Dear Readers, in the fading photo above you can see me aged about 10 with our new puppy, named Spock because of his black shiny fur (rather than his ears, which were of a distressingly-normal size). I had always wanted a dog, but there were five large humans crammed into our little two-up, two-down house, and my Mum wasn’t sure she could cope with one more living creature underfoot. I don’t blame her, but mine was a long-standing campaign – there’s a photo of me aged five clutching a toy dog and looking wistfully into the camera. When asked what I was thinking about, I apparently replied ‘getting a doggy’. Who could resist? Well, clearly my parents as it was five long years until I finally got my hands on a real live dog. I look utterly besotted in this photo, and so I was, but having a dog soon proved to be rather more of a challenge than I’d thought.

From the start, Spock was a nervous and highly-strung dog, characteristics not helped by the fact that he was at everyone’s beck and call, and had nowhere to call his own. In the end, we took to ordering him to go under the armchair: on the cry ‘Under!’ he would slink behind the legs of whoever was sitting in the chair and would peer out with the biggest eyes you ever saw. Ours could be a fractious house, and, being a sensitive animal, he must have picked up on the nervous energy in the air. It wasn’t helped by the fact that our resident cat (Fuzzy) had no time for the puppy at all. Spock would occasionally jump on her back in a frenzy of sexual frustration and she would run up the garden with him clinging on like a baby giant anteater. Eventually, he took things too far: she was sitting on the fence one afternoon when he jumped up and, with impeccable timing, she drew a single claw down his nose, leaving a perfect line of blood. That was that, and he never bothered her again.

It probably didn’t help that I took to knitting clothes for Spock, including, on one occasion, little booties. How gentle he was as I put each one on, and how eager he was to shake them off! The tam o’shanter that I knitted didn’t last very long either. What he did like was when we set up a show-jumping ‘ring’ in our tiny back garden, though he was prone to go under the obstacles rather than over them. He would probably have loved agility training, but this was unheard of in East London in the 70s. He must have been stressed and bored, a difficult combination.

Walking Spock was a nightmare. He was so pent up and so excitable that he wanted to murder any passing dog, child or pram, so we took to only taking him out after dark. Sadly he was also afraid of passing large, parked vehicles and took a serious dislike to any peculiar shadows. Poor, poor little dog. We were all on edge in our house, and Spock absorbed all of it. Sometimes I’d be sitting on the sofa and the dog would look at a spot just behind my head. His hackles would rise and he’d start to growl. There would be nothing there when I turned around. On other occasions, he would sit in the middle of the floor and howl. I always felt as if he expressed the feeling of claustrophobia that we all felt.

And then, a miracle happened.

We managed to move house to Seven Kings, just a few miles up the road from Stratford where I grew up, but a completely different world. Our ‘through lounge’ was nearly thirty feet long. We had a garden. We had room to get away from one another, although on the first night that we moved in all of us, dog and cat included, huddled in a little circle in the living room. And then, the following morning, Spock, tail wagging, tongue lolling, started to run from one end of the living room, through our fancy new ‘sun lounge’, before descending to the garden with a huge leap. He’d gallop to the end of the garden, turn on a sixpence with a great scatter of turf, and then run back, over and over again. At some points it was as if he was trying to become airborne. I have never seen such unfettered joy in an animal. Overnight, most of his ‘neuroses’ fell away. I suspect many of ours did, too.

My platform-soled foot with Spock.

What a very good boy he was! So tolerant of being at everyone’s behest, so gentle with his family, so determined to protect us from terrifying vans and passing toddlers. He died when I was at university: Mum and Dad found him collapsed in the middle of the living room that he loved to run through so much. When he saw them, he gave a feeble wag of his tail and tried to get up, but he’d had the doggy equivalent of a stroke, and the vet could do nothing for him. He was my first, and so far my only dog. For the longest time I’d catch sight of a black shadowy shape out of the corner of my eye when I was at home, but it was never there when I looked head on. I am not sure where animals go after they die, but if there is a heaven then they deserve to be in it. I hope that they can finally be utterly, uncompromisingly themselves.

Wild Rock Dove from the Outer Hebrides (Photo by Will Smith, article athttps://www.bto.org/community/blog/wild-rock-doves-solving-genetic-enigma)

Dear Readers, I can already sense you asking why the feral pigeon appears to have infiltrated my Red List piece for this week (in addition to wondering why someone is handling the bird in the first place). Well, as you may know, feral pigeons are descended from rock doves, birds that used to inhabit sea caves, cliffs and mountainous areas right across Europe, Asia and Africa. However, over the years the rock dove has morphed into the feral pigeon, which, while it’s the same species as the rock dove, is genetically distinct. As you know, feral pigeons come in every colour under the sun, and there are other differences too.

The original rock dove only comes in one colour – grey- with a distinctive white patch above the tail and two black wing bars. The wild birds also have longer,thinner beaks and a more pronounced forehead than their feral cousins. Unlike your typical feral pigeon, these birds are extremely shy and difficult to catch, as the author of the study, Will Smith, points out.

‘Fieldwork was often challenging and involved long nights in Outer Hebridean meadows, climbing through ruined buildings to study the doves as they roost. One of the privileges of this is getting familiar with all the other animals and plants that make their home there, including the Corncrake. These fascinating birds seem to purposefully move gradually closer and closer to the tent each day until they are shouting ‘crex-crex’, at maximum volume, all night, a metre from my head. At least Rock Doves don’t test an ornithologist’s patience quite that much!’

Actually it sounds like absolute bliss (except for the Corncrake). What Smith discovered was that the birds in the Outer Hebrides are actually still genetically distinct and very similar to the ancestral pigeons of the feral birds. This is a real find, as in many fairly isolated places, such as the Orkneys, the wild rock doves have bred with ferals and are now no longer similar to the original birds. A similar thing has happened with the Scottish Wild Cat, which interbreeds with domestic cats and is so in danger of disappearing as a distinct species. We are moving towards a much less biodiverse world, and so preserving these relict species is important for the planet as a whole.

Rock Dove (Photo by Will Smith)

There are many opportunities for further research and protection for the wild dove – there is a population in Ireland which has not been the subject of a study (yet), and there may well be populations in many places in Europe, particularly on some of the islands in the Mediterranean. While homing pigeons and other ‘stray’ feral pigeons will join rock dove flocks, the bigger danger is if people start to keep free-flying pigeons and these interbreed with the wild birds. Another danger seems to be that feral pigeons are more likely to survive trichomoniasis, the disease which has wiped out 90% of our greenfinches and which is a danger to rare birds, including pigeons, wherever it turns up. However, for now, the rock doves of the Outer Hebrides are living by the sea just as they’ve always done. It will be interesting to see if they eventually attain some kind of conservation status to help protect them in the coming years.

You can read the whole of Will Smith’s article here, and jolly interesting it is too.

Josh Gabbatiss and the book that he started when he was nine years old (Photos from The Guardian Man, 30, completes encyclopedia of animals he started at nine | Zoology | The Guardian

Dear Readers, I’m not quite sure why this story made me teary-eyed, but I loved it so much that I wanted to share it. Josh Gabbatiss started his ‘Book of Animals’ when he was just nine years old. I love that, as he says, he knew even at that age that he was in it ‘for the long haul’ – he started with worms, corals and other invertebrates, and planned to work his way through the animal kingdom until he arrived at the primates.

I suspect that he didn’t know that it was going to take him twenty-two years, however, because he finally finished the book earlier this year. In the meantime he’d become a zoologist, and then a climate consultant. Josh says that he worked away at the book pretty much consistently until he was in his early teens, when there started to be big jumps in time between sections. In his late teens, he moved onto mammals, but then when he went to university, it all stopped – the book was ‘too precious to move to a different city’. Finally, during the Covid lockdown he got stuck in again. What a talented artist he is! This is the final picture.

The final page.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone out there published it? Josh’s website is here in case anyone has a hankering.

I have a great fondness for animal encyclopaedias, because when I was growing up, I was gifted one by my Auntie Marie. Auntie Marie wasn’t a real auntie – she worked with Mum, and they had a great fondness for one another, despite being chalk and cheese. Marie had, let’s say, a theatrical background – her hair was always black as coal, her lipstick ruby-red, her eyes lined with kohl. In my memory she has a cigarette holder (though I am possibly conflating her with Cruella de Ville, most unreasonably). We were a very poor family, just about making ends meet, but Marie would lend us her caravan in Whitstable once a year for free so we could have a holiday. And when we went to visit her in her huge apartment, which overlooked Clapham Common, she would always live up to her reputation as being the world’s worse cook, something that my poor younger brother bore the brunt of. She heard that he loved saveloy sausages, and so she cooked him up six of them, and looked on with pride while he tried to eat the lot. Once, she made a trifle out of stale Christmas cake, including the icing and the marzipan. No amount of begging could stem her largesse.

But, her generosity in the giving of books was the thing that I most remember. She introduced me to Thelwell, he of the little fat ponies, and to the Molesworth books, my favourites to this day. And the Readers’ Digest Encyclopedia of Animals that she gave me was so pored over that I memorised whole sections. It gave me a way to fit the animal kingdom together, even though so much has changed in the years since I was a child (I just found out that anteaters and sloths are no longer Edentates, but Xenarthrans). We didn’t have a lot of books, so this one was my most treasured possession. At some point, it got water-stained (probably through me reading it in the bath when we finally got a bathroom) and then, somehow, it just disappeared from my life, leaving a spark of interest that has never gone out.

The last time that Mum saw Marie, she was in hospital and her hair, still black in her eighties (a miracle!) had finally grown out, and was white. Mum told her that it suited her, but Marie was adamant.

“As soon as I get out of here, I’m grabbing that dye bottle”, she said. “I don’t want people to think I’m old”.

When she died, the only people at her funeral were the gay couple from the flat upstairs, who had taken her under their wing much as she’d been doing with other people all her life, and Mum and Dad. But the ripples of her life went much further probably than she ever realised. She helped me to make the connection between the animals that I saw in the garden and the world of scientific inquiry, something that I’m finally uniting in my life now with my Open University degree.

And she gave my brother a life-long loathing of saveloys.

Cyclamen

Goodness readers, there isn’t much going on in the garden at the moment – the couple of cold snaps that we’ve had in December and January have put nearly all the plants back, and who can blame them – in my north-facing plot it takes long enough to warm up in the best of years. But I was very cheered by these cyclamen, who have taken several years to establish themselves but are now going great guns. I’ve always had a great fondness for this plant, whether as a house plant or in the garden, and I remember my late Aunt Hilary’s garden, where all the spring flowers had naturalised themselves. I imagine it’s something of a building site now.

Cyclamen in Aunt Hilary’s garden

And my one patch of snowdrops is also spreading. How I love spotting their pristine white flowers from the kitchen window! If I stay in the house until I’m about 120 years old, maybe they’ll have filled up the rest of the garden. Or maybe I should divide them  this year. Truth be told, they’ve been such a long time coming that I’m nervous about interfering.

And then the buds are coming on the flowering currant, one of the finest of the early flowering shrubs, and a magnet for the hairy-footed flower bees in late March.

Flowering currant buds…

The flowering currant in April

I don’t know about you, Readers, but it’s felt like a very long winter this year. However, as I was taking a few photos this afternoon I noticed a trio of great tits chasing one another round and round the whitebeam, a robin singing, and the first shy heads of the grape hyacinths appearing. We’re nearly there. One more push and we’ll have gotten through another year!

Dear Readers, ‘terrified’ would be a strong word, but ‘daunted’ would be closer to the mark, as I get stuck into my t-tests and Mann-Whitney U tests and chi-squared tests, all to see if the results that I’ve got in my experiments for my OU course are actually worth the paper that they’re printed on. It’s all good stuff, though – I can feel my brain creaking as it expands, and the delight when I actually work out how something works is quite something to behold. This afternoon, I couldn’t work out how to do something, so I told my husband how frustrated I was and, miraculously, all he had to do was stand behind me and squint at the calculation and suddenly it all became clear. He didn’t have to say a word!

To be fair, I have a similar effect when he’s lost something (which is a fairly common occurrence). Early on in our relationship, I learned that, instead of joining him in the hunt for the missing object, all I had to do was say ‘you’ll find it, you never really lose anything’ and the item would appear, though generally not in any place that a sane person would expect. I swear that there is a tear in the fabric of the universe through which wedding rings/valuable pieces of paper/keys/wallets/work passes drop, only to reappear elsewhere on the space/time continuum (usually a pile of something completely unrelated). Go figure, as us statisticians say.

Anyhow, when I looked up from my endeavours it was to read that the oldest dog in the world has been verified by the Guinness Book of Records. Bobi is not only the most elderly dog in the world at the moment, at an extraordinary 30 years old, but the oldest dog ever. He lives with the Costa family in the village of Conqueiros in Portugal, where he has lived all his life after a narrow escape – he was one of four siblings, the rest of whom were ‘euthanised’ (I suspect this is a euphemism for ‘drowned in a bucket’ but I could be wrong) because they were too many, as Thomas Hardy would have described it in ‘Jude the Obscure’. Anyhow, Bobi was rescued by eight year-old Lionel Costa, who kept the puppy a secret by hiding it in an outhouse and sneaking food to him. When the puppy was discovered the family decided to keep him, and Bobi has continued to eat whatever his family have for dinner. Clearly it’s done him no harm – it’s only recently that he’s had trouble walking and deteriorating eyesight. He is clearly a Very Good Boy.

Bobi the oldest dog in the world and feline friend

And for those of you who are dog lovers, there’s a real treat coming up at the Wallace Collection in London. ‘Portraits of Dogs – From Gainsborough to Hockney’ runs from 29th March to 15th October this year, and jolly good fun it looks too. I shall take myself off and review it for you when it opens, but for now, here’s a taster of what’s coming up.

https://www.wallacecollection.org/art/exhibitions-displays/portraits-of-dogs-from-gainsborough-to-hockney/

Dad and Mum at their 60th Wedding Anniversary Party in 2017

Dear Readers, as you are great at keeping me honest, I wanted to let you know that I am currently working on a book about Mum and Dad, and particularly Dad’s dementia and how our relationship developed in spite of/because of it. I have promised my lovely writing group that it will be completed by my next birthday in January 2024, so I thought it would be mean not to share it with you as well. Accountability is a great thing, so I’m hoping it will work. I’ve already written quite a lot of it, but keep thinking of other things to include, like you do. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

I came across this poem by George Barker, about his mother, and it rather reminded me of Dad at his most outgoing and rambunctious, though he could also be a quiet, thoughtful man. Like all of us, he had many facets, according to how the light fell. As we approach the third anniversary of his death, I find I still miss him and Mum every day. I guess I always will, but that’s no bad thing because it means that they’re still loved and still held in my heart.

Dear Readers, I am always so impressed by these 3-D murals – it’s hard to believe that this one doesn’t feature an actual rowboat or jetty. 2nd February was World Wetlands Day, and so this work, at Cabot Circus in Bristol, shows a pond that’s full of rubbish at one end, and then full of dragonflies at the other. It was commissioned by the Wildlife and Wetlands Trust, and the artists were 3D Joe and Max, who clearly have form with this kind of thing.

3D Joe and Max’s installation in Leicester

A Roman Bath mural in Gloucester….

A scary chasm in Newcastle…

A leaping crocodile in Bristol

So all of these look like a lot of fun, though I’m not sure that ‘mural’ is actually the right word, seeings as these are on the floor. ‘Floorals’ maybe? You can read all about 3D Joe and Max at their website here, which includes some very interesting videos.

I wonder what the reaction of a dog or cat to one of these would be, or a small child come to that. And I hope they’re always positioned with lots of room to walk round them for the delicate of constitution or the unsteady of foot (puts hand up). But they are rather fun, and very confusing. Anything that makes us do a double-take is surely a pleasure.

Turtle Dove (Streptopelia turtur) Photo by Mike Pennington

Dear Readers, in The Guardian today I read that a team of scientists are raising a ‘further’ $150m in order to pursue their attempt to resurrect the dodo, a relative of the pigeon which became extinct in the 17th century. We’ve been here before of course – I wrote a piece about the ‘resurrection men‘ a while ago. What makes me particularly cross about this case is that the turtle dove, one of our most iconic birds (number two on the Twelve Days of Christmas for one thing) is threatened not just in the UK but globally, and I can’t help but think that a ‘further’ $150 million would be better spent trying to preserve the species that we have, rather than trying to ‘create’ a no doubt lonely and miserable bird from the past. You can probably hear the harrumphing from wherever you are.

The turtle dove has gone from over a quarter of a million birds in the UK in 1960 to just a few thousand now. A survey in Surrey found just 80 singing males, with 20 of them on the Knepp Estate, which has been a triumph of rewilding, but which needs to be duplicated all over the country if we’re to save our endangered species. The turtle dove seems to love the thorny scrub that’s been allowed to grow at Knepp, and it’s a species that loves the tiny seeds of scarlet pimpernel and ramping fumitory. It may also eat tiny snails and it needs clean water, as do all our birds. Its return to Knepp gives me a little hope, for who would want to lose the sound of the turtle dove from our countryside altogether?

This is a recording by Frank Lambert from the Knepp Estate, and what’s so wonderful is not only the sound of the turtle doves but the choir of other birdsong in the background.

So what has happened to this bird, to make it so rare?

Turtle Dove – Photo by Charles J. Sharp

Current research seems to show that the birds are making fewer nesting attempts, and that those that are made are less successful. This could be because of a lack of breeding sites, and a lack of food – birds that are not well-nourished are less likely to breed, As if this wasn’t enough, the birds appear to be prone to trichmoniasis, the same disease which has done such damage to greenfinches. Finally, the birds are hunted across their migration route, which encompasses much of Europe, North Africa and Russia. But interestingly, it seems that it’s the loss of breeding habitat which is the most crucial factor, and fortunately several conservation organisations are trying to persuade landowners to improve their land so that it’s more welcoming for the turtle doves. You can read about some of their initiatives here, and it makes for a little bit of hope. Fingers crossed for these elegant birds, and let’s hope that they can be prevented from going the same way as the dodo.

Dodos at the Oxford Museum – Photo By BazzaDaRambler