Author Archives: Bug Woman

The Tree of the Year 2022

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The Waverley yew (Photo from the Woodland Trust)

Dear Readers, this year’s UK tree of the year is the Waverley Yew, which grows over and around the ruins of the first Cistercian monastery founded in the country over 900 years ago. The monastery was dismantled after the Reformation of 1536, and it appears that this tree was just a seed then, as its age is estimated at no more than 480 years. The roots appear to ripple like lava before plunging back down into the ground, while above the many limbs reach out from the trunk like arms. It really is a stunning tree, elegant and poised.

The Waverley Yew will now go forward to represent the UK in the European Tree of the Year 2023.

The trees are selected from a range of ancient and veteran trees by experts from the Woodland Trust, and are chosen to highlight the vulnerability of trees, few of which have any formal protection in spite of their age, value for wildlife or position as venerable elders in the community. Here are a few more of the shortlisted trees:

The Escley Oak (Photo by Woodland Trust)

The Escley Oak is one of the largest and oldest oaks on the Ancient Tree Inventory, and is thought to be at least 400-500 years old. It stands beside a public footpath in Michaelchurch Escley, Herefordshire.

The Holly on the Hill, Hawnby, North Yorkshire (Photo by Woodland Trust)

The Holly on the Hill is a most unusual broad rounded crown, which implies that it might have been harvested for its foliage and berries for many years, maybe to decorate nearby churches and houses. It could be up to 300 years old, but experts believe it probably dates to the mid-nineteenth century.

One of the Twelve Apostles lime trees from St James’s Church, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire (Photo by Woodland Trust)

As you know, I have a great fondness for lime trees, and 12 of them were planted along the path leading to St James’s Church in Chipping Campden to represent the twelve apostles. The original avenue was probably planted in the 1770s, but five of the trees have died and been replaced. The one in the photo is the oldest of the original trees.

The Langley Park Chestnut, Angus, Scotland (Photo from the Woodland Trust)

And finally, I rather like this battered tree, which looks as if it has been in the wars but has survived, nonetheless. Just look at the size of it! It has a girth of 7.81 metres, and the central trunk is hollow at the top. Langley Park House, which overlooks the Montrose Basin between Dundee and Aberdeen, was built in the 18th Century, and it’s thought that the tree possibly predates it.

So, let’s see how ‘our’ tree does in the European competition next year. At a time when trees are being cut down willy nilly to appease insurance companies and homeowners, to clear plots for development and roads and just because they’re seen as ‘messy’, anything that highlights their importance, and gets people involved and thinking about them, can only be a good thing.

More Sciencing!

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Dear Readers, I know that you have been positively agog to hear the latest on my bird food preference experiment for my Open University course, so here is an update (try to contain your excitement please 🙂 )

I have pretty much got the birds coming to feed on my ultra-nutritious minimally-coloured dough balls now. But what birds? Well, these guys…

Yep, a pair of magpies. I know when they’re around because they rat-a-tat-tat at one another like a bunch of plastic machine guns. They are very shy for such big bolshie birds, which means that I can’t just sit in the kitchen and make notes. Instead, I have to listen for them, and sneak out to my back bedroom which overlooks the garden.

What we have to do is to present them with 45 red dough balls and 5 yellow dough balls. Then, we have to do a count while there are still between 35 and 15 balls left. This is trickier than it sounds as a hungry magpie can wolf down the lot in about five minutes flat, which would mean that I’d have to start again. This performance has to happen ten times with mainly red dough balls, and ten times with mainly yellow ones, so just as well I started the experiment itself a week before I was meant to, as results have to be in by the end of November.

The aim is to see if the birds prefer one colour of balls to another, and if so if it’s statistically significant (which means some antsy-fancy maths). Before I started the experiment proper, I would have anecdotally said that they seemed to prefer the red ones, but on my first trial yesterday they ate 4 out of the 5 yellow ones, which points the other way. This is the trouble with real life, it’s never quite as neat as the textbooks. Anyway, let’s see how we get on as the weeks go by, and the data is gathered. It certainly makes for a lot of getting up and down to check on progress, which can only be good for my back. Too much sitting is bad for one, as we know. And it’s fun to do some real science! All I need now is a white coat and I’ll be in business.

Red List 2022 – Number Two – The Herring Gull

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Things that I have seen herring gulls do:

  • Dance on a patch of muddy ground to ‘bring up the worms’
  • Slide down a pitched roof, then flutter up to the top and slide down again, like a child in a playground.
  • Swoop over the shoulder of a two year-old and take the ball of ice cream out of the cone without a sound.
  • Feed their fluffy youngsters on the flat roof of Dorset County Hospital, where they nested as if it was a shingle beach.
  • Fight off all comers on a landfill site as they dive for the tastiest morsels
  • Sit on top of a pole at a popular beach in Jersey, waiting for the café owner with the water pistol to disappear before descending onto some abandoned chips

The sound of their wailing is really the sound of the seaside to me, although they are just as often found inland now – when I wake up in Dorchester, the first thing I hear are the gulls on the roofs behind, and they were a familiar reveille in Islington too.

Young herring gull (Larus argentatus)

From the amount of opprobrium that these birds get, you would think that they were a rapidly increasing pest, but in fact they are on the Red List for British Birds, as both their breeding and non-breeding populations are decreasing and have done so since the early 1970s when the first census was taken. Since then, numbers across the whole of the UK and Ireland have fallen by a half to two thirds.

The reasons for this are complex and varied. Herring gulls have, as noted above, often scavenged at landfill sites, but increasingly the organic material is used for biofuels, or buried immediately, reducing the availability of food. On the other hand, these sites are seen as harbourers of Clostridium botulinum, botulism to you and me – this can be fatal to anyone who ingests enough of it, including gulls. I remember that when I lived on the River Tay in Dundee, some tins of preserved meat were washed overboard from a ship, and they became contaminated with the botulinum bacteria – herring gulls were literally falling dead from the sky. Reductions in by-catch from fishing boats has also had an effect, and our old friend the mink can be a significant predator of chicks in some areas. No wonder the gulls are moving into urban areas, where there are plenty of messy people throwing their Kentucky Fried Chicken remains on the ground (although it’s fair to say that it’s a rare rubbish bin that is gull-proof, these being adaptable and intelligent birds). In spite of their Red List status, 16,000 gulls were culled as a ‘nuisance’ between 2013 and 2018. We clearly need to find a better way to live alongside these birds.

Herring gulls are not endangered in Europe as a whole, where they have a population of over 1 million and an extremely large range. Still, something is going on here in the UK which is not favourable to these big, beefy gulls, and what affects them is likely to affect other coastal birds who are less adaptable. And so, it’s something to be lamented. It would be yet another loss if their calls were not heard above our rooftops. They are the quintessential ‘seagull’, the backdrop to any number of radio programmes about the seaside, including Desert Island discs.

Am I the only one who finds that the hairs stand up on the back of their necks when they hear the herring gull’s ‘long call’ (recording by Irish Wildlife Sounds, made in Barleycove, County Cork, Ireland).

And this is the begging call of a juvenile – it is surprisingly high-pitched, and I’ve found myself turning round to identify the caller on more than one occasion, only to realise that it’s coming from a big bruiser of a young gull (recording also from Irish Wildlife Sounds)

And finally, here’s a story by Liz Humphreys, Principle Ecologist at the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). She is monitoring kittiwakes, but her task involved tiptoeing her way through a gull colony that included herring gulls. Here’s what she says in ‘Into the Red’ by Kit Jewitt and Mike Toms.

“I’d give myself a second to brace myself for the welcoming committee and then step into the fury. 

I would see the gull chicks fleeing in panic, diving into the vegetation and takin gcover behind rocks. Carefully picking my way through, I then noticed the speckled fluffy behinds of small gull chicks poling out from the plentiful rabbit – and sometimes puffin – burrows. I would pause, even in the mayhem, to marvel at this comical sight of leopard-skinned balls tucked away in the undergrowth. Clearly they were working on the principle that if they couldn’t see me, then I couldn’t see them. Meanwhile the adults were alarming from the skies, getting increasingly agitated at my presence. ”

Herring gulls clearly just want to live their lives, which are so intertwined with ours. I remember staying at a chalet in Lochinver in Scotland. Clearly, one of the local gulls had been fed by previous visitors, because s/he would stand on the hand rail overlooking the kitchen and glare in, occasionally shuffling from foot to foot. We tried to ignore that pale-eyed stare, but in the morning, just at first light (which comes very early in Northern Scotland in June) there was a sharp rat-tat-tatting at the glass door. We woke with a start, and there was the gull, ready for breakfast. Eventually we came to an agreement – we would leave out something when we went to bed, and the gull would feed and then go off to pursue more appropriate avian pursuits. These birds should not be underestimated, and we will need to learn to live with them.

Herring gull chick in nest with egg, photo by John Haslam.

Wednesday Weed – Groundsel Revisited

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South London Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris)

Dear Readers, when I was on my walk from Beckenham to Crystal Palace last week I was impressed by the sheer volume of groundsel. I have seen it growing weedily from cracks in the pavement in North London, but it seems to be at its happiest growing amongst the plantain and dandelions on a patch of proper rough ground.

This is a plant that has been with us ever since we first colonised the UK, and I love its old-fashioned quality, although as each plant can produce up to 1700 seeds three times per year, it is not so popular in other parts of the world. Furthermore, after drying and cold storage for three years the plant still achieved a germination rate of 87%, and it should be very proud of itself.  However, groundsel is not thought to be particularly harmful to native plants or to crops, unless you happen to be a mint farmer in Washington State. Who knew that there were mint farmers? I learn something every day on this blog. My Nan used to say that mint ‘goes seven times to the devil and once to you’, but in my experience if mint is happy you might as well give up all hope of growing anything else in that particular spot.

There is some debate about whether groundsel is toxic, either to humans or to animals, but it is clear that it was used as a purge, something that was often the case with plants that were mildly poisonous. For your delectation I present this tale collected by Roy Vickery who, along with Richard Mabey are my go-to people for the folklore and historical uses of UK plants. The description is rather graphic and the language is rather salty, so you might want to scroll past if you’re of a delicate disposition.

‘Mr Joby House, who used to be at Hewood, told us that, for constipation, you boiled groundsel and lard and take that and you will shit through the eye of a needle. His sister Lucy had constipation so bad that when the doctor called in the morning he said Lucy would be dead by 5 o’clock. Mrs. House went to the gypsies (Mrs. Penfold)…and she told her how to cure her. The doctor came late in the day, and Lucy was running around; there was shit everywhere. The doctor had brought Lucy’s death certificate, but he was so mad he tore it up and put it in the fire’ (From The Oxford Dictionary of Plant Lore (Roy Vickery 1995))

As I mention in my original piece, groundsel is munched upon by many, many caterpillars, so here is a poem by Julian Bishop. I love the idea of the caterpillar’s world view being reconfigured. See what you think.

CATERPILLAR by Julian Bishop

The weeks play out in peaks and troughs
charted by the parabola of his back –
he meanders from one room to another,
all wreathed in the same leafy wallpaper.

Every morsel of groundsel is a Groundhog Day –
there’s no furlough for a hungry caterpillar.
He knows an airborne killer hovers over
his world of constant foraging, a beak

swooping out from behind the green curtain.
Nonchalant about the hair-raising danger,
other caterpillars give him sage advice:
Bruv, it’ll get you one way or another. 

One day his restricted life will be lifted
by the gods gifting him a pair of wings.
From the cockpit of his modified body,
he will gaze down goggle-eyed on a land

reconfigured, where for a few precious weeks
heaven was a place of herbal teas, perpetual eating,
garden meals the boundaries of liberation.
Where will his new-found freedom take him?

And now, back to 2014 when I wrote this original piece.

Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris)

Groundsel (Senecio vulgaris) (and is that a roach or a dog-end in the top right of the picture, I wonder?)

What a non-descript, retiring little plant Groundsel is. Slightly droopy (especially in the hot weather we’re having in London at the moment), it lurks in the toughest corners of the urban environment, at the bottom of walls and in the smallest of cracks. But this is one tough plant. The Groundsel photographed here is growing in a spot which was blitzed with weed-killer about six weeks ago (much to my annoyance). Dog pee, blazing sun, tiny amounts of soil and huge amounts of pollution daunt it not. The name ‘Groundsel’ comes from the Old English for ‘Ground Swallower’, and it has advanced to all four corners of the globe, probably because its seeds have been mixed in with food crops.

The light, hairy seeds of the Groundsel can travel a long way....

The light, hairy seeds of the Groundsel can travel a long way….

Richard Mabey points out that the ‘Senecio’ part of the Latin name for Groundsel comes from the word for ‘Old Man’. With its seeds attached, the seedhead looks rather like Einstein’s hairdo, but when they are all gone, it looks like the (somewhat dimpled) head of a bald man.

I remember feeding my budgie on Groundsel and Chickweed, and it is said to  persuade rabbits to feed when nothing else works. In ‘Watership Down’ by Richard Adams, one of the wisest rabbits was named Groundsel, which is maybe a nod to the animals’ dietary preferences.  The seeds are also taken by sparrows and finches – I tend to forget that, before birdtables came along, wild birds did perfectly well finding food for themselves. Indeed, once upon a time a certain proportion of ‘weeds’ such as Groundsel were happily tolerated in our fields, and so there was plenty for birds to eat in rural areas. These days, the fields are less biodiverse than our gardens, and so the birds that are left come to us. For an agricultural approach to groundsel (otherwise known as ‘blasting it off the planet), have a look at the approach taken by Dow AgroSciences here, and weep.

Groundsel Blog 2Groundsel is a favourite food of Cinnabar and Flame-Shouldered Moths, and the Ragwort Plume Moth. In fact, the plants of the Groundsel family (which includes the Oxford Ragwort and various types of Fleabane) support an extraordinary number of butterflies and moths, and a partial list is included here

Cinnabar Moth Caterpillar By joost j. bakker [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Cinnabar Moth Caterpillar By joost j. bakker [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Flame-shoulder moth By picture taken by Olaf Leillinger (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Flame-shoulder moth By picture taken by Olaf Leillinger (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

So, the main habitats of this ancient weed are now our city streets and brownfield sites, our railway sidings and wastelands. This is why these sites can be so important, particularly for insects. At least on a derelict site, there are unlikely to be regular applications of insecticides and herbicides. Our greatest biodiversity is not found in ‘the countryside’ anymore, but in those marginal areas that have not (yet) been developed. It’s important to remember that a Cinnabar Moth caterpillar doesn’t care what an area looks like, just that it has enough to eat. For some more information about Brownfield sites, and why they are important to insects , I can recommend this article from Buglife, a charity worthy of support by anyone who cares about our invertebrate neighbours.

Groundsel blog 3

 

 

 

 

At Whittington Hospital

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Whittington Hospital Main Entrance (Photo by Tony Peacock)

Dear Readers, whenever I enter Whittington Hospital I am flooded with emotion. This is where they looked after my mother when she became ill with sepsis on Boxing Day 2015. It’s here that they saved her life, so that she could go on to enjoy her sixtieth wedding anniversary party, and to relish some of the small sweetnesses of existence as she became increasingly ill. I remember so well sitting in the canteen before the ward opened to visitors and walking back down the stairs in tears after a tricky visit.

Today, I was there for a whole raft of blood tests. I have some strange numbness and tingling in my feet, and as Mum, Dad and my brother all have type two diabetes, I thought I should get it checked out. Never one for half measures, my doctor has also requested lipids, liver function, bone density, a blood count and anything else she could think of. I expect that my left arm is now a few ounces lighter than my right.

The phlebotomy clinic is very well-organised – you’re checked off, given a number, and ten minutes later you’re leaving. The receptionist was apologetic that things were running a little late, but in the end I was actually seen five minutes before my scheduled time, so I’m definitely not complaining. I used to sometimes faint when my blood was taken, but fortunately I seem to have grown out of it – provided I don’t watch, it’s fine. And I should know the results by the end of the week. I never forget how lucky I am not to have to worry about the costs of medical procedures like this.

Anyway, today I wanted to share this original piece with you, written while Mum was still in hospital. It was the first time that I’d shared anything personal on the blog, and it changed everything for me. So, let’s go back to December 2015.

IMG_5116My mother and father came to stay with me in London this Christmas. All three of us knew it was a risk. Both my parents have the full range of late-onset ailments ( COPD, diabetes, dicky hearts) but this is the only holiday that they get, and, besides, prizing safety above all else means that we gradually retreat into our shells, like hermit crabs, afraid that every shadow is a shore-side bird waiting to gobble us up.

On Christmas morning. Mum was trying to pin one of the brooches I’d bought her onto her jumper, fumbling with the clasp. She sat back and smiled, the filigree butterfly a little skew whiff. Then, I remembered.

‘One last present,’ I said.

I’d almost forgotten the orchid that I’d hidden away in the bedroom. As I walked back downstairs, I looked at the flowers. I am not a great fan of orchids – they have an alien quality that looks sinister to me. And yet, my mother has a gift for coaxing them into flower time and again. This one was pale pink with mauve bruise-like blotches. The mouth of each bloom opened like a man-trap with long, backward-pointing teeth.

‘It’s beautiful!’ said Mum, as I passed it to her.

As I removed the wrapping, one of the flowers detached itself and floated to the ground. I picked it up, feeling the waxiness of the petals. I showed it to Mum.

‘Oh, put it in some water’, she said, ‘I can’t bear to think of it just getting thrown away’.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Won’t it just die anyway?’

But she looked so upset that I found a dish and floated the flower in it. It’s still there now.

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Early on Sunday morning, I heard a rasping whisper from Mum and Dad’s bedroom.

‘I think you need to call someone’, Mum said. ‘I can breathe in, but I can’t breathe out’. I could hear her chest wheezing and crackling from across the room.

An hour later, she was in an ambulance, being given oxygen, heading for the nearest London hospital.

The doctors confirmed that she was 80 years old. They heard the recitation of her health problems, shook their heads over her oxygen levels and the sounds coming through their stethoscopes. They ascertained that at her best she could walk only ten paces without having to stop to gather her breath. They admitted her to the hospital. She was put in a huge room on her own. There were no windows, but there were lots of empty navy-blue storage cupboards, as if this had once been a kitchen but all the appliances had been removed. The fluorescent light gave off a constant background hum. It was like being in the belly of a great machine.

‘I’m not afraid of dying’, said Mum. ‘But it makes me so sad to think that I’ll never walk around Marks and Spencer again, or walk in a park. And I know I’m lucky and there are lots of things that I can still do, but somehow, just now, that doesn’t help’.

Normally I try to protect myself by avoiding what is really being said in these conversations, by trying, like Pollyanna, to look on the bright side. But today, I just sat, and held her hand, and cried with her.

IMG_5085As I walk to the hospital, I notice how bright all the colours seem, as if I’m hallucinating. The thoughts are chasing one another round and round inside my skull, as scratchy as rats. There is a wall alongside me and beyond a wildflower garden, at head height. The low winter sun lights up a patch of trailing bellflower. I see the way that the stamen are casting a hooked shadow on the lilac petals, the way a single raindrop trembles on the edge of a leaf before falling, in what seems like slow motion, onto the soil. And for a moment, I don’t think about Mum at all, and I feel my shoulders relax. I take a deep breath, then another. And then I walk on.

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It used to be that hospital wards were full of flowers, the stink of lilies and gently decomposing chrysanthemums rising above the smell of antiseptic and hospital cooking. But now, all plants are banned ‘for hygiene reasons’. Probably the nurses are so overworked that they don’t have time to cope with browning foliage and wilting poinsettias. But I can’t help thinking that something alive and beautiful is as important for healing as drips and antibiotics. Mum’s bunker looked completely sterile. But I had underestimated her.

At Christmas dinner, I had handed out some crackers that I’d bought from a wildlife charity. Each one contained a card that, when opened, released a snippet of bird song. The game was to guess which bird was singing – nightingale, blue tit, wren? Mum had put the cards in her bag. When the very important Consultant and his two trainees came along to see how she was doing, she produced one of the cards and pushed it into the Big Man’s hand.

‘Open that’, she said.

He looked at her askance, and opened the card. The sound of a song thrush in full-throat filled the bare room, flooding the place with the sound of woodland wildness.

The consultant’s face changed. He closed the card and opened it again. He turned to the two trainees.

‘I know you want to go home’, he said to them, ‘But listen to this!’

And he ‘played’ the song again, before closing the card and handing it back to Mum with a bow.

After a few days, Mum is moved to a different ward. As usual, she hates it at first – relationship is what Mum thrives on, and in each new location she has to charm everyone all over again. But she does have a window now.

‘At night, I can see all the planes flying over’, she says.

I notice that there’s a spider outside the window. At first I think it’s dead, but then I see that it is on a web, blowing backwards and forwards as the wind buffets the building. I decide not to tell Mum. She isn’t the world’s biggest spider fan. But it makes me happy to see this little note of anarchy in this antiseptic place.

‘At least I can get a breeze here’, says Mum. ‘Though when I was standing up next to the window yesterday they made me get back into bed in case I caught a chill’.

Her temperature is still too high, she is coughing most of the time and she’s pulled her canula out.

‘ I thought I’d be feeling a bit better by now’, she says. ‘But they’ve still got me on that bloody antibiotic that doesn’t work’.

I know that doctors don’t like to be told their jobs, but still.

‘Did you know that Mum’s been hospitalised for Proteus infections several times?’ I ask the doctor when he’s next on his rounds.

‘No’, he says. ‘Maybe we should talk to the people in Metabiotics’.

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Proteus is a super-bug, and Mum probably acquired it in a hospital. Along with MRSA and C.Difficile, it is infecting our clinics and operating theatres. Proteus is so-called because it hides in the body, changing location. There are several variants, many of them immune to one antibiotic, some to several. The use of several antibiotics simultaneously is called Metabiotics.

This is the age of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria. On a bad day, I feel that we are standing on the threshold of apocalypse. I remember a display I saw about the Jamestown settlers in America. Several of them died from a simple tooth abscess that could not be treated, became infected, and spread through the body.

As we seek to sterilise our homes and hospitals and schools, life is creeping back through the keyhole, pouring under the door, finding the draughty spaces around our windows.

The doctors change the drugs. My mother’s body becomes a battleground. At 3.30 a.m. she rings me.

‘I’m in The Game’, she says. ‘I’m trapped in a room, and they’re murdering people next door, and slaughtering them like animals, and they won’t let me out’.

‘Mum,’ I say, heart racing, ‘You know that none of this is real?’

‘I know’, she says, ‘but I want to get out and they won’t let me go’.

The phone goes dead. I call the ward. After what seems like a year, the nurse answers. I explain the situation.

‘I’ll talk to her’, he says. ‘It’s the drugs’.

The next morning, Mum can’t remember any of it, but her breathing seems better. Then her blood sugar climbs to 32, a dangerously high level. It seems that, somehow, the bacteria are fighting back. This is not going to end any time soon.

On my visit, Mum hands back the cards with the bird songs in them.

‘Take them home’, she says. ‘Keep them safe. They don’t belong here’. And she closes her eyes, a look of concentration turning her face to marble. She is not beaten yet.

IMG_5117

Today, there is finally good news. The blood sugars are under control. Mum’s breathing is improving. Her poor body has fought back again, and if all goes well, she will be out of the hospital in a couple of days.

I am making my peace with the orchid. The buds are clenched fists, but the newly opened flowers are poppy-shaped, like cupped hands, around the soft inner petals. I see that the long, tongue-like leaves have a fine layer of dust.

‘I’d better clean you up’, I say to the plant. ‘Before Mum comes home’.

Update

Mum finally left the hospital on Thursday, and is travelling back home to Dorset with Dad and I on Sunday. She isn’t fully well yet, as might be expected, but she is getting better.I am deeply grateful to all the staff at the Whittington Hospital in north London for their unfailing care of my mum, and for their patience and dedication. The NHS truly is a pearl beyond price.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Capital Ring – Beckenham Junction to Crystal Palace Part Two

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Dear Readers, now that we are suitably fuelled after our visit to the Pride of Venice café yesterday we head up Penge High Street under two railway bridges towards Crystal Palace Park. This first rather unprepossessing bridge carries one of the oldest railway lines in London and takes trains from London Bridge station to the South Coast. It formed part of the London and Croydon Railway, and when it was built in 1839 it operated by something called ‘atmospheric traction’, which my Capital Ring guide describes as ‘ (the trains) being vacuum-drawn through a continuous pipe’. This sounds very space-age to me, and indeed the trains were not in the pipe (as I had first thought), but the pipe was used as a power source. You can read all about it here, and I have even found an etching showing the locomotive-less carriages, and the pumping station that was used to create the vacuum at Norwood Station on the London and Croydon line.

The ‘Atmospheric Railway’ at Norwood Junction (then called Jolly Sailor station)

The next bridge is much grander, and dates to 1854 – it was built to ferry people to Crystal Palace station, of which more shortly. You will see that a very fine pigeon is using it as a roosting/nesting place.

The 1854 bridge

And then we enter Crystal Palace Park. The Crystal Palace was a glass and steel creation, three times the volume of St Paul’s Cathedral, and originally built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, which took place in Hyde Park. The whole structure was moved to what was then Penge Place, next to Sydenham Hill, but which was quickly renamed ‘Crystal Palace’.

The Crystal Palace after its reconstruction in Penge

The venue became London’s major exhibition space, hosting everything from circuses to dog shows, Handel concerts to the first ever display of flushing toilets. Alas, it never managed to turn a profit in spite of its many visitors, and in 1911 the company that owned Crystal Palace declared bankruptcy. The building was taken into public ownership, and in 1920 it became the site of the first Imperial War Museum, before the museum was moved to Lambeth. Gradually, the Crystal Palace was renovated and restored, and by the end of the 1920s it was turning a profit.

In 1936, the manager of the site, Sir Henry Buckland, was walking his dog with his daughter Crystal (!) when he noticed a red glow coming from inside the building. He entered to find two employees fighting a small fire that had started after an explosion in the Ladies Cloakroom. They were unable to extinguish it and, in spite of the presence of 89 fire engines and 400 firefighters, neither was anyone else.

Crystal Palace fire, 1936

100,000 people gathered on Sydenham Hill to watch the fire, which is said to have been visible from eight counties. Sir Winston Churchill said that ‘This is the end of an age’, and so it was. But, as we shall see, some remnants from the Crystal Palace do live on.

We walk up past the café (showing considerable fortitude by not stopping for another coffee) and are greeted by these creatures.

An Irish Elk (Megaloceros giganteus)

The ancient animals in Crystal Palace Park date back to 1854, and were designed and sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the guidance of scientist Sir Richard Owens. Although we know a lot more about what dinosaurs etc would have looked like these days, these models were based on the most up to date scientific knowledge of the time, and were a wonder of the age when they were first exhibited. The dinosaurs were extremely popular, to the extent that small models were sold to children and other interested Victorians, but the full-size animals were very expensive to produce, and so some creatures were never made, including, to my eternal sadness, the giant armadillo or glyptodon.

However, what remains is now Grade I listed, and many of the creatures have recently been renovated. Clearly the Irish elk is waiting for some antler repair and a new coat of paint, however, and I fear that, in such a prominent position, some eejit will always be wanting to swing from the antlers.

The other creatures are positioned on less accessible islands, and are faring rather better. In the original design the level of the lake would have gone up and down, revealing more or less of the animals which would have been very interesting. Furthermore, the planting, with lots of Aracuarias and (my favourite) swamp cypress trees, makes for an evocative setting.

The Iguanodons are the first large dinosaurs that the visitors see. Sadly, Owen thought that a thumb-bone which had been found could be a small horn, seen here on the Iguanodon’s nose (though even Owen described this as ‘doubtful’. The nose horn has  caused much hilarity amongst later scientists, who can be an unfeeling bunch.

Iguanodon

The Megalosaurus is depicted here as being a quadruped, but we now know that it was more likely to be bipedal, something discovered in 1858, just after the model was completed. I love the way that the dinosaur is becoming an ecosystem all of its own.

Hylaeosaurus

There is a range of aquatic dinosaurs and other creatures. Owen thought that the large eyes of the Ichthyosaurus meant that it had good night/underwater vision. This one is depicted basking like a giant many-toothed seal, but in reality they were totally aquatic.

Ichthyosaurus

The plesiosaurs are thought to have unnaturally flexible necks by current day scientists. The teleosaurs, on the other hand, are pretty accurate – Owen conjectured that they would resemble modern-day crocodilians such as the gharial of India.

Plesiosaurus at the front, teleosaurus at the back.

A small group of Labyrinthodons are tucked away at the corner of the island – Owen thought that they would resemble giant frogs in body shape, though we now know that they looked more like salamanders. They look just the right size to take for a walk on a leash, and they would certainly scare the life out of any rottweilers that they encountered.

 

And so with some reluctance we climb away from the dinosaurs. I don’t personally give a hoot that they’re not anatomically correct – I love the way that they lurk amongst the autumn colours, giving a sense that we are just part of a history that goes way back into deep time.

Swamp Cypress

And finally, we get a really good view of Crystal Palace transmitting tower, the site of the first ever television broadcast by John Logie Baird in 1933. It was the tallest structure in London (219 metres/719 feet) until the topping-out of the main tower at Canary Wharf in 1990. As an indication of how London has ‘grown up’, it’s now the eighth tallest building, the tallest being The Shard at 310 metres/1016 feet.

And so, we complete our walk via Crystal Palace Station, which was built to accommodate the many thousands who visited the Crystal Palace, and which is still a very impressive station. But our train was due as we arrived, so no time for photos. I shall take a few at the start of our next walk, which will take us from Crystal Palace to Streatham. However, as there is a train strike next Saturday, that will probably be in a fortnight. Who knows what we will get up to next week?

The Capital Ring – Beckenham Junction to Crystal Palace Part One

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Battersea Power Station from the train

Dear Readers, this week we are heading back to Beckenham Junction to continue our walk around the Capital Ring. And what a splendid view you get of Battersea Power Station as you head south from Victoria Station! You might remember that I visited the site earlier this year, before the refurbished power station was opened, and I’m due for a revisit now you can actually get inside the building. For today, though, it was enough just to trundle past and admire it from a distance.

And what on earth is this strange object, photographed through a rather grimy Southern Railways window? It is a silver swan in the Pullman carriage next door. I got very excited in case there was a steam engine attached, but although this amazing vintage carriage is going to be part of a tour called ‘The Golden Age of Travel by Steam’, presumably the engine arrives later, as when I wandered down the platform all I could see was a boring old diesel engine. Each carriage is decorated differently, and this one appeared to be called ‘Vera’ – they all date to the 1920s. Apparently you can never be overdressed, which is very exciting, but as this trip was £540 per person, I expect that it would need to be a very special occasion indeed.

Anyway, we were soon arrived in the rather less plush surroundings of Beckenham Junction Station, and after a quick toilet stop at Waitrose (yes, we did a bit of planning this time) we were off through the leafy streets of South London. Not so long ago this was all farmland, and you can still see occasional signs of the old farms and estates, such as this set of gatehouses.

I thought this tree had a very ent-ish look (the Ents were the tree gods in Lord of the Rings). (Or possibly The Hobbit). No doubt someone will put me right 🙂

And look! Mistletoe.

We pass the church of St Paul’s Beckenham, which was established in 1863 by the Cator family – you might remember them from Beckenham Place Park and Mansion last week. Cator anticipated that his estate would include no less than 3,750 people, and so he wanted to build something suitably grand to cater for their spiritual needs. In the event, about 600 people would attend the Sunday services during the 19th Century, though only 40 would take communion because the rest of them had not been confirmed, and therefore weren’t allowed. The church was badly damaged during the Second World War by incendiary bombs and a land mine, but had a particularly diligent vicar who managed to get the restoration work completed before he retired in 1949. In the sixties the church was apparently ‘affected’ by the charismatic movement, and there were dance groups and a wind band (you can almost hear the author of the history section of the church’s website ruefully shaking his or her head) ‘though this is not our practice now’.

St Pauls, Beckenham

I was much entertained by a pair of magpies who were clearly up to something, but I’m not sure what. I suspect it involved picking little hibernating insects out of the stonework.

And then we’re off again. We have been so lucky with the weather on these walks, I don’t believe that a single drop of rain has dampened our heads.

Then we take a turn ‘between house numbers 173 and 175’ – I love how precise the Capital Ring guide is, if you’re paying attention it’s (almost) impossible to get lost. We enter into Cator Park (that name again!) and cross two little streams, first the Beck

and then Chaffinch Brook…

…which both end up in the Ravensbourne, the stream that we met last week. Cator Park is very fine, full of some energetic dogs and small children learning to steer their scooters and bicycles, some with more accuracy than others.

I was much taken by these dandelions. I think the low sun at this time of year really makes them glow.

Someone who designed the park clearly had a great love for conifers, because there are half a dozen stands of them, looking just a little incongruous in South London but none the less magnificent for all that.

And look at this magnificent Raywood Ash! It’s not quite in full splendour yet, but it’s getting there. I photographed some in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery last year, so have a look to see how they are at their best.

Raywood Ash

And looky here! A stink pipe, and in a rather better state of preservation than most of the North London ones that I’ve seen. In the end I spied two, both with a tulip design at the top. While my local stinkpipes mark the route of the Northern Outfall Sewer, these beauties presumably follow the Southern Outfall Sewer, which eventually ends up in Crossness. The idea was that the methane and other gases would be vented high above the heads of the public, and would waft away in the breeze, presumably adding to the burden of carbon in the atmosphere that we are all suffering under now.

This rather uninspiring corner marks the site of Kent House, so-called because it was the first building on the road out of London that was actually in Kent (no longer – these days it’s the London Borough of Bromley. For most of its life (and it appears to have been built in the 13th century) Kent House was a farmhouse, before a brief period as a nursing home in the early 20th century. It was demolished in 1957, which seems rather a shame.

Kent House in 1910

The site of Kent House today

There are some extremely fine houses on this road. In one of them, a gardener with a leaf blower (an invention of the devil if ever I heard one) stopped in his task to pick up a single tiny leaf from the driveway. I suspect that his clients might have been of the extremely picky kind.

Many of the houses had some lovely plaster work detailing.

On we go, getting a first proper look at the Crystal Palace radio mast…

And then walking through yet another park, where the sports pavilion has this lovely mural…

…and past this house with its twisted pillars.

We cross over the platforms at Penge East Station and pass the Roman Catholic Church of The Good Shepherd. The building dates from 1887 and was probably originally the Mission Hall for nearby Holy Trinity Church. I love the coloured glass in the windows,

And now we are getting hungry, and what better than a quick bite in The Pride of Venice café? Most of the other diners seemed to be hungover clubbers, but the sandwiches were of the doorstep variety and the tea was good and strong, so just what the doctor ordered. And now, we were on the last leg of the walk, and were hoping to see something prehistoric. Let’s see how we got on tomorrow….

 

On Islington Green

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Dear Readers, some of the most magnificent London Plane trees in the Capital line the central avenue on Islington Green. This isn’t a village green, but is instead part of the common land that used to exist here, where tenants and ‘commoners’ had the right to graze their sheep and cattle. Latterly, it was a place where dung was dumped,  it’sThese days it’s completely hemmed in by roads, with Upper Street on one side and Essex Road on the other, but it still serves as an oasis of (relative) calm in this lively area.

In 1885 it was described by one Henry Vigar-Harries as a spot where

” the young love to skip in buoyant glee when the summer sun gladdens the air“.

He also describes how “within a mile and a half from this spot there are 1,030 public houses and beer shops” and if you included restaurants, cafés and coffee shops in that number you wouldn’t be far wrong now.

According to the Hidden London blog, the trees here were planted in 1808. They are mostly plane trees, but along the edge opposite where Waterstones is now (and where Collins Music Hall stood until it burned down in 1897) there’s a row of very fine lime trees. Grey squirrels and parakeets seem to enjoy them immensely, as does the enormous flock of pigeons that lives here.

Islington Green pigeons

The War Memorial, created by John Maine, was designed to resemble a twisted wreath and was inaugurated in 2007. Six years later the foundations needed to be dug again because they were inadequate for the weight of the stone, all eight tonnes of it – the memorial is made from stone quarried in Fujian, China, which is also where the carving took place.

There are no names on the memorial itself, but there are plaques commemorating those who received the Victoria Cross, the highest medal for gallantry awarded in the UK. Frederick Parslow was serving on a merchant ship carrying over a thousand horses for the war effort when it was attacked by a U-Boat. Parslow gave the order to abandon ship, but then received a message from a Royal Navy destroyer to hang on as long as possible. He remained on the bridge, completely unprotected, while the U-Boat concentrated fire on the section, and he was killed. His son, also called Frederick Parslow, was the Chief Officer, and managed to hold out until the destroyer arrived. 20 men were killed, but the horses were saved.

Frederick Booth was awarded the Victoria Cross for rescuing an injured soldier alone, under heavy fire from the Germans, in what is now Tanzania.

Both men came originally from the Islington area, Booth from Holloway and Parslow from the Balls Pond Road.

There is another memorial here too, and I always visit it if I have time when I’m in Islington. This is in memory of Bob the Street Cat, who was the long-time companion of James Bowen, a Big Issue seller who used have a pitch outside Angel Station. Bowen found Bob as an injured young cat, and the two soon became inseparable. Bob passed away a few years ago, but fans of James and Bob (immortalised not only in bronze by sculptor Tanya Russell but in a book by Bowen called ‘A Street Cat Named Bob’ and in a film) raised money for the seat. I love that Bob is always dressed according to the season, and for autumn he is wearing a very natty scarf.

I was lucky to find the benches empty – there are normally people sitting here, under the trees, enjoying the bird song and some early morning sunshine. But today, for a few brief minutes, the messages on the two adjoining benches are clear as day. We are, indeed, stronger together, and there is no doubt that so many people deserve a second chance.

Red List 2022 – Number One – The Pochard

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Pochard (Aytha ferina)

Dear Readers, the Pochard is one of those ducks that it’s easy to take for granted. With its dapper plumage of mahogany and smoke with ruby eyes it’s a handsome bird, but not one to elicit a sudden intake of breath. And yet this is a bird that has been wintering in large numbers in the UK since records began, and we also have a decent resident breeding population, especially in Northern Ireland, where the populations on Lough Neagh and Lough Beg number about 7000 pairs. Once committed, each pair of pochards sticks close together, the bespectacled female appearing to take things very seriously while the male gets on with the important business of looking as distinguished as possible. In the breeding season, however, all that decorum gets dropped completely. Listen to this group of displaying male pochards in the recording below. I’m sure that they’re saying ‘Yahoo!’ (recording by Jarek Matusiak and made in Poland). If you don’t love pochards before hearing this, I’m sure you will afterwards.

This is the rather less musical call of a female pochard taking off from a lake (recording made by Peter Boesman in Belgium)

And this is a female ‘growling’, though whether she’s telling the male in the background to come on or go away is anyone’s guess (recording by Simon Elliott in Northumberland). All the recordings are from Xeno Canto which is a whole world of wonders for anyone interested in animal sounds.

The word ‘pochard’ probably comes from the Norman French word for ‘poach’ (which is presumably what people often did) or ‘poke’ (which is probably a reference to the bird diving down and poking its bill into the mud to get the small invertebrates that form its food.

Female Pochard by Savithri Singh

Pochard (Photo by Dr Raju Kasambe)

Pochards were an important source of food in medieval times. It wasn’t an easy duck to catch however – they are wily, wary and fast on the wing once they get airborne. Good for them, I say – they have often here from the bitter winters of Eastern Europe and Russia, and they deserve to rest. This is all the more important as the bird is globally threatened, with its global population down from 2 to 2.5 million birds in 2016 to just over a million birds in 2021, a terrifying drop. As usual, there are many factors – pochards are quite specific about the habitats that suit them, and the number one reason for the decline appears to be the loss of suitable breeding sites in Eastern Europe, and the general problem of water pollution from agricultural run-off right across their range.

Like many ducks, pochards are eaten by mink, foxes, raccoon dogs and wild boar, who also trample and eat the eggs. It’s also reported that pochards might be suffering from the decline in black-headed gull nesting sites – ducks that nest alongside the gulls have bigger broods, probably because the two species can share warnings about approaching predators (and if a black-headed gull is worried you’ll definitely hear about it). It just goes to show how interwoven different species are, and how if one starts to have problems there are knock-on effects for everybody else.

In many places along their migration route, pochards are also hunted, often illegally, and this seems to affect breeding females and juveniles disproportionately. The increased use of water bodies for recreation (i.e. idiots on jet skis and in speedboats) doesn’t help. And finally, climate change is increasing the salinity of many of the places where pochard used to feed en route to their wintering or breeding grounds, making them unsuitable. All in all, these familiar and well-loved ducks are facing a whole barrage of challenges.

All this, I know, sounds extremely depressing. And it’s important not to get Pollyanna-ish about the way that things are going. But still, we have to believe that each of us matters, and that each of us can do something, and so we can. One organisation that I like very much that supports all manner of waterbirds is the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, founded by Sir Peter Scott. It has some wonderful reserves all over the UK, including the original Wetlands Centre at Barnes in London which is still an amazing place to visit. And with Christmas coming up, maybe there’s something that would work as a present for someone.

https://www.wwt.org.uk/

Another organisation that is very close to my heart is, of course, the London Wildlife Trust, which manages Woodberry Wetlands, Walthamstow Wetlands and Camley Street Natural Park among many other sites (and I’ve seen pochard at both Woodberry and Walthamstow Wetlands). You can help them (or your local Wildlife Trust) out in a variety of ways, but for those of us who already feed the birds, it’s worth noting that the Wildlife Trusts benefit from any bird food that you buy from Vine House Farm, who grow a lot of the seeds etc on site, making it much more sustainable.

It’s going to be a hard winter, I know, and many of us will just about be getting by without any spare cash for charities, so over the course of this series I’ll be thinking about ways that we can help our beleaguered birds without having to spend any money. In the meantime, though, let’s see if we can’t get out for a walk to appreciate them as the days shorten and the nights draw in. Winter can be an exciting time to see birds, and in other news apparently there is a real shortage of berries in Scandinavia and a glut here, so keep your eyes peeled for waxwings, especially if you live in eastern Scotland or on the east coast. Fingers crossed!

 

If Only Animals Could Talk….

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Ornate Wood Turtle (Rhinoclemmys pulcherrima) Photo by Tornadohalt, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Readers, the whole idea of ‘dumb animals’, which was always a bit dubious as far as I’m concerned, has been thrown into even greater doubt following the discovery that over 58 species of animals that were thought not to communicate with one another do, in fact, chat away to one another.

Many vertebrate animals with lungs are known to be able to produce sound by forcing air up and through structures in their throats. However, scientists thought that many of the sounds were either produced accidentally, or in extremis – wailing because you’re being eaten by a crocodile doesn’t count as communication, apparently. Turtles in particular were thought to lead quiet lives.

Fortunately, scientist Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen of the University of Zurich was curious about this idea, and he started by paying close attention to his pet turtles.

“I decided to record them, just to check it out,” he says. “I found several sounds there, and then we just kept going [with more species]. And suddenly, I had good sampling and I could understand a bigger picture.”

And what a bigger picture it is! Turtles, the Australian tuatara and even a species of lungfish ‘talk’ – circumstances differ, but include parental care, mate selection, and marking territory. The most garrulous communicators are apparently males when fighting other males or when they are trying to woo a partner. I am resisting the urge to make any comparisons with any other species.

A Talkative Tuatara (Not a lizard!) (Photo by By Sid Mosdell from New Zealand – Tuatara, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70735190

 

And how about this critter? ‘What the hell is that?’ I hear you cry. This is a Cayenne Caecilian (Typhlonectes compressicauda), a kind of amphibian which lives in muddy water, and which has no functional eyes. No wonder sound is more important to this animal than was thought. It’s thought to detect its prey by touch or by vibration, but if it can communicate vocally presumably it can also hear. Fascinating stuff.

A Cayenne Caecilian (Photo By User:Haplochromis – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3037073)

And finally, and in a way most extraordinarily, this lungfish has also been found to communicate vocally. The South American lungfish lives in the swampy regions of the Amazon, and, in the breeding season, the parents work together to build a nest. The male develops special fins at this time which he waves to oxygenate the water so that the eggs and young fish can breathe. Once hatched, the youngsters are said to resemble tadpoles. With this degree of parental care, it’s not surprising (to me anyway) that the species is able to communicate vocally, especially as muddy water would make anything else difficult.

South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxa) Photo Vassil, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

What is particularly interesting is that this means that the ability to communicate vocally evolved way earlier than scientists previously thought – at least 407 million years ago. As most fish don’t have lungs, and it’s known that they can produce a wide variety of sounds, it probably goes back even further than that. Clearly, vocal communication has been part of the lives of animals pretty much since they came into existence.

You can read the whole article here.

And of course, I couldn’t leave this subject without including some examples of the vocalisations of these ‘mute’ creatures – you can have a listen here. Enjoy!