Dear Readers, being a cat fosterer is always bittersweet – it’s lovely to see cats blossom in a home environment, but it’s sad to say goodbye to them. These two cats hadn’t had a great start in life: Pudding spent her first two days hiding behind the books on the bookshelf with just her ears showing, her fur bare on her stomach and back legs where she’d been overgrooming from stress. But just look at her now!

Instead of being constantly on the lookout for food, she and her sister spent time lazing about on the furniture, chasing one another and demolishing my knitting…

 

When the people who adopted them came to collect them today, both cats ran up to them to say hello, and then chased one another around the house as usual, like normal playful cats. They’re three years old, but I do wonder what kind of kittenhood they had – it sometimes feels as if they’re making up for lost time. And I know that they’ll do really well when they have a garden to play in, though the birds will have to watch out. One reason why I foster, and why if I did adopt it would need to be an indoor cat, is because I spend a lot of time trying to attract birds and other animals to the garden, and it seems unkind to have a pet that might massacre them.

It seems very quiet as I sit on the sofa writing this: a few hours ago I’d have had a cat ‘helping’ me to type. I always have a little cry when the cats go. But honestly, the satisfaction of seeing animals rehabilitated and going off to loving homes, with people who will adore them, is more than compensation. Charities are always looking for people who can foster cats or dogs, and I really recommend it. Every animal is different, you learn so much, and for me, a house isn’t a home without an animal or two (not counting the spiders and the clothes moths, obviously). If you’ve been thinking about it, do give it a go – you might love it!

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, a frosty morning presents a great opportunity to have a look for lichens: they are everywhere but, like mosses, they are often overlooked, because they are not as colourful or as showy as flowering plants. Hah! They are complicated, multi-faceted organisms, as we shall see below. They can give an indication of how clean the air is – look at this headstone from Milborne St Andrew, the sheer variety of lichens tells you something about both which species can survive, and how old the stone is.

Plus, unlikely as it seems, lichen is the food for the caterpillar of the Marbled Beauty moth, as I described here

Sometimes we just need to slow down a bit to admire what’s under our noses. And if not now, when? We haven’t got forever, you know.

And now, let’s see what I had to say about lichens back in 2024.

In her piece in Nature’s Calendar, Kiera Chapman tells us that there are 2,300 species of lichen in the UK. They vary enormously, from flat crusts like the ones above to organisms that look more like coral. They live in habitats as varied as deserts and rainforests, and can vary in size from less than a millimetre to two metres.

What is a lichen, though? It’s not a single organism but an association between at least two organisms – the mycobiont, which is a fungus, and the photobiont, which gathers energy from light via photosynthesis and can be an alga or a bacteria. The relationship between the two has been debated for a century and a half. The whole idea of mutualism between two species (where both benefit from the association) was pooh-poohed at first, with the hypothesis being that the fungus ‘captured’ the alga/bacterium and held it captive, like an ogre sequestering Rapunzel in a tower. In fact, there is still some discussion about how to classify the relationship: it may appear that the fungus is parasitizing the other organism, but some photobionts can’t now exist without the fungus. It’s clearly a complex relationship that varies in emphasis from species to species.

Chapman discusses two different artworks that are based on lichen. First up is a monumental work by Klaus Daven on the Vouglans Dam in the Jura region of France. It was created by a process known as ‘reverse graffiti’, whereby a pressure washer blasted off most of the lichen and algae in order to create an image of a forest. It was sponsored by the electricity company and a company that makes power washers. For Chapman, and for me, it feels slightly uncomfortable – destroying one set of lifeforms to make images of others seems the opposite of environmentally friendly, however impressive the final results are.

The second work is by German artist Hubert Fenzl, who uses sustainably harvested Claydonia lichen to make artworks that will live indoors for years. His ‘Rainforest’, shown below, uses the lichen to form a birds-eye view of a forest, surrounded by a menacing red area that seems to surround and encroach upon it. As Chapman points out, the combination of a human artistic vision and this natural material asks questions about our care of the forests. There is also none of the grandiosity of the dam project. I know which I prefer.

I was also very heartened to learn from my RHS magazine this week that biology studen Lottie Cavanagh-Sweeney has been commissioned by the British Lichen Society to make a Lichen Trail at the RHS garden at Rosemoor in Devon. Magnifying glasses are provided to examine some of the smaller lichens, and you can download the trail to a smartphone. One of the featured lichens is the rare Tree Lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria) which Fay Newbery, a plant pathologist, describes as ‘green when wet, brown and crinkly when dry.’

Just look at this gorgeous organism!

The elephant in the room, however, as with so many other things, is climate change. An article in New Scientist in 2022 suggested that it had taken a million years for the algae that form the photosynthetic part of the lichen partnership to evolve to cope with 1° Centigrade of warming. They are also not fond of air pollution – the variety of lichens on the headstone at the top of the page indicates that it’s in a rural area with relatively clean air. Still, let’s not become too downhearted just yet – lichens have been here a long time, and who knows how resilient they might prove to be? In the meantime, let’s keep our eyes open for these overlooked organisms.

 

This poem reminds me so much of some of the people that I grew to care about when I worked at the night shelter in Dundee – one young lad was schizophrenic and a heroin addict. This is for you, Jamie. I hope that, somehow, you pulled through.

It Was the Animals
Natalie Diaz
1978 –

Today my brother brought over a piece of the ark

wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag.

He set the bag on my dining table, unknotted it,

peeled it away, revealing a foot-long fracture of wood.

He took a step back and gestured toward it

with his arms and open palms—

It’s the ark, he said.

You mean Noah’s ark? I asked.

What other ark is there? he answered.

Read the inscription, he told me.

It tells what’s going to happen at the end.

What end? I wanted to know.

He laughed, What do you mean, ‘What end?’

The end end.

Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled.

His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters.

He held the jagged piece of wood so gently.

I had forgotten my brother could be gentle.

He set it on the table the way people on television

set things when they’re afraid those things might blow up

or go off—he set it right next to my empty coffee cup.

It was no ark—

it was the broken end of a picture frame

with a floral design carved into its surface.

He put his head in his hands—

I shouldn’t show you this—

God, why did I show her this?

It’s ancient—O, God,

this is so old.

 

Fine, I gave in. Where did you get it?

The girl, he said. O, the girl.

What girl? I asked.

You’ll wish you never knew, he told me.

I watched him drag his wrecked fingers

over the chipped flower-work of the wood—

You should read it. But, O, you can’t take it—

no matter how many books you’ve read.

He was wrong. I could take the ark.

I could even take his marvellously fucked fingers.

The way they almost glittered.

It was the animals—the animals I could not take—

they came up the walkway into my house,

cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips,

marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother,

tails snaking across my feet before disappearing

like retracting vacuum cords into the hollows

of my brother’s clavicles, tusks scraping the walls,

reaching out for him—wildebeests, pigs,

the oryxes with their black matching horns,

javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelots

with their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat.

So many kinds of creature.

I wanted to follow them, to get to the bottom of it,

but my brother stopped me—

This is serious, he said.

You have to understand.

It can save you.

So I sat down, with my brother ruined open like that,

and two by two the fantastical beasts

parading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles,

built itself up around me, filled my coffee cup

before floating it away from the table.

My brother—teeming with shadows—

a hull of bones, lit by tooth and tusk,

lifting his ark high in the air.

Dear Readers, an adult red kangaroo is quite scary enough when it decides that it doesn’t like you: Roger the red kangaroo went viral after a video of him crushing a steel bucket as if it was a paper cup highlighted the strength of these animals.

Imagine, then, meeting up with one of their ancestors. Procoptodon goliah became extinct about 40,000 years ago. Although they were only a little taller than Roger, at 2 metres, they weighed a gob-smacking 240 kilograms (Roger was 89 kilograms). And that caused something of a problem for scientists. Was this massive animal actually able to hop around like today’s kangaroos?

One of a group of extinct animals known as the sthenurine or short-faced kangaroos, Procoptodon was thought to have been unable to hop, because the impact of landing would have broken their legs, but more importantly their Achilles tendons would have snapped. Scientist Megan Jones, at the University of Manchester here in the UK, notes that the tendons in kangaroos alive today are often dangerously close to snapping, but this is because the Achilles tendon holds a lot of the elastic energy that enables the kangaroo to power itself through a series of hops – in fact, this is a very energy-efficient way of getting around.

However, Procoptodon is not just a scaled-up version of a red kangaroo – their feet are shorter, and their calcaneus, or heel bone, is wider. Jones believes that because of this, the bones of this ancient kangaroo would have been more resistant to bending, and could have accommodated a larger Achilles tendon.

While hopping probably wasn’t Procoptodon’s main method of getting around, it could certainly have thundered across the outback when needed (though goodness knows what was brave enough to chase it). Current day kangaroos also use a range of different  ways to get about: they wander around on four legs, sit up like a tripod using their tail and, of course, speed around the place when necessary. I always think that kangaroos travelling at speed are extremely elegant animals, and sometimes wonder why more large animals didn’t choose this as a method of locomotion (although it’s very popular in small animals, with jerboas and springhaas both choosing to boing about the desert/savannah). All in all, I am delighted to think of these massive animals crashing about, and am only sorry that there aren’t any left for us to witness.

You can read the whole article here

Well Readers, on a dank and dismal Sunday morning I sat down at the kitchen window with my checklist, shut the cats out of the kitchen (because believe me there was no other way they were going to let me get any peace), set my timer for an hour and off we went. First up were two ring-necked parakeets, who have become regulars. I thought they’d prefer the sunflower seeds, but they’ll eat anything.

Maximum starling count was eight birds, and very fine they’re looking too, with their full breeding plumage. This one was clicking and chattering away. They even managed to scare off the parakeets but then started fighting amongst themselves.

A pair of blue tits were very daring and swooped down on to the bird table to take a single suet pellet before darting back into the lilac bush. The pair of great tits also did a ‘grab and run’.

Of course the squirrels put in an appearance, scaling the bird table like the free climbers that they are.

Four goldfinches came for a visit, which was great to see – they’ve been noticeable by their absence this past month or so. Three chaffinches dropped in as well.

Two woodpigeons visited the bird table, but spent more time beating one another up than feeding, as is their way…

Four collared doves rocked up, and waited patiently for their turn…

and then in the last minute (literally) two magpies smashed onto the bird table, scattering suet pellets and birds in all directions, followed  seconds later by a jackdaw.

So all in all I saw 29 birds. Some were sadly absent – no blackbirds, and there haven’t been any for months. No robin, but I have seen one around. No coal tit, ditto. No house sparrows! There’s usually a little flock, I  hope they’ll turn up soon. No dunnock, no long-tailed tits. But an hour is a short period of time, and hopefully most of these birds were just elsewhere.

Very pleased with the starling numbers though, definitely up on last year.

Did you do the Birdwatch? How did you get on?

Dear Readers, you might remember that in 2022 there was a lot of excitement when an American Robin turned up in a back garden in Eastbourne and hung around for days, causing quite a stir.

However, this is as nothing compared to the surprise of one of ‘our’ robins turning up in Montreal in Canada on 7th January this year. This is a first for Canada, and is a tremendous surprise – while American Robins are migratory, and so are sometimes picked up by storm winds and deposited in Europe, European Robins tend to stick close to home. So, the question arises: did this Robin hitch a lift? Many sailors, and indeed many ship passengers, have noted the presence of small birds resting on board, so it’s not unlikely that this little chap did the same. The bird has attracted hundreds of birdwatchers, and as with the American Robin in Eastbourne, it gives bird enthusiasts.a chance to see a species that they’d have to travel thousands of miles to see otherwise.

Interestingly, rare birds arriving by ship are more common than you might think – the few European Robins that have arrived on the Eastern Seaboard of the US have all been discovered in close proximity to ports, and so are thought to have hitched a lift. However, the status of a ship-assisted bird depends on whether it was also ‘human-assisted’. If a bird is fed or otherwise looked after while on board, it’s considered to have arrived on land with human help, and so won’t be counted as a rarity. However, if the bird arrives without anyone assisting it, it’s thought to have arrived as if it had landed on a bit of flotsam (or possibly jetsam, I’m sure someone will put me right on that one), and so it can be counted as a rarity. Of course, it’s not always clear whether a bird has been fed or not, but one notable example was a Grey Catbird, native to the US,  that landed on the QEII and was befriended by the crew. When the ship docked in Southampton it stayed onboard –  It liked its new quarters so much that it subsequently toured the Mediterranean with the ship, no doubt well-fed all the way, though I have no details about whether it ever attended the Captain’s Table.

Dear Readers, when i went to the garden centre with my lovely friend J on my birthday, she treated me to a positive plethora of dahlias. And here they are! Some of them will be great for pollinators, and others are purely an indulgence. But I have to confess that I have not had the best of luck with dahlias in the past. I’m hoping to grow these in pots, and to put them out once the risk of frost has passed, but that’s as much as I know, so I’m very happy for any advice you might have.

My Dad was a great lover of dahlias, and was very good at growing them. They make such extraordinary cut flowers, but Mum was less keen, as she maintained that they were always full of earwigs. Of course, being Bug Girl (the precursor to Bug Woman) this was part of their appeal, but I could never find any earwigs, though there were plenty of aphids, who were farmed by ants. I spent many hours with my watercolour paint set, trying to mark the ants in different colours so that I’d recognise them if I saw them again. Alas, as with so many scientific experiments this one fell at the first hurdle – watercolour paints are, as you might expect, soluble, and so as soon as the ants got into the damp earth all the paint came off.

And in other news, my friend L has introduced me to Finchley Garden Centre, where they have a whole field of dahlias that you can cut for 60p a stem. And a very nice caff too! Something for us North Londoners to explore eh….

Wow. I’d not come across this before, but what a passionate description of the powerplay between mothers and sons, the need to break free, and the cost of it all…see what you think.

My Mother Would Be a Falconress
Robert Duncan
1919 –
1988
My mother would be a falconress,
And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,
would fly to bring back
from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
where I dream in my little hood with many bells
jangling when I’d turn my head.

My mother would be a falconress,
and she sends me as far as her will goes.
She lets me ride to the end of her curb
where I fall back in anguish.
I dread that she will cast me away,
for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission.

She would bring down the little birds.
And I would bring down the little birds.
When will she let me bring down the little birds,
pierced from their flight with their necks broken,
their heads like flowers limp from the stem?

I tread my mother’s wrist and would draw blood.
Behind the little hood my eyes are hooded.
I have gone back into my hooded silence,
talking to myself and dropping off to sleep.

For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me,
sewn round with bells, jangling when I move.
She rides with her little falcon upon her wrist.
She uses a barb that brings me to cower.
She sends me abroad to try my wings
and I come back to her. I would bring down
the little birds to her
I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly.

I tear at her wrist with my beak to draw blood,
and her eye holds me, anguisht, terrifying.
She draws a limit to my flight.
Never beyond my sight, she says.
She trains me to fetch and to limit myself in fetching.
She rewards me with meat for my dinner.
But I must never eat what she sends me to bring her.

Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me,
always, in a little hood with the bells ringing,
at her wrist, and her riding
to the great falcon hunt, and me
flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart
to bring down the skylark from the blue to her feet,
straining, and then released for the flight.

My mother would be a falconress,
and I her gerfalcon raised at her will,
from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own
pride, as if her pride
knew no limits, as if her mind
sought in me flight beyond the horizon.

Ah, but high, high in the air I flew.
And far, far beyond the curb of her will,
were the blue hills where the falcons nest.
And then I saw west to the dying sun—
it seemd my human soul went down in flames.

I tore at her wrist, at the hold she had for me,
until the blood ran hot and I heard her cry out,
far, far beyond the curb of her will

to horizons of stars beyond the ringing hills of the world where
the falcons nest
I saw, and I tore at her wrist with my savage beak.
I flew, as if sight flew from the anguish in her eye beyond her sight,
sent from my striking loose, from the cruel strike at her wrist,
striking out from the blood to be free of her.

My mother would be a falconress,
and even now, years after this,
when the wounds I left her had surely heald,
and the woman is dead,
her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart
were broken, it is stilld

I would be a falcon and go free.
I tread her wrist and wear the hood,
talking to myself, and would draw blood.