Newly-fledged House Sparrow

Dear Readers, over the years I have become a subscriber to many august and academic journals, from the offerings of the British Arachnological Society to the detailed papers in British Birds. And I am frequently surprised and enlightened by the stories that pop up, from the tale of the Garden Centre Spider and a lady who was rescuing and reviving spiders from her swimming pool to the remarkable account of a blue tit feeding a family of great spotted woodpeckers. However, i have recently subscribed to BirdGuides, who promise to alert me to any unusual birds spotted in my vicinity, along with providing me with Birdwatch magazine (as fast as I unsubscribe to one thing I seem to have resubscribed to something else, ahem). And this week it has provided me with some fascinating data about the longevity of some familiar birds.

Ringing birds is something for the specialist, with a small number of ornithologists trained and permitted to do it – it should involve minimum stress to the bird if done properly, but it does provide some fascinating facts about the migration, age and condition of birds. The study by the British Trust for Ornithology revealed that a 31 year-old avocet had been found – this is a bird that was once so rare that it became the symbol for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Who knew that it lived for such a long time? These look like such delicate birds that I’m always surprised that they can survive for decades.

An avocet at RSPB Minsmere (Photo by Airwolfhound from Hertfordshire, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

However, what I found even more fascinating was the recovery of a 13 year-old house sparrow. The average lifespan of a wild house sparrow is only three years, so this was an ancient and venerable bird. House sparrows very rarely venture far from where they were hatched: they may occasionally ‘take a holiday’ as a flock during the early autumn, but in general they are very loyal to a nesting and roosting site. There are a couple of locations locally with thick hedges or with ‘old-fashioned’ roofs where the sparrows can nest, and I suspect that generations of sparrows have used and re-used these sites. How distressing it must be for them when someone new comes in and cuts the hedge, or repairs the roof!

Mum and Dad’s bungalow in Milborne St Andrew had an eight-foot high beech hedge all around it, and an old holly tree that was as thick in prickly leaves as any I’d ever seen. Every year the blackbirds and sparrows nested in the hedge, while the wily robin nested in the holly. Mum will have been dead for five years in December this year, but it was only on my last visit that I plucked up the courage to walk past their old home, fully convinced as I was that everything would have changed. But as I turned the corner I could see that the hedge was still there, beautifully trimmed, and as I past the entrance I saw that Mum and Dad’s roses were as abundant and as well-cared for as they’d been when my parents were alive. I’d like to think that the new owners enjoy the chirruping of the sparrows every bit as much as Mum and Dad did.

The beech hedge at Mum and Dad’s bungalow

And so we continue to learn more and more about the birds that we share our lives with. When we understand a bit more about a species it makes it easier to consider what they might need to thrive. When I think about a sparrow living for thirty years, I wonder what changes it has seen in its long life. Let’s hope that the sparrows fledged this year will have more to celebrate than the ones that have been born in previous decades.

Jersey Tiger Moth (Euplagia quadripunctaria)

Dear Readers, without wanting to be Pollyanna-ish, and without wanting in anyway to understate the crisis that faces us regarding the natural world, I have found it interesting to think about all the creatures that are becoming common in the UK now, and which were unheard of when I was a child. First up are some of the insects that are now not only hopping over the Channel for an occasional visit, but seem to be breeding, largely due to the milder, wetter winters that we have in the south of the UK. The Jersey Tiger would be one case in point, this year we have been positively tripping over them, and very fine they are too.

Then there’s this remarkable beastie, the UK’s largest hoverfly: usually known as the Hornet Mimic Hoverfly (Volucella zonaria). It’s a very fine fly indeed, The fly lays her eggs in the nests of wasps and other social insects, where the larvae hatch and spend their time cleaning up the detritus in the nest. I have a brief image of them wielding a tiny dustpan and brush, probably while wearing an apron and a headscarf. Clearly I should be writing children’s books.

Hornet Mimic Hoverfly (Volucella zonaria)

And who can forget the ivy bees (Colletes hederae) who occupied my attention so thoroughly last month? Again, these were rare as hen’s teeth, but have now made themselves very much at home. I draw your attention to the remarkable film of the ivy bees in reader Philip Buckley’s lawn.

But it’s not just insects. How about these birds? They have made themselves very much at home over the past thirty years, but I don’t remember ever seeing them as a child. The first Collared Dove was seen in the UK in 1952. There are now an estimated million breeding pairs. There is some thought that they are moving into rural territories vacated by the vanishingly rare Turtle Doves, but this probably isn’t the cause of the latter bird’s decline – agricultural practices seem to be more likely to be the reason, as rewilding efforts at places like Knepp have managed to increase their breeding success.

Collared Doves are extremely adaptable birds, and I have a great fondness for the way that they sound like a child’s trumpet when the males are chasing the females around. I was about to say ‘during the breeding season’, but Collared Doves breed all year round, another reason for their success.

Collared Dove (Streptopelia decaocta)

And then there are these chaps. If you had told me when I was a child that I would be watching ring-necked parakeets feeding in my garden I would have been amazed, but here we are.

The first ring-necked parakeets bred in the UK in 1971. In 2022, the British Trust for Ornithology estimated that there were about 12,000 breeding pairs in the UK, largely in the London area at the moment though they are clearly moving into other areas at some speed. The jury is out concerning their impact on other wildlife, especially tree-nesting birds, but to be frank at this point it’s too late to be worrying. Monitoring is continuing, but habitat protection and restoration is key to ensure that there’s enough dead wood about for everybody.

And finally, here’s someone that I never saw in town when I was a child, let alone in my back garden. Urban foxes really have become part of the landscape of London and many other cities. Foxes were first seen in London in the 1930s but they are much more obvious than they used to be, and I suspect more numerous – we are much more wasteful creatures than we were in the 1930s, and our leftover food is what attracts these animals. Plus, in many cases we urbanised around foxes who were already there: in other words, we moved into their territories. It’s good to see another adaptable animal living alongside us. In our nature-deprived country, we need all the reminders of wildness that we can get.

‘Woolly Bear’ caterpillar

Dear Readers, when I was writing my piece about starlings yesterday it seemed to strike a chord with quite a few people. ‘What’s happened to the starlings, and the sparrows?’ they asked, with genuine distress. There’s now a word for this, solastalgia – it was coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005, and it describes the feeling, akin to homesickness, that we get when something in our home environment changes. It can be something as dramatic as a earthquake or volcano, or even when someone has built all over your history. This happened to me when I returned to my home town of Stratford in East London after Westfield and the Olympic Park had been built, and I could barely find my way from the old shopping centre because so much had changed. However, the deep meaning of the word is the sense of being disconnected with where we live because the natural environment has changed.Increasingly, we’re mourning for the fall in abundance and the loss of species of creatures that we shared our childhoods with. For me, there’s a real sadness about the woolly bear caterpillars, technically the larvae of the Garden Tiger moth. Although we had a tiny garden you could guarantee to see some of these furry beasties galloping across the cement path, in search of something or other to eat. If you picked them up, they curled into a little ball, just like the one in the photo, but if you were patient they’d uncurl and head off up your arm. You could feel the difference between the little suckers on the back legs and the hooks on the front ones. Every so often, the caterpillar would lift its head and wave around in search of a plant to munch on. I would always pop them back after a few minutes.

I don’t remember the last time that I saw a woolly bear caterpillar in London.

Garden Tiger larvae (Photo by TigerTatoo, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

These are not particularly picky eaters, and they’d certainly gobble up most of the ‘weeds’ in our garden. If I remember correctly, they had a particular taste for docks of all kinds, and could sometimes be found in the little patch of nettles right in the corner. So what’s happened to them? Butterfly Conservation blame weedkillers and the habit of ‘tidying up’ everything from hedgerows to gardens. It makes me happy that more and more people are tolerating wild corners in their plots, because these are just the kinds of spaces where caterpillars of all kinds thrive. While it’s nice to have plants for adult pollinators to feed on, they also need places to lay their eggs and for their larvae to feed on.

It would be lovely if the next generation of children could also make friends with, and learn lessons from, invertebrates of all kinds. These creatures are on a child-friendly scale, and children seem to have a natural affinity with creepy-crawlies of all kinds, at least before they get older and a bit more squeamish and easily influenced by ideas of what’s cute and what’s not.  We had a fungi walk in Coldfall Wood this weekend, and the children were enthralled with a leopard slug, and even more fascinated with a blob of slug eggs. That curiosity and natural empathy might be what saves all of us, in the end.

I would not want to diminish in any way the scale of the environmental challenge that faces all of us. To return to the starlings that I wrote about yesterday, the size of the murmuration at Brighton Beach has dropped from over 100,000 individual birds to just 8,000 in the past forty years. But I have to believe that it’s possible to help by the pressure that we put on our governments, the way that we live and the opportunities that we provide in our homes and gardens and parks for animals and plants to make their home. Tomorrow, I’ll write about the creatures that have appeared during my 60-odd years, animals that I would never have dreamed of seeing up close and personal when I was a child. In the meantime, let me know what has been lost of the creatures that you used to see. We can honour and grieve them together.

Fledgling starling

Dear Readers, there are few sights in nature so compelling as a starling murmuration, and this is a great time of year to see one. Once upon a time you could even see this event in central London – I used to sit with my Mum on a bench in St James’s Park overlooking the lake, and the starlings would fly in from all directions as the light faded, massing and pulsing, the shape of the flock constantly morphing and changing until finally they settled for the night.  In ‘Nature’s Calendar’, Kiera Chapman has a wonderful description:

‘A liquid swirl of birds in a twilight sky, like billowing smoke become animate, rippling and pulsing in an aerial ballet of contoured Henry Moore figures, sometimes shimmering and transcendent, sometimes ominously threatening. The unearthly sound of their wings overhead, like the sound of the distant sea‘.

There is something about a mass of individual animals acting as one  that is spine-tingling and can bring me close to tears. Have a look at this film, and see what you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4f_1_r80RY

Starling Murmuration at RSPB Minsmere (Photo Airwolfhound, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

There are different views about why starlings have this evening ritual. Some suggest that it confuses predators, especially peregrine falcons. Chapman explains how, when a murmuration is relaxed, the flock is ‘diluted’ – spread out in space. When the birds spot a peregrine actively hunting, the birds bunch together in a response known as ‘blackening’. You can sometimes see a pulse spread through the flock in what’s called a ‘wave-event’, as each bird tries to get closer to the bird in front, causing a black line to pass through the murmuration. If the peregrine suddenly dives from above the birds scatter in a ‘flash expansion’, rather like a bursting firework. The murmuration may also split in two to avoid a peregrine, or even develop a hole where the falcon is flying, known as a ‘vacuole’. If you watch the murmuration film above, you can see several of these changes, and others beside. And in the photo below, a falcon to the top right has caused the murmuration to bunch up and split into two parts.

Anyone who has watched a murmuration will be astonished by how quickly the whole ‘organism’ can change direction. Craig Reynolds, a computer scientist working in the 1980s, built a model of this behaviour based on only three factors:

• Each bird avoids colliding with other birds
• Each individual bird would try to match the speed and alignment of the birds around it
• Each bird would try to move towards the centre of the murmuration (birds on the edge are more likely to be predated).

These simple rules provided a pretty good model for group behaviour in animals, but normally you would expect to see them diluted across a flock as it thinned out, and this doesn’t happen with murmurations – one little bird seeing a falcon can influence the behaviour of all of its flock mates in a fraction of a second. Scientists now believe that starlings are so attuned to a sudden change in direction of another bird that they are in effect primed – the murmuration exists in a state of what’s known as criticality, on the edge of changing at all times. This means that information from any single bird is transmitted across the whole murmuration with, as Chapman says, ‘incredible speed, and without loss’.

This extraordinary ability to react doesn’t always serve starlings, unfortunately. A few years ago several hundred dead starlings were found in a lane in Anglesey, which created all kinds of theories about what had happened. Scientists came to the conclusion that the birds had tried to avoid a bird of prey but the birds at the tail-end of the murmuration hadn’t been able to pull up in time, and had struck the road and been killed. In 2010 a similar incident occurred in Somerset, though here the thought was that the birds had mistaken the gravel drive of a house for a reed bed and had misjudged the height. But be that as it may, the biggest danger to starling murmurations is the fall in number of the starlings themselves and the destruction of their habitat.  You will  look in vain for such a sight in central London these days, after starlings were evicted from places like Leicester Square because they were too messy and noisy. I hope that the descendants of those birds have moved to the seaside and joined one of the last big murmurations that I know about, around Brighton Pier. There’s a really nice short film here showing what happens, and it’s really tempting to just jump on a train and go and see it! Maybe there’s something a bit closer to home though. Do share if you know of any murmurations in London. I feel deeply nostalgic for the sights of my youth.

Dear Readers, over the past few months we have been suffering from an epidemic of graffiti here in Coldfall Wood. Normally, the fences and the walls are spray-painted, but for the first time since I’ve been living in East Finchley someone has taken to tagging the living trees as well, along with a memorial bench.

There is something particularly invidious about despoiling something that someone has set up to memorialise a loved one, someone who loved the woods, and this is a very popular bench – mothers sit there for a well-earned rest with their babies and toddlers, dog walkers take the weight off of their legs, youngsters scroll their phones and chat.

And then, there is the effect on the trees – it’s easy to forget that they are living things and that although the bark appears dead, it can still absorb the toxic chemicals in the paint. Furthermore, there are photo-receptors in the stem which can be blocked, and gas exchange between the tree and the environment can be affected.

And finally, I believe in ‘broken window theory’ – if a place looks as if nobody cares about it (and nothing could be further from the truth in Coldfall Wood) then it encourages other people to behave badly. This is one reason why we litter-pick, for example.

The graffiti has been reported to Haringey Council on numerous occasions over the past few weeks, and, to be fair, offensive graffiti is removed very quickly. However, stuff like this isn’t a priority for cash-strapped and understaffed local organisations and so a group of local people (including some of the Friends of Coldfall Wood) took things into their own hands. Armed with some Graffiti-Go (a water-based, non-toxic paint remover) they went to work, and the results bring me a little frisson of joy. The memorial bench has also been cleaned up.

Before

After

Before

After

It might feel as if we’re helpless these days, with so many terrible things going on, but I do believe that what we do as individuals matters. Someone might come back and graffiti the trees, but we’ll be back to clean it up again. Increasingly, people seem to be respecting the wood and feeling protective of it, and this has to be a good thing. We are so lucky to live close to ancient woodland, and it gives us so much, from a beautiful place to walk to a chance to interact respectfully with nature. It is often easier to make a difference than we think.

Christmas Cactus

Dear Readers, in my ‘plant hospital’ (i.e. a desk at the back of the house) my Christmas Cacti have been quietly minding their own business all year, before suddenly busting forth in the past week or so. They are so splendid that I had to share them with you. The white one is smothered in flowers, and I love the magenta stigma against the ivory of the petals.

The pink one is not quite so floriferous, but even so, the flowers are enough to cheer anyone up.

And the red one has only a few flowers, poor little thing, but I seem to remember that that was the same last year.

What I’m puzzled about is what exactly has triggered these plants into flowering. Is it day length? Is it that I suddenly started watering them a bit more? Whatever the reason, they are all a bit previous, poor dears, as they are Christmas cacti and now it will all be over by the big day. Nonetheless, I am delighted that they’re flowering again, and now I just need to think what to do when they’ve finished. Should I be repotting them? Feeding them? Watering them less? Over to you, Readers! If you’ve managed to keep a Christmas Cacti for years, I bow to your superior knowledge and expertise. Failing that, I will be pulling out my copy of ‘The House Plant Expert’ by Dr D.G Hessayon that I have had for about a century, and actually reading it. As indeed I should, as it’s now out of print and selling for nearly £40 on Amazon.

And if you want to read a bit more about Christmas Cacti, here’s a Wednesday Weed that I did on these very plants in 2021. So they’ve survived two years. Thank you to my lovely friend Jo who bought them for me as a Christmas present.

New Zealand’s Bird of the Year – The pūteketeke. Does it look familiar? Photo from Pūteketeke: New Zealand crowns ‘bird of the century’ championed by John Oliver | CNN

Dear Readers, New Zealand has just announced its ‘Bird of the Century’, the Australasian Crested Grebe and when I saw photos of it I was slightly puzzled. Surely this was a straightforward Great Crested Grebe, as spotted on the reservoir at Walthamstow Wetlands only the day before? And indeed it was, though the bird, known in Maori as the pūteketeke or ‘puking bird’ is the Australasian subspecies, Podiceps cristatus australis.

The bird had an able ‘campaign manager’ in the form of television host and comedian John  Oliver. He bought up billboards in New Zealand (famous for the Lord of the Rings films) and popped up a photo of the bird with the words ‘Lord of the Wings’. He managed to persuade the American host of the Today Show to appear dressed as a Great Crested Grebe (sadly I’ve been unable to find a photo of the costume). He campaigned not only in New Zealand, but in the UK, US, Japan and France, and flew a plane above Rio de Janeiro with a campaign banner. The competition normally only attracts about 35,000 votes, but this year it received over 350,000, with 290,000 for the pūteketeke.

Photo by Bernard Spragg at https://www.flickr.com/photos/volvob12b/23475117089

What’s with all this stuff about puking though? Apparently the bird will sometimes eat feathers and then regurgitate them in order to reduce its parasite load. Personally, I suspect that the temptation to link the bird’s name, pūteketeke. to puke was too good for Oliver to miss. But anyhow, here we are. The Australasian Great Crested Grebe is rare in New Zealand (less than 1000 pairs), so it could probably do with all the help it can get.

Personally, though, my favourite New Zealand bird is probably the Kakapo. Who can forget that magnificent  film where a particularly randy bird attempts to mate with the cameraman’s head? And what’s not to love about a rare, noctural, flightless parrot? And there are only 252 of them (as at 2023). Come on people! 

Sirocco the kakapo. Photo by By Department of Conservation – https://www.flickr.com/photos/docnz/4015891720/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48081940

And then there’s the rather splendid Kea, another parrot but one which has had a rather trickier relationship with humans. Intelligent and destructive, it was accused of injuring sheep and other domestic animals, and while this proved to be true, the subsequent hunting reduced Kea numbers to less than 5000. These days the bird is protected, so it can dismantle cars and torment tourists as much as it likes.

Kea investigating a car full of tourists (Photo by By Bold_kea.jpg: Peti Deuxmontderivative work: Avenue (talk) – Bold_kea.jpg, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9032026)

And who can resist a Kiwi, with its nostrils at the base of its beak and the fact that its eggs are larger as a percentage of body weight than those of any other bird on earth?

Young kiwi (Photo by By Stewart Nimmo – Released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence by Development West Coast as part of the West Coast Wikipedian at Large project., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94641030)

So, whatever you think about the campaign for New Zealand’s Bird of the Century (and the knocking of the Kiwi off the top of the chart has led to charges of ‘foreign interference’ which it’s difficult to dispute under the circumstances), it’s always good to see birds in the news, particularly rare birds. The extraordinary birds of New Zealand need all the loving attention and protection that they can get, as they face threats from habitat destruction, climate change and invasive species. Long may they continue to be a source of dissension.

Kea about to land and showing orange flight feathers (Photo from CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9031801)

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, only a few days ago I was exhorting everyone to ‘watch the skies’, but today I am inviting you all (well, at least those of you in temperate zones) to ‘watch your feet’ instead, because the leaves are making some very fine patterns at the moment. What an extraordinary transformation is going on! I suspect that the breakdown and decay of the leaves from deciduous trees is the biggest annual change in biomass in the seasonal areas of the world, and as it happens it releases an ephemeral but evocative smell. Scuffling through leaves reminds me instantly of looking for conkers in the garden of my Aunt Mary’s care home, of walking with friends through the local woods, of raking up leaves for the Guy Fawkes bonfire that we used to have when I was a child.

As Rebecca Warren explains in her article in Nature’s Calendar, the different parts of the leaves decay at different rates. Fungi are very important detritivores, spreading their hyphae over the fallen leaves like tiny fingers and extracting the nutrients that they need. Slugs, snails, bacteria and worms all get to work, and the frost and rain help break down the trickier elements of the leaf. Lignin forms the skeleton of the leaf, and is often the last part to remain.

I also love those ‘ghosts’ of leaves that you sometimes see on a particular kind of paving stone, where the leaf has disappeared, but its ‘shadow’ remains.

Of course, if you live in the UK one reason often used for disruption on the railways is ‘leaves on the line’. But why? Well, the tracks are lined with literally millions of trees (and there used to be a lot more mature trees alongside the route for HS2 which have now been cut down) (don’t get me started) and they all shed their leaves over the course of a month or so, leading to a mulch on the rails. This makes the rails slippery, and so train drivers have to accelerate and brake more carefully, which can cause slower journeys and delays. ‘Leaf fall timetables’ are in place for many of the more rural lines, including my regular journey from Waterloo to Dorchester to visit Mum and Dad’s grave. I note that the first three trains of the day in both directions will be leaving 5 minutes earlier, so I had better make a note. If you are in the UK and want to check your trains for ‘leaf fall timetable changes’, have a look here.

Well, as the rain pours down outside and the leaves gently turn to mush, here is a poem by Amy Boothby, aged 10. Many of the poems by adults equate autumn with sadness and loss and endings, but not our Amy, who sees the excitement of it all. Let’s be more Amy whenever possible!

Autumn, by Amy Boothby (Age 10)

Look at the different coloured leaves,
Swaying gently with the breeze,
Lovely reds, browns and greens,
All waiting to fall from the trees.
When they leave they twist and turn,
Ready to join the masses of fern,
Landing softly on the ground,
You can taste the smell of autumn, all around.

Dear Readers, I have been watching the influx of Bohemian Waxwings this year with some interest, and not a little excitement. These handsome birds ‘irrupt’ out of Scandinavia during years when the berry supply that they rely on in Scandinavia starts to run out, and they head south and west. It looks like quite a promising winter, with birds arriving in some numbers on the east coast of Scotland, and with some turning up now in East Anglia. There is also one record from Richmond Park.

I have been lucky enough to see waxwings actually in my very own street here in East Finchley, munching berries from the whitebeam tree just up the road from the Kentucky Fried Chicken on the corner. I first spotted them on an icy day in 2010, and then they were back in 2017 in the very same tree. They tend to stay around until they’ve eaten practically all the berries, and as they defecate every four minutes this can make for a very ‘interesting’ abstract pattern under the tree. However, while they’re feeding they seem absolutely fearless: they were unconcerned about me and my camera, and the various other people that I grabbed and forced to watch as the birds flew about. There is a rumour that waxwings can get ‘drunk’ on the fermenting berries, which may account for their devil-may-care attitude. Anyhow, I shall be keeping a very close eye on this tree, just in case.

You don’t have to be out in the wilds (or indeed the suburbs) to spot waxwings either: in 2005 160 waxwings were recorded in the trees outside Warren Street Station in Central London, and the largest London flock ever recorded was at Lakeside Shopping Centre, with 367 seen in 2011. The species is sometimes known as ‘the carpark bird’ because if there’s a cotoneaster hedge, or some pyracantha, or a few rowan or whitebeam trees the birds will often hang about, sometimes for as long as a week. So another place that I’m keeping a close eye on is the carpark at the Sunshine Garden Centre, which has some splendid Pyracantha bushes.

Pyracantha at the Sunshine Garden Centre

Incidentally, even if the waxwings don’t show up, these are great sites for the various little thrushes that arrive in the UK at this time of year, especially Redwings. My first sight of a Redwing is always an indication to me that winter has finally arrived.

Redwing in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery last year.