Dear Readers, my lovely husband has had another bash at reducing the duckweed in the pond, and I think it’s now down to abou 50% cover so I can actually see what’s happening with the tadpoles. What a lot there are this year! It’s difficult to get a proper portrait of the little wigglers, but here are a couple of attempts.

The one on the right looks to me as if his or her back legs are on the verge of busting out. How strange it must be to be a tadpole and to completely change from a legless aquatic vegetarian to a four-legged carnivore in the space of just a few months. Goodness knows it’s hard enough with the stages of life that us humans go through, and we don’t (completely) change our body shape, although we do seem to acquire extra dimensions in some places. At least we don’t suddenly find ourselves wide-mouthed and grinning on a lilypad, and the diet of flies and slugs would be a bit wearisome.

I was also struck by the difference in size between the different tadpoles – sometimes, some tadpoles will overwinter in the pond and turn into frogs in the spring, while others will go hell for leather and become frogs before the autumn. I guess that the variation means that at least some will survive, whatever the weather conditions, but the smaller ones will be at risk of being cannibalised by their larger brothers and sisters.

And after all, this feels like such an annual miracle. I have no idea where the frogs lived before the pond arrived, or where they go to when they leave the pond (some do stay to hibernate on the bottom, but goodness knows where the rest go. It’s been lovely to take a break between my DNA transcription and my protein translation, but now it’s back to work for another hour. Progress is being made but however well you plan, it never seems enough, at least for a perfectionist like me, who doesn’t know when to stop. Onwards!

Large Red Damselfly in the garden

Dear Readers, it has been the most glorious weather for the past few days, and my heart is filled with sympathy for all the young people who are huddled over their text books and trying to revise. I know that we always have examinations just as the weather is at its most blissful, but it doesn’t get any easier as you get older, I can tell you. I remember doing my accountancy exams and throwing the books across the room on at least one occasion (tort law if my memory serves me). Still, I did at least manage a brief break in the sunshine, and it fills me with great joy that these insects are out and about, in spite of the duckweed in the pond and the very strange spring weather.

The males seem to emerge first and wait around in the undergrowth for some females to put in an appearance. They are so delicate, especially when they fly and the sun catches their wings, but they certainly put up a fight if they sense competition. There was a cloud of holly blue butterflies too, and one very determined-looking large white butterfly. As is usual when I’m meaning to be doing something else, I feel a great urge to tidy up the pots, or drag out some more duckweed, or even, as a dear friend of mine once did when trying to avoid some unwanted task, to clean the kettle flex.

Still, today I have not only revised the structure of the cell (bacterial, plant and animal), the theory of natural and sexual selection, mitosis and meiosis and a great raft of Mendelian genetics, but I have also reminded myself of the wonders of bird migration. If I had a bit more energy I would wax lyrical, but actually I think I’m going to pour myself a cold drink and go damselfly-spotting. Only twelve days to go, and I’ll be a free woman. Cheers!

Dear Readers, I sneaked out from my revision for lunch with my lovely friend J this lunchtime, and as I warned you things are going to be a bit random on Bugwoman for the next week or two, so I thought I’d share this lovely place with you. It’s not only a restaurant but a yoga centre, and it’s also a charity which provides one meal in the developing world for each meal eaten in the restaurant (Charity Commission link here) They are also dog-friendly, which my friend’s little dog was very happy about.

There’s a large glass atrium (which can be a bit warm if you’re a lady of a certain age as J and I both are) and also a cooler bit inside. But the key thing is the food, the vast majority of which is either vegan or can be made vegan, with a few vegetarian courses too, and lots of gluten-free options. Did I mention that South Indian cuisine is one of my favourites in the world? The masala dosa ( a spicy potato-filled crepe with coconut chutney and vegetable curry) is delicious, and my friend raved about her jackfruit biriyani. And, just in case you think that all sounds a bit frugal, the vegan chocolate cake and chocolate brownie with vegan ice-cream was exceptionally tasty. There was also a vegan mango lassi. There is so much choice and my vegan friend, who usually ends up eating a bad risotto or a plate of vegetables when she goes out was nearly overwhelmed. You can have a look at the menu here. Believe me, for Islington this is very good value, especially for the very swanky new Islington Square, which is where the old Post Office used to be.

Photo from https://www.islingtonsquare.com/shop/omnom/

So, honestly, with vegan food as good as this, who needs meat (note that where it mentions chicken etc on the menu they’re using plant-based meat alternatives)? I will certainly be back. I’d like to put in a word for the mint and lime tea too, a combination that I’d not come across previously and will probably be trying to replicate at home. And finally, the staff are welcoming, efficient and helpful. This is a lovely place, a one-off and somewhere with a conscience. If you’re in London, it’s well worth a visit. 

Dear Readers, two pieces of news today. First up, I was sitting in the garden yesterday when I heard a blue tit calling – there has been one yelling its head off for the past few weeks, but like an  eejit I never thought to look up at the bird box that we put up a couple of years ago. Holy moly, it looks as if someone is actually at home. I am very excited, but will also be keeping my hopes under control – up there the blue tits should be safe from all but the most intrepid cat (knowing the ones around here I wouldn’t be surprised to see one piloting a small hang glider), but the magpies have made their nest in the tree opposite and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they clocked this arrangement. Anyway, fingers crossed and I will keep you posted.

My second piece of news is that I have exams on the 8th and 9th of June, for my Cellular Biology and Biology of Survival courses, and so my posts may be shorter/more ‘science-y’ between now and then. I did my revision timetable yesterday (rather later than planned) and was somewhat surprised by the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ that there is still to do, so I expect to be a bit frazzled by the time June 10th comes round. Nonetheless I shall soldier on valiantly. I have really loved these two courses, though I will never do two simultaneously again – there’s much more work when it’s two individual subjects than when it’s one big course, even though it’s the same number of credits overall. Keep your fingers crossed, lovely readers! After this I am looking forward to getting out and about a bit and finding a few more things for you to read about, so stay tuned….

Orca porpoising in Hood Canal, USA (Photo by By Minette Layne from Seattle, Washington, USA – Single breaching orca (cropped), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3351306)

Dear Readers, two whale-related stories today. First up, Orcas (Orcinus orca) have managed to sink three boats in the Straits of Gibraltar since 2020 (though out of more than 500 encounters that’s not bad odds). The whales appear to target the rudder of the boat, charging it until it’s broken or bent. But why? One theory is that the attacks stemmed from something that happened to a particular female whale, White Gladis. The author of a study on the whale attacks, Alfredo López Fernandez, believes that the whale suffered a traumatic event – either a collision with a boat, or possibly entanglement in illegal fishing nets. Since then, she started to attack the boats, and other whales have copied her – in at least one encounter, the sailors involved believed that a female whale was teaching her offspring to charge their boat.

Another theory is that this behaviour is just a fad – the whales are just playing, and certainly they show no interest once the boat has stopped. They don’t appear to be trying to target the humans (and their behaviour with prey animals such as seals, where they band together to topple a seal resting on an ice floe into the water) shows that they are able to devise complicated tactics to get at ‘food’ if they want to.

However, whales attacking boats that they believe have harmed them has a history – grey whales were known as ‘devil fish’ at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th centuries, because mother whales would ram any whaling boats that they saw (and quite right too). Maybe the orcas really do see boats as a threat. However, this isn’t good news for them – the Iberian population of orcas is only 39 individuals, and ramming a boat can be more dangerous for the whale than it is for the humans. Let’s hope that the whales come to a decision that it isn’t worth the hassle soon – orcas are extraordinary creatures, and the world would be much worse off without them.

Orcas breaching close to Unimak Island in the Aleutians, Alaska (Photo by By Robert Pittman – NOAA (http://www.afsc.noaa.gov/Quarterly/amj2005/divrptsNMML3.htm]), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1433661)

And now onto the Bowhead Whale (Balaena mysticetus). This cetacean can live to be over 200 years old, and weighs in at a sleek 80,000 kilograms, give or take a few grams. Scientists would expect such a large animal to have a higher rate of cancer than smaller creatures, simply because they have so many more cells, each of which could potentially become cancerous. However, like many other large animals, the rate of cancer in these animals is much lower than expected, something known as Peto’s paradox.

Bowhead whale breaching off the Alaska coast (Photo By Bering Land Bridge National Preserve – bowhead-1 Kate Stafford edit, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44326238)

Not only do the whales have more copies of genes that suppress cancer, but they are also much more able to repair the DNA damage caused by exposure to carcinogens, ageing etc. The repairs are also much more accurate than those that occur in other animals, including humans, cows and mice. Alas, although we now know what happens to bowhead whales, we can’t just generalise from their mechanisms to ourselves, but it does cast an interesting light on why these marine creatures can live to such an advanced old age. In 2007, a bowhead was found dead with a type of harpoon manufactured between 1879 and 1885 still embedded in its body ( a sad inditement of our troubled relationship with these remarkable animals), which meant it was approximately 130 years old. However, since then a whale aged 211 was found, and the Australian national science agency, CSIRO, estimates that the natural lifespan of a bowhead is about 268 years.

You can read all about bowhead whales and their remarkable ability to avoid cancer here.

Also, another factoid. The bowhead whale has the largest mouth of any animal, measuring almost a third of the length of its body (they grow to about 50 feet long), and the baleen in its mouth (the structures that are used to filter out the plankton on which this giant feeds) is about 10 feet long. And it has the thickest blubber of any animal, with a maximum thickness of 19.5 inches.

Traditionally, bowheads have been hunted by indigenous peoples around the Arctic Sea, and a small number of whales are still taken every year (67 individuals, or .05 of the Bering Sea population). However we might feel about this, now that commercial whaling pressure has been removed, there is also growth in the number of whales in many other parts of the bowhead’s range, so I am allowing myself to feel the tiniest bit of cautious optimism, in the face of realism about climate change, seabed drilling, pollution etc etc etc. Maybe these tough, long-lived animals have more in their DNA than ‘just’ cancer resistance, and I’m sure that there is much more that we can respectfully learn from them.

Bowhead whale ‘spyhopping’ off the Sea of Okhotsk (Photo By Olga Shpak – http://ria.ru/earth/20140219/995484804.html, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33130137)

Dear Readers, I’m sure many ‘proper’ gardeners would throw up their hands in horror at the sight of the side return to my house but I must admit that I rather like it. My garden is north-facing, but this little narrow sliver between my house and my neighbours seems to have become a ‘weed sanctuary’, a home for all the commonest ‘weeds’ of East Finchley, and, in my view, nothing that I could plant would ever thrive as well.

So, what do we have? First up is Greater Celandine, a member of the poppy family, and a more cheerful plant you couldn’t wish for, even though it is poisonous. It was believed to be a cure for warts, and as my maternal grandmother was a great curer of carbuncles and skin complaints of all kinds, it will always have a place in my garden.

Then there’s Yellow Corydalis, a member of the fumitory family. I love the flowers but I have a particular fondness for those wispy, delicate leaves. This is another common North London weed, most often seen growing out of tiny crevices in a wall.

And then there’s our old friend Herb Robert, the first plant that I ever did a Wednesday Weed about back in 2014. It’s a cranesbill (or species geranium), its leaves smell of burning rubber, and the leaves and stem turn to bright red – it made the railway lines at East Finchley station look very fine a few years ago. I just love it.

And peeping out below the Herb Robert in the first photo is some Green Alkanet, although this is happier in the sunnier conditions in the front garden.

And then there are a few plants that have ‘blown in’ – these tend to be at the sunnier, garden end of the side return. I love these forget-me-nots, planted about three metres away but now making themselves at home here. The original plants were from my dear friend J, and so I always think of her when I see them.

And finally, how about these? This is Tellima, otherwise known as fringecups – I originally planted some right at the other end of the garden, where they did rather badly (I think it was too dry under the whitebeam). And now they’re back, and a happy bumblebee was feeding from the rather inconspicuous but nectar-heavy flowers.

At one point I was planning on getting some containers to plant up along the side of the house, but for now I think I’m going to let it be. It can be a bit tricky to walk along in the height of summer, but how pretty it looks with all its pink and yellow and blue. And last year an enormous white foxglove pinged up next to the hosepipe, so it’s always full of surprises. So, while the garden may not win any Gardens Illustrated awards, it makes me (and the creatures that I share the garden with) happy, and that’s good enough for me.

Dear Readers, it’s a little later than usual but the starlings are starting to fledge, and as usual there are frantic parents all over the bird table, and youngsters who, when all the other birds fly off, stay put and look around as if they don’t understand what all the kerfuffle is about, which indeed they don’t. Today it was the magnificent black cat, Bear, who lives across the road, and who often makes an attempt to catch the birds, though he usually doesn’t manage it. It’s a sad fact that the dense undergrowth that makes the garden so attractive to birds also provides multiple hiding places for felines, but then there are lots of pairs of eyes on the watch, so most birds escape most of the time.

I adore cats, but there are clearly too many of them around these parts, and they take a terrible toll of our wildlife. Keeping them in at dawn and dusk would help a bit, as would wearing a collar with a bell, though some cats learn to move very stealthily even when they have one (and of course cats can get strangled if the collar isn’t quick release). My cat is an indoor cat through choice, largely because she’s terrified of all the other cats that move through the garden, but going forward I think I would only have indoor cats, in an attempt to take at least one predator out of the equation. Of course, some cats are also daft old things that don’t take birds or other small mammals, like my Mum’s cat Snuggles who would doze on the lawn with small birds hopping within paws-length and never a feather ruffled, so you can’t tar all cats with the same brush. Nonetheless, many of them do what they instinctively need to do, and it’s yet another threat to our beleaguered birds and small mammals, to go alongside intensive farming, avian flu, urbanisation etc etc.

Still, here are the starlings raining down on the bird table. Note the poor sparrow bullied out of the way early on.

And then these two turned up.

Historically feral pigeons haven’t visited the bird table, but just lately these two have taken ownership, although the starlings can still be a match for them en masse.

The big brown pigeon is quite something, and I can’t work out whether he has a full crop or is in some way unwell – he was certainly feeding well, and flying normally, but he does look a bit odd. Still, I suppose that I only put food on the bird table occasionally now, so we’ll see what happens over the next few weeks. And I am also keeping an eye on the magpies, who still seem to be around their nest in the whitebeam, though I’ve seen no sign of offspring yet. It will be interesting to see what happens as more starlings fledge and attract all manner of predators (including corvids and sparrowhawks) to the garden.

Dear Readers, I don’t know what’s going on where you live, but here in East Finchley, after a very wet and cold spring, all sorts of things are positively busting out, including the froghoppers. I have never seen so much cuckoospit in my life – not only is it all over the lavender, but it’s also on the catmint and the poor old asters, where it seems to be taking quite a toll (though I suspect some of this is actually the slugs). Generally, cuckoospit looks a little unsightly but doesn’t cause any harm, and is soon gone – the ‘spit’ is a protective layer for the rather cool little bug (a true bug in this case) who lives inside. You can read all about it here (and I note that 2014 was apparently another very good year for froghoppers), and for anyone interested in the plant disease Xylella (spread by froghoppers, but according to the RHS not yet detected in the UK as at 2023) I did a piece here.

And then I’m worried about the buddleia (as usual). It starts off so pristine, but already the black aphids have arrived and are damaging the leaves, some of which are shiny with honeydew already – not a complete disaster, as honeydew is the favourite food of several butterflies, including the holly blue that I saw last week.

Holly blue

However, this yellow discolouration is new – I’m thinking possibly a virus of some sort, or eelworm or something else exciting. Any thoughts, gardening friends?

All in all, though, I am not unhappy with how things are going. I know the green alkanet has run amok, but look at the happy pollinators.

And there’s a mint moth hiding in the nettles…

And the Bowle’s mauve perennial wallflower is doing really well…

And there is not a spare square inch for any more plants. Although that probably won’t stop me from buying some :-).