backpack.

What I’m lugging about in the aforementioned backpack is this rather brilliant book about the conservation of the Amur tiger in remote north-eastern Russia. The author, Jonathan C. Slaght, has already brought this region to life in his book about Blakiston’s Fish Owl, “Owls of the Eastern Ice‘, and as in his previous book Slaght has a gift for conjuring up not just the animals, but also the people involved in the conservation effort and the whole sense of walking in the forest. When I last picked the book up a 300 kg brown bear had been caught in a tiger snare, and the resultant carnage left two scientists up a tree. Way too exciting for night time reading, I’m sure you’ll agree.

And then there are those books that you’ve forgotten you’ve ordered, and which turn up out of the blue. I’ve read most of existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom’s work, including his previous book which he co-wrote with his wife of 65 years who was dying. I put the other two books down to read this one: Yalom is 93 years old, and his memory is failing, but he has spent the past few years during and since Covid giving one hour, one-off sessions to people, and then referring them on to other psychotherapists who he thinks can help them.I have always been fascinated by therapy (and have been in therapy myself for almost ten years – to me, it is to my psyche what pilates and walking are to my body), but I wondered what good could come of one intense hour of connection. The answer is ‘quite a lot’.

So, Readers, any recommendations/thoughts? What are you hoping that Santa will put in. your Christmas stocking? Do share!

Dear Readers, there was a very interesting article in New Scientist this week, concerning the hybridisation of polar and grizzly bears. As the Arctic ice that enables polar bears to go north to hunt for seals becomes less and less reliable, polar bears are increasingly moving further south, where their range overlaps with grizzly bears who, finding the climate to their liking, are moving north. Hence, some interbreeding is taking place in the wild. One female polar bear met up with two grizzlies, and had two cubs by each male – three daughters and a son. In a turn of fate that even Shakespeare couldn’t have dreamed up, one of the females then mated with her own father and with the other male that her mother had mated with. She in turn had four cubs.

Scientists were initially excited by this turn of events –  for a start, the cubs of the original mating should have been infertile but, as one of the daughters showed, they could clearly reproduce. Would the offspring be better adapted to the changes occurring due to climate change?

Grolar bears (and pizzlies, bears with a polar bear father and a grizzly bear mother) are more heavily-built than polar bears, with larger feet and heads. Scientists originally conjectured that this might mean that they could hunt for a wider range of prey, rather than being restricted to seals as polar bears are. But, as I learned on my biology course last year, hybrids are often not well-adapted to either of the environments of their parents, being somewhere in the middle between them, and so it proved with these hybrids. There are no wild grolar bears/pizzlies except for the ones that we already know about. These bears don’t have the non-slip paws of polar bears, and so can’t hunt on the ice, but they also don’t have the massive forelimbs and shoulders of grizzly bears, which enable them to hunt terrestrial prey. It seems that they are not the future of bears in the far north after all.

Grolars and pizzlies are not the only climate-induced hybrids that exist as populations that were once separate move together – there are blynxes (bob-cat/lynx hybrids) in North America, and coywolves, the result of wolf/coyote matings. Where both animals serve a similar purpose in an ecosystem, these hybrids might not have much of a knock-on effect on their ecosystems, but where they have different ‘habits’ things could change significantly. For example, grizzly bears leave carrion for other animals to feed on, but polar bears eat pretty much everything. If grolars and pizzlies inherited the polar bear habits, this could have a significant effect on the grizzly ecosystem.

However, this is largely hypothetical. It looks as if grolars and pizzlies are not common, and are unlikely to be the future of Arctic bears. It’s ironic that the word ‘Arctic’ actually means ‘with bears’ (Antarctic meaning ‘no bears’). Our only hope is a) that climate change is actually taken seriously by our governments and something is done about it or b) that polar bears learn to eat some of the prey that grizzlies currently take. Neither is likely, but hope was the last thing left in Pandora’s box, as we know.

Incidentally the bear in the photo was the result of a grizzly/polar bear mating at Osnabruck zoo. Whether this was an accident or a deliberate attempt by the Zoo to raise an ‘unusual’ animal isn’t clear to me. Two hybrid cubs were born, and the female, Tips (in the photo) was shot dead after escaping from her enclosure in 2017. It’s an open question about whether any animals should be in zoos, but clearly this was a desperately unhappy end to an unhappy story. Not very festive, I know. I promise to ease up on the misery going forward.