Dear Readers, ten years ago, on 15th February 2014, I summoned up my courage and clicked on the ‘Publish’ button on my first ever blog post. What a lot has happened since! I’m now an elderly orphan, having lost Mum in 2018 and Dad in 2020, but I’m also a youthful retiree, having given up work in September last year. We’ve been through a pandemic, Brexit has happened, we’ve had five prime ministers, the US has had Trump, the wheels are falling off the wagon all over the rest of the world, climate change continues apace, and some days I just want to switch off the wifi and retreat into a good book. 

And yet. 

I meet so many people who are interested in the natural world and concerned about what’s going on in their local communities, and who are doing whatever they can to right wrongs and to do their bit. I see people doing their best with their resources, be they time or money or energy or all three, to make things better. A friend recently told me about an interview with Carl Safina, an American conservationist and writer, who was asked, in hushed tones, whether he was optimistic or pessimistic about the state of the environment.

“That’s a question for people sitting in the bleachers”, he said. “I just want to know that I’m in the game”.

And amen to that. If I’ve learned one thing from writing this blog for the past ten years, it’s that action, however small, is the cure for despair. 

And so, for the next ten days, I’m going to reprint my favourite post from each of the last ten years. Here’s my first ever post. And thanks, eternally, to The Gentle Author, who’s blog course gave me the courage to launch. Have a look at the Spitalfields Life blog. It is a wonder. 

2014

When I got off the tube train at East Finchley Station this afternoon, I noticed a small, hunched shape on the platform. As I bent over for a closer look, I realised that it was a bumblebee, lying motionless on her back. As everybody else piled past on their way home, I wondered what to do. I couldn’t bear to think of people treading on her. What if she was still alive? So I picked her up and rested her in the palm of my hand. She looked substantial, but her weight barely registered. And then she moved, one of her legs groping into the air as if looking for something, anything to cling on to.

My bumblebee is a Queen, who has come out of hibernation too early because the weather has been so unseasonably mild. She has been unable to find any flowers to feed from, and has used up her last energy searching the desert of the station platforms for something to eat.

I cradle her in my hand all the way home. Once there, I put her onto a plate, and position her so that she can drink from a spoon filled with sugar-water, the closest substitute for nectar that I can make. I watch as her leg twitches, but gradually the movement becomes weaker. I fear that there is no hope for her.

The bee will not be the only creature to die – she has some ‘hangers-on’. I count four mites crawling through her fur, each the size and shape of a flaxseed. That’s a heavy burden for an insect to be flying around with. The mites live in bumblebee nests, and will attach themselves to the young queens, like this one. When an infested bumblebee lands on a flower, some of the mites will get off and wait for another bee to latch onto, as if changing buses. However, without the bee the mites won’t survive either.

Looking at the bumblebee closely, in a way that she would never allow if she was healthy, is both a privilege and a kind of impertinence. I notice, as I never did before, that her wings are like smoked glass, the ridged veins standing out and catching the light from my angle-poise lamp.  Her eyes are black, like twin coals in her alien face. She has little hooks on the end of each leg, rather than feet. There are bands of dirty yellow fur behind her wings but just behind her head there is the faintest shadow of gold, only discernible from a very particular angle.

As I watch, she is curling up, her antennae covering her face, her legs crumpled under her. I will leave her for a while, but I am sure that she is dead.

The other casualties, apart from the bee herself and her little team of parasites, are the eggs that she carries. She will have mated once last summer, when she first emerged from the nest as a fresh young queen. I imagine her flying to meet the male bees at the top of the lime trees where they leave their pheromones, a kind of sexual perfume, so that she can find them. Inside her will be the first of her fertilised eggs that, if things had been different, would have hatched into the first workers to support her nest. From this one female up to four hundred and fifty bumblebees would have been born, going on to pollinate countless thousands of plants. When any creature dies, however humble, however common, there is a ripple effect that spreads much wider than that little death.

Amaurobius similis, a laceweb spider (Photo by Cassandra Li)

Dear Readers, after our spider walk a couple of weeks ago, an intrepid group of spider admirers (myself, Cassandra Li and spider expert Edward Milner) decided to pilot a walk in Coldfall Wood after dark. We knew that glow worms ( a kind of beetle ) had been found in the woods in 2009 and 2010, but there are also many insects and arachnids that are active after dark. We had no idea what we would find, but setting off into the darkness of the trees with our head torches was a fascinating experience, and even I, who have been known to fall over for no apparent reason, managed to stay upright for once.

It was astonishing how many different spiders we saw, but then many of them are nocturnal, lurking in the crevices of oak trees and the interstices of man-made structures such as handrails and fences.

Take the spider in the photo above, for example. Amaurobius similis, like many lace-web spiders, is largely active at night, and this was a very fine specimen. If you look to the left of the photo you can see the spider’s web, which it often builds after dark – when fresh, the strands have a faint bluish tinge, hence the alternative name of the group as the blue-web spiders. This type of silk is known as cribellate silk, a word that means ‘sieve-like’. It’s produced by an organ known as the cribellum, which is filled with tiny holes through which the silk is pushed and then combed out, producing a woolly texture. The fibres absorb wax from the cuticle of any insect that contacts it, and furthermore it doesn’t dry out, unlike the sticky threads of more  conventional webs. Interestingly, some spiders can switch between cribellate silk and the ‘normal’ spider silk that we see in our gardens.

Along the handrails of the bridges, nearly every joint was occupied by a Silver Stretch Spider (Tetragnatha montana) – they reflected silver in the light of our torches, but seemed completely unconcerned by our presence.

Male Tetragnatha montana in defensive pose (Photo by Gail Hampshire via https://www.flickr.com/photos/gails_pictures/6056350532)

When we came to the wetland area, we passed a dead tree. On our previous walk, Edward had mentioned that it was a perfect habitat for the Flattened or Walnut Orbweb Spider(Nuctenea umbratica) – the spider hides away beneath the bark during the day, and then spins a huge orb web at night, catching moths and mosquitoes. It really is a very impressive spider, and one I’d never knowingly seen before. I love the way that the shadow in the photo makes it look even more splendid. That woodlouse had better watch out.

Flattened or Walnut Orbweb Spider (Nuctenea umbratica) Photo by Cassandra Li.

Cassandra was great at getting these night photos with a combination of a torch and an iPhone. I was very impressed.We even had one new spider species – Agalenatea redii. This is a little orbweb spider, more commonly found (at least according to my Britain’s Spiders field guide, highly recommended) in rough grassland. She (for indeed it was a female)  was a very attractive spider when viewed with the hand lens, and it goes to show that although animals sometimes behave as predicted, very often they don’t.

By my reckoning, this brings the total number of spider species found in Coldfall Wood to 142 species, not bad when you consider that there are only 670 species in the UK, and most of these are miniscule little money spiders, extremely difficult to identify to species level.

Agalenatea redii (Photo by By Lucarelli – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11209516)

We didn’t just see spiders, either. We found a number of slugs, including this one (which I think is a Yellow Cellar Slug), who seemed to be strangely attracted to this slime mold, which we think is Stemonitis fusca. What interesting structures slime molds form! I can feel a slime mold blogpost coming on. But I digress….

And on the subject of ‘dangly flies‘, how about this Tiger Cranefly (Nephrotoma flavescens) – the length of the legs is really something. What a handsome creature it is!

And so we had a great time in the woods, and even managed to get (briefly) lost – it’s interesting how everything looks the same after dark, and how easy it is to get turned around. Sadly, the one creature that we didn’t see (this time) was the elusive glow worm. This is not a worm at all but a beetle – the female emits a glow to attract the male. I’ve only seen them once in the UK, in a hedgerow near Slapton Sands in Devon, but the London Wildlife Trust is asking people to look out for them in London, as there are already a couple of sites, and they could be overlooked. The larvae eat snails, so are very handy for the ecosystem.

There are two species of glow worm in the UK (well, 3, but one species hasn’t been seen since 1884), and as far as I remember, the one in Coldfall was the Lesser Glow Worm, which is extremely rare, but not as brightly lit as the ‘ordinary’ glow worm – the female has two little lights on the back of her abdomen, which makes her very difficult to find. No wonder we had problems! But we haven’t given up hope, and will certainly be keeping our eyes open next summer. Who knows what we’ll find?

Male Lesser Glowworm (Phosphaenus hemipterus) (Photo by By Urs Rindlisbacher – Majka GC, MacIvor JS (2009)  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8770508)

Dear Readers, I was shooting the breeze with a few friends while leaning on this fence next to Coldfall Wood when I noticed two things. First up, just look at all those oak seedlings! Some trees were felled here earlier this year (long story and a sad one), but all these little trees have sprung up. It makes me think that the density of planting in the Tiny Forest movement really does mimic what happens naturally when a tree falls – everything germinates in the unexpected light and heads towards the sun in a great botanical race.

Secondly, though, what are those lovely little orange things in the middle of the patch?

Well, I do believe that these are oak marble galls, and they have a very interesting story. First up, these structures are the homes of the larvae of a tiny wasp Andricus kollari, who lays its eggs on the bud of a pedunculate oak (one of our two native species) . When the larvae begins to feed, the oak itself produces this ‘gall’ instead of a bud, as a result of interaction with the chemicals produced by the larvae. Each gall protects one larva, although the wasp doesn’t always have things its own way – various parasites may also move in. However, in August the adult insects leave, and the galls fall from the tree., as in the photo above.

An Andricus wasp (Photo By Dl sh ad – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55391400)

All the wasps that emerge from the marble galls are asexual females – they are carrying self-fertilised eggs. In the spring, they seek out a different kind of oak, a turkey oak (which is a non-native tree) and lays their eggs on the buds. The developing larvae give rise to a completely different kind of gall, which looks like a kind of pale banana.

Andricus kollari sexual generation galls nestling in turkey oak bud (Photo by M Chinery from https://www.britishplantgallsociety.org/cynipid/)

These galls mature in March, and when the wasps emerge they are the ‘sexual generation’ – the males and females who emerge mate, and the females head off to find the bud of a pedunculate oak in order to lay their eggs, and for the circle to start all over again.

Although the wasps clearly make the buds that they use for their larvae unviable, they actually cause very little damage to trees, and often prefer trees that are already in decline. Which is just as well, as these tiny insects were deliberately introduced to the UK early in the 19th Century, because the galls were thought to be a useful source of tannin for dyeing and tanning – before this, the East India Company had a licence to import galls from other parts of the world, especially Syria which was the home of the Aleppo gall. As the turkey oak was introduced to the UK in 1735, the wasp already had everything that it needed for a complete life cycle (and I shall be paying more attention to the few turkey oaks in Coldfall Wood in the spring to see if I can see any galls). However, the marble oak gall produces only 17% by weight of tannin, while the Aleppo gall has 4 times as much, so I suspect the industry was short-lived. However, oak galls have been a source of ink for millenia – the Dead Sea Scrolls contain traces of oak gall ink. Sadly, the ink does not last, and over time it discolours and can damage the paper that it was written on.

Nonetheless, the galls have provided food for all manner of creatures – woodpeckers, bank voles and field mice  will crack the galls open in the search for larvae, and lots of small insects will make their homes in the galls (these are known as inquilines – how I love a new word!). And then numerous wasps will parasitize the larvae of the gall wasp. One gall, of a larger kind known as an oak apple, was kept in a container to see what would hatch out, and no fewer than 12 insects popped out!

Oak marble gall that’s been predated by a bird

And look, I have found you a poem, and a beautiful one at that. ‘Gall’ is by Catriona O’Reilly, an Irish poet now living in the UK. See what you think.

GALL

Those from Aleppo were bitterest,
yielding the vividest ink. More permanent
than lampblack or bistre, and at first pale grey,
it darkened, upon exposure,
to the exact shade of rain-pregnant clouds,
since somewhere in the prehistory of ink
is reproduction: a gall-wasp’s nursery,
deliberate worm at the oak apple’s heart.
We knew the recipe by heart for centuries:
we unlettered, tongueless, with hair of ash,
the slattern at the pestle, the bad daughter.
But all who made marks on parchment or paper
dipped their pens in gall, in vitriol; even
the mildest of words like mellow fruitfulness,
of supplication like all I endeavour end
decay equally in time with bare, barren, sterile;
the pages corroding along all their script
like a trail of ash (there is beauty in this)
as the apple of Sodom, the gall, turned
in the hand from gold into ashes and smoke.

Dear Readers, after a long day in the office (front of the house), I went into our bedroom to get changed into something more comfortable, and spotted a spider, seemingly floating in mid-air.

It took me a second to realise that not only had this spider moved in, but she had actually made a web going from the ceiling to the duvet.

Goodness, Bugwoman, I thought, I know that you’re making the place friendly for wildlife, but I suspect that your husband might think this is a step too far. Fortunately, I had a glass to hand, and so I gently removed the spider and popped her onto the climbing hydrangea outside the open window (which is probably how she got in in the first place).

It made me think about how quickly a spider can spin a web – this one clearly wasn’t there when I woke up, so in the space of about eight hours this extraordinary structure had been created. And I was very lucky, because another spider was making a web right across the path to the shed in the garden.

It’s a funny old time at the moment – I’m still working, but on 15th September I’m finished, and I feel very ‘between worlds’ – wanting to do a good job at work, anxious about taking this step into the unknown, eager to get on with my new life, sad to be leaving my old one. But there is something so very grounding about just sitting down and watching this everyday miracle taking place, preferably with a cup of tea in one hand. The lad next door is having a bath and playing some Latin American music, which somehow seems to blend with the whole sunny, late-afternoon vibe.

I loved watching how the spider produces the silk from the spinnerets at her rear end and then manipulates the strand into position in a process that’s almost too quick and neat to see.

But, yet again, this wasn’t the best place for a web, and no sooner had she finished than we had to go to the shed and there was nothing for it but to barge through all that hard work in order to get to the secateurs. I do hope that she finds somewhere that will be a bit less disrupted tomorrow.

Dear Readers, I am finding the buddleia outside my office window very distracting, with its red admirals and peacock butterflies and even the hummingbird hawk moths, but today was my first painted lady (Vanessa cardui). Every year I become excited at the prospect of a ‘fall’ of this species – it’s migratory, and its numbers in the UK depend largely on conditions thousands of miles away. The ones in England generally arrive over the Atlas mountains in Morocco, driven ever onwards by the need for food: it’s thought that when the population density reaches a certain level in an area, the adults move on to pastures new, being driven as far north as Orkney and Shetland. This is also the only species of butterfly ever to have been found in Iceland. However, some butterflies make an even longer journey: some butterflies were recently found to have originated in Central Africa, which seems to indicate that the painted lady can make an annual round trip of about 12,000 km.

However, it’s important to note that no individual butterfly makes this whole trip: the butterflies will lay their eggs en route, and the life cycle is a short one, with the process of turning from an egg to an adult taking as little as three weeks depending on temperature and food availability. The caterpillars are fond of thistles, burdock, stinging nettles and viper’s bugloss, and will make a little ‘tent’ out of the leaves to protect themselves. The fully-grown caterpillars are black and spikey, like those of their close relatives the red admiral and the peacock. Sadly, the painted lady cannot survive the winters in the UK and further north in any form, so it’s all a matter of timing.

Painted lady caterpillar (Photo Harald Süpfle, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

I remember the great ‘fall’ of painted ladies in 2009 – I was still living in Islingon, but was treasurer for our local community garden, Culpeper Gardens. I popped over, as I did every day, and every single flower and wall seemed to be hosting an painted lady. I had never seen such a concentration of insects of one species in one place, and it felt like one of those miracles that we are blessed with a few times in a lifetime. Often these occurrences are correlated with El Niño years, maybe because the heat dries up the nectar sources in Southern Europe and North Africa, and so the butterflies have to move on, crossing the Mediterranean and the English Channel and flying over the cliffs of Southern England until eventually they end up on some end-of-season buddleia in a North London front garden. Growing a few plants for these wanderers to feed on feels like such a small thing, and it’s so rewarding.

For a very long time, no one could work out whether painted ladies made the journey back south – everyone figured that they probably did (otherwise where would new adults come from every summer?) but we didn’t have the technology to spot them. But in the early 2000s scientist Jason Chapman used a kind of vertical radar to ‘watch the skies’. During the autumn of 2009, Chapman managed to identify the southwards migration of the species at between 200 and 600 metres, using a tailwind to fly at an average speed of 45 km/h. It’s thought that, unlike on the northerly migration where successive generations are involved, on the flight south it’s likely to be done by individual butterflies, meaning that an adult hatched in Scotland could end up migrating some 5000 km south to its final breeding grounds in sub-Saharan Africa. Whoever thought that butterflies were fragile had clearly not met this species. In Martin Warren’s wonderful book ‘Butterflies’, he calls the migration of the painted lady “one of the most outstanding phenomena of the butterfly world…..eclipsing even the famous migration of the Monarch butterfly in North America’. 

But how does a newly-emerged painted lady know whether to head further north in search of food, or to hurry south to escape the approaching winter? It’s thought that, even in the chrysalis, the butterfly can detect daylength, which will trigger the general direction in which it flies. Once airborne, the insect can use the time of day and the position of the sun to orientate itself – it uses its antennae to detect daylight, and its eyes to find the sun. On cloudy days, it can use polarised light to detect where the sun is, and they also have a magnetic compass. In order to survive the trip, Monarch butterflies increase in size and fat storage, and a hormone delays the development of eggs, which increases the butterfly’s lifespan, and this may also be the case for Painted Ladies.

Sadly, these finely-tuned creatures with their complicated life cycles are often used at weddings, and released as ‘live confetti’.  As you might guess, the idea of releasing live creatures, possibly into an unsuitable environment following a wedding, appals me just about as much as the recent fashion for dyeing doves in different colours and then releasing them for gender-reveals and weddings. Have a bit of respect, people! Animals are not toys.

The caterpillars can also be bought to be reared so that children can understand their life cycles. As far as this goes, wouldn’t it be better to grow caterpillar food plants in the garden, and encourage children to watch them in their natural state? There are plenty of wonders out there, we just have to look for them. Admittedly I’ve sometimes ‘rescued’ caterpillars from areas where they looked to be running out of food or in danger of being strimmed, and it’s fascinating to see them change over time, but I think that’s different from buying in caterpillars for the purpose. Or maybe I’m being unfair. In a way, anything that encourages children to take an interest in the natural world is great, but I think we need to move away from seeing it as a commodity that we can buy, and move towards seeing it as part of our environment, and something that needs to be cherished in situ. What do you think, Readers?

Peacock butterfly

Dear Readers, the price of going on holiday is the small mountain of work that’s on my desk just waiting for me to come back. But one joy is the buddleia that I can see through my window. I honestly don’t remember ever seeing it so full of butterflies, all new-minted. Look at this Peacock butterfly! Its caterpillars feed on nettles, so if there was ever a reason for not being too tidy in the garden this is it. The eyespots always astonish me – the white dots seem to make them look more dewy and realistic.

And then there are the Red Admirals. These can be migratory but the ones on the buddleia look too neat and tidy to have made a long journey. At one point there were six different individuals on the flowers, sometimes fighting over a particular raceme, sometimes getting buzzed off by a passing bumblebee.

There were the usual white butterflies as well of course, but it was the Vanessids – the red admirals, peacocks and small tortoiseshells – that outnumbered everyone else today.

And then, this. And for once, I actually managed to get a photograph.

Hummingbird Hawk Moth

And of course, I remember my Mum insisting and insisting that she’d seen a hummingbird on her red valerian, in spite of me telling her that such a bird would be a very, very long way from home. You can see why someone would think that they’d been visited by such an exotic spirit, though. I still remember the delight in her voice when she told me, and now I wonder why I felt the need to disenchant her. Sometimes we are too clever for our own good.

I am so grateful for my tatty, aphid-ridden old buddleia, which is living up to its alternative name of ‘butterfly bush’ today. Every few minutes, a dark shadow flies over the house, lands on the plant, opens its wings and transforms into a fragment of jewelled velvet. It makes me feel both infinitely blessed, and unworthy. What have we done to deserve such beauty, what with us wrecking the planet and all? And yet, here it is, maybe to remind us that all is not lost and everything is still worth fighting for.

It does feel like an exceptional year for butterflies here in London – what are you seeing, Readers? Does it feel like a good July, after a very slow start? Let’s hope that butterflies and moths are popping up all over the place.