Orca wearing salmon’ hat’ (Photo by Jim Pasola of the Orca Network via https://nypost.com/2024/11/28/us-news/orcas-spotted-wearing-salmon-hats-for-the-first-time-in-37-years/)

Dear Readers, back in 1987 a female from a pod of orcas off Puget Sound in Washington State, USA, started wearing a salmon on her head. One could be forgiven for thinking that this sounds rather too much like some teenage TikTok craze, and indeed,  it ‘went viral’, with the whole pod wearing ‘fish hats’ within six weeks, and whales in other pods taking up the trend. Then the orcas stopped doing it, and life returned to normal, until this year when fish hats are all the rage again. As orcas can live for decades there’s a good chance that some of the animals doing this have seen it all before. But why are they doing it?

“Your guess is as good as mine” says scientist Deborah Giles, in a very refreshing burst of energy. However, there are a few theories.

One is that there are so many salmon about (and indeed, it is apparently a bumper year) that the whales are storing the fish on their heads for a quick snack later on. Orcas have been known to tuck a fish under their ‘arm’ (pectoral fin), but salmon might be a bit small for this, so maybe the head is a better option.

But for me, I wonder if this is a cultural thing? Different pods of orcas have very different habits, from seal-eating as opposed to fish eating, and I blogged a while back about the orcas who are attacking boats in the Bay of Biscay. I suspect that they are not only hyper-intelligent but that, like humans, they might be subject to social contagion. I remember being a small child and looking around our playground to see that every single child was involved in some kind of ‘clapping’ game. Except me, who never saw the point, but that’s another story.

Anyhow, it appears that we might get at least some answers, as with the advent of drone technology it’s a little easier to follow an orca with a fish on its head to see what it does with it eventually. If it eats it, then maybe the carrying theory is correct, but if it just leaves it, well maybe it is just ‘playing’. Who knows? These are some of the most enigmatic animals of all. I wouldn’t put it past them to decide to wear ‘fish hats’ just to confuse the scientists.

You can read the article here.

Dog Rose (Rosa canina) – great for short-tongued bumblebees

Dear Readers, as I was leafing through my Bumblebee Conservation Trust newsletter this week, I read that a bumblebee with a full stomach is still only 40 minutes away from starvation. Yikes! No wonder these Einsteins of the insect world have learned a number of techniques to maximise their nectar uptake. But first, let’s have a quick think about the differences between different species of bumblebee.

Plant preference is all down to the length of a bumblebee’s tongue. There are short-tongued species, whose tongues are only 6- 8.5 mm long, and these bees love open, easily accessible flowers like the dog rose above. Species include our old favourite the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) and the newcomer the tree bumblebee (Bombus hypnorum)

Buff-tailed queen bumblebee on winter flowering honeysuckle, with teeny tiny tongue…

Other species, including my favourite the common carder bumblebee, have much longer tongues (up to 20 mm) and they can access nectar in plants such as foxglove, comfrey and thistles.

Common Carder Bumblebee on Cirsium atropurpureum

But I’m sure you’ll have seen bumblebees on plants that they’re not ‘meant’ to be on – I’m sure I’ve seen buff-tails fighting their way into foxgloves, for example. The point is that bees waste energy trying to access nectar in plants that they aren’t ‘designed’ for, and so some of them cheat, by chewing a little hole in the base of a deep-throated flower and then ‘nicking’ the nectar without a fight. Furthermore, Dave Goulson (who is undoubtedly one of the world’s most knowledgeable bumblebee experts) has found that bumblebees can learn how to nectar rob by observing other bees doing it. Amazing!

So, here is the BCT’s list of top plants for bumblebees with different tongue lengths:

Short-tongued bees:

Bramble

Goat Willow

Borage

Dog Rose

Borage (Borago officinalis)

Long-tongued bumblebees

Comfrey

Foxglove

Red clover

Spear Thistle

White comfrey

Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea)

And at this time of year, let’s not forget Mahonia – not native, but a very important source of nectar for queen bumblebees emerging for a quick nibble on mild days in winter. There was a huge bee the size of the first joint of my thumb on the mahonia in the garden this week, and I was so glad it was in flower.

Mahonia flowers

Photo by Bryan Alexander at https://www.flickr.com/photos/bryanalexander/148121418/

Dear Readers, it has been very blustery these past few days, as Storm Bert has rolled through wreaking havoc in all directions. But having looked at the list of storm names for the 2024/5 season, my eye falls upon the name beginning with ‘V’, which just happens to be mine (correct spelling too!) Lets’ hope that we don’t get that far through the alphabet, as I’m pretty sure that we’ll be needing an ark if we do.

And here is today’s poem. I find it very relatable – we always seem to want to be somewhere else, looking at something else, rather than where we are. Though as time goes on I find myself happier and happier to be looking at the weather through a window rather than getting drenched or knocked on the head by a falling branch. See what you think!

Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day
Anne Brontë 1820 – 1849

My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.

The long withered grass in the sunshine is glancing,
The bare trees are tossing their branches on high;
The dead leaves beneath them are merrily dancing,
The white clouds are scudding across the blue sky.

I wish I could see how the ocean is lashing
The foam of its billows to whirlwinds of spray;
I wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,
And hear the wild roar of their thunder to-day!

Nordmann Fir outside Tony’s Continental in 2023

Dear Readers, you can tell that Christmas is on the way when you see the first fir trees outside Tony’s Continental. It might seem a little early, but there is something to be said for getting the most out of the Christmas period, especially as the trees seem to have been bred to keep their needles for much longer these days. I have a special fondness for the festive season, as did my Mum and Dad. 26th of November would have been my Mum’s 89th birthday, followed swiftly by Dad’s 89th birthday on 5th of December, so this time of year always brings back memories. In particular, I remember the glee with which Dad enjoyed the week between Mum becoming ‘a pensioner’ and his achieving that exalted status.

You can read all about the Nordmann Fir in a previous post here, but for today I just wanted to share this piece about my Dad, from 2019. Mum had died on 18th December 2018. Reading this makes my heart ache, but it also makes me smile, and that’s the way life seems to go these days.

Dear Readers, I was in Dorchester visiting my Dad this week, and the nursing home is revving up for Christmas. Dad had made me a present – he’d coloured in the drawing above, and had insisted on being given a red pen, because

‘You can’t have a Christmas tree without red balls’.

And who is to argue? Dad had even signed it. He really enjoys doing a bit of colouring in, though I think he regards it as a favour to the carers. After all, how does he find time?

‘I’ve been for tea with the Queen a couple of times this week’ he announced.

‘What’s it like, Dad?’ I asked.

Dad shrugged. ‘It’s a bit boring really’, he said, ‘but I have to keep going because otherwise she gets annoyed’.

Dad is in a good mood today, and is delighted when we get a taxi and head off to the garden centre in Poundbury. The place is like the Tardis – from the outside it looks tiny, but inside there’s a route that goes through a woodland scene with nodding reindeer, a frozen north area with cuddly penguins bobbing up and down, and a whole array of Christmas jumpers. I nearly buy Dad a Christmas pudding hat, but stop myself in the interests of maintaining his dignity, and decide that I’ll get one for me. Dad is, however, pleased with the musical Christmas tie that we get him. He plans to dress up for Christmas lunch, and I hope that this year we’ll all be able to enjoy it a bit more. Last year it was only a week after Mum died, and we were all  shell-shocked.

We head off to the pub across the road, where they are doing pie and mash. Dad rubs his hands together in delight. Unfortunately, it’s a relatively posh pie (i.e. one with shortcrust pastry and chunks of meat) and I think Dad was looking forward to a ‘proper’ pie and mash dinner. As any East Ender knows, you have to have a flat, rectangular pie, with flour and water pastry and a filling of ground beef, with mash that hasn’t got anything fancy like butter in it, and ‘liqor’ – a green parsley gravy made from the water that the eels have been cooked in (for jellied eels). It’s one of those local things that you either grew up with and love, or don’t ‘get’ at all.

Double pie and mash (Photo one)

One of the main London purveyors of pie and mash, Manze’s, sells frozen pie and mash and liqor, and I have a cunning plan to buy some for Dad in the New Year. They have a microwave at the home, so I’m sure it’s possible!

I often wonder what goes on in Dad’s head these days. Have a look at the picture below, which he painted a year ago, not long after he’d gone into care.

It’s a tree with a Robin in it, and in a way it’s rather beautiful – I love the colours, and the way that he’s stippled the leaves and the bark. But there is something amiss with the angle that it’s been painted at. Unless, it strikes me now, it’s a branch coming out of the main tree, in which case it makes a bit more sense. The scientist in me wonders what can be told from these drawings, and if the art of people with vascular dementia (like my Dad) is different from that of folk with Alzheimer’s Disease. But somehow, while Dad’s drawing and colouring is as bright and lively as it is at the moment, I feel as if he’s doing ok.

Dad was always an uncommunicative man, but somehow, since his stroke back in 2003 and then his dementia, his feelings are much closer to the surface. His delight and interest in things is clear, as is his sadness. We are fortunate that he doesn’t get angry very often, and can usually be helped to feel better. One of his favourite carers tells me that when he starts to get agitated (which is normally when he thinks that he should be somewhere else, or that he needs to do something about the ‘lorries’ that he doesn’t own), she tells him that she is his secretary, and he tells her what needs to happen. Just recently, he wanted to get the lorries sorted out for Christmas, and his carer noted it all down and came back half an hour later to tell him that she’d done it. To be with someone who has dementia, it seems to me vital to have imagination, and to be able to play. I am gradually learning to relax into Dad’s world, to go with his train of thought however otherworldly it seems. It takes so little to keep him happy.

What is hardest is when Dad talks about not being able to see Mum. Sometimes it’s because he’s done something wrong (and I can normally persuade him that Mum loves him and isn’t cross with him). This time, it was because ‘Mum and the kids’ were all so spread out geographically, and it just wasn’t possible to organise transport.

‘So I think I’ll just stay here’, says Dad, and I agree that that would be for the best, what with Santa and two reindeer visiting the home tomorrow.

Sometimes, the nurse rings me if Dad’s getting agitated, and he and I have a little chat. Often I’m not quite sure what’s the matter (it might be to do with money, or with Dad’s non-existent haulage business), but I’ve learned that a calming tone of voice and reassurance works best. I got one of those calls last week, and at the end of it, Dad sighed with relief, and said:

‘It’s good to know that I’ve got you to fall back on’.

And my heart just opened.

‘Yep’, I said. ‘You’ve always got me to fall back on, Dad’.

And so he has.

Photo Credits

Photo One from https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g186338-d6678541-Reviews-Golden_Pie-London_England.html

Dear Readers, the lovely young man who has been helping me out in the garden made his last visit today (you can find him here) and true to form I’d bought enough plants for a garden twice the size. First up were some cyclamen from my friend M’s garden – M used to live in our house back in the 70s, and actually planted the whitebeam tree, which was a tiny sapling then and is now nearly as tall as the house (or was until the tree surgeons were in a few months ago). The cyclamen are now nice and cosy, and I look forward to seeing them in flower at some point soon (the one above is the only other cyclamen that I have!)

Wood anemone (Anemone blanda)

We’ve planted up some wood anemones, to replace the ones that seem to have gone awol over the past few years…

Snakeshead fritillaries

And we’ve popped in some snakeshead fritillaries, some of my very favourite bulbs, and a good choice for a damp, north-facing garden…

Grape hyacinths

And I’ve bought way too many grape hyacinths, some blue, some white, some in the middle….

What happened to my crocuses last time

And I’ve even risked some crocuses, though the squirrels had great fun with them last time.

The biggest excitement, though, is using some woodland and hedgerow seed mix for the first time – goodness only knows what will come up, but we’ve used it along the gap between the houses, and scattered it around generally, so fingers crossed!

One of the big lessons of the past few months has been that it’s ok to ask for help – breaking one’s leg made me realise that I really can’t do everything on my own, nor should I. I am really excited about the garden and about what might happen over the next few months, and I am so excited to have someone to partner with me to create it. Let’s see what happens!

Ethiopian Wolf (Canis simensis) Photo by By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66000167

Dear Readers, when we think about pollinators, I’m sure most of us think about bees, but actually the range of animals that can transfer pollen from one flower to another is much, much wider – not just other insects (beetles, hoverflies, wasps), but also birds (and on this subject there’s a very interesting new study by Jeff Ollerton, which suggest that bird pollination is much commoner than we think) and bats. Pollen is also sometimes transferred by small mammals who are nectar feeders, particularly some of the little marsupials. But a new report is thought to be the first observation of a large mammal being involved in pollination.

The Ethiopian Wolf (Canis simensis) is the rarest dog in the world – there are thought to be less than 500 individual animals left. They live in the Bales Mountains of Ethiopia, and scientist Sandra Lai and her colleagues at the University of Oxford watched as the wolves licked the nectar from the Ethiopian Red Hot Poker flowers – these plants are so sweet that local people use the nectar as a sweetener for coffee. The snouts of the wolves ended up covered in pollen, and they feasted on as many as thirty plants per day. Not only that, they also brought their cubs to the flower fields.

Ethiopian wolf flower-feeding (Photo Adrien Leasaffre via New Scientist https://www.newscientist.com/article/2457336-nectar-loving-ethiopian-wolves-may-be-the-first-carnivore-pollinators/)

Studies like this always make me wonder what else we’re missing – for the longest time no one realised that blue tits were feeding on the flowers of crown fritillaries, for example. It’s true that bears sometimes seek out plants with nectar, but they don’t seem to seek them out systematically, whilst it’s clear that the Ethiopian wolves do. And what beautiful animals they are!

Photo by Nik Borrow at https://www.flickr.com/photos/nikborrow/39027505831

You can read the New Scientist article here, and the full paper here. 

Bug Woman and Her Dad at Her Wedding, 2001

Dear Readers, a big theme in my Open University degree this year is genetics and inheritance, and so that’s made me think about what has been passed on to me by my mother and father, and by their mothers and fathers. It always feels as if the obvious things have come from my Dad, and I’m very grateful for most of them.

We both have ridiculously thick hair. Mine is practically the same colour as my Dad’s hair in the photo, although with the help of a very good hairdresser it’s less salt and pepper and more silver.

And then there are the teeth. Both of us have/had a gap between the front teeth. Although not the most even, prettiest of gnashers, they are strong – I have had only one filling in my life, and the dentist reckons that even that one was unnecessary. My poor Mum had endless gum disease episodes, and ended up with dentures, whilst Dad kept his teeth to the end of his life. So thanks for that, Dad!

Of course, not all my genetic inheritance has been so fortunate, as with anyone. One of my parents carried something called Factor V Leiden – it’s a genetic condition which increases the risk of deep vein thrombosis (which, fortunately, I have never had). I am heterozygous for this (which means that I have only one copy of the gene, from one parent), but it does mean that, for instance, if I’d taken HRT I’d have been 15 times more likely to have a DVT than  someone without Factor V Leiden. It’s one of those things that probably would never have been picked up if I hadn’t had a genetic screening for another condition.

My bicuspid heart valve is also most likely an inherited condition, though not necessarily from Mum or Dad – this is something that can skip a generation. My grandmother on my mother’s side died of a heart condition at the age of 64, but she also had a weakened heart following a flu epidemic in the 60s, and she never had any kind of scan or investigation. So who knows where my heart problem came from?

But then, there are the things that I got from Mum and Dad that it’s hard to pin down to genes. Mum suffered from depression (and so have I), but then there were lots of environmental factors in her life that I think would have driven  most people to despair. Dad ignited a love of nature in me, but was the tinder already there? Mum was one of the most creative people that I’ve ever met, and I love making things too, but is my passion for knitting and cooking a result of the example set, or something innate? When it gets to personality and talent, it’s hard to separate the genes from the environment for sure. While there are some conditions where someone’s genetic inheritance really is destiny, It feels important to acknowledge that the vast majority of the traits that we see in humans and other organisms are the result of a complicated dance between genetic potential and the effect of the environment.

Dear Readers, there are many depictions of lions that make them look every bit as magnificent as they are in real life (such as those by Landseer at the bottom of Nelson’s Column) but I have to say that the ones in Ravenna largely looked about as terrifying as golden retrievers. Take this one, outside the Archiepiscopal Museum. He looks a bit like I do when I’m summoning up the strength to blow out my birthday candles (well, there are quite a lot of them these days). Sadly I can’t find out any more about him, but in truth he’s probably scarier than the lion on the plinth next to him.

Oh bless! This one looks as if he’s taken his dentures out. I rather want to pat him on the head.

Jesus from the Chapel of St Andrew at the Bishop’s Palace (6th Century)

On the other hand, lions don’t always have a good time in Ravenna (as you can see from this mosaic of Jesus treading on one), so maybe that’s why they like to keep a low profile. It’s all a bit confusing as the winged lion is the symbol of St Mark, and of Venice (the Venetians ruled Ravenna rather later on in history) so it’s one of those examples of an animal that changes its meaning according to context.

St Mark with his lion from St Vitale in Ravenna (Photo by Lawrence OP from https://www.flickr.com/photos/paullew/14001748412)

But finally, I must include my favourite lion of all time. He stands outside the Arsenale in Venice, and is originally from Delos in Greece. The body dates back to the sixth century and the head was added later. Maybe he was originally a dachshund?

So, do you have a favourite statue, particularly an ‘unconventional’ one? Do share!

Dear Readers, Philip Levine (1928 – 2015) was the son of Jewish-American immigrants who emigrated to Detroit. He began working in the car factories aged 14, and he wanted to give voice to the people that he worked with, the blue-collar workers who have been so often overlooked. Interestingly, he was fascinated by the Spanish Civil War, and after a stay in Barcelona he drew an interesting comparison between that city and Detroit:

“Both cities are built on the backs of sullen, exploited workers, and the faded revolution in one smolders like the blunting, racist fear in the other.”

Food for thought in these dangerous times. And here’s the poem. See what you think.

They Feed They Lion

By Philip Levine

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.