My First Attempt….

Dear Readers, I have finally caved in and bought myself a trailcam – I have always been fascinated at the thought of what goes on in the garden after I’m asleep, and this feels like a great way to find out. However, clearly on 20th August the angle on the camera wasn’t right, as all I captured was the big human animal above on his way to the shed.

Last night, though, was much better.

I always throw out a handful of dry dog food for any passing foxes, and this one must have been waiting, because it’s literally a few minutes after I shut the back door. I love the way that foxy is scouring the patio to find every last bit. I was always a bit concerned that it was being gobbled up by one of the neighbourhood cats, but it seems not.

There’s an opportunistic moggie at 10.37 pm…

And then we have another visitor at 3.43 a.m. At least, I think it’s a different fox? What do you think? I think this second fox is a bit chunkier, with a bushier tail.

Then it seems to be all quiet until somebody’s cat comes to visit at 5.20 (and what a splendidly fluffy cat it is!)

And here’s one of our regular cat visitors, who always says hello if I’m sitting on the magic bench…

And here’s fluffy cat again….

And finally this energetic little hooligan…

So, I am very impressed with my new toy. What I am secretly hoping for (though not secretly anymore, clearly) is that at some point it will confirm that we have a hedgehog – I think I’ve seen the poo, but not regularly. So fingers crossed!

Jaffa on the right, McVitie on the left….

Dear Readers, our foster kittens Jaffa and McVitie have been with us for a few days now, and it’s fair to say that they’ve come out of their shell a fair bit. They are getting on for six months old, and so are in that gangly adolescent phase. Plus, kittens always wear an expression that reminds me of a dowager duchess seeing somebody naked in the garden.

At first I thought that Jaffa was the boldest one, but the other kit is now definitely building in confidence. They both rush to the door when they hear me coming – at the moment they’re confined to one room, but we’ll be gradually letting them have the run of the rest of the house from the weekend on, and then the fun will really start.

As a cat fosterer, you find yourself becoming obsessed with poo (those of you eating your breakfast might want to skip past this part) – one of the kits has an upset stomach, but the other one is fine. They’re both on ‘sensitive’ food, which is very expensive, so as soon as they sort their digestion out, we’ll be trying to wean them onto ‘normal’ food. Being a cat owner can be brutally expensive, what with vet fees and special food, and I see an increasing number of people deciding that they can’t afford to keep an animal. There are investigations into the corporate buy-up of many local vets practices, which ‘seems’ to have coincided with a doubling in the costs of some treatments. All the vets I know are caring people who want to do their best for the animals, but their corporate ‘masters’ are very keen on profit. Not an ideal situation, for sure.

Anyway, these two kittens are absolutely adorable. They get on well together, they’re eating well, they purr when you pick them up, and they’ll make somebody the most perfect pets. They’ve had me in stitches with their antics already :-).

‘The Crows’ by Anselm Kiefer

Well, Readers, it might not be the end of summer quite yet, but it’s difficult to ignore the ‘back-to-school’ signs in the shops, the lengthening days, the goldening of the leaves. I absolutely love this poem/poems….see what you think. Read slowly, and let the pictures form in your head…

Three Songs at the End of Summer

By Jane Kenyon

A second crop of hay lies cut
and turned. Five gleaming crows
search and peck between the rows.
They make a low, companionable squawk,
and like midwives and undertakers
possess a weird authority.

Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.

Across the lake the campers have learned
to water ski. They have, or they haven’t.
Sounds of the instructor’s megaphone
suffuse the hazy air. “Relax! Relax!”

Cloud shadows rush over drying hay,
fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine.
The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod
brighten the margins of the woods.

Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts;
water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.

*

The cicada’s dry monotony breaks
over me. The days are bright
and free, bright and free.

Then why did I cry today
for an hour, with my whole
body, the way babies cry?

*

A white, indifferent morning sky,
and a crow, hectoring from its nest
high in the hemlock, a nest as big
as a laundry basket …
In my childhood
I stood under a dripping oak,
while autumnal fog eddied around my feet,
waiting for the school bus
with a dread that took my breath away.

The damp dirt road gave off
this same complex organic scent.

I had the new books—words, numbers,
and operations with numbers I did not
comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled
by use, in a blue canvas satchel
with red leather straps.

Spruce, inadequate, and alien
I stood at the side of the road.
It was the only life I had.

Golden Rain Tree ( Koelreuteria paniculata) at Chelsea Physic Garden

Dear Readers, one of the joys of this blog has been the amazing people that I’ve met, not just in East Finchley, but all over the world. On Monday I went on an expedition to Chelsea Physic Garden with my friend JD – I haven’t been there for probably thirty years. What a wonderful place it is! And, in full glory at the moment, is the Golden Rain tree.

What you can’t see until you get close up is that the ‘fruits’ of the tree are tiny bladders or lanterns, making this a very unusual tree. It is becoming increasingly popular as a street tree, as not only does it have these ‘pods’, but it has yellow flowers in spring, impressive early foliage, and the pods darken to shades of deep orange in the autumn. Plus, it’s a relatively small tree, so could fit in any large-ish garden (though I suspect that the pollinators would prefer it if you planted a crab apple or cherry. Or even a hawthorn)

You might think, from looking at the tree, that it’s a member of the bean family, but no! It belongs to the ‘soap-berry’ family, the Sapindaceae, which includes trees such as the horse chestnut, the maples, and the lychee tree. Why soap-berry, though? One thought is that it relates to the milky sap of some of the plants in this family, but I remain a little sceptical.

Golden Rain tree flowers (Photo By Didier Descouens – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119770021)

The tree comes originally from China, Mongolia and South Korea, which makes one of its other names, ‘Pride of India’, a little confusing. Still, it is a tree that’s travelled widely – it arrived in Japan as long ago as 1200, and can be found all over Europe and North America. In his book ‘London’s Street Trees’, Paul Wood describes how the tree can tolerate pollution, exposure, hard surfaces and most things that a city can throw at it – anything, in fact, except shade.

Sitting under a Golden Rain Tree is supposed to make you fall in love with whoever you’re sitting with, allegedly – a 1957 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and DeForest Kelley (yes, that DeForest Kelley – ‘I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer, Jim’) was a tale of a Professor in Civil War Indiana falling in lurve inconveniently, mediated by the tree.

In Japan, the tree is associated with scholars, and is often grown close to their tombs. As the tree was mainly used medicinally to treat eye complaints, you can see how somebody studying texts for hours at a time, often in failing light, would have appreciated the plant, and how the connection with those who study might have grown.

Photo by Mauro Halpern (https://www.flickr.com/photos/mauroguanandi/3376028300)

Is this tree edible? Well, apparently the young shoots can be boiled and eaten like spinach, but the seeds are acidic, and the plant contains cyanide, so you might want to give it a miss. On the other hand, the flowers produce a yellow dye, and the mature leaves produce a black dye, so that might be a fun thing to try if you’ve some cloth or wool that you’re fed up with.

And here’s a poem, by Sylvia Plath no less. I found it sensual, but confusing. And my botanist self frequently had to pause and scratch her head. See what you think.

The Beekeeper’s Daughter by Sylvia Plath

A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
You move among the many-breasted hives,

My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.

Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest —

A fruit that’s death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.

In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eyes to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar roses

The queen bee marries the winter of your year.

Dear Readers, this post could also be called ‘no good deed goes unpunished’. On Saturday, I noticed that my neighbour’s green wheelie bin was in the middle of the pavement, and I knew that they would be away until mid-week, so I decided to put it away in their front garden. As I dragged it back, I brushed against my buddleia. Suddenly there was not only a sharp pain on the back of my neck, but a very distinct sound of angry buzzing coming from inside my shirt.

Well, this was not a happy situation, but fortunately my shirt was of the oversized variety (much more comfortable in this hot weather) and so, by a process of wriggling and dangling upside down I managed to liberate the angry insect before further harm was done, and lo and behold, a very cross bumblebee fell onto the pavement.

Now, I have only once been stung before, and that was when I accidentally stepped on a bee while wafting barefoot across a lawn as a teenager. And that was excruciatingly painful, whereas this was merely disconcerting. Which got me to thinking about the way that bumblebees sting.

I had always believed that bumblebee stingers were barbed, so if they stung someone  they would die. But actually, it’s honeybees which have a barbed sting – bumblebees can sting multiple times if necessary, so I’m very glad that ‘my’ bee decided to only sting once, probably out of the shock of suddenly being in an enclosed space. I also had such a mild reaction that it now seems clear that I didn’t inherit my mother’s extreme allergy to insect venom – a wasp sting on her neck caused very alarming swelling and pain, and Mum was told that another sting might be enough to kill her. However, I do note that it’s been discovered that different species of bees and wasps can have very different venom, so maybe I shouldn’t be too complacent.

Below is a photo of the bee sting 24 hours after it happened – and before any of you lovely people ask,  I have had the mole checked out and it’s fine.

Venom has evolved lots of times in different members of the animal kingdom, but is largely used for two reasons: for predation (i.e, a snake subduing its prey) or defence (i.e. a bumblebee stinging me on the neck). Defensive venom is usually a much simpler chemical, which causes immediate pain, as opposed to predatory venom which may act instead as a neurotoxin, paralysing an animal so that it can be eaten. Furthermore, one very interesting study has found that venom can even change within a single species, according to how likely the animal is to be predated, and how harsh the environment is. Venom is usually ‘expensive’ for the animal to produce, and so if the animal is less likely to be attacked, we would expect the composition of the venom to change to a ‘cheaper’ variety. This was observed in a study of bumblebees in the Swiss Alps, where the composition of the venom changed as the altitude increased – there are less predators at high altitude, and also life is harder, so the bumblebee uses its metabolic resources for other things, such as keeping warm and being able to fly. It still has venom, but less of it, and the chemical make up of the venom is different.

You can read this fascinating study here.

So, all in all being stung on the neck was an interesting experience, and one that’s raised all sorts of questions for me about the complexity of the natural world, and how varied things are. What a teacher a bee sting can be!

Per Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75993893

Dear Readers, in a couple of months I will be sneaking off for a very special holiday to somewhere that I’ve always dreamed of visiting. I’ll be gone for a couple of weeks, and it’s very doubtful that I’ll have either the time or energy (or indeed wi-fi) to post every day to the blog while I’m gone.

So, I had an idea.

I know that many of you have blogs of one kind or another, so I’m inviting anyone who would like to to submit something to be posted as a guest blog on Bug Woman. You won’t need to write anything new (unless you’d like to), but it would be a way of engaging with a different audience from your usual one, and it might be fun! I would do all the practical stuff around transferring your work and of course you’d receive full credit.

I would only ask that your piece has some connection, however vague, with the natural world.

If you don’t have a blog but would like to submit some writing/photos, that would be good too!

Leave me a note in the comments, and I’ll get in touch with you to discuss.

Dear Readers, one of the things about sitting on the bench in the garden is that I start to notice things, and yesterday it was the way that the collared doves are chasing one another around. You might think that breeding season is over, and so it is for most birds, but doves and pigeons can breed all year round, provided they have enough food themselves to make ‘crop milk’ for their nestlings.  I always thought that this protein and fat-rich secretion was limited to just the pigeon family, but apparently both flamingoes and male emperor penguins can also produce it. At any rate, love was definitely in the air yesterday – one male collared dove chased what I assume was a female from roof to roof, and then another male briefly joined in. The female flew away on every occasion – this might be an unconscious test of the male’s persistence and flying ability, it may be that the female isn’t ready to breed, or it may be a combination of both.

For those who haven’t heard it, the male collared dove’s ‘breeding call’ always reminds me of a tin trumpet.

The male was also ‘dancing’ around the female – it was difficult to see exactly what he was doing due to the angle of the roof, but it definitely involved bobbing up and down and inflating the throat, while making a very assertive three-note call. In the clip below, you can hear a duet, which happens between a bonded male and female, and also the sound of wingbeats – there’s a distinct whistling sound when collared doves fly.

Male collared doves also perform a display flight – I watched this male flying up, nearly vertically, before ‘gliding’ back down. What a shame the female wasn’t impressed!

Also, I’m just noticing the vertical habitat of mosses and lichens above the gutter on our flat roof. I’m very impressed.

In other bench-related news, I looked up at the leaves on our whitebeam, which are coming back after our November pollarding, and they look just like lace….

I have no idea who is eating them, but I shall send a photo off to the Royal Horticultural Society and see if anyone has any idea (chip in if you have any thoughts!) The leaves will be falling soon-ish (though the whitebeam is the last tree to shed its foliage) so I’m not worried for this year, and I’m sure the stress of the pollarding/drought/cold spring/hot summer won’t have helped, so fingers crossed that the tree is happier next year.

Dear Readers, you might remember that, a few years ago, I was a cat fosterer for first Cats’ Protection, and then the RSPCA – I did a post about it here. And then one of my fostered cats, Willow, turned into a permanent cat, and so that was that. She died last year, and I was heartbroken, but this year I’ve finally decided to start fostering again, for the RSPCA, and yesterday I heard that my first two foster cats will be arriving on Tuesday.

Above is a photo of what I think of as the Biscuit Kittens, as we are getting two boys, and their names are McVitie and Jaffa. I don’t know which out of the four they are, but will be sharing photos further down the line. The photo was taken in April, and the cats have been in the animal hospital at Finsbury Park ever since – between them they’ve had cat flu, diarrhoea, and mouth lesions (could be something called calici virus, but I’m not sure). Anyhow, they’ve had a rough start, poor little things, so some TLC and a home environment will probably be just the ticket.

I am imagining quiet chaos for the next few weeks – kittens are usually full of energy (though they also conk out as if a switch has been turned off). They are curious with no sense of danger at all, and a knack for getting into places where you don’t want them to get. All in all, we are about to be livened up and stressed.

I can’t wait. I’ll keep you all posted.

Dear Readers, I don’t know why it’s taken me 15 years, but I’ve finally gotten myself a bench for the garden, so I can sit and watch the pond and the rest of the garden, and see what’s going on. I think the catalyst was getting a teeny tiny bit of wildflower turf to make a soft edge for part of the pond – it makes it feel more accessible somehow. I’m half tempted to sit on it and pop my feet in the water for the tadpoles to bite.

We have been lovingly tending the turf – it needs regular watering so that it can root itself properly, but to my untutored eye it seems to be doing very well.

In fact everything is in full growth at the moment – it’s funny how a garden goes from a bit bare to under control to aaargh in the space of what feels like five minutes…

But the garden is abuzz with honeybees and lots of common carder bumblebees – these are about the last of the bumblebees to fly, and are little ginger critters (though at this time of year a lot of them may look a lot paler and more worn). Interestingly, the honeybees are on the hemp agrimony, while the bumblebees prefer the great willow herb.

Blurred common carder bumblebee on great willowherb! You’re welcome!

I used the Merlin app (highly recommended) to see what birds were about – in the space of five minutes I got blue, great and coal tits, magpies, woodpigeons, collared doves and, joy of joys, a goldcrest – I could hear it, but I didn’t see it this time. How lovely to know that they’re about, though!

And a little flock of starlings were watching from next door’s TV aerial – they always seem very restless to me at this time of year.

And, when I left the bench to take some bee photographs, they took advantage and came down to feed – it’s almost as if they either didn’t know I was there, or knew that I meant them no harm. It’s interesting to see the way that this year’s youngsters are at different stages of adult plumage….

And so I have made a promise to myself, to sit on the bench for ten minutes every day, no matter how tired or busy or stressed I am (in fact, especially on those days). There’s always something going on, and it is so calming to just watch plants and insects and birds do their thing.

I know lots of poems that attempt to bring consolation after someone has died, but few capture the rage. This one works for me! See what you think.

Dirge Without Music

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.