Male jumping spider

Dear Readers, I have been writing this blog since 2014 (on a daily basis since lockdown in 2020) and I feel as if I still haven’t cracked two related stylistic problems when I write about animals.

First up, how do we describe the sex of an animal when we don’t know whether it’s male or female? I remember when I was a young woman I had a huge poster of a blue whale on my wall.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” I enthused to a friend.

“How do you know it’s female?” my friend asked.

“How do you know it’s not?” I replied. And herein is the problem.

We have a tendency, probably enshrined in the way that English has developed, to regard all animals as male unless they are definitely known to be female, and to me this doesn’t feel right. After all, in most species there’s a roughly 50:50 split. Take the case of Community Vole, for example. It’s hard to sex little rodents at the best of times, and so I ended up with my usual workaround – the vole was described as s/he or they according to the context.

I do appreciate that I am not consistent on this (I keep trying things out to see what seems the least clunky/the most elegant), but it does address this particular problem, for me at least. Because it matters to me that we at least acknowledge that the animal that we’re looking at has an equal chance of being female or male.

Sometimes, of course, it’s clear that an animal is male (as in the jumping spider above – the pedipalps (little boxing gloves) at the front are only possessed by males) or female (the fox in the photo below showed herself to be a vixen when she squatted to pee, rather than lifting her leg as a male would).

But Bug Woman, I hear you say, surely the easy answer is to call animals ‘it’, in the time-honoured tradition? Well, this is my second stylistic problem, because to call something ‘it’ denies it all individuality and personhood, and designates it as an object. I am sure many of us remember ‘Silence of the Lambs’, and the particularly creepy bit where the serial killer is trying to persuade his captive victim to put some skin lotion on, for reasons too dreadful to contemplate here.

“It puts the lotion on its skin” he intones.

Once something is an ‘it’, you can do whatever you like to it, and there is far too much ‘it-ing’ going on in the world.

And yes, I have sometimes used ‘it’ in my pieces when I’m in a rush and have no idea how to work around whatever problem has been thrown up by the story I’m trying to tell. But it always feels lazy to me. My cat is not an ‘it’. The birds in my garden are not ‘it’. Even the spider on the web in my living room window, being buffeted by the wind as I write this, is not an ‘it’ (in fact I’m 99% sure that she’s a she).

And so here I am, trying to be respectful and tying myself in knots, but I do think there is a serious point here. In various places in the world, rivers, mountains and other natural features are being considered for the status of legal personhood, as a way of protecting them, because persons have certain inalienable rights. It feels more important than ever that we celebrate the uniqueness and individuality of an animal and that we recognise that it, too, has personality and a way of being in the world. Because as the story of Community Vole showed us, it’s easier for people to care about one animal than about animals in general, just as the story of one homeless person or one refugee can make us feel an empathy that statistics and generalisations never can.

Let me know what you think, Readers! Do all these convolutions get in the way of enjoying the blog, or do they make the blog feel more thoughtful and inclusive?

Dear Readers, I like to think of myself as pretty immune to fear when it comes to insects, though obviously I have a healthy respect for those that can bite and sting and will give them the space that they need. But as a child I had a completely irrational terror of the common-or-garden cranefly, or daddy-long-legs as they’re known in the UK. There’s something about the way that they fly so erratically that still gives me the shivers, though I’m much more under control than I used to be. After all, these creatures are harmless and, once hatched, have vanishingly short lives. For me they are the quintessential sign of autumn, as they bask in the sunshine or search for places to lay their eggs. Mum and Dad’s bungalow walls in Dorset were often covered in them, and it was a rare evening when a daddy-long-legs didn’t fly in and bash itself half to death against the ceiling light.

These are a very ancient type of fly: they were probably bumbling around 245 million years ago, and there are over 15,000 species of cranefly, in 500 genera. I was delighted to hear that scientists describe them as ‘deciduous’, not because they lose their leaves easily but because their legs detach very easily from their bodies, presumably as a way to thwart predators. In my more unenlightened days I would sometimes attempt to swat craneflies, and was always horrified at how easily their legs would come off. Furthermore, sometimes I would assume that the insect was dead only to hear it rustling some hours later, finally lifting off out of the wastepaper basket where its supposed corpse had been deposited and flying around the room like some zombie invertebrate. These days, I will carefully catch an errant cranefly in a glass and take it outside, which is much kinder. Mostly craneflies cannot feed as adults, and are really just waiting to mate, lay their eggs and die. I am pretty sure that the one in the photo is a gravid female.

While most baby animals have a kind of charm, it’s hard to find find anything cute about a larval cranefly, or leatherjacket. In many of those 15,000 species, the larva is a detritivore, helping to tidy up rotting vegetation. Alas, the commonest UK craneflies (Tipula sp.) include some species where the larvae feed on the roots of living plants – you will sometimes dig up a leatherjacket when trying to sort out a lawn, for example. Fortunately, the larvae are also a juicy snack for many birds, including crows, magpies, jackdaws and especially rooks. There was one famous incident in 1935 when there were so many leatherjackets under the wicket at Lords cricket ground that the groundstaff were tasked with digging them up and burning them (surely putting them on a bird table would have been a more ecological way to deal with the situation, but these were less enlightened times). Our old friend Wikipedia notes that ‘the pitch took unaccustomed spin for the rest of the season’.

This was clearly a problem across the country in the mid 1930s, and for your delectation, here is a 1936 article from The Guardian, which is a pure delight. As a sample, here is a description of a leatherjacket from the piece in question:

‘a horrible thing like a midget concertina, more or less the same at both ends, without any legs‘.

I have no idea what Paris Green is, but I do like the idea of turning over the soil to expose the grubs to their natural enemies.

Leatherjacket (Photo by Rasbak, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

I really do want to work on my attitude to craneflies, though. Their lives are short, and they can’t help having detachable legs and little aeronautical skill. Their heads look rather like those of miniature carousel horses, and I find that that helps a bit, though you could argue that it would be a roundabout from hell.

Head of a cranefly (Photo by By Thomas Shahan – Crane Fly – (Tipula), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8998257)

However, the largest cranefly in the world was recently discovered in China, and has the scientific name Holurusia mikado.

Horusia mikado, the world’s largest cranefly (Photo from https://www.chinadailyhk.com/articles/38/140/76/1524561317187.html)

Sadly, many newspapers recorded the species as a mosquito, even though the insect barely feeds, and only eats nectar when it does. Poor cranefly! I can feel my empathy winning out over fear, as it so often does. It can’t be a lot of fun being a cranefly. To end, here’s a rather sad summing up of the life of the daddy-long-legs, written by Craig Brown at the height of an ‘explosion’ of craneflies in 2006, and included in ‘Bugs Britannica’ by Peter Marren and Richard Mabey.

“It is, I suppose, this sense of their utter uselessness that makes us pity them, and perhaps even, in our more downhearted moments, identify with them. Their life is all such an effort – and to what purpose?….Swarms of male daddy longlegs dance around like drunken morons on the lookout for lady friends. Copulation sounds like a grim affair for both parties. ‘The male genitalia include a pair of claspers which grip the female genital valves’, says one encyclopedia, ‘but in order to do so the male’s abdomen has to be twisted through 180 degrees’. Their only pleasure in life seems to be cleaning their legs, which they do obsessively after each meal, pulling them one at a time through their jaws. After all this, they bluster into a light-bulb, have a pot-shot taken at them, lose half their legs, crawl around for a bit, lose the other half, and then die. It’s not a life to be envied, I think, as I reach for the dustpan and brush”.

Dear Readers, it’s surprisingly hard to find beech trees here in East Finchley – it’s very much oak and hornbeam in the areas of ancient woodland, and the large street trees tend to be London plane or lime. And yet, in Hampstead Garden Suburb, just off of Ossulton Way, I discovered a cul-de-sac which is planted with nothing but beech trees. If you didn’t already know, you could tell by the crunch of the beech nuts (otherwise known as mast) that crunch underfoot.

Beech mast

Beech (Fagus sylvatica) are very muscular trees, with silvery-grey bark that can be smooth as silk, or criss-crossed with horizontal etchings and multiple ‘eyes’.

The leaves look a little like those of hornbeam, with distinct veining, but those of the beech are less ‘toothy’ at the edges of the leaf.

Mast, though, is one reason why beech trees are not planted along our streets as often as trees such as London plane. The trees produce their ‘nuts’ in vast quantities every two to three years, and at these times the pavements can be carpeted with brown seeds. However, this isn’t the only thing that people find to complain about.  As I was taking my photographs, a woman emerged from her house.

“I’m just photographing the beech trees”, I said, just in case she thought I was a grey-haired burglar’s sidekick, ‘casing the joint’ in advance of a robbery.

“They’re a nuisance!” she said. “At this time of year you can be sweeping up your front drive two or three times a day”.

Oh well. It’s easy to forget all the shade that the trees provide during the summer, and their wildlife value, which is extensive: finches, in particular visiting bramblings, find the nuts irresistible. But I wonder how it was decided that the whole of this small road (Holyoake Walk in case you’re ever in the vicinity) would be planted with beech, when it’s such an unusual tree locally?) Hampstead Garden Suburb is very protective of its historic nature, and so the council’s current policy is to replace damaged or diseased trees with one of the same species. I suspect that the lady will be sweeping up leaves for many years to come.

Brambling (Fringilla montifringilla) Photo by Mike Pennington

A variant of beech that you’re more likely to see is the purple variant, the copper beech. These trees can look stunning with the sun behind them, though not much sun today. But although this is a more well-behaved tree, I still find the ‘true’ beeches irresistible. They seem to be native to southern England and Wales, but have been planted throughout the rest of the country. Folklore has it that the King of the Forest is the oak, but the beech is the Queen. Long may she reign.

Dear Readers, I know I promised that I wouldn’t mention ivy bees again, but last week I was contacted by reader Phillip Buckley. Here’s what he said:

“We’ve had hundreds, nay, thousands of these bees in our front lawn for 4 or 5 years around this time of year, and I now know what they are thanks to your post.  I always thought it odd that I never saw one on any of the many nearby flowers (and thought they were being pretty rubbish ‘bees’ as a result) but never thought to look at the ivy encrusted old stone wall at the front of our road.  Right now, there are so many cruising all over our lawn at a height of just one or two inches that it is frankly scary to walk through them and even more impossible to mow the lawn!  I read that the males don’t or can’t sting but the females will if annoyed – my wife isn’t prepared to test that theory and has had them climb up inside her trouser legs so now always tucks her trouser bottoms into her socks when gardening.  In previous years they’ve mainly built their nests in the vertical cut edge of the lawn but this year they’re also all over the surface of the lawn as witnessed by the hundreds of piles of sifted soil.  They also spend a lot of their time exhibiting the frenzied mating behaviour you describe.  This all lasts for a few short weeks and then, suddenly, they’re gone for another year.  I have a few photographs although it’s difficult to capture the shear density of them and can’t put them up on this reply panel anyhow.  We won’t be removing the ivy anytime soon as we think it’s all that’s holding our stone wall together so I guess we’ll be sharing our space for a few more years yet!?”

Well, clearly I had to investigate further, and Phillip kindly sent me some photos. He and his wife are obviously great friends to nature, because what they have going on in their garden is a scene of bee-abundance that is vanishingly rare these days.

Below you can see a fine bank of ivy that no doubt the bees will use for nectar and pollen.

These are the nests at the edge of the lawn…

Here is the lawn itself….

And here are some male bees forming a mating ball in their excitement…

Ivy bees going about their business…..

And most wonderful of all, here’s a short film that gives you some idea of their abundance.

Honestly, who needs to go to the Serengeti when there are wildlife spectacles like this? As Phillip says, in a few weeks it will all be over for another year, and trousers can be untucked and lawn-mowers taken out of the shed. If only we could all be so understanding of the needs of the creatures that we share our space with, the world would be a much nicer place.

Dear Readers, you might remember that one of my many ambitions when I retired was to visit all the London Wildlife Trust nature reserves, so I thought I’d start with an easy win. Camley Natural Park is a few tube stops down the line from East Finchley, and is one of the most urban of the reserve sites, with the Eurostar and LNER trains whistling past in one direction, the canal running alongside and the shops of Coal Drops Yard and Granary Square just minutes away.

The view from the bridge over the canal next to Camley Natural Park

Still, once you’re past the café and into the reserve itself, peace reigns. There’s an area of marshy land and a pond that feeds directly from the canal, and dragonflies and other water insects flit past.

There’s lots of hemp agrimony but looking at it, I’m aware that the plant in my garden is a cultivar, rather than the wild plant – the seed heads here are much fluffier. Autumn really is a time for texture, and from the spikiness of the teasels to the softness of this plant everything begs to be touched.

And how about this Old Man’s Beard/Traveller’s Joy next to the bridge into the reserve? Our only native clematis, this plant produces what my mum would have called ‘hair do’s’.

The reserve is usually pretty quiet during the week, and I’m always impressed by the sheer variety of people who visit – an elderly man was reading his paper and sipping a cup of coffee by the main pond, toddlers rampage along the paths, friends wander and chat, and yet there’s something about the place that inspires calm as soon as you step through the gate.

I’ve seen  heron here before, but today there were some coots at one end of the pond, and some moorhens at the other. The coots were feasting on the water plants beneath the duckweed (I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one fighting a losing battle with the stuff), and the moorhens had two well-grown chicks. They kept them  close to them, though, and I wondered if the coots were sometimes as aggressive to other species as they are to one another.

One coot was standing on what was probably once a nest site. I love coots’ feet! The extra surface area means that they can shovel their way through the water at some speed, as anyone has ever watched the shenanigans during the breeding season will have noticed.

Eurasian Coot (Fulica atra).

Coot munching on water weed.

The moorhens (Gallinupa chloropus)  are much smaller, daintier birds. This family had two chicks, one of which was developing the red beak which is one way to distinguish between the two species, though the coot’s white ‘crash helmet’ is probably the most diagnostic feature.

And then it’s off along the path again.

At this time of year, the only birds that really sing are the robins and the wrens, but what the reserve lacks in variety it makes up for in quantity – there was a robin singing about every ten metres, and when they weren’t singing they were ‘chinking’ at one another. Such territorial little birds!

Here’s an example of a robin singing, by David Darrell-Lambert and taken from Xeno-Canto (David has led dawn chorus walks in Coldfall Wood in the past)

And here’s an example of that ‘chinking’ call, this time by a Swedish robin and recorded by Lars Edenius

It was good to see lots of wood piles too, which are great for fungi and for all manner of invertebrates and small mammals.

And finally, it was good to see some cyclamen in flower: it’s easy to forget that, although these plants are not strictly native, the autumn-flowering species (Cyclamen hederifolium) has been in the UK since 1596, and has been seen in the wild since 1597. It can be surprisingly popular with bees looking for a little late summer nectar and pollen, and I love how delicate the flowers are.

So, if you’re stuck in Kings Cross and are desperate for a little taste of nature, I can very much recommend Camley Natural Park, for its peace and for its variety of plants and animals. And the coffee at the café isn’t too shoddy either.

The Kingfisher Cafe (from Architecture Today magazine (https://architecturetoday.co.uk/camley-street-natural-park-learning-centre-erect-architecture-london/)

Dear Readers, the brown and distorted leaves of the horse chestnuts on Hampstead Heath tell their own story of how things have changed during my lifetime, and particularly during the last twenty years. If you had a look at the short film in the blog that I did a few days ago, you’ll have seen that loveliest of things, a horse chestnut in full leaf. These days, we’re lucky if they get past flowering before the leaf miners and the various fungi that attack the tree have turned those big palmate leaves into a patchwork of brown and yellow, before they shrivel and fall.

Horse chestnut leaves, July 2022

It’s said that these various ‘pests’ won’t kill the trees, but I do wonder if the leaf damage over successive years weakens them. After all, most of them are relatively recent. The leaf miner, a tiny moth whose caterpillars actually live between the layers of the leaf, was only sighted for the first time in 2002. Since then it has been working its way steadily across the country, until most of our horse chestnuts are a tatty mess long before they should be losing their leaves. The trees are also producing fewer and smaller conkers, which is a shame for any remaining children who like to play with them. However, there is evidence that blue tits are starting to get the hang of feeding on the larvae, and it’s hoped that parasitic wasps might recognise this handy food source, as they often do. Let’s hope it’s soon.

In ‘Nature’s Calendar’, Rowan Jaines tells the story of how the horse chestnut first arrived in the UK. It’s been here long enough for many people to think that it’s a native, and to be honest I thought it was another one of the things that the Romans had done for us, but no. The first record of the Horse Chestnut in Europe is from 1576, when the tree was planted in the gardens of the imperial palace in Vienna. It was so impressive that it spread across the gardens of the continent, with two trees arriving in France in 1615. One of the trees lived in the grounds of the Hotel Soubise in Paris until its death in 1840, while a second lasted until 1767 in the Jardin des Plantes. Louis XIV loved the tree so much that he ordered avenues of the trees to be planted at Versailles, assuring that the tree would be fashionable, and would spread across the estates and gardens of the rich throughout the eighteenth century.

However, its place of origin was something of a mystery. The first trees planted came from Turkey, and horse chestnuts were thought to be of Asian origin right up until the nineteenth century, when it was found that their home range was actually in the Balkans, in the mountains of Bulgaria, Albania and Greece.

Horse chestnut bud

However, what’s very interesting to me is how the tree got the name ‘horse chestnut’. I always wondered if it was something to do with the shape of the bud, which could possibly look like a horse’s hoof (if you squint). However, it appears that the conkers were ground up and used as medicine for coughs and chest complaints in horses as far back as the sixteenth century. In fact, chemical compounds in conkers have been found to control inflammation and swelling and reduce the accumulation of the fluid that causes the horses to cough, so there is scientific evidence for centuries-old practices. I always find it heartening when the skills of generations stand up to twenty-first century scrutiny, as many often do. Let’s celebrate the horse chestnut, that most impressive of trees, and let’s hope that nature soon finds a way to balance the effect of its parasites.

Horse chestnut flowers

Frogs in the pond in 2022

Dear Readers, this has to be my favourite New Scientist headline so far this year. See what you think:

Frogs have attempted sex with other species for millions of years.

Well, I don’t know about you but this seems like a pretty rubbish life strategy, though my observation of the frogs in my garden strongly suggests that this could be true. At the height of the breeding season, the frogs attempt to mate with other male frogs, they mob the females and if there were toads or goldfish in the pond I’m pretty sure that they’d try to mate with them as well. Frogs have been observed engaged in sexual congress with boots, turtles, dead frogs and frogs of a completely different species. 

One theory is that in situations of explosive breeding, where lots of males emerge from hibernation at once and there are relatively few females, grabbing whatever you can find and hanging on like billy-o would usually pay off. Frog mating involves amplexus, in which a male grabs a female and hangs on with a specially adapted ‘thumb’. He then waits until the female lays her eggs and fertilises them as they emerge, but a female might take hours, or even days, to be happy enough to lay, so he has to be capable of staying with her, and fending off other males, for that whole period. Possibly the occasional male grappling a stick or a goldfish is a small price to pay for the chance of successful reproduction.

What is interesting, though, is that even frogs that have different mating strategies from the ones in my pond also display what scientists call ‘misdirected amplexus’. Tree frogs, for example, sit around and call to attract a female, who comes to them, and who gives the male a little pat on the shoulder to indicate that she’s happy to mate, and yet even these species occasionally mate with the wrong species. What’s going on? Evolutionary biologists have studied the behaviour across 159 frog species, and have concluded that even the earliest frog species, dating back to some 220 million years ago, also made these kind of mistakes. It could even go back further, to the ancestors of frogs, salamanders and a type of amphibian called a caecilian.

Presumably if this behaviour was catastrophic, frogs wouldn’t have become the extremely successful and widespread species that they are today, but there is bad news. The incidence of frogs getting it wrong seems to be more widely reported in the 21st Century than previously, and scientists are concerned that habitat destruction, drought and noise might all be contributing to frogs not meeting enough females, and becoming more generally confused. Add this to the chytrid fungal disease which is causing the decline and even extinction of many frog species, and what can seem like a harmless quirk of behaviour could have serious implications for these fascinating animals.