Alexanders at Camley Street Natural Park

Dear Readers, there was an outage on the Victoria Line this morning which scuppered a visit to my pal S in Walthamstow, so I decided to make the most of it and see what was happening in Kings Cross. This area has transformed out of all recognition over the past few years, from an area that was one of the dodgiest spots in London to somewhere full of chi-chi caffs and high-end dress shops. Still, one thing that has been made over and which supports a whole range of wildlife is Camley Street Natural Park – today there was a small group of primary school children getting very excited over the coot, who was taking reeds to his partner. She was already sitting on the nest, and spent inordinate amounts of time re-arranging everything.

Distant coot!

I’ve written about this place here and here and indeed here, but there’s always something new to admire. This is the first time that I’ve noticed how abundant the Alexanders is – last time I found it, back in 2020, it was growing on a rubbish tip close to Muswell Hill Playing Fields. Well, it’s very at home here, and I was also pleased to see some Fritillaries popping up in the damper spots – not quite a water meadow yet, but lovely nonetheless.

There’s a lot of white blossom about too: I was very surprised to see this hawthorn hedge already in flower. Did no one tell it that it’s also known as Mayflower? Maybe it’s a cultivar…

And there was this pretty little tree – cherry plum maybe?

Anyhow, I decided to have a wander back to the station, to see how the planting was going there. And I was stunned by this  flowering cherry. When the sun came out, it positively scintillated.

And the growth on these trees also sparkled in the sunlight…

So, although I missed meeting up with my friend, it was nice to go for an aimless wander. I couldn’t help noticing how many security guards there were amongst the trees and new buildings. There’s no doubt that this isn’t a place where homeless people congregate any more, most of them having moved to Euston, from whence they will no doubt be moved on again. And this will keep happening,  unless someone does something to actually help solve the multiple problems of access to housing, social and mental health care and addiction that many people have, rather than relocating it to another part of the capital.

Chiffchaff ((Phylloscopus collybita) Photo by Andreas Trepte. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, I haven’t actually heard a chiffchaff yet this year, but no doubt Cherry Tree and Coldfall Wood here  in East Finchley will soon be full of the sound of little brown birds advertising their presence. In fact, the song of the chiffchaff sometimes irritates me a bit, which is a little unkind to the poor bird, who is only trying to find a mate after all. But having had this thought, I decided  to look into other bird calls which are thought to be stressful to the human ear, and up came the ‘Brain Fever Bird’, otherwise known as the Common Hawk-Cuckoo (Hierococcyx varius) – the call sounds as if the bird is saying ‘Brain Fever’, but as the song is repeated it gets louder, higher pitched and somewhat more hysterical. Have a listen to its call, and see if you can imagine laying awake in a tropical climate, maybe with a touch of malaria, and listening to this being repeated over and over again…

Common Hawk-Cuckoo

Mind you, it could be worse – further east, the Common Hawk-Cuckoo is replaced by the Large Hawk-Cuckoo, who sounds even more insistent, to my ear at least.

But let’s get back to the chiffchaff, who sounds positively melodic after that lot. Here we are, back in 2024, when it appears that I was already feeling a bit ambivalent about that constant ‘chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chiff-chaff’….

Dear Readers, have you heard one yet? The song of the chiffchaff is one of those brainfever calls, the very sound of spring (along with the frogs in the pond). Here’s one that I recorded a few years ago in Cherry Tree Wood here in East Finchley – these ‘little brown jobs’ seem very fond of the scrubby area alongside the tube track. I love the way that the bird cherry blossom is blowing down in the wind.

I haven’t heard a chiffchaff just yet, and that’s perhaps a little surprising, though the rain has been relentless and I have been mostly cowering indoors. In ‘Nature’s Calendar’, Rebecca Warren suggests that some chiffchaffs are now spending the winter in the UK, as the winters become milder and a few insects survive through the year. There would certainly be precedent – the number of blackcaps, a small, usually migratory warbler, who stay throughout the year seems to be rising. Plus, Warren points out that some chiffchaffs, who normally migrate all the way to Africa from Scandinavia and other parts of Northern Europe, are now ‘short-stopping’ in the UK.

It can be tricky to identify a chiffchaff if it isn’t calling, however: have a look at the willow warbler (Psylloscopus trochilus) below. Migratory birds arrive in the UK in ‘late March’ (as opposed to ‘early March’ according to my Crossley guide), but as we’ve seen, that isn’t exactly diagnostic. Apparently, the willow warbler is a) yellower, b) larger and slimmer, c) more ‘open-faced’ and d) has a longer bill with an ‘almost orange’ base. Well, good luck with that, birdwatching peeps. Both chiffchaff and willow warbler are usually shy and retiring, and frequent similar scrubby habitat, so the best you’ll get is a glimpse.

Willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus). Photo by Andreas Trepte.

But then, maybe all we have to do is listen? Here’s the song of the willow warbler, to compare to the chiffchaff’s song in the video above. This was recorded by David Pennington in South Yorkshire.

And because I can’t resist it, here’s a chiffchaff from Belgium, recorded by Bernar Collet

If you pay attention, you can see the changeover going on – the migrants who appeared in autumn, such as the redwings, are restless and will be heading north to their breeding grounds, while many birds will be heading north from their wintering grounds in southern Europe or even further afield. They seem to be adaptable, these birds, with some of them staying put, some of them ‘short-stopping’ and some of them coming to the UK in ever decreasing numbers, as is the case with many of the birds that I’ve been looking at in my ‘Into the Red’ season. But the chiffchaffs come in huge numbers, up to 2 million every year, and let’s hope that it continues. They build their nests close to the ground, in brambles or nettles, and this reminds me of what an important, protective habitat a bramble patch can be.

Like the wren, the chiffchaff seems such a bundle of energy. This small bird has (probably) travelled to the UK all the way from Africa, crossing the Mediterranean, avoiding being shot in various places, to set up home in a piece of scrubby woodland. And how he sings! Like the wren, he expends so much energy in song, punching into the soundscape like a tiny sewing machine. They make me think that, however creakily, the wheel of life is still turning.

Chiffchaff (Photo by By Munish Jauhar – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32538487)

Tyrannosaurus rex reconstruction By Nobu Tamura  CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72994785

Dear Readers, I am a bit of a one for perfume, although I am much more careful not to blast everybody with aroma these days – I well remember my Dad saying how, when he was a bus conductor, he dreaded going upstairs because of the fug of different scents from all the ladies on their way to work. I think we appreciate how much more chemically-sensitive a lot of people are now, and don’t want to cause coughing, spluttering, eye-watering or nausea. So, I am very careful about how much I apply, and try to make sure that it’s died down a bit before I venture out. Was it Coco Chanel who suggested that you spray some perfume into the air, and then walk through the mist for the optimal amount? Anyhow, one thing I have never, ever wondered was what a Tyrannosaurus Rex smelled like, but clearly I am behind the times, because there  is a developing science called archaeochemistry, which seeks to recreate the scents of yesterday.I suspect this all kicked off when museums became a bit more ‘immersive’. I remember visiting the Jorvik Museum in York, not long after it had opened. You jumped into a little train and were taken around a ‘Viking village’, complete with the smells of rotting fish on the harbour, or chamber pots in the streets. Lovely! But there is now a whole industry in creating the scents that scare people – one firm, Aromaprime, produces scents of everything from burning plastic to vomit. But to return to our T Rex theme, they also produce one called ‘Dinosaur Swamp‘, which apparently  ‘mimics that of the boggy, humid swamps and forests the T-rex may have lived in; within the vicinity of prey that fed off the plants and used the nearby water sources.’

And, in fact, this is the smell that’s used in dinosaur displays, rather than the actual smell of a T-Rex, which would probably be a mixture of rotting meat stuck between the animal’s teeth (presumably it couldn’t floss because of its teeny tiny arms), mud, blood and dung. Lovely.

One scent-maker described how he was asked to recreate the smell of a woolly mammoth, which the client wanted to smell ‘sweaty’. However, with a notable devotion to accuracy, the scent-maker discovered that mammoths didn’t sweat (and neither do elephants), so he went to visit a llama farm, and came up with the scent of ‘dirty wool and grassy poo’. Much better, I’m sure!

However, it’s not all trivial stuff. Aromaprime also develop ‘scent cubes’ to be used with dementia patients or the partially-sighted, containing the scents of everything from coal fires to toffee apples to a flower shop to a library. When I think about how evocative scent can be, I can well imagine how these might bring back memories and add a whole new dimension to teaching sessions too. We might not know how a T-Rex smells, but most of us can remember an apple pie, or the scent of candyfloss.

Lesser Celandine outside the MacDonalds building

Dear Readers, I’ve always loved the sunny faces of Lesser Celandine flowers, but had never noticed them in the beds alongside the MacDonalds building in East Finchley. Have they always been there, I wonder, or are they just a bit more obvious now that there’s been some cutting back? I imagine that they’ll now spread cheerfully through the bed, and good luck to them too. These members of the buttercup family are some of the first flowers of the spring, making the most of the lack of leaf cover to flower, multiply and then disappear in a matter of months.

And you might remember that we have a new street tree not far from my house in the County Roads. It’s a Prunus serrulata var Pandora otherwise known as a flowering cherry, and even though it was pouring with rain I stopped to take a quick photo of the emerging flowers. And what a lot of them there are, considering that the tree has only been here for ten minutes. Hopefully it will continue to do well.

This is one of those ‘in tearing haste’ posts, because by the time you read this I will have been to Sadler’s Wells to see ‘Mary, Queen of Scots’ by the Scottish National Ballet. I will be going with a blog-friend, J, and will report back – it sounds very interesting, and I am currently getting into dance and theatre in a big way. Have a look at the trailer in the post above to get the general idea!

Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers from the Crossley Guide

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, I’ve been hearing great spotted woodpeckers drumming away for the past few weeks, especially in our local patch of ancient woodland, Coldfall Wood, and indeed at our local garden centre. But listen as I might, I haven’t heard the higher-pitched drumming of the lesser spotted woodpecker. You might remember that there had been a very interesting project involving passive acoustic monitoring for the bird’s calls and drumming in the south of England, which indicated that there might be lots more of the birds about than we first thought. Fingers crossed!

Juvenile green woodpecker in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery

And let’s not forget that ‘flying dragon’, the green woodpecker. It rarely drums, as it spends most of its time tapping away at anthills, but you can still hear it ‘yaffling’ away at this time of year. And very distinctive it is too! Though possibly confused with that other green bird of North London, the rose-ringed parakeet.

Rose-ringed parakeet

Green woodpecker

And so, let’s see what I had to say about woodpeckers in 2024..

Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopos major)

Dear Readers, great spotted woodpeckers come and go in my garden – one will visit for a few days or weeks, and then there will be a gap for several months or even years. But you can be sure of hearing a woodpecker drumming if you take a walk in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, or Coldfall Wood. Woodpeckers were thought for the longest time to have shock absorbers in their skulls, to stop them from getting concussion, but last year it was discovered that this was not, in fact, the case. However, as Lulah Ellender points out in her piece in Nature’s Calendar, the idea had already inspired designer Anirudha Surabhi to design a cardboard cycle helmet based on the three-layers (bone, cartilage and foam) that were supposed to protect the bird’s brain. And very exciting it looks too! Sadly it was never brought to market – the cardboard would have to be waterproof, which would involve using some non-recyclable components. The company survives as Quin, which manufactures ultra-safe motorcycle helmets.

The internal design for a Kranium (woodpecker-inspired) helmet (Photo from https://www.quin.design/en-gb)

However, just because the skull of the woodpecker isn’t what protects it from concussion, it doesn’t mean that these birds are not superbly adapted to a life that involves ‘bashing your head against something hard’. Because they eat grubs that might be buried deep inside trees, woodpeckers have extremely long tongues that actually wrap around their skulls when not in use.

Image from ‘Food of the Woodpeckers of the United States’ (Posted on https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14749524544/)

But how about that drumming/drilling activity? Whenever I try to do any drilling I almost invariably get stuck at some point, and Ellender mentions that the same thing happens to woodpeckers – in fact, it’s been estimated that they get stuck approximately 36 per cent of the time. I’d be taking that beak back to B&Q if it was me, but as the woodpecker is rather stuck with its appendage, it’s developed a number of ways of getting around the problem, such as ‘walking’ their bills out of the hole a bit at a time.

And here for your delectation is an actual film of an actual woodpecker in Coldfall Wood here in East Finchley. It was recorded at maximum magnification, hence all the movement, so if you are of a queasy disposition you might want to give it a miss.

Woodpeckers are adapted in every way for their arboreal life styles, from the protective membrane and stiff nasal hairs that keep the dust out to their stiff tail feathers to enable them to stand ‘upright’ while drumming. They are both shy and bold, loud and elusive, as anyone who has ever tried to find the location of a drumming bird will know. They are the very sound of the woods at the start of the year. And how about this poem? Philip Gross is a poet that I haven’t come across before, but I’ll certainly keep my eyes open now…

A woodpecker’s
BY PHILIP GROSS

                                 working the valley
or is it the other way round?

That bone-clinking clatter, maracas
or knucklebones or dance of  gravel

on a drumskin, the string of  the air
twanged on the hollow body of  itself …

It’s the tree that gives voice,
the fifty-foot windpipe, and the bird

is its voice box, the shuddering
membrane that troubles the space

inside, which otherwise would be
all whispers, scratch-and-scrabblings,

the low dry flute-mouth of wind
at its  just-right or just-wrong angle,

the cough-clearing of moss
or newly ripened rot falling in.

But the woodpecker picks the whole
wood up and shakes it, plays it

as his gamelan, with every sounding
pinged from every branch his instrument.

Or rather, it’s the one dead trunk,
the tree, that sings its dying, and this

is the quick of  it; red-black-white, the bird
in uniform, alert, upstanding to attention

is its attention, our attention, how the forest,
in this moment, looks up, knows itself.

Dear Readers, you might remember that I was getting a new side door, and was worried about the impact on the foxes that pop in every night. Fortunately I have a trail camera, so I was able to track what was happening. The door went in on 25th February, and all we had that evening was cats, like Cosmo the cat-poodle above.

Just cats on the 26th February, including this tabby who is currently sitting next to the pond and playing whack-a-mole with the poor frogs.

But who is this on the 27th?

Yes, the foxes are back, having found a new route into the garden. I remember a talk that I attended about urban foxes during lockdown, which explained that they have excellent three-dimensional maps of their territories, and so it appears. It took these foxes just two days to work out how to get to a food source. Very impressive. And what a relief!

Photo By Yu Miyawaki – Imported from 500px (archived version) by the Archive Team. (detail page), CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74005710

Dear Readers, I love this. Image after image, until that last line….I hadn’t come across Mark Wagenaar before, but it’s worth looking for his other poems. A very singular vision, to be sure…

Meanwhile the elephants

Mark Wagenaar

have retired now that the circus
has closed, to their watercolors
& bowling leagues, their tusk-dug
rose gardens, their record collections,
their calligraphy—
say one has
begun a letter to you, peacock feather
gripped in the beautiful gray coils
of its trunk, & she dips it in the inkwell
& begins
darling, I have my dead &
I have let them go,

as the elephants walk thirty kilometers
to find the house of their keeper
who died last night, to keep a vigil,
an honor guard of fifteen-thousand-pound
bodies, they wait all night,

as she continues, the past is always
vanishing if we are good or careful,

as the elephants nurse their young,
wrap their trunks when they greet each other,
trumpet when they hear Miles’s Kind of Blue,

what is eternity but the shadows
of everyone who has ever fallen,

the languages of the dead are never more
than a breath away, darling,

as the elephants are drawn & painted
by da Vinci, by Max Ernst,
are reincarnated as Buddha,

our mouths are incapable,
white violets cover the earth,

remember the gates of Rome, linger
near pianos, near the bones & tusks of their own,

the greatest of the shadows are passing
from the earth, there was never a city brighter
than a burn pile of tusks.

Dear Readers, if you live in the south of England you might have noticed these little chaps whizzing about when the sun is out, as it is today. This is a male hairy-footed flower bee (Anthophora plumipes), and if you watch for a while you’ll see that they are feisty little critters – this one saw off a queen bumblebee who must have been three times his size. In this species the males emerge first, from eggs that were laid last year, and they set up a territory around a promising-looking patch of flowers. This hebe bush has been a favourite stopping off point for bees ever since we arrived in East Finchley more than fifteen years ago. Long may it remain, because it’s in a south-facing garden, and so the bees are drawn to its warmth. Plus, warm conditions mean  that nectar flows more easily, and so the bees can get the energy that they require quickly.

The males have distinctive white faces, and are very ‘buzzy’ – their flight has a high-pitched whine. But they aren’t just hanging around the flowers for food: they know that the females, who emerge later, will need to feed, and this gives the males a chance to mate with them. You would think (as I did initially) that the females are a completely different species: they are jet black and look more like bumblebees.

Female hairy-footed flower bee

But why are they described as ‘hairy-footed’? Well, have a look at the wonderful photo below, of a live bee taking off…’hairy-legged’ might be a better description.

Male Hairy-footed Flower Bee (Photo By gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K – Male Hairy-footed Bee. Anthophora plumipes, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50578878)

When people talk about bees, they tend to think of honeybees, or, at a pinch, bumblebees. But there are hundreds of other species of bee in the UK, some of them hyper-local, and with a very short flight season. I always think of the hairy-footed flower bees as the first to emerge, at least in these parts, and the ivy bees to be the last, but this year I shall be keeping an eye open for all the species in the middle.

Maybe the most endearing feature of the hairy-footed flower bee is its habit of flying around with its tongue out, as if hoping to just run into an obliging flower without making any effort at all. Keep an eye out for this zippy sign of spring.