‘Guest House’ by Edward Gordon (1940 – )

Dear Readers, I spotted this rather wonderful painting on Facebook today, and when I shared it, my friend A said that it seemed to be very calm, but somewhat lacking in liveliness. Well, how a fortnight can change one’s perceptions, because I find myself looking at the rug and thinking ‘trip hazard’, while I doubt that the shiny floor would provide much purchase for my crutches. All in all, it’s a reminder that we see the world through our own eyes, and that that view can be skewed by our current situation.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, of course – as my mother and father became older and more infirm, their little bungalow seemed to become more and more like a house of horrors. Dad had a stroke, and so his spatial perception was not as good on his left hand side. He was able to walk around, but was forever bashing his left arm into door knobs and hinges and the corners of tables. As he was also on Warfarin, he regularly looked as if he’d been savaged by a werewolf, but usually didn’t notice. As I rushed over with the usual lint and bandage, he’d make little of the blood running down his fingers.

“Only a flesh wound!” he’d say. He remembered Monty Python and The Goon Show long after he’d forgotten who I and Mum were.

Mum became less and less able to walk, so even the tiny difference in height between the carpeted living room and the kitchen lino could prove to be a problem. I remember her making me a cup of tea whenever I arrived to stay with them, and then using her walker-with-a-tray to transport it over the little ‘bump’ and across the living room. It was the last little bit of hospitality that she was able to offer, before I took over all the cooking/cleaning/domestic duties for the rest of my visit. I can still see her brow furrowed with concentration as she manoeuvred her domestic chariot towards me, a small tsunami of tea heading in my direction with every step.

But the real challenges were when they came to visit us here in East Finchley, and I wanted to take them to the High Street in their wheelchairs. First there was the question of wriggling past the wheelie bins, over the tree roots and around the worst potholes in the pavement. Then there was the camber on the paths that seemed intent on dumping both of my parents into the kerb. Dropped pavements weren’t always dropped enough, cars didn’t always stop at the zebra crossing, shops and cafes aren’t always accessible. Why had I never realised this before? I felt like an idiot for not realising sooner how hard it was for people with any kind of mobility problem.

I went to see a talk by a remarkable woman called Sinéad Burke. She is a Little Person who also has a passion for fashion, and was the first Little Person to be on the cover of Vogue magazine. Many of the things that she said in her talk have remained with me, but one was that, although when we think of a ‘person with disabilities’ we usually think of a relatively young person in a wheelchair, there was a strong possibility that, if we live long enough, all of us will end up with a variety of disabilities. Then there are all the disabilities that are invisible to the observer, but very real to the people who have them. Plus, as I know, you can go from able-bodied to disabled (at least temporarily) in a matter of seconds.

I can’t help but wonder how much richer all our lives would be if everyone was able to play a full part in our communities, rather than being stuck in their homes because they can’t get outside. At East Finchley Station, no one in a wheelchair could possibly get a tube train because they’d have to go up two steep flights of stairs (and I know how steep they are because I fell down them only a fortnight ago 🙂 ). It’s even worse at Dorchester Station, where there’s a railway bridge from the westbound platform to get to Dorchester town centre. I have no idea what people are meant to do if they can’t get up all those iron stairs. And this is the tip of an iceberg of hazards and problems that face someone who simply wants to go out. As usual, if you have money for taxis or carers or other aids life is easier, so it’s the poorest who usually suffer the most.

I do think that some things have improved, but there’s still a long way to go. It’s so important to the health and vibrancy of a community that everyone who wants to be included is included, that everyone who wants to be heard is heard. Let’s hope that it will get easier and easier for people to play their part, regardless of their disabilities. We need everyone, after all.

Fruit from Tony’s Continental, from my friend L

Dear Readers, it would be easy to get a bit downhearted when confined pretty much to quarters for six weeks, but I have been so thankful for my friends and for my Readers. I have had lots of excellent advice from people that I’ve never met in real life who have had fractures or breaks, and who have great insights into how to manage the situation. People are offering to take me out for a drive, or to help me in a whole range of ways. To say that it’s cheered me up would be a real understatement.

My friend A brought me vegetables, my friend L brought me fruit (and how inviting does that look!) Another friend called L brought me homemade soap, and very lovely it is too! Several friends have brought flowers, my friend J brought an orchid and some Hotel Chocolat chocolates including some Apfel Strudel ones (though my absolute favourites were these cherry ones). They came in a packet of six. My husband had one, and the rest seem to have completely disappeared.

Friends have brought me books, and my friend S brought me this wonderful little jigsaw, small enough to do on a tray. Look at how elegant the individual pieces look!

But most wonderfully of all, what my friends bring is the outside world. It would be so easy to feel isolated and depressed, but every time someone visits, they take my mind off my poorly leg and turn my thoughts elsewhere. My friend J popped in with her daughter E yesterday, and it was so good to talk about rocks, and foxes, and drawing and writing. I’ve heard about what’s going on in Coldfall Wood, and Long Lane Pasture, and all the gossip from the street. It actually makes me quite tearful to realise how lucky I’ve been. And the biggest shout out of all to my husband, who has looked after me cheerfully even when I’ve been in grumpy and in pain, and who is adding a few more meals to his repertoire every week.

Independence is such an illusion, isn’t it? I’ve always thought of myself as an independent person, but in truth we are reliant on other people to an extent that I can’t even begin to describe, from the people who empty the dustbins to the people who run our shops and hospitals and schools. We are all suspended in an almost infinite web of connections, and sometimes it’s only when things go wrong that we realise it. So thank you to everyone who has commented, or visited, or reached out. I feel bathed in love.

And finally, I hesitated about whether to share this poem, so I’m just sharing the link. Be warned that it includes anorexia, suicide and the death of a cat, so not an easy sell. But I think it’s extraordinary. See what you think.

Love Poem with a Dying Cat, by Nen G.Ramirez.

View through the consulting room window

Dear Readers, today I had my ‘wound check’ and an additional X-Ray on my poorly leg. What a beautiful sunny day! I sat outside the front door in my wheelchair waiting for the taxi to arrive, and watching the bees circling the last of the lavender, and felt more at peace than I’ve felt for a fortnight.At the hospital, the lovely Irish nurse took out some of my stitches, and I got a first look at my leg once all the bandages were off. There’s a long incision on my knees and then a smaller one, and a couple of nicks on my ankles, plus some bruising, but honestly it’s not too bad. I’m not actually worried about scars – they tell the story of who we are, and what we’ve experienced – but it was a relief to see everything healing up. What a wonder our bodies are!

Then it was off to X-Ray. John, my husband, is a novice wheelchair driver but managed really well. It’s tricky negotiating the lifts at the Whittington as, until you have a bit of experience, you never know what side the doors are going to open on. Plus, one lift in three is pretty much permanently out of order (or maybe I’ve been unlucky).

John came in with me for the X-Ray, and then stood behind the protective screen, so he could see the photographs. He said my leg looked as if it had been patched up by an enthusiastic home DIY-er.

Then, back to the fracture clinic. Looking out of the window I could see the most extraordinary tree, with huge leaves and candelabras of white flowers. Forgive the photo quality, the window was dusty and the light was wrong.

I do believe it might be a catalpa or Indian Bean Tree, which in a decent photo looks like this:

Catalpa bignoniodes (Photo Magnus Manske, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

The consultant popped in and announced himself very pleased with my leg, the X-Rays show that everything is healing as it should, and he’s going to refer me for physiotherapy and will see me again in a month. I’m going to be using my crutches/wheelchair until then, as I’m still only 50% weight-bearing on my damaged leg. He suggested moving on to low-dose codeine once my current high-dose stuff has run out, but the worst of the pain in my leg seems to be easing, so hopefully I won’t need anything for much longer – I’m not going to be a martyr, but I’m not used to being on drugs long-term. Interestingly, the consultant said that I should avoid ibuprofen – part of the healing process with bones is actually inflammation, so you don’t want to dampen that response down. Who knew? You learn something new every day.

And now I’m home again. And I’m determined, once I’m mobile again, to go and find the catalpa tree, and say hello to it. I wonder how many people have been cheered by the sun coming through its leaves as they wait for news, or for a painful procedure?

Dear Readers, the origin of the ‘invasion’ of London by ring-necked parakeets has been a source of speculation for decades. Here are just some of the stories.

• Jimi Hendrix released a pair of parakeets from his flat in Brook Street, London, while on an LSD trip back in the 1960s
• The parakeets escaped from the set of The African Queen while it was being filmed at Shepperton Studios
• The birds escaped from aviaries destroyed during the Great Storm of 1987 (this one is easily rebuffed – ring-necked parakeets were already spreading in London back in the 1970s.

For various reasons, all of these theories, attractive though some of them are, don’t quite fit the bill, so I was interested to read a report in The Guardian today by Tim Blackburn, a naturalist and author whose work I greatly enjoy (I currently have ‘The Jewel Box’, his book about moths, on my steadily-increasing reading pile). Blackburn has been involved in trying to determine the Geographic Profile (GP) of Britain’s parakeets – this technique aims to track an organism back to its point of origin, and is often used to determine the source of a disease outbreak, or, as in this case, where a novel species came from.

The study has revealed that the parakeets come from more than one source, with two major clusters in Croydon, South London, and Dartford in Kent. The first reports of a breeding population of ring-necked parakeets seems to be from the mid 1960s, but the study points to a ‘scare’ about psittacosis, an infectious and highly dangerous disease transmitted by parrots of all kinds, which was widely publicised during the 1950s. The study conjectures that fear of the disease may have led to the release of pet parrots of all kinds, but ring-necked parakeets are particularly adaptable birds – I’ve seen them roosting happily in sub-zero temperatures in their native India, and they also seem very able to find homes and food in human-influenced habitats.

Pet birds were much more popular when I was growing up than they seem to be now – everybody had a budgerigar or a lovebird or a cockatiel, or sometimes several of these birds. No wonder a health scare had such a big impact.

The study discounts Jimi Hendrix’s ‘trip’ and ‘The African Queen’ as a source of Britain’s parakeets, but doesn’t entirely rule out the theory about damaged aviaries in 1987 as a way of adding birds to the established population – there seems to have been a jump in numbers following the storm. But it also points out that ring-necked parakeets are now established on five continents and in thirty-four countries, so they don’t need a lot of help.

Like so many species, ring-necked parakeets arrived here with our help, and now I think that they’re pretty much here to stay, much like the terrapins that were dumped into our ponds and rivers when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze wore off. It has been possible to completely eradicate some species – nutria, or coypu, were widespread on the south coast when I was growing up (they were used for fur, but like all rodents were fond of gnawing, and managed to establish themselves in the ditches and damp areas of Kent, Essex and East Anglia) but were trapped and poisoned to extinction. Mink are also gradually being eradicated from East Anglia (another fur animal, though these were deliberately released, with devastating effects on the ecosystem). But I hope that the parakeets will find their niche alongside our other birds – there is some evidence that small birds nesting close to parakeets do better because predators are not so likely to attack their nests, and also that parakeets often enlarge nest holes, making them easier for birds such as stock doves to use. On the other hand, there are fears that the competition for nest holes will impact bats, nuthatches and woodpeckers. I wonder how it will all play out? I just know that the parakeets always brighten my day with a ridiculous drop of tropical vivacity, especially as I’m mainly housebound at the moment and can only really see them out of the window.

Ring-necked parakeets in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery

Leg Update! Well, my leg is still aching and sore even after my humungous quantities of painkillers, but then the orthopedic surgeon did say it was going to be painful. Off to the hospital for a check on how things are going tomorrow, so will keep you posted!

Florida carpenter ant (Camponotus floridianus) Photo By Bob Peterson from North Palm Beach, Florida, , CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21785629

Dear Readers, ever since I fractured my tibia ten days ago, I’ve been wishing that there was a way to detach my leg, sort it out and then screw it back on once the problem was sorted. However, as this is impractical I’ve been turning my attention to the first aid procedures of other creatures, and in particular ants. Ants are amongst the few creatures that tend the injuries of their nestmates: the Matabele ant, for example, produces an antibacterial substance from a special gland. This species lives by raiding termite nests, a dangerous expedition as the termites fight back hard, and the ants are often injured – up to 22 percent of the ants on each raid end up with at least one limb missing. Damaged ants are carried back to the nest and treated by special ‘nurse’ ants, who lick the wounds clean and who often apply a special antibiotic from the gland on their back. 95% of the ants so treated survive, compared to only 5% of ants that are callously separated from their ‘nurses’ by the scientists studying them. Can the ants  tell that some wounds are infected, and some not?The jury is still out, but it appears that infection causes a change to the hydrocarbons in the exoskeleton of the ant, which might signal to the nurse ants. If this was to be the case, the ants would be the only animals other than humans who can specifically treat infected wounds.

Matabele ant (Megaponera major) running off with a termite (Photo by By ETF89 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52639002)

And then there’s the Florida Carpenter ant (pictured above). Scientist Dany Buffat was studying a captive colony of the species when she noticed an ant chewing off a nestmate’s injured leg. The injured ant put up no resistance, and on further observation it appeared that amputations were not unusual, but that they only occurred when the injury was to the ant’s upper leg. The mortality rate of amputees was 90 percent higher than that of ants with a similar injury but no amputation. In ants with a lower leg injury, there seemed to be no difference whether the leg was amputated or not, and in fact ants did not amputate a leg with an injury in this part of the leg.

The reason seems to be to do with the ants physiology – the muscles that pump blood (and infections) around the body of the ant are found in the upper leg, so amputating the leg prevents the infection from spreading. However, an injury in the lower leg doesn’t involve these muscles, and so amputating the leg at this point doesn’t stop the spread.

It appears that the ants are able to determine the best course of action depending on the location of the wound, just as the Matabele ants appear to be able to determine whether or not a wound is infected.

To me, this is mind-blowing stuff, and just makes me wonder what else we will find out about these extraordinary animals. And in a fractured leg update, I can announce that I made it both up and down stairs yesterday, so I could sleep in my own bed. It’s lovely to feel a gradual return to normality. Onwards and upwards!

Toadflax Brocade Caterpillar (Photo by L.Dolata)

Dear Readers, some of my fondest childhood memories are of hanging out with the caterpillars in our tiny back garden. We had cinnabar moth caterpillars, looking like tiny tubular rugby players in their ‘uniforms’ of yellow and black. They would denude the ragwort flowers until there was nothing left but a few stumps, before moving on to the next plant.

One year, I ‘rescued’ five caterpillars and fed them in a plastic box until they pupated. Then, I put the pupae in a big sweet jar, with twigs so that they could climb up and their wings could unfurl. We then checked the bottle (which was under the stairs along with the gas metre) every day. Alas! One day we looked, to find four perfectly pristine, newly-emerged green and red cinnabar moths, and one sad soul who had gotten stuck during emergence and died.

We released the survivors early next morning, but my brother and I decided to hold a funeral for the one who didn’t make it. The moth was interred in a matchbox, along with a ball of cottonwool, and we made a ‘tombstone’ out of a fragment of old kitchen tile. We wrote ‘Gone, but Not Forgotten’ on the tile in wax crayon, and proceeded to lower the matchbox into a pre-dug hole with all due ceremony.

It’s funny what you learn from such a seemingly trivial experience – that caring and preparing for things often isn’t enough, that things that you love die, the importance of ritual, and the indifference of the natural world. Strangely, I have always found that indifference somehow comforting – so much of what happens really isn’t personal. A virus, or a bacteria, doesn’t have it in for you, it’s just doing what it does. It doesn’t care if you’re famous, or rich, or a wonderful person. There is something about shrugging and getting on with it, about not getting ‘snagged’ on the unfairness of events, that is very liberating. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t many terrible things that can and should be prevented. Balance is all, in this as in so many other things.

Cinnabar moth caterpillar (PhotoI, Tony Wills, CC BY 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

My favourite caterpillars of all, though, were the woolly bears.

Two Garden Tiger Moth Caterpillars (Photo by Baykedevries, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

I used to handle them all the time, although the hairs are supposed to irritate the skin – I distinctly remember having two of them ‘race’ up my arms. They eat docks and nettles, and are the most bumbling, inoffensive of beasts. I learned a truly horrific lesson from a woolly bear that I was, again, rearing in a plastic box (Stork Margarine if I remember correctly). The caterpillar had stopped eating, and I was expecting it to pupate. Instead, as I watched, it literally burst, and what seemed like dozens of tiny maggots emerged. The poor caterpillar had clearly been parasitised by a wasp. It was all that I could do not to drop the box. Every kind of body horror ever dreamed up by a movie-maker has a parallel somewhere in the insect kingdom, I’m sure.

But generally, my lifelong interest in invertebrates was nurtured by my contact with caterpillars and slugs, spiders and flies. There is so much to learn, and so much to understand. And when people talk about ‘plants for pollinators’, we are increasingly thinking about not just feeding the adults with nectar and pollen, but feeding the larvae on docks and nettles, ragwort and grasses. My friend L sent me the photo of the lovely Toadflax Brocade caterpillar above, nibbling away on some toadflax, a most attractive plant. We could all do with leaving some ‘weeds’ in our gardens, especially as insect populations are under such pressure. I hate the thought of children no longer interacting with caterpillars, the most inoffensive and lovable of the many insects in our garden (though anyone trying to grow cabbages might not agree). Who knows what passion for the natural world might grow from such a humble beginning?

Toadflax Brocade Moth (Photo by Ilia Ustyantsev athttps://www.flickr.com/photos/155939562@N05/41055576322)

Leg Update: Still blooming painful, but waiting to hear from the GP about possible remedies. In the meantime, watching re-runs of Masterchef and Bake-Off -The Professionals. And will probably return to my bed on the first floor today, which will make everything feel a bit more normal. Fingers crossed I can get down again (joke – if I don’t think I can get down, I won’t go up 🙂 )

Meadow froghopper (Philanus spumarius) Photoby Charles J Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38317620)

Dear Readers, as I was laying sadly on the sofa bed last night, waiting for my painkillers to kick in and wondering what position would be least painful for my leg, I felt a sudden ‘ping’, and a froghopper landed on my hand. What a surprise! I can only imagine that s/he came in when my husband brushed against the lavender in the front garden (which was full of cuckoo spit), or maybe from some laundry left briefly in the living room. But how s/he cheered me up! A bug for Bugwoman!

Two froghoppers on the back of a buddleia leaf (2023)

These insects really do look like tiny froglets – they start off green, as in the photo below, and gradually turn brown. They do little harm to plants, and are amongst the most impressive jumpers in the invertebrate world – a froghopper can jump up to 70cms, which considering it’s only half a centimetre long is a considerable feat.

Newly-emerged froghopper

Indeed, new research has shown that froghoppers are able to outperform insects that are much more famous jumpers, such as fleas -they can jump higher compared to body size, and can accelerate their heavy bodies four times faster. In fact, the force exerted during a froghopper jump is 414 times their bodyweight, compared to fleas (135 times), locusts (8 times) and humans (2-3 times). In short, what I had on my finger was a creature of Olympian abilities. I took the time to observe this most unlikely athlete, with its short legs and stubby body, for some minutes before it started to become restless, repositioning itself several times. I waited to see what would happen and indeed, it wasn’t long before ‘my’ froghopper decided to take themselves elsewhere. I felt the ‘ping’ as it catapulted itself across the vast, bleak plains of the duvet cover. I hope that it found the pot plants so that it had something to feed on!

The great thing about being interested in nature, and in particular in invertebrates, is that you’re pretty much never alone. There’s always a moth in the clothes cupboard, an ant appearing from between the floorboards, a spider in the window frame or a bumblebee bashing itself against the window. And every time, my curiosity is piqued, and I’m taken out of myself for a few minutes. Such occasions remind me that nature is always going on, doing its ‘stuff’ regardless of our personal situation, and that I’m part of a great interweaving of plants and animals, just one more organism amongst many. I find it strangely comforting.

So, in other news today we have put together a wheelchair, so soon I should be able to brave the pavements of East Finchley and go outside to see what’s been happening. As soon as it stops raining, that is…..

Pre and post operative X-rays showing intramedullary tibia nailing (not mine!)

Dear Readers, I have been hoping to get my mitts on the actual x-rays that have been taken off my poor old fractured leg, but in the absence thereof I thought I’d give you a rough idea of what’s been done. In the old days, the doctors would have tried to align the fractured ends of my bones ( a process called ‘traction’ which believe me you don’t want to experience too often) and would then have coated my leg from hip to ankle in thick plaster for six months, whilst keeping their fingers crossed. Not any more! These days you can insert a metal rod (titanium in my case) from below the kneecap right through the bone, tying in the broken ends of the fracture. Then you ‘nail’ the whole lot together horizontally. The procedure is known as intramedullary (i.e. inside the bone) nailing. The bone will grow around the internal scaffold of the pin, which shouldn’t need to be removed, and will hence send security men scuttling for their rubber gloves for the rest of my travelling career.

Well, the procedure is a miracle of modern science, but for the past few days my painkillers have only really worked for about two hours out of six, so I’ve had plenty of time to contemplate the dull ache in my bones. Eventually, this morning I realised exactly what the pain reminded me of.

“Growing pains!” I said to myself.

When I was about ten years old, and increasing in height by a couple of inches every few months (or so it seemed) I had persistent pains in my legs. The aches were really painful, to the point where they kept me awake and made me quite tearful and irritable (no difference there, then. My husband is a saint). I remember that Mum used to make me a hot water bottle, though I don’t remember any painkillers being involved – I don’t really remember being dosed with anything in the 1960s except for Rosehip Syrup and some rather tasty malt-flavoured paste called Virol.

What are growing pains, though? They’re still clearly a ‘thing’ now, described as being pain in the calves, knees or front of the thighs. They appear to be more common in very active children (being more of a bookish sort I doubt that this was the reason in my case). Strangely, the pains appear to have nothing to do with growth, which rather scuppers my theory – I was thinking that maybe the similarity of my current pain to that of my childhood days was due to the shin bone gently regenerating around my splendid titanium pin. As it is, it’s probably just my bruised and unhappy flesh accommodating itself to this unexpected new ‘visitor’.

And what else to fill the time, but to look for a poem? I found two. The first one, ‘Fracture Story’ by Nell Wright, describes some of the things that I’m currently feeling – the urge to ‘make things right’ when what I need is patience, the way that I see trip hazards and disaster everywhere, the feeling that, inside me, my body knows what to do, and is already doing it.

Fracture Story

By Nell Wright

It was a beautiful place, horizon on all sides
like diner mirrors. I sped
toward its limit and hit the asphalt hard. My arm

in the X-ray glowed like a jellyfish at night
and I wanted to slip into its ocean and go
totally numb. I wanted

to fix what I’d done, but the doctor said
Stay patient, massaging my plaster
with soap. On the radio they spoke

about a meteor shower, so we spread old
towels in the darkest back yard. While we waited
someone laid out an endless riddle

about albatrosses. Cannibalism was the answer.
Inside me, minerals were mending themselves,
sending collagen threads across

the bad chasm I’d made. From behind a wide cloud slid
stars like flecks of bone, old and glowing.
They held their breaths. When one dashed

across the black, I think I gasped
admiring the platonic plummet: it left
no fallen body. No broken heft.

In the morning I got up and walked
to the laundromat. Mountains ran
a cardiogram across the sky. Inside

two parts of me were reaching
toward each other—something I’d felt
before, but more in the mind. I started

to forgive myself. It
was a physical place. Hard
to be lonely carrying that slow embrace.

And then there’s this one, by Ellen Bass, an American poet who I admire greatly. This is about a different kind of fracture, between mother and child, but about a lot of other things besides. Since I’ve hurt my leg, I find myself thinking a lot about my mother, about how she always knew how to make things better, from growing pains to broken hearts. And about how she was in chronic pain for much of her later life, and how she still managed to make the best of it, and how much I can learn from that.  See what you think.

Fracture

Ellen Bass

When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away—
relocated they call it—
their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming.
Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart,
twisted knot, hot blood rivering
to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet.
Just weeks before
I watched a bear and her cubs run down a mountain
in the twilight.
So buoyant, they seemed to be tumbling
to the meadow,
to the yarrow root they dug, rocking
to wrest it from the hard ground, fattening for winter.
They were breathing what looked like gladness.
But that other mother . . .
Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent.
Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.

Dear Readers, while I was laying on the sofa with my leg suitably elevated I suddenly remembered that I had some bought yet more nature books, and that they were waiting at our local Post Office. So my extremely-helpful husband headed off and returned with this wonderful book about spiders, which has some of the best spider illustrations that I’ve ever seen. The book is full of hard-science and pretty pictures, and what more can you want (other than seeing the Tories booted out which is obviously a personal preference). Anyhow, I found myself intrigued with one species in particular.

Bagheera kiplingi, (male) the more or less vegetarian jumping spider (Photo By Maximilian Paradiz – https://www.flickr.com/photos/maxorz/4360611024/in/photolist-7DkgJG-7CdsDj/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47104533

This little chap is Bagheera kiplingi, a jumping spider found only in Mexico and Central America. The spider was named originally by entomologist couple George (1845 – 1914) and Elizabeth (1854-1940) Peckham, who specialised in the study of jumping spiders, and who discovered the spider in a trip to Guatemala. They named the species after Bagheera from The Jungle Book, and after Rudyard Kipling, but they didn’t stop there – other spider species were named for Akela the wolf, Naga the snake and Messua, a female character in the book. I’m not quite sure what the link between a tale about Indian wildlife and some spiders on the other side of the world was, but at least it makes the creatures easy to remember.

However, Bagheera kiplingi is unusual in another way – it is the only spider species so far discovered that is pretty much vegetarian. Furthermore, it is reliant not only on a particular group of plants (the Vachellia or thorntrees) but also on just one part of the tree. Some thorn trees produce globules of fat and nectar at the tips of their leaves, which are known as Beltian Bodies. These are produced purely to encourage the ferocious ants that protect the tree to stay put – the ants live in the thorns that the trees produce, feast on the Beltian bodies, and rush out in a frenzy if any passing antelope or monkey tries to eat the leaves.

Ants on the thorn of Vacellia – note the little yellow blob of the Beltian Body  on the leaves to the left (Photo By Ryan Somma – flickr image page, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9031797)

The jumping spider’s diet comprises 60 to 90 percent Beltian Bodies, but grabbing them obviously poses a problem – the ants would clearly kill something as small as a spider very easily. Fortunately, jumping spiders have both excellent eyesight and superb speed and jumping ability, so they can leap onto a leaf and munch a number of planty-nuggets before bouncing away again. They have been observed by scientists as they watch the flow of ants and judge their leap to fit into a gap in the traffic.

Bagheera kiplingi (Female) Photo Wayne Maddison, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Not only do the spiders avoid the ants, but they sometimes cheekily supplement their plant-based diet with an ant-larva snatched from the jaws of a worker carrying it to a new location.

Of all the 40,000 species of spider, this is the only one that relies for most of its diet on plants. However, there is so much competition in the rainforest that finding a reliable niche seems to pay off for Bagheera kiplingi. The Beltian Bodies are produced all year round, so there’s no lack of food, and except when feeding the spiders hang out in the drier parts of the plant which aren’t protected by the ants. It all seems like a pretty halcyon existence to me, unless you mistime a jump and get pulled to pieces by angry insects, and presumably the risk pays off. Nature is endlessly surprising and adaptable!

Bagheera kiplingi eating a Beltian Body (Photo from https://spooder.fandom.com/wiki/Bagheera_kiplingi

Hippo on the run (Photo Jozef020, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

Dear Readers, just because I am pretty much immobile (apart from the challenge of getting to the toilet on crutches) doesn’t mean that I’m not intrigued with animal locomotion. And so it was that yesterday I read this interesting piece about the hippopotamus. It seems to imply that at some point, when sufficiently motivated, a hippo can get airborne – i.e., all four of its legs are off the ground at the same time. This is quite a feat for such a heavy animal, and something that elephants aren’t able to do, though rhinos are apparently more gymnastic than hippos – maybe they have longer legs? At any rate, this all got me thinking about the things that we take for granted, and how animals are a constant source of wonder.

Back in the day, people used to think that horses got airborne, but got it completely wrong as to when.

Horse Race (Public Domain)

It took the photographs of Eadward Muybridge to capture the moment when a horse is actually airborne – at this point, all four legs are bent, rather than straight out like a rocking horse. You can see this clearly in the two central photos of the top row.

Scientists at the Royal Veterinary College in Hertfordshire studied captive hippos at Flamingo Land in North Yorkshire – a student was dispatched to video the hippos moving out of their night quarters and chasing one another around their paddock. When it was analysed, the film showed that the hippos really only have two gaits, the walk and the trot, but that they could get airborne at a fast trot, which happened up to 15% of the time.

Why study hippo locomotion, though? For one thing, it could give us insights into how those other giant land animals, the dinosaurs, moved. For another, understanding the biomechanics of movement can help with the medical needs of captive animals, and animals in sanctuaries. Furthermore, these are difficult animals to study – hippos are responsible for more deaths in Africa than any other large mammal, they are most active at night, and they spend the majority of their daytime hours in the water. Which brings us to another point. Hippos may seem ungainly on land, but in the water they are as graceful as a ballerina, even though they can’t actually ‘swim’ – their bodies are too dense for them to float, and so they either run along the bottom of a lake or river, or jump upwards to breathe. If you have six minutes to spare, I recommend this short BBC film on the hippos of the Okavango Delta. You won’t be disappointed!

Hippos of the Okavango

And finally, a quick medical update – still in some pain, still taking my painkillers, still sleeping downstairs, but things are definitely improving all the same. This won’t be a quick fix, so I’ll have to be patient, but everything is moving in the right direction!