The Exterior of the Linnean Society

Dear Readers, last week my friend L, an accomplished naturalist and all-round nature nerd like myself, took me to see an exhibition at the Linnean Society. I’d been to the Royal Academy many times, but there are lots of other organisations in Burlington House too, all with splendid names – The Society of Antiquaries, The Royal Astronomical Society and The Geological Society to name but three. But the Linnean Society, founded in 1788 and with members including Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace felt like a very special place – it was here that Darwin gave his first exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection back in 1858. Current members include David Attenborough, and indeed I saw him wandering past a few years ago.

L and I were here to see the current exhibition, which is in the splendid library.

The Main Library at the Linnean….

The current exhibition is on depictions of nature on paper – the Linnean has a collection of books and specimens dating back to its inception, and you can go on a behind-the-scenes tour which includes the collections of Linnaeus himself. Included in the exhibition were some of the original prints taken from Durer’s image of a rhino. It always amuses me that the little unicorn horn on the shoulders of the rhino carried on being depicted in images for centuries after the original illustration was made, even though a real rhino has no such appendage.

1658 – Illustration of Rhino by Topsell

We know that people used to press flowers, but at various points there were also pressed fish, and indeed a pressed bat, although the body of the animal was probably drawn on later.

Still life of Bat by Alois Auer (1813 to 1869)

There are also some lovely cyanotypes – this was a camera-less way of capturing images on light-sensitive paper. Anna Atkins is considered to be the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images, and some consider her to be the first woman to create a photograph. I love these images – somehow the lack of colour (except that beautiful blue) means that I can concentrate on the structure of the plant.

Cyanotype of an algae by Anna Atkins (1799 – 1871)

To get into the Linnean, you simply have to ring the doorbell – they have a whole range of talks, and it’s a pleasure just to browse in the library. At the moment they have a facsimile copy of a book by Maria Sybilla Merian (1647-1717) – she was one of the first people to illustrate the different life stages of insects, which were very poorly understood at the time. She made a trip to Suriname and the book Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium was the result. Just have a look at these extraordinary illustrations!

Spider Avicularia avicularia

So if you’re passing the Linnean on a Tuesday to Friday, do ring the doorbell and have a look around. There are magazines to browse, illustrations to look at, and a whole sense of history to soak in.

Dear Readers, after I posted about my Open University doughball experiment yesterday, someone very wisely asked me about what happens if it’s not just magpies who eat them. Well, that turns out to be a very interesting point, as today the squirrels discovered that they have a taste for bright orange suet (though we have since topped up the bird feeders, so they’ve reverted to eating the sunflower hearts instead).

The point of the experiment is really to interpret the results – I’m pretty sure that the magpies, who can see not only all the colours that humans can but ultra-violet as well, may have a preference for orange or yellow balls (my guess is probably orange as it’s closer to the colour of ripe fruit). Squirrels, on the other hand, have dichromatic vision, which is closer to colour  blindness in humans – they therefore can’t distinguish between green and red, but should in theory be fine with telling the difference between orange and yellow. Will they care though? Only time will tell. And they’d better get a move on, as my assignment is due on 10th February, only two and a bit weeks away.

Anyhow, onto the Great Garden Birdwatch. There was a flurry of excitement at the start after the feeders were filled up, followed by a visit from a cat, and then the squirrels rampaged around the garden like lunatics, flicking their tails at one another and generally being manic. As usual I saw a reasonable range of birds, but I’m still convinced that they don’t come when it’s the hour of the GGBW just to be annoying.

Anyhow, the total count was:

2 Blue Tits

1 Coal Tit

1 Long-tailed Tit (I’m sure there were others but I just caught the tail-end of the visit)

1 Collared Dove

1 Robin

3 Great Tits

1 Woodpigeon

3 Starlings

and

2 Ring-necked Parakeets (who managed to fend off the squirrels for a surprising amount of time, and who had great fun mobbing the cat who walked along the top of the new 6-foot fence with a feigned nonchalance that reminded me of me walking into a party with a lot of people that I don’t know).

Anyhow, that’s that for another year! I saw only 16 individual birds, which was less than the average of 27, and makes me feel rather inadequate (irrational, I know), though my Starling and Great Tit numbers were above the national average, as was my parakeet count. I note from the count so far that the House Sparrow and Blue Tit are still number one and two respectively, with the Woodpigeon up at number three, the Starling down at number four, the Blackbird holding steady at number five and the Robin up at number six. Still, there’s a whole day of counting yet to come, and the results are due in mid April.

Which reminds me that the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland has just reported on the New Year Plant Hunt (very speedy!) – I shall have a look, and report back soon.

Dear Readers, this weekend is the Big Garden Birdwatch here in the UK – as usual we’re being asked to record the birds in the garden for an hour, and I’ll certainly do it at some point, probably on Saturday before another wave of heavy rain comes in. But the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) is particularly keen for people to do it this year, for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, the long cold spell may well have impacted smaller birds, such as wrens and long-tailed tits, so it will be interesting to see how they’ve done compared to last year, when the winter wasn’t so harsh.

Fledgling long-tailed tits

Secondly, the RSPB want to check up on how many winter visitors such as fieldfare and redwing are still about – again, the cold conditions might either have chased them away or kept them in the UK for longer.

Redwing

Interestingly, at the same time as we’re being encouraged to top up the bird feeders, the RSPB has actually stopped selling bird tables because they can be such vectors for disease, in particular trichomonosis, which has been responsible for a huge fall in the numbers of greenfinches. The disease is passed in bird saliva, so it’s a problem where birds pick up seeds, husk them and then let them fall, hence the more expensive sunflower hearts, which have no husks, are less dangerous. All in all, I’d agree that having a garden full of plants with berries and seeds is probably the healthiest way to go, but not everybody has the luxury of that much space. Plus, there is also little doubt that feeding and providing water in the most difficult seasons of the year probably aids bird survival, so it’s a tough decision. There was a very interesting talk on the whole subject at the Wildlife Gardening Forum Symposium a few days ago which I haven’t caught up with yet, but will report back when I do.

In the meantime, I just looked at the results for the first day of the Garden Birdwatch and the house sparrow is at number one, for the 21st year in a row. Even so, this species has declined by sixty percent since the very first Birdwatch in 1979, and we have lost an estimated 38 million birds from the skies in the past sixty years. Terrifying numbers, and citizen science projects such as this one provide a snapshot of what exactly is in our gardens and parks over one January weekend. It provides a picture of changing numbers, not just for this year but over time, and without information, scientists can’t help to deduce what is going on for each species. So if you’re in the UK, and you’ve got an hour to spend, you know what to do…

House Sparrows

Dear Readers, you might remember that a few years ago, I was performing an experiment on my local magpies for my Open University degree. On that occasion, I was trying to determine if they preferred red or yellow doughballs, and the answer was a resounding ‘yes!’ to the red ones. This year, I’m hoping to see if the birds have a preference for orange balls over yellow ones and I suspect that the outcome might not be quite so straightforward.

This year I used my brain and used my food processor to make the dough – it’s a lot quicker than messing about rubbing the lard into the flour and then trying to get an even colouration. But the real test will be whether the magpies are as enthusiastic as they were last time, or if anybody else will get stuck in.

What we’re trying to distinguish is whether the birds are taking the balls purely based on their colour, or if they’re just taking the ones that are commonest. So, to start off with we do ten trials with 45 orange balls and 5 yellow ones, and then ten  trials with 45 yellow balls and 5 orange ones. To make it all even more complicated, we have to record the trial when there are between 15 and 35 balls left, so you have to keep an eye on what’s going on. Last time the magpies were so fast that they’d scoff the whole lot in ten minutes, so woebetide somebody coming to the door or ringing me up mid experiment. If there are fewer than  15 balls left you have to start the whole thing all over again. Sigh.

Once all the trials are done, you do some antsy-fancy statistical work, to try to prove that your results are not random, and then  I need to write a report. All by 10th February! But I’m not complaining. Sciencing is one of my very favourite things to do, and it certainly keeps me busy!

Stop Press One

I put the doughballs out on Tuesday, and not a single one was eaten on by Thursday morning. Then I went to see the podiatrist on Thursday morning and the whole lot had gone when I came back. Hopefully the magpies have rediscovered them, and things should run smoothly from now. Fingers crossed….

Tiefenbach Glacier in Austria, with ‘duvet’ to try to preserve the snow

Dear Readers, I have been following Alaskan poet Erin Coughwell Hollowell for years now, and as this week saw the US being pulled out of the Paris Climate Change accord by That Man, it seems appropriate to feature some of her exquisite poems about the ephemerality  of the natural world (and much else besides).  See what you think.

These three poems are online here.

Cycles and Limits

Nothing is consumed whole. Nothing.
We put the bread, the nuts, the sweet apple

into our mouths and chew. Standing at
the counter, I take care to chop the carrots

into equal sized pieces as the potatoes
so that it might all cook together. Be taken

along with a chopped onion for savor
and digested. The cottonwood tree

that leaned for so long finally falls. Impact
shatters the rotten trunk, the branches

scatter across the forest floor. Then moss
and beetle and rain get to work. After

a few years, after the hares have sheltered
beneath and dug among, the tree becomes

soil. Becomes mushroom that I gather
and add to the soup. It becomes impossible

to imagine any other end point. Some day
I will be alone. If there is singing, I will not

hear it. If someone is saying words about
my life, parsing out the good things I tried

to do, I will not attend. My atoms uncoupling.
My consumption, my alchemy, already under way.

Alaskan dirt road duet in a minor key

In the grey morning, I find beside the road
two large footprints coupled with two small

and I worry. Grandmother hare, now arrayed
white for the winter and the snows delayed,

you are trying to tell me something. Stillness
in the deep alder thicket that was shattered

by unseasonable rain followed by wet snow
followed by rain. Golden hare eye the only

thing tilting toward me as I walk. A season
of rain in a place that signifies snow. Six

diesel trucks with empty beds and a single
occupant rattle by each morning on a road

that has only eight houses. As soon as
it is light, I walk the edges and hope not

to see you. You keep living if you live
small. Alongside me, your prints are

a dancing. I keep you living if I live small.

After the dissolution

When we tell of this, the we that remains
five hundred years from now, our storied glacier

will be so small. Who could imagine this
great being of ice scored with huge crevices?

We’ll say that glaciers were white, because
we won’t imagine that ice becomes blue

as the weight of it presses out centuries
of air. We won’t remember gray moraines

comprised of stones rounded by the rolling
of so much power advancing and retreating.

We won’t tell of rivers a shade of turquoise
that stuns the eyes, carrying glacial flour

and ice’s breath to the sea. And those huge
boulders left in the middle of fields, we’ll

imagine that men put them there for some
reason. We’ll have forgotten how the tongues

of glaciers could rearrange the earth. We’ll
have forgotten how a glacier could tell a story

that reminded us of how small we are,
how brief our lives that misunderstood forever.

The entrance to Bluebell Wood in Bounds Green

Dear Readers, I was 65 years old on Monday (don’t ask me how that happened, last time I looked I was in my thirties), so what nicer way to spend the morning than with a walk in Bluebell Wood, followed by coffee and cake at the Sunshine Garden Centre? The wood was looking particularly lovely today, and was full of birdsong, though as we’ll see the delightful squawks of one bird somewhat dominated the sound scape.

There were Great Spotted Woodpeckers drumming, a Green Woodpecker yaffling away on the adjacent golf course, Blue Tits peeping, Great Tits singing ‘Teacher, teacher’, and even some Coal Tits and Long-tailed Tits with their high-pitched squeaks. And of course there was the inevitable sound of leaf blowers, also from the golf course. I don’t know if anyone saw Wallace and Gromit at Christmas, but the mechanical gnomes ‘pointlessly blowing leaves from place to place’ certainly made me laugh. How did we ever cope when all we had were rakes, I wonder? When I am in charge, leaf blowers will be banned for sure.

Anyhow, one Great Tit was combing over a dead tree, though whether looking for insects under the bark or a possible nest site I’m not sure.

And there were the usual squirrels sitting around, pretending  not to up to mischief…

But then there was this pair of parakeets. I mentioned yesterday that they nest early, and here is the evidence. They had found a tree hole, and were cheerfully doing some housekeeping, which mostly seemed to involve enlarging the entrance. I am hoping to have new windows this year, so I can relate.

And what’s the point of building a love-nest if you can’t have a little kiss?

And then  sometimes you just need to stretch your legs and admire your handiwork…

Well I think they’ve done a very fine job, and I’ll be interested to see if there is the patter of tiny claws later in the year.

And so we walked on, and admired the sweet woodruff and the daffodils and  the bluebells that are just starting to show their faces. And then it was time for cake (blueberry and lemon since you ask). What a nice way to start my birthday!

Dear Readers, I guess the word must have gotten out – this morning we had no less than nine Ring-necked Parakeets in the garden, and a right old racket they were making too! They seem to be unperturbed by whatever we put out food-wise – they’ll eat sunflower seeds or suet, and today they were also getting stuck into the buds on the lilac. I’ve seen them munching on my neighbour’s cherry tree buds too.

They really are handsome birds. This male, in full breeding colours (note the very black neck-ring) seems on the face of it to be in charge, but who knows? When he and the rest of the flock fly off, one of the adolescents takes advantage to continue to feeding without competition.

Adult male

Juveniles tend to be a bit ‘yellower’ in plumage than the adults. 

Juveniles

It’s thought that there are about 12,000 breeding pairs of this parakeet in the UK now – it’s the most northern breeding parrot in the world. From a population that was very much centred on two groups, one in south London and one on the Isle of Thanet, the bird has expanded its range to include Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham – this chatty, social bird is clearly an urbanite, and it may be that the warmer conditions in city parks and woodlands make them more conducive to nesting success. And they are remarkably successful in rearing their young – the British Trust for Ornithology estimates that 72% of broods survive to adulthood. I’ve noted previously that the parakeet nests very early, selecting a nest site (usually a hole in a tree) from January onwards. With an average of four eggs per nest, it’s no wonder that the parakeets are doing so well, but studies so far have not shown a detrimental effect on other tree-nesting birds. Parakeets are very domineering on feeders, however, apparently particularly to the detriment of starlings, who would otherwise definitely rule in our garden.

The little chap below has a very short and stubby tail – I’m wondering if s/he had a close encounter with a cat?

Anyhow, Ring-necked Parakeets are here to stay now – the birds have been genetically tested and are all part of the wild population that comes from India/Pakistan. Consensus now is that they are all descended from cage birds imported in the 1960s and 1970s, and that their ancestors escaped/were released on multiple occasions (so there goes the Jimi Hendrix releasing his parakeets while on an acid trip hypothesis). Whether they will prove to be a problem in future years is anybody’s guess, but for now I’m enjoying their cheekiness and the touch of the exotic that they bring to my East Finchley garden.

Classic lasagne (Photo by By jules / stonesoup – mum’s lasagne, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10755032)

Dear Readers, I am in tearing haste today as tonight we are having some friends over for dinner for the first time since I broke my leg, and I am rather out of the habit. So, I’m resorting to my old favourite, lasagne. What a forgiving dish this is! You can prepare most of it in advance, and provided you don’t burn it at any stage, it will sit happily in the oven for quite a while if anyone gets lost en route/the tube is playing up/etc etc.

Vegetarian lasagne (Photo by By FloGalsen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83272195)

Increasingly, though, I’m realising that what makes lasagne so delicious is its texture and the rich tomatoe-y flavour, combined with the white sauce, rather than the meat, and so it’s usually vegetable lasagne  these days. Tonight I’m going all out and using aubergine, plus a mixture of ricotta and parmesan. Vegan lasagne is slightly more challenging, but it’s only really about the cheese and there are a lot of umami-ish replacements, though I confess to not being a big fan of nutritional yeast. Let me know what vegan variations you’ve come across, if you have any favourites!

My Mum’s big dinner party dish, I remember, was beef stroganoff (well, this was the 70s), followed by Black Forest gateau (which she often knocked up herself). But she was really more of a party animal than a dinner party girl, which meant vol-au-vents, sausage rolls, and yes, pineapple, cheddar and cocktail onions on sticks. Still, I went to a funeral a few weeks  ago, and one of my cousins told me how fantastic he thought my Mum’s parties were. And, on reflection, he’s right – we’d grown up in a tiny house, and once we had a slightly bigger one it seemed as if all of Mum’s urge to provide hospitality and to entertain people came out. I remember one party which ended at five in the morning, with someone that Dad worked with who was in a choir leading a lovely singalong. Magical.

What are your food-related memories? There’s nothing like the taste of a meal to bring back so many recollections, and sometimes just a whiff of soup cooking, or the unmistakable smell of school dinners, acts like a time machine and I’m 9 years-old again, and pretending to be allergic to beetroot so that I don’t have to eat the stuff (though I love it now). Do share!

Colombian Tree Frog (Dendropsophus norandinus) Photo By Grupo Herpetologico de Antioquia, Universidad de Antioquia, Museo de Herpetologia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73774836

Dear Readers, I have been banging on about biosecurity and the importation of ‘pest’ species into the UK, in particular with plants destined for garden centres. Well, a very interesting paper has just been posted which looks at the various diseases and non-native creatures who have turned up, and one that piqued my interest was the discovery of a little Colombian tree frog in some roses at a florist in Sheffield. First up, who even knew that we imported roses from Colombia (via Ecuador as it happens). Presumably these are air-freighted so that they can arrive nice and fresh, and poor froggy survived the whole trip. Nor are they the only vertebrate ‘hitchhikers’ arriving – there are geckos from Greece, wall lizards from Italy, marbled reed frogs from South Africa and another tree frog from the Ivory Coast.

Marbled Reed Frog (Hyperolius marmoratus) Photo by By Ryanvanhuyssteen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37544823

What occurs to me is that if an animal as large as a frog or lizard can turn up alive in imported plants, what chance do we have of stopping invertebrates or fungi or invasive plants from arriving? Dutch Elm disease and Ash Dieback were both originally imported with saplings from overseas. But maybe we should all check a little more carefully into the origin of the plants and flowers we buy, and consider the implications of air-freighting, especially with Valentine’s Day coming up. Sigh. Nothing is straightforward anymore, but maybe it never was, and it’s just that we’re more aware these days.

Onwards!

In central France, a tiny wild boar piglet rescued by farmer Elodie Cappe has had the threat of euthanasia lifted. Rillette (oh dear) grew up with Cappe’s horses and dogs, but when the time came for her to return to the wild, she instead made her way back to the farm repeatedly, and so Cappe decided to keep her. Because the rules around keeping wild animals are so strict (and rightly so), Cappe was threatened with imprisonment, a fine of 150,000 euro and having Rillette put to sleep, even though clearly the boar couldn’t be rehabilitated as a wild animal. Fortunately, the higher court decided that Rillette could stay, and now she has her own basket and hangs out with the other animals.

Over 170,000 people signed a petition to save Rillette, including Brigitte Bardot, a long-term animal activist. It makes me think about how we can rally around an individual animal or person, but the mistreatment of literally billions of pigs, in intensive farming units all over the world, goes largely unnoticed. I suppose it’s easier for us to empathise with the story of one creature than to get our heads around the untold suffering of uncountable numbers. As with so many things, I suspect that the sheer scale of many current problems, from biosecurity to industrialised farming to climate change, are just overwhelming. Still, it’s always good to know that we can be moved to action by a story, and that so many people will try to help if they can.

Boar piglet (known as a ‘squeaker’ ) (Photo By 4028mdk09 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13139423)