Dear Readers, as the pond is still frozen it’s a little early to be waiting for the frogs to put in an appearance, but hopefully as the weather warms I might soon see their little faces looking up hopefully from under the duckweed (which is currently under control, but I think that every year). And in the meantime, here is some amphibian-related poetry.

The Frog

By Hilaire Belloc

Be kind and tender to the Frog,
And do not call him names,
As ‘Slimy skin,’ or ‘Polly-wog,’
Or likewise ‘Ugly James,’
Or ‘Gape-a-grin,’ or ‘Toad-gone-wrong,’
Or ‘Billy Bandy-knees’:
The Frog is justly sensitive
To epithets like these.
No animal will more repay
A treatment kind and fair;
At least so lonely people say
Who keep a frog (and, by the way,
They are extremely rare).

And here’s Norman MacCaig, a man who loves frogs almost as much as I do. This is so well-observed.

Norman MacCaig – Frogs

Frogs sit more solid

than anything sits. In mid-leap they are

parachutists falling

in a free fall. They die on roads

with arms across their chests and

heads high.

I love frogs that sit

like Buddha, that fall without

parachutes, that die

like Italian tenors.

Above all, I love them because,

pursued in water, they never

panic so much that they fail

to make stylish triangles

with their ballet dancer’s
legs.

And finally, here’s a poem by Goethe, no less, who clearly didn’t appreciate the vocal qualities of the frog…

The Frogs
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A pool was once congeal’d with frost;
The frogs, in its deep waters lost,

No longer dared to croak or spring;
But promised, being half asleep,
If suffer’d to the air to creep,

As very nightingales to sing.

A thaw dissolved the ice so strong,
They proudly steer’d themselves along,
When landed, squatted on the shore,
And croak’d as loudly as before.

Dear Readers, when I was growing up my Mum would always pop a soluble aspirin into the water if she received some cut flowers – this was a very rare occurrence, and so she wanted to make them last as long as possible. But is there actually any evidence that it helps? In New Scientist last week, James Wong went through the science, and very interesting it was too.

As you probably know, aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) is derived from a naturally occurring plant compound, salicylic acid – willows, or Salix, are named for this chemical. In humans it acts as a painkiller, but in plants it acts as a signal that some kind of damage is imminent, through drought, pests or some other threat – Wong describes salicylic acid as a kind of ‘on/off switch’ for the immune system.

Studies have shown that if plants are misted with aspirin, their own defences ‘ramp up’, and this treatment also seems to improve the quality of harvests: one experiment showed an increase in the Vitamin C in tomatoes, while another study showed spraying cherries made them larger, with a higher antioxidant content.

However, the one thing studies haven’t shown is that putting aspirin in to plant water makes the flowers last longer. When compared with pure tap water, there was no difference in the longevity of chrysanthemums or roses. What does seem to make a difference, empirically at least, is a) not having your flowers in a room that’s very warm, b) not keeping your flowers in the kitchen (probably because of proximity to fruit like bananas, which exude ethanol as they ripen – this encourages other fruit and flowers to hasten through their life cycle too), and c) change the water every few days. Let me know if you have any ‘hacks’!

Tiny cucumber spider on cut lilac!

Dear Readers, many wonderful things came about as a result of my broken leg last year, strange as it might sound. I had been lucky enough to have never broken a bone, never spent a night in hospital, never had a general anaesthetic or an operation. I had never been immobilised for so long, or so completely. And I feel as if the experience changed me in a lot of ways, mostly for the better. So, I thought about how I could symbolise the event so that I wouldn’t forget the lessons that I’d learned, and I suddenly remembered that my Facebook friend Joanna Smith, someone that I’d never met, was a jewellery designer.

Joanna and I had chatted a bit online because she followed the blog here, and when she heard about my leg she was a great support, being the proud owner of a titanium implant herself. And as I started to heal, I asked her if she’d be up for collaborating with me to design and create something to commemorate what had happened.

You might remember that I had a spiral fracture, and the image in my head was always one of the bone unpeeling like an orange. And to fix it, I had a piece of titanium implanted through the bone. The spiral being held steady around a metal rod held a lot of resonance for me, for reasons that I’ll try to unpack shortly, but what I especially loved was the design that Joanna came up with – a real rod of heat-treated titanium in the middle so that it glows a discreet blue in certain lights, surrounded by the swirl of silver. The whole pendant has the heft of a reliquary. I haven’t taken it off since I received it a week ago.

So what does it all mean? On the surface, it’s about physical healing, about how a traumatic wound can be brought back under control by a surgical intervention. But it also symbolises how interconnected we are – when I think about all the people who helped me get better, from the medical teams to my friends and relatives who stepped up time and time again, to my good friends here on the blog who offered advice and counsel and taxi rides (thank you Mark!) and support. However independent we like to think we are, we are truly need other people, and I was moved by people’s kindness and generosity over and over again.  When we feel as if we’re spiralling out of control, it’s that solid core of our friends who hold us together.

And the final thing is that the titanium symbolises resilience, the ability to endure and to harness what has happened, in all its swirling complexity, and to make something solid out of it. To allow pain to open our hearts to all the other people in pain, to increase our understanding. I was fortunate because my pain gradually faded, but I know that there are many for whom that’s not the case. The pendant both reminds me that I can come through, and that there are those who are still in the maelstrom, deserving of patience and comfort and support.

And so that’s quite a lot for a little pendant to symbolise, but it does its job quietly and sincerely.

If you’d like to see Joanna’s work, or if there’s something you’d like to commission, you can find her here. Highly recommended, as I’m sure you can tell!

Dear Readers, it’s easy for me to forget that although East Finchley is a relatively modest area by London standards, it’s just around the corner from some truly spectacular houses, including this one, built in 1924 and known as ‘Tudor House’. It has some truly lovely Arts and Crafts details, and its location, just around the corner from Highgate Wood on Lanchester Road, means that it seems to have attracted the attention of some high-profile folk.

As I stood on the pavement taking a few photos (and being glared at by at least one passerby), I had no idea that this was formerly the home of legendary popstar Liam Gallagher and his missus until last year, when it appears to have been sold again. When it was sold to Mr Gallagher in  2019 it looked like a truly stunning house that had been renovated with great love and care by the previous owner – have a look at the brocIhure that was created at the time here.

I have no idea what’s going on at the moment – the front garden seems to be undergoing a drastic renovation, but who knows what’s going on inside? I just hope it’s as sympathetic as the previous work. The property is on Haringey’s ‘Local Heritage’ list but doesn’t appear to be listed, so won’t have any particular protections. However, the good burghers of Highgate are a ferocious lot, very knowledgeable and keen to preserve their environment, so fingers crossed they’re keeping an eye on it.

Oh, and we also spotted this lovely Wolsey Fifteen/Fifty, which apparently dates to between 1956 and 1958. What a beauty, and so obviously well loved and cared for. I imagine a few heads turn when this one is out for a spin! Does it bring back any memories for anyone?

Red-backed Shrike (Crossley Guide)

Dear Readers, the Red-Backed Shrike (Lanius collurio) was once a common visitor to the south of England, and bred here in some numbers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Alas, it is now rare enough to cause a surge in bird watchers when it visits, and with only four breeding pairs in the whole of the United Kingdom over the past few years, it is functionally extinct as a breeding bird.

What happened? Well, you may know shrikes as ‘butcher birds’  – they are formidable predators of more or less any animal smaller than themselves, and the corpses of their victims are impaled on thorns to be eaten later. It’s worth remembering that this is not a large bird – it’s somewhere between the size of a sparrow and a starling. However, what it lacks in size in makes up in attitude.

Red-backed shrike (Photo by Antonios Tsaknakis, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

Thomas Bewick, the engraver of birds, suggested that ‘their courage, their appetite for blood and their hooked bill entitle them to be ranked with the boldest and more sanguinary of the rapacious tribe’. Even their Latin name, Lanius, means ‘I tear or rend in pieces’. At the RSPB reserve at Minsmere, Red-backed Shrikes used to fly into Sand Martin nests, take the chicks and impale them on barbed wire, much to the disgust of visitors (Birds Britannica, by Mark Cocker and Dominic Couzens). However, the shrikes favourite food is  large insects – crickets and grasshoppers, fat caterpillars, huge beetles are all taken with great enthusiasm. Alas, we all know what’s been happening to insects of all kinds, let alone the big hunky ones.

Another important factor in earlier years (and possibly even now) was egg-collecting – Red-backed Shrikes have particularly beautiful eggs in a huge variety of colours and patterns, so multiple birds were likely to have their eggs stolen. One notorious collector (again, from Birds Britannica) took almost 900 eggs of this species during a 50 year ‘career’.

However, this is a bird that climate change could actually benefit. The Red-Backed Shrike is widespread in the warmer parts of Europe, and seems to enjoy long, hot summers, so with a bit of habitat recreation maybe these birds could be enticed to recolonise. They are spectacular creatures, and maybe they can be enticed back. A few pairs still choose to breed here every year, so maybe it’s not impossible. And overall, Red-backed Shrikes are not endangered, either in Europe or globally, so at least there’s that.

I’m sure you’d love to hear what a Red-backed Shrike sounds like (just in case one turns up in the garden and starts impaling things), so here you go…it’s surprisingly twittery!

And look, a poem! Oh my goodness. I am struck dumb, for once. See what you think.

Shrike Tree by Lucia Perillo

Most days back then I would walk by the shrike tree,
a dead hawthorn at the base of a hill.
The shrike had pinned smaller birds on the tree’s black thorns
and the sun had stripped them of their feathers.

Some of the dead ones hung at eye level
while some burned holes in the sky overhead.
At least it is honest,
the body apparent
and not rotting in the dirt.

And I, having never seen the shrike at work,
can only imagine how the breasts were driven into the branches.
When I saw him he’d be watching from a different tree
with his mask like Zorro
and the gray cape of his wings.

At first glance he could have been a mockingbird or a jay
if you didn’t take note of how his beak was hooked.
If you didn’t know the ruthlessness of what he did–
ah, but that is a human judgment.

They are mute, of course, a silence at the center of a bigger silence,
these rawhide ornaments, their bald skulls showing.
And notice how I’ve slipped into the present tense
as if they were still with me.

Of course they are still with me.

* * *

They hang there, desiccating
by the trail where I walked, back when I could walk,
before life pinned me on its thorn.
It is ferocious, life, but it must eat,
then leaves us with the artifact.

Which is: these black silhouettes in the midday sun,
strict and jagged, like an Asian script.
A tragedy that is not without its glamour.
Not without the runes of the wizened meat.

Because imagine the luck!–to be plucked from the air,
to be drenched and dried in the sun’s bright voltage–
well, hard luck is luck, nonetheless.
With a chunk of sky in each eye socket.
And the pierced heart strung up like a pearl.

Eurasian lynx in Bavaria (Photo By Aconcagua (talk) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6358217)

Dear Readers, on 11th January this year I was stunned to read that four lynx had been found wandering around in  -14 degree temperatures in the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland. Holy moly! These animals have been extinct in the UK for about a thousand years, but someone seems to have decided that the right thing to do is to release them and to let them fend for themselves.

The first thought was that the animals were an attempt at an illegal rewilding. Normally, such attempts take years of collaboration with local communities and education, not to mention finding suitable animals and ensuring that they are prepared for living wild. Releasing four lynx all at once would put immediate pressure on the food supply for the animals in the immediate area, not to mention that the small birds, hares and other creatures that the lynx eat are very hard to find in winter. Plus, these lynx appeared to be habituated to humans, obviously a very bad thing when what you want for successful rewilding is an animal that’s wary of us.

All of the lynx were easily recaptured (though I imagine they gave the locals a bit of a shock when they were first spotted), but one of them sadly died shortly after recapture. The cats are now in quarantine, and will probably live out the rest of their lives in a zoo or big cat sanctuary.

And when all of that had calmed down, we had this.

Feral Pigs in the Cairngorms (Photo by Greg Macrae)

A group of nine feral pigs (usually wild boar/domesticated pig hybrids) were spotted not far from where the lynx had been released. This time they were rounded up and the whole lot were culled, poor things.

So, I am left wondering if these releases were a serious attempt at rewilding (if so they were extremely ham-fisted), or if someone, somewhere, has a mini-zoo that they can no longer look after, and are liberating their animals a few at a time. But what’s next? Brown bears? Wolves? Moose?

Personally I would love to see some of the wildlife that previously roamed these islands back and living wild, but I’d fear for any releases, especially of apex predators. The release of white-tailed sea eagles has generally been a huge success, but they are still sometimes found dead in ‘suspicious circumstances’, along with golden eagles, hen harriers and virtually any other raptor that you care to name. I suspect that wolves and lynx (the animals most often mentioned in these discussions) would just end up wearing a metaphorical target on their chests. And in a way, I don’t think that we either deserve them, or are grown up enough to live with them peacefully. As a species, we seem to be less and less willing or able to live with the plants and animals that surround us, or  to recognise their right to exist if they inconvenience us in the slightest. Maybe the few wolves and lynx that are left in the world should be allowed to stay in the few remaining wild places where they can go about their lives without meeting up with us, because it seems to me that it never ends well for the animals.

Not to be completely negative, though, I am delighted that most of the beaver releases in the UK seem to be going very well, in spite of occasional local opposition. There are even beavers in Enfield, for the first time since the Middle Ages. And otters have made a remarkable comeback (I mentioned recently that there are even some in Walthamstow Wetlands). Where there are small populations of a native animal, habitat management can have huge benefits, and there are sterling efforts underway for small mammals such as the water vole and the dormouse. It’s worth remembering that most of the animals, birds and plants that we used to have are still here, but just in much smaller numbers. If we can make a place that suits them (as has happened at Knepp, where Turtle Dove numbers are increasing every year) we can often help to revive populations. We just have to be sensible about it.

Turtle Dove at Knepp

Photo by Donovan Govan., CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Readers, it’s that time of year – restaurants double their number of tables and their prices, florists sell out, chocolate manufacturers make everything heart-shaped and Bug Woman will be staying home with her beloved and watching something non-demanding on the television. Poets, of course, have their own takes on the big day. Here are some of my favourites. Do feel free to let us know your own in the comments!

I love the unconventionality of the Valentine as onion, and the air of uncertainty around this relationship…

Valentine

By Carol Ann Duffy

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

Photo from the Smithsonian Zoo in Washington DC https://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalzoo/15710848762

And if you thought that was unconventional, how about this one? I love Naomi Shihab Nye. Proof that poems (and Valentines) can be made out of anything.

Valentine for Ernest Mann

Naomi Shihab Nye
1952 –

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.

And this one, much more romantic and rather good on the strange complexity of love…

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII (I don’t love you as if you were a rose)

Pablo Neruda
1904 –
1973

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way
to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

And finally, because I love W.B Yeats, here’s one that’s definitely about love, though not specifically a Valentine. It feels more and more real to me as I get older.

When You Are Old
William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

I’m looking forward to your choices! Funny, sad, romantic or pragmatic, it’s all good!

Giant redwood snapped in half by Storm Eowyn in Benmore Botanic Garden, Argyll, Scotland (Photo by Max East at https://www.flickr.com/photos/maxeast/7024372169

Dear Readers, whilst down here in London Storm Eowyn rattled a few patio chairs and blew a bird feeder off the lilac, the damage in Scotland has been extreme. Look at the poor Giant Redwood (above)! This 50 metre specimen was planted in 1863, and here we are. Winds reached 135 mph in Scotland, and broke an 80 year-old wind speed record in Ireland. But as the world warms, it’s likely that there will be more ‘extreme weather events’. Ever feel like the proverbial frog in a saucepan? I wonder when we’ll decide to ‘jump out’ and do something about turning the gas off.

Anyway.

The Royal Botanic Society in Edinburgh has four sites in Scotland. At the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, a 29 metre Deodar Cedar, the tallest tree in the collection, was blown over. It was planted in 1859 and had survived all the storms up until now. This beautiful tree is the national plant of Pakistan, and is considered sacred in the Hindu religion. In addition, over 27 other trees have been badly damaged, and the greenhouses have lost more than 100 panes of glass.

Deodar Cedar (Cedrus deodara) Photo By Paul Evans from London, United Kingdom – DSC00483.JPG, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9471983

Benmore seems to have suffered the worst damage with 200-300 trees lost, and several greenhouses and polytunnels, which were protecting some of the endangered plant collection, crushed and damaged beyond repair.

At Dawyck Botanical Garden in Peebles, 50-60 trees were lost, and it’s estimated that it will take a full year to make the garden fully accessible again.

At Logan Botanical Garden in Stranraer, opening of the site will be delayed due to storm damage.

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew are sending four arborists to Scotland to help assess the damage and help with the clear up, but you can see the scale of the problem here.

You can argue that botanical gardens are largely ‘zoos for trees’ – they have collections of plants that would never be found together in the wild, and that is true. However, they also do remarkable conservation work, and help to introduce people to plants that they might never get a chance to see ‘in the wild’. I am going to make a little donation to the clean up effort for the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens, and if you feel similarly moved, there’s a link below…

https://www.rbge.org.uk/support-us/donate/

Well, Readers, by the time you read this my latest assignment will be with my tutor, so I can reveal that woodpigeons and magpies prefer orange doughballs to yellow ones. So what, I hear you say. Well, the birds had previously voted on whether they preferred red dough balls to yellow ones, and the result there was a resounding ‘give me the red ones’. We know that birds have colour vision, and so there are really two questions here. Firstly, why do they prefer orange/red over yellow, and secondly, what impact would this have if the dough balls were actually prey species, either berries or insects?

What complicated the results a little this time was a) the weather, and b) that the squirrels discovered that they also like doughballs.

Firstly, who knew that birds hated windy weather so much? They seemed unfazed by torrential rain (though this did cause problems by making the doughballs disintegrate). In the end, I was only able to run 18 trials instead of my planned 20, but the results were pretty resounding anyway.

And secondly, what took the squirrels so  long to discover that they liked dough balls? They will eat meat if it’s on offer, so it’s  not really a surprise, and as they have dichromatic vision (i.e. they’re practically colour-blind), if they’d eaten too many this could have caused a problem. Fortunately, they would pick up one doughball in their tiny paws and nibble at it, rather than hoovering the lot up like the birds. I think we can discount their contribution.

So, back to the main questions. Why do birds prefer orange and red over yellow? The obvious answer (to me anyway) was that in plants, this colouration is usually an indication of ripeness. I’m not sure whether birds can taste sweetness, but at any rate the berries are at their maximum nutritional value when they’re full of  energy-giving sugar. So it came as no surprise that woodpigeons would go for the red or orange berries before the yellow ones. I was a little more surprised that the magpies did so, as they are much more omnivorous, but they too showed a clear preference.

The issue is complicated by research that was done in Mediterranean forests. There, a large number of unpalatable insects are coloured red, and when fake prey (yet more doughballs) was put out, with some coloured red and some coloured grey or green, it was found that the adult birds overwhelmingly chose the grey or green prey, while the juveniles chose red, green and grey equally. The adults appeared to have learned, by encounters with red live prey, that it didn’t taste good, and so avoided the red fake prey, while the juveniles were yet to learn. In the UK, some red insects, such as ladybirds, are unpalatable, but clearly the magpies either didn’t eat them, or decided to give it a go anyway. Or, of course, they could have looked at the doughballs and thought ‘that’s not an insect’. I’d put nothing past them.

Secondly, what would happen if the doughballs were real live prey, rather than something that I’d knocked up in my kitchen. It depends on whether the prey are berries or insects.

If the prey were to be berries, it would be good news for the orange or red ones, provided that the seeds inside the berries could survive the trip through the birds digestive tract. The seeds would be carried away from the parent plant and some, at least, would fall on fertile ground, maybe without the risk of competition or overshadowing. You might expect the red and orange plants to become more common, while the yellow ones languished because their seeds feel at the feet of their parent plant. Of course, even berries of  an unpopular colour will be eaten when birds are desperate, so this is all a numbers game, and the yellow berries may even have other survival advantages.

If the prey were insects, however, it’s a different story. At the rates of preference for my orange and red prey, these insects would become scarcer and scarcer, as they were gobbled up, while their yellow relatives would go about their business unmolested. The red and orange insects might even be driven to extinction, though what often happens is that the energy budget of the birds will make them switch when the red and orange insects become rarer and harder to find – if it costs more energy to find something than the nutritional value that it contains, it makes sense to switch to something easier to find, i.e. the yellow insects.

It’s important to realise that this is an important mechanism for evolution – after all, we have the example of the good old peppered moth as evidence. It was shown that, before the Clean Air acts, the dark morph of this moth was better camouflaged than the mottled one against the tree trunks where it rested, and so the mottled one became rare in the population, because it was preferentially picked off by birds. When the air became cleaner, and lichens began to recolonise the tree trunks, it was the mottled morph that was better camouflaged, and so the black morph became much rarer as it was suddenly more apparent to predators.

And so, a little back garden experiment with doughballs opens up a whole world of questions. Would the birds prefer red to orange berries? How quickly do they pick out the red/orange berries, and could this show strength of preference? If I spent hours making the red doughballs look like teeny tiny ladybirds would the magpies still eat them (I imagine that they’d take one look at my efforts and laugh their feathered heads off).