Flower crab spider (Misumena vatia)

Dear Readers, I was so intrigued by this bright yellow spider yesterday that I thought I’d do some research. It’s known that the females of this species can change their colour from white to yellow (and indeed in North America this species is known as the goldenrod spider, as that’s the plant that it’s most frequently found upon). However, the change takes a full 25 days to occur, which doesn’t sound especially helpful if you’re doing it for camouflage. Furthermore, it appears that the spider’s ability to catch prey doesn’t decrease if it’s not on a ‘matching’ flower – let’s not forget that insects see colour differently from mammals, with UV light playing a big part in perception, and so a colour difference that is very apparent to us may not be so clear to an incoming hoverfly. 

White form of Flower Crab Spider (Photo by By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81672235)

I am indebted to Tone Killick, one of the administrators of the UK Spider Identification Facebook page, who produced a very interesting paper on this fascinating spider. He is unconvinced about the possibility that the change in colour is to evade predators – this is a very speedy spider, and furthermore birds are able to spot the arachnid even if it’s perfectly matched to its flower. And we already know that it doesn’t apparently help the spider to catch prey. The spider has a very low rate of success (apparently it only catches 3.5% of the prey that it attempts to grab in its spikey front legs), which means that it has to wait around on a flower for a very, very long time before it gets a meal. And here’s where Killick makes an interesting lateral link. The yellow pigmentation is caused by a chemical called ommochrome, which has been shown to provide protection against UV damage in spider’s eyes. Could it be that, if a spider spends a long time in sunshine, she develops the yellow colouration as a sun screen (we could hypothesise that spiders that stay white live in shadier places). Clearly more research is needed, but for now let’s move on to the other interesting facet of the spider’s life, reproduction.

All of these biggish yellow and white spiders are female. The males are only 3-4 mm long, while the females are 9-11mm. Furthermore, the males look completely different.

Male Flower Crab Spider (Photo by By James Lindsey at Ecology of Commanster, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1669767)

In the spring, the tiny males run through the flowers following the silken threads that the females leave as they move from one bloom to another. Upon finding a female, they scramble onto her abdomen while the female continues to go about her business, seemingly oblivious.

Female eating fly with male on her abdomen (Photo by S Drozd Lund from Misumena vatia photo – image 105272 (biopix.com))

The male then taps on the female to see if she’s receptive to some sperm transfer (like you do) and if all goes well, they mate. The male then makes an extremely speedy retreat, before he ends up as dinner. He must keep all eight legs crossed that the female hasn’t already copulated, as if so she can be extremely (life-threateningly) grumpy.

The female lays 150-400 eggs on a suitable leaf and covers it with lots of silk. Then she starts her guard duties – during this time, the only way she will eat is if a particularly silly fly blunders into her space and she can grab it. After 25 days the spiderlings hatch, and many will fly away by standing on some vegetation and holding a strand of silk which will act as a parachute. Alas, many dangers await these tiny spiders, though they can survive the freezing temperatures at 5 km above the earth’s surface. Many will be eaten by predators, and others will end up in an unsuitable environment. Some, however, will survive to adulthood, to delight amateur arachnologists and lovers of the unexpected everywhere.

Dear Readers, I always find that the jet lag when I’m travelling east is much worse than when I’m going west – I couldn’t keep my eyes open during the Coronation, but then come bedtime I’m pinging around the room like a pinball. One trick is to get out early (ish) in the morning so that the sunlight and other people’s pheromones can help the body to resynchronise its rhythms and so, bleary-eyed and in need of caffeine I headed out onto East Finchley High Road. But what is this?

A pollarded tree

Yes, a whole lot of pollarding has gone on in spite of it being spring and the trees no longer being dormant but starting to leaf up.

An unpollarded tree

I’ve rattled on about this kind of thing before (very recently in fact) and I have no problem with management of street trees – better that they’re trimmed than that they get blamed for subsidence and cut down (don’t get me started). But I am keeping an eye on this tree, further down towards to the station. See what’s at the top?

Yes, a nest, probably magpie or crow by the size of it. It’s against the law to disturb a bird’s nest, even one that belongs to such a common species. I will be interested to see if it’s left alone.

I couldn’t resist a snap of The Archer at East Finchley Station – he’s looking particularly fine in the spring sunshine. Look at those muscles! Clearly all those gym sessions have been working. He is firing his arrow along the Northern Line, and there is a legend that the arrow itself can be found at the end of the line, in Morden. The statue is by Eric Aumonier, and was unveiled in 1940

In general, things are looking really lovely at the moment – all the rain has brought a lot of plants and animals along. At the entrance to Cherry Tree Wood, this young magpie was trying to work out what was edible – s/he was very relaxed, which is unusual. I think that piece of rubbish to the right had attracted his/her attention. Put it in the bin, people!

The flowers at the entrance to the Wood are looking very fine – it’s part of the Paths for Pollinators project, and there were several honey, bumble and solitary bees buzzing around, so it’s clearly working.

There are lots of hybrid bluebells inside the wood – these tend to survive better in the drier sections of the wood, and clearly the pollinators, such as this hairy-footed flower bee, don’t care about its provenance.

The Hawthorn is in flower..

and so is the Herb Robert…

and so is the Bird Cherry – it always reminds me of fireworks zigzagging off in different directions. In previous years there have been ermine moth caterpillars here, but they’ve given it a miss this year, and the trees are looking magnificent.

Then it’s out of the wood and onto the unadopted road, a laneway at the back of the houses on Park Hall Road and Summerlee Road. It’s often been an interesting place for plants and animals, and today was no exception.

Look at this little beauty! This is a female Flower Crab Spider (Misumena vatia) – this species comes in many colours, and I’m not quite sure that this one has got that camouflage business right, though she’d do really well on some gorse or tucked inside a daffodil. They can change colour from white to yellow to green apparently, but a complete colour change takes up to 25 days, which isn’t going to be very helpful for our spider. However, her prey insects (hoverflies and bees) see colour in a different way, so maybe she isn’t so conspicuous to them as she is to us.  Judging by the size of her abdomen I’d say she’s pregnant, so there will soon be the patter of many, many teeny-tiny feet.

And this tree is looking particularly splendid – it’s a foxglove tree (Paulownia tomentosa), and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in flower before. I feel a Wednesday Weed coming on….

And finally, a brief word on weeds. The green alkanet is having a particularly good year – those blue flowers are so intense, and I love the way they look against a red brick wall. I know that they’re a thug but the pollinators love them, and they grow in places where other more delicate plants would give up the ghost.

And aren’t they preferable to this? Just before we left the weedkiller man came round on his little electric vehicle with a huge tank of herbicide on the back.

At least this time he spared the tree pits that people have planted up. Look at all that greenery, making food for insects and cover for all manner of little creatures! Let’s face it, we all need as much greenery as we can get.

Dear Readers, by the time you read this we will be heading back home after almost a fortnight in Toronto. I’d be lying if I said it had been an easy or a fun visit – my mother-in-law’s memory is now about ten minutes long, I would say, and this been very hard on my husband. In previous years we would have been off to Collingwood to see our aunties, Rosemary and Linda, but they both passed away in the autumn of 2022, and it has hit us very hard now we’re back in Canada. But still, we have some wonderful friends here, and I will always have a deep affection for this city, which has felt like a second home for more than twenty years.

So, in no particular order, here are some recommendations if you ever find yourself here:

Our favourite coffee shop is Versus, easily the best coffee that we’ve had, and the pastries are pretty good too.

On the restaurant front, we can recommend:

The Queen Mother Café, a stalwart for over forty years.

Oliver and Bonacini Grill, especially as so many places are closed on Sundays.

Cantina Mercatto – very noisy on a Saturday night but pretty relaxed early/during the rest of the week.

For a splurge:

Opus was lovely, and the beignets for dessert were extraordinary. Expensive, but the quality is great.

Auberge du Pommier is situated in the middle of a car park in York Mills, but inside it is one of my favourite places, not just in Toronto but anywhere. It always makes me feel welcome, and the fact that we meet our friend M there is the cherry on the cake. The service is efficient and friendly, and it’s one of those restaurants where I want to eat everything on the menu. Highly, highly recommended.

We always stay at the Cambridge Suites Hotel – as the name suggests, the rooms have separate living and sleeping areas, which is great if you’re staying for a fortnight as we are. Sadly the site is going to be turned into (you guessed it) a condominium tower, but hopefully not for a few years yet.

We haven’t had much time for sight seeing this year, but we did enjoy The Beach(es), and it would be nice to get back to the brickworks in daylight and when the sun is shining.

And so let’s see how exciting our trip through Lester Pearson airport is (last time it took us nearly four hours to get through check-in and security, so let’s hope things are better this year). See you on the other side!

Evergreen Brickworks

Dear Readers, I don’t know what you would do on a wet and windy night in Toronto, but I would hazard that taking a three-mile walk through an urban environmental park in search of beavers probably wouldn’t be at the top of the list. But that’s exactly what my husband and I did with our friend D on Tuesday night. It hasn’t stopped raining properly for about the past week, but we missed out on the beaver spotting last year, so nothing was going to stop us this year.

The Evergreen Brickworks (previously known as the Don Valley Brickworks) opened in 1889, when local entrepreneur John Taylor noticed that the soil was good quality clay, ideal for making bricks. A quarry was set up to the north of the site, and the brickworks themselves were built at the south end. The bricks were used to build a variety of local landmarks, including Casa Loma (a remarkable  castle-like home that included an oven large enough to cook two oxen and three bowling lanes), the Ontario legislature and Osgoode Hall, home to the Law School.

Casa Loma being built in 1912

The site was mostly quarried out by the 1980s, and then the battle began. It was purchased by a company who wanted to use it for housing, but as it was on a floodplain it was decided that it wasn’t suitable, and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority had to buy it back at a vastly increased price because it was now zoned as residential. But by 1994, restoration of the site had begun, with the quarry filled in, three new ponds created, and paths which link it to the Beltline trail.

The buildings of the brick works themselves have been largely preserved and are used for everything from the regular farmers’ market to children’s events. There’s even a garden centre, but of course at 10 p.m. at night, in the rain, it was closed.

Evergreen brickworks with autumn sumach (Photo By Glogger – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16987626)

And so we found ourselves walking down to the brickworks . There’s something magical about stomping through a completely deserted forest, the moon a hazy disc through the low cloud, listening out for rustling  in the undergrowth or the hooting of an owl. Our friend D has seen beavers here several times, and there’s evidence of their activity everywhere – gnawed tree stumps, piles of branches in the ponds. He was disappointed that we didn’t see an actual beaver, but sometimes it’s enough just to know that they’re there and living their lives so close to the centre of town. The brickworks have a really impressive list of animals of all kinds that have been spotted, and if I lived in Toronto I think I’d be making a pilgrimage every week, binoculars and field guide in hand.

https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/3796341-Roughly-Evergreen-Brickworks-Park-Check-List

Apparently the beaver family currently in the pond is the first that’s stayed for the winter – often beavers visit just to top up on food, but don’t make the place their home. However, this year a pair of young adults and their kit did stay put, and the rangers are interested to see what will happen next.

Evergreen Brick Works beaver from https://parkbench.com/event/visiting-our-beaver-brick-works-to-harbourfront-centre

Sadly, the ponds have also become a dumping ground for unwanted goldfish and terrapins. D says that some of the goldfish are now enormous, but I suppose they’ll provide food for the herons, such as the great blue heron ( Ardea herodias) below.

Great Blue Heron (Photo by nigel, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

The terrapins will be competing with native turtles, but as the pond is also home to the native snapping turtle they might have met their match (in the UK they have no competition at all).

Common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) (Photo by Dakota L., CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

And so, after walking around in the rain for a couple of hours we finally headed back, serenaded by the sounds of running water (including the drips from our kagoules) and the haunting cries of some mysterious animal off in the distance. D did say that he’d seen coyotes a couple of times, and they are definitely coming into the city more often, probably as their usual homes are being disturbed. Apparently the secret with a coyote is to make yourself look big and scary, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard any stories of humans being bothered by the animals (though I suspect that pets might be in a bit more danger). Still, at least no one’s spotted any mountain lions or bears at the Brickworks. Yet.

Dear Readers, here I am, still in Toronto but today I have spent about six hours writing up my Open University science experiment – regular readers might remember that I decided to look at the hairy-footed flowerbees that visit the garden, and to see whether the number of males to females was temperature-dependent – the females are all jet-black, which should mean that they heat up more quickly than the males, who are little stripey geezers.

So, today has mostly been crunching numbers and looking at scientific papers, and I just looked up and realised that in exactly 59 minutes we are leaving for a posh meal with a lovely friend of ours, and here I am in my low self-esteem trackpants and a jumper that has seen better days. 59 minutes is not long to transform myself into a goddess, so today I shall just give you a brief recap, and tomorrow I shall return to things Toronto-related.

Suffice it to say that there were more females than males at all temperature ranges, but interestingly (to me at least) there was only a statistically-significant difference at the higher temperature range. I think this is because the week that I chose to observe my bees also featured high-winds and torrential downpours, so when it was cold, wet and windy all but the bravest bees stayed at home and did their crosswords/knitting/watched Netflix/whatever bees do when they’re confined to quarters. When the temperature was a bit higher, the females came out much more than the males, even when it was breezy: I think this is because a) they’re larger (as it turns out) and so can survive more boisterous conditions, and b) because every day they have to collect enough pollen to feed one of their larvae: hairy-footed flower bees are solitary bees, so each female is solely responsible for feeding their offspring. That is a pretty strong incentive to go out there and get provisioning, while for the males (especially if they’ve already mated) there’s no real advantage to risking the inclement conditions.

But who knows? I think my bottom line will be ‘more research is required’, as it should be in all good scientific inquiry.

And now I’m off to have a shower and make myself presentable. See you all tomorrow!

Dear Readers, so after a bright-ish start we’re soon back to light  rain and blustery winds here in Toronto, but we did have a brisk walk to the Distillery District, for a coffee in Balzac – this is Canada’s own coffee chain and very nice it is too. The company often uses old industrial or historic properties, and so each place is different. This time, it was pretty busy inside – normally we sit outside and admire the Dogs of Toronto (of which more later). But today, with a bit of London-style table ninja-ing we managed to get a seat, and it was good to catch up with my husband – we’ve spent so much time with his ageing Mum that we’ve lost touch with one another a bit. It’s always good to reconnect.

Much of the Distillery District is now very fancy shops – there’s a John Fluevog shoe shop, lots of places selling ice cream and hot chocolate, a few mini-breweries, some art galleries and one place the size of a warehouse (which could actually once have been a warehouse) that sells skin cream, inevitably containing hyaluronic acid. This is something  that our joints make naturally as a lubricant, and which is sometimes injected into arthritic knees to help with the pain. Whether it makes any difference when smeared onto the skin is anyone’s guess.

I imagine that, with all the bars and restaurants, this is a cool spot on a lovely summer’s evening. Alas, on a damp spring morning it feels a little tired and down at heel. Or maybe that’s just me.

Anyhow, on we go to something that always cheers me up – Berczy Park. It contains the famous dog fountain that I discovered last time I was here but hey, here it is again. I love the way that the dogs around the fountain are admiring/worshipping the golden bone at the top, but the cat is eyeing up two birds on an adjacent lamp post.

Here are the dogs….

…and here is the cat and the birds.

And here is a rather splendid real bird – I’m seeing a few of these chestnut-coloured pigeons, and very pretty they are too.

And then John pointed me in the direction of another little pocket park, just behind Yonge Street. I’d been a bit disheartened because it appears that an 81 storey condominium is going to be constructed right next to the Courthouse Park that I wrote about yesterday, and I have fears for its survival, but maybe I’m being too pessimistic – the courthouse itself is going to be preserved in its entirety, so maybe the park will be too. Plus Torontonians can be very fierce when something they love is threatened, so let’s see what happens.

Who would have guessed that this was here? A few trees bursting into green in a space that could not be more urban, and the walls were echoing with the chirps of the ubiquitous sparrows.

Dear Readers, we have been very lucky so far with the weather in Toronto, but today the skyscrapers have disappeared into the low clouds. It’s difficult to keep your spirits up when the world outside is so dismal and grey, but fortunately R, who is looking after our cat while we’re away, has been sending me updates and photos so I know exactly how Willow is getting on.

To start with she was definitely very suspicious.

But as the days have worn on, she’s started to relax, and to even come downstairs when she hears the door open to see if there’s any food in the offing…

And now she is quite happy to be stroked…

And seems generally much more relaxed.

This morning R tells me that her 3 year-old daughter was ‘reading’ an Ursula Le Guin story to the cat, who was unimpressed but unfazed. I told R that the cat was used to Tolstoy so maybe felt a bit underwhelmed :-). And just look at that lovely London weather! R tells me that the cat is following the sun  around the house, as usual. She’d have a spot of bother doing that here in Toronto today.

One thing that R and I have both concluded is that the cat is probably now completely deaf – last time I tried to get her into a cat carrier she was asleep and I was able to pick her up gently and pop her in before she even noticed, something I would never have been able to do if she’d been able to hear me – I swear that she slept with one ear open. Also, her yowls for food and attention have gotten much louder, so I suspect she can’t hear herself. Still, apart from that she seems perfectly happy, and I’m really pleased that she’s eating well while we’re away. It’s one less thing to worry about.

And so we’re at the turning point of the holiday, with a few more lovely friends to see, and my mother-in-law’s 95th birthday on Thursday. It’s been a hard trip in many ways, but there are many compensations. Still, I find my thoughts turning gradually back towards home. Let’s see what the next few days brings.