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By Martyn Stenning
December 2014:
Well, October did bring some thunder
storms, but thankfully no great disasters. Uckfield
High Street flooded, but this was apparently due to surface
runoff in excess of the capacity of the drains to
cope. Let’s hope the new improvements will deal with
that.
November is still remaining mild, with showers and sunny
intervals. Most of the leaves have fallen from the deciduous
trees, with the exception of oak, alder and some beech
(recorded mid-November). Most of the summer migrant
birds have gone and the winter migrants have arrived.
Interestingly, there are probably more birds visiting us in
the winter than the summer. Our winter visitors
include redwings, fieldfares, extra blackbirds and song
thrushes (all from Scandinavia). Polish blackcaps.
Also arriving are purple and green sandpipers, turnstones,
curlews, grey plovers, dunlin, knot, wigeon, teal, gadwall,
pochard, Brent geese, hooper and Bewick’s swans, merlin,
short-eared owls, great grey shrikes (occasionally), hen
harriers, and many more. However, their presence is
more subtle than the summer visitors as they are not
breeding or singing and because it is dark much of the time,
we do not often see them. However, if you were to
visit the mudflats of Pagham and Chichester Harbours at low
tide, with the help of binoculars and a spotting telescope,
you will see many of the waders and geese in the list.
The ducks will be at Pulborough Brooks, the short-eared owls
at Lewes Brooks, the redwings and fieldfares can commonly be
seen in the fields around Isfield, the great-grey shrike
often visits Ashdown Forest, as does the hen harrier which
also likes the South Downs. They come for mild weather
and abundance of food.
Most of these birds migrate at night, and sometimes call to
each other in order to help keep together and
navigate. The redwings are particularly vocal and call
with a subtle high pitched seep as they fly
overhead. Redwings and fieldfares are species of
thrush related to blackbirds, song and mistle
thrushes. Also in the thrush family are stonechats,
nightingales, wheatears and robins. There is a rare
relative called the ring ouzel which is like a blackbird
with a white bib. These birds usually live on the
slopes of mountains in places such as Wales, the Pennines,
Lake District and Scotland. However, during the winter
they can occasionally be found on the Fire Hills of
Fairlight.
November 2014:
Watching the sunlight on my bedroom wall
this morning, the quarter-light window had just been opened,
and I could see the image of warm air from the bedroom
cascading out of the window into the cold frosty air
outside. Curiously, this can only be seen via the
image cast onto the opposite wall, but was invisible when
looking at the window itself. The sunlight was
diffracting at different angles through the window and
illustrating the differential viscosity of the two airs as
they mixed. I closed the window, and it stopped
immediately. Thanks to the excellent double
glazing. This is an indication of how global warming
is happening. We burn fossil gas (or oil) which heats
water to heat our houses. If the heated air escapes it
heats the world outside. So by using carbon in the gas
that was laid down 150 million years ago. This global
warming is causing ice to melt in the arctic that did not
used to melt. It is causing insects and the birds that
eat them to move further north and higher up
mountains. It is causing deserts to get larger and
ocean currents to change. Tropical coral is dying due
to carbonic acid in the sea from the carbon dioxide (a
greenhouse gas). We are all responsible for this, but
we and our governments have got to try to slow this trend or
our children and grandchildren will inherit a much poorer
world.
There was ice on my car this morning, the first time this
autumn. However the sun was strong enough to cause
sunlight roofs to generate steam, and to look like the
houses were on fire. The first few days of October
were like the last days of summer. However, on the 4th
of October the jet stream moved to the south of the British
Isles and brought welcome rain to the desiccated soils of
Sussex. By the time you read this, most of October
will have passed. It was October that brought the
“hurricane” of 1987 and the devastating floods of
2000. I wonder what will happen this year? One
thing that we can predict about climate change is that the
consequences will be unpredictable.
Most of the leaves are still on the trees, and butterflies
were still flying during early October. The berry crop
this year is phenomenal, with holly, hawthorn, rowan, sloe
and other plum species producing huge amounts of
fruit. It has been said that this is a harbinger of
hard weather to come – we shall see.
October 2014:
Autumn is upon us. Nature will
exhibit many changes over the next few weeks.
Leaf-fall has started with the elder trees; other trees are
just starting to turn on 17th September. These are
birch, beech, poplar and lime (linden). The horse
chestnut leaves have turned brown and will soon fall and
hazel is also beginning to turn. Incidentally, horse
and sweet chestnut are not related, and are in completely
different families. And resemblance between the two is
entirely due to what is called convergent evolution.
Sweet chestnut leaves are still green today.
Autumn is also the time for rutting deer, and I saw an
impressive group of large antlered male fallow deer from the
Uckfield to London Bridge train today. We are having a
warm dry September, but nature still moves on with peacock
butterflies seeking hibernation sites in buildings.
Dormice are fattening up for hibernation, and can double in
size within a few weeks. Birds such as willow warbler,
chiffchaff, swallow and house martin are migrating south in
huge numbers. The autumn equinox is on 21st September
when everywhere on planet Earth will experience 12 hours of
daylight followed by 12 hours of darkness. After that
daylight time variation resumes. We will be in for
rain and wind, equinox weather, although this usually
happens in October with events such as the hurricane force
wind of 1987 and the floods of 2000.
However, a beautiful orchid chooses to flower at this time,
it is called autumn ladies tresses (Spiranthes spiralis)
and as its name suggests, has a spiral arrangement of
beautiful small white flowers. Colchicum, the autumn crocus
also flowers at this time, but is not native to Britain, but
hales from Mediterranean climates around the world.
Many plants such as bracken and most water plants will be
dying back for the winter.
As well as dormice, bats, hedgehogs and before going extinct
in Britain, brown bears, still around on the continent will
also all be going into hibernation soon. However,
mice, rats, voles, shrews, rabbits, foxes, badgers, weasels,
stoats, otters, polecats, martens, deer, reintroduced
beavers and before they went extinct in this country,
wolves, lynx, bison, elk and wolverines do not hibernate,
but continue to roam.
Autumn is a time for spiders, wasps and moths giving us a
final flurry of invertebrate animal life before most die in
the frost or hibernate.
September 2014:
From a hot July to a cool August.
However, we are not having a bad summer. The sea
temperature off Brighton went up to at least 19°C in early
August, but has dropped back to about 17°C now. The
swifts have returned to Africa, and the other migrants are
following their example gradually. Some of the last to
leave will be the swallows and house martins which can have
2 or 3 broods during their stay in Britain. A few
swallows are even remaining in the West Country over winter
in recent years. This is interesting and probably due
to milder winters allowing the insects they feed on to fly
through the winter.
Vivien and I took a group of teenagers to an International
Youth Camp in arctic Finland recently, and it was
interesting to see the differences in natural history
there. There are very few people, and many more trees
of fewer types, mainly spruce, pine, birch, aspen, rowan and
willow in order of apparent frequency. The trees were
shaped by the winter snow and were tall and narrow.
There were very few birds, except around human habitation
where they seem to take advantage of human activity.
There was a bird, not found in Britain, called a Siberian
Jay (or Kukkoli in Finnish). This bird lives all over
the Eurasian arctic, and is attracted by human camp fires
where it expects to find food. It is not afraid of
humans, and if you hold up a sausage or other food it will
perch on your hand and eat it without fear. Other
birds that I saw were willow tits, bullfinches, great tits
and near houses – blue tits, house sparrows and feral
pigeons. I also saw swifts, swallows and house martins
being hunted by a merlin. There were also wood grouse
or capercaillies there.
Reindeer were wandering everywhere, grazing freely on
anything they could find, especially lichens (reindeer
grass). Red squirrels are frequently seen playing in
the trees. There are frequent wild flowers of
different types, and the commonest is
rose-bay-willow-herb. Often known in Britain as fire
weed. It is all along the road sides and forest
tracks. There are also copious bilberry plants rich in
fruit, and also delicious cloud berries.
The animals that all the campers will never forget were the
midges and the mosquitos. These came out after every
shower of rain and fed on humans!
August 2014:
July has brought hot weather and
thunder-storms. How great for nature that it is
getting both warmth and moisture to make things grow.
However, the heat seems to be outgunning the rain, and many
streams have stopped flowing, and we are still having to
water parts of our garden. If you have a bird bath,
please remember to top it up, as lack of water in the summer
is one of the most potent killers of birds and other
wildlife.
The butterflies continue to be a treat, and it looks like
being a great year for them. The honeybees also seem
to be doing well, with bee keepers being able to extract
copious amounts of honey from their hives. Bumblebees
also seem to be doing well. Their life-cycle is rather
different from honeybees, and generally gets completed by
the end of August. The queens then go looking for
places to spend the winter before starting their new nests
in the following spring.
The ants went on their nuptial flights during mid to late
July. This normally happens when the air is hot and
humid. The males and queens fly up towards the sun,
mate, the males die and the queens land, bite off their
wings and seek a place to start a new colony. The
black ants (Lasius niger) particularly like nesting
under paving stones. The small yellow meadow ant (Lasius
flavus) prefers to nest in the ground under long
grass, and build a tussock. It often lives with a tiny
white relative of the woodlouse called Platyarthrus
hoffmannseggii which wanders the tunnels that the
ants make and cleans up any detritus material in the nest.
Lammas (or loaf mass) is the 1st August. This is the
Celtic harvest festival. Look out for Lammas growth in
the trees, especially oak, ash, beech, sycamore, yew, scots
pine, and hawthorn. This is a second flush of leaves
that the tree produces to compensate for the loss of leaves
due to them being eaten by caterpillars or damaged in other
ways during June and July. It does not occur in poplar,
birch and willow. The old leaves become rich in
tannins which makes the leaves bitter and inedible.
The new flush is usually too late for the insects. The
tannin is also passed to the bark of the oak tree to prevent
damage there, but is used by people to tan (preserve) hide
to make leather.
July 2014:
It is now late June and mid-summer.
Our part of the world seems full of flowers and buzzing
insects. Butterflies by day and moths by night flutter
around like angels. Soon we will hear stridulating
male grasshoppers singing among the meadows trying to
attract a mate. This flurry of insects is timely for
the cornucopia of fledged birds that have left the
nest. The numbers of insects available will ultimately
control the numbers of insectivorous birds that
survive. However, if you feed the birds consistently,
more birds and more insects should survive because you are
raising the carrying capacity of the environment.
Nature is generally balanced, with a bottom up pyramid of
numbers, for example, many thousands of tons of leaves
absorb nitrogen and carbon from the air and ground to cover
our trees each year with a verdant green coat which absorbs
energy from the sun. However many thousands of
caterpillars will eat a proportion of those leaves.
One family of blue tits (say 9 babies and 2 adults) requires
between 700 and 1000 caterpillars each day to keep it
fed. When those baby blue tits leave the nest at the
same time (early June) as many other families of small
birds, these provide food for the families of sparrowhawks
which require about 400 grams of meat each day. That is
about 40 blue tits. However, if all this did not
happen we would be overwhelmed with caterpillars and blue
tits as every animal only has to replace itself in its
life-time to maintain a stable population. In the
past, human mortality was higher, and regulated the
population of people, but now we are regulated by health
care and birth control. Our developing intelligence,
technology and decision making is taking over from disease,
war and famine. Although these things still exist in
parts of the world. Human pressures on the world (7
billion people, and increasing) is the greatest threat to
the survival of our natural world. Let us hope that
our collective decision making can progressively ameliorate
that threat.
Uckfield and district is very good at preserving
nature. Trees are encouraged to exist with at least 2
Woodland Trust reserves (Lake Wood and Views Wood), 2 local
Nature Reserves (West Park and Hempstead Meadows), one Site
of Special Scientific Importance (Buxted Park). And
several Sites of Nature Conservation Importance.
June 2014:
Geological studies and DNA analysis has
shown us that the world has gone through many changes over
the c. 5 billion years of its existence. One of those
changes is the types of plant life that has dominated the
surface of the planet. Some of the earliest land
plants were the horsetails. These may have dominated
the land between about 541 – 252 million years ago
(MYA). Remnants of these plants still exist in the
genus Equisetacea (horsetails) which were part of a much
larger group of fern-like plants (Pteridophytes), most of
which have gone extinct. These plants do not flower,
but reproduce by producing tiny spores. Horsetails are
then often regarded as living fossils because most of their
relatives only exist as fossils. Modern horsetails
form colonies in suitable areas and often dominate, but they
are generally infrequent and so are considered to be a bit
special, although they are often not popular with
gardeners. They are often misnamed as marestails which
they superficially resemble, but are not at all related to
horsetails. Marestails are flowering plants
(Angiosperms) which live in shallow water and reproduce
using tiny wind-pollinated flowers.
The ferns dominated plant life until about 200 MYA when the
flowering plants appeared. The horsetail like plants
gave way to the modern ferns and also the angiosperms.
These all now compete with each other for space, and then
diversify until we see the range of plant communities that
exist today.
May and June are the months when gardening activity begins
to be intense, and we all delight in the flowers and newly
green trees. Keeping the weeds under control can be
quite a challenge, but weeds are only plants that we
consider to be in the wrong place. Many gardeners are
now looking to grow native species rather than imported ones
because they are usually better for the insects that rely on
them, and are less likely to be invasive and more likely to
survive. Wildlife gardens can result in a greater
diversity of birds also and other animals such as frogs and
slow worms. I have had many enquiries recently about
how to garden to care for wildlife, this is an encouraging
trend. We can all have our own little nature reserve
which should result in reversing the recently published
trend showing declines in about 60% of Britain’s native
species.
May 2014:
One of the scientific tasks that Vivien
and I do each year is to participate in the National
Breeding Bird Survey. To do this we survey a single
kilometre square that has been randomly allocated to us by
the local section of the British Trust for
Ornithology. Our square is just SE of Ringmer.
The survey involves getting up at 05:00 hrs. on a bright
calm morning and walking 2 transects of the square.
This is done twice, once in the early part of the breeding
season usually during early April, and again in the later
weeks, usually in June. We did our early visit
yesterday (12th April). We were delighted to hear our
first cuckoo, whitethroat and lesser whitethroats.
Each of these had flown all the way from Africa to sing to
us that morning, and we did appreciate it.
Cuckoos specialise in feeding on hairy caterpillars, well I
suppose something has to. They can lay up to
twenty-five eggs, each one in the nests of other
birds. Each cuckoo tends to be a specialist at using a
host species of a particular type, for example robin,
dunnock, meadow pipit and wren, but around 100 different
host species can be used.
When the laying of eggs is over, all adult cuckoos fly back
to Africa again, usually by July. Apparently, cuckoos
are rather promiscuous, and will mate with any cuckoo of the
opposite gender that they encounter. To do that, the
male sings its famous cuckoo song to attract a female, or
the female makes a kind of bubbly call to attract a
male. After they mate, the female has to go off to
find the nest of its chosen host and lay just one egg in
it. She then goes off to mate again and find another
nest until she has no more eggs left. The adults then
fly back to Africa, leaving their young to be raised by
their chosen host.
The thing I find amazing is that the baby cuckoos never meet
their parents. However, they still know what calls to
make when they return the next year, and more amazing still,
know that they have to fly back to Africa, and not only
that, but they know the way!
A plant that flowers at about the time the cuckoos arrive is
the beautiful pink/purple cuckoo flower, also known as
ladies smock and milkmaids. This year has been
particularly good for this plant with a particularly good
showing on the Little Horsted roundabout on the A22/A26
intersection on the Uckfield Bypass.
April 2014:
What a contrast with last
winter! In 2012/13 we had snow, ice and cold winds. In
2013/14 we had rain, rain and more rain accompanied by
strong mild SW winds and hardly any frosts. Now we are
getting temperatures of 18°C and more, when last year the
temperature did not rise above 6°C until well into April.
I am seeing brimstone butterflies almost every day now; the
male is bright sulphur yellow, and the female much paler and
almost white. Their caterpillar food plants include
buckthorn, spindle and privet. Another
early butterfly that I am looking out for is orange
tip. Again, it is the male that lives up to its name
and has orange tips on its wings; the female has just black
edges to its forewings. Both males and females have
greenish speckled hind-wings. The food plant of this
butterfly is ladies smock, also known as milkmaids.
This is the lovely purple crucifer (cress) related to
watercress. This flower is just appearing now, and is
common in wet ground, indeed it is a sign of water
underground such as a spring or drainage system. I am
also frequently seeing peacock and tortoiseshell
butterflies. These two species have caterpillars that
feed on stinging nettles, and are two further harbingers of
the reawakening of nature that is happening right now
(mid-March).
Spring is turning out about as good as it could be at
present, with long periods of blue sky and warming sun
stretching each day a little longer, about half an hour per
week. 21st March is the spring equinox when day equals
night everywhere on the planet. Suddenly, our resident
dawn chorus of blackbird, robin, songthrush, chaffinch,
wren, dunnock, blue tit, great tit, coal tit, skylark, green
and great-spotted woodpeckers, carrion crow and woodpigeon
birdsong will be augmented by our summer visitors from
warmer climes, such as chiffchaff, willow warbler, blackcap,
whitethroat, swallow, garden warbler, nightingale and
cuckoo. In May the swifts will arrive, and these
aerobatic aviators will be swooping around the houses of
Uckfield screaming as they go.
I had a report today (March 16th) of a probable juvenile red kite in the Framfield area, so please keep an eye out for that. This enigmatic and large raptor is not actually red, but mainly brown with a rufus tail in the adult. Juveniles are paler buff coloured, and tend to roam in first year.
March 2014:
Signs of spring
are all around! Today (16th February) was probably the
best day we have had for weather for about two months!
We had almost wall to wall sunshine with a few fair weather
cumulus clouds, and hardly a breeze. Last night there
was a chorus of frogs in my pond, and this morning there
were several clumps of spawn to add to the clump that
appeared a few days ago. This morning as I pruned a
hornbeam tree in my garden, I spotted three common buzzards
soaring a thermal in the sky above my house. Earlier,
a blue tit was sussing out a nest-box on one of my oak
trees. I saw several celandines in flower today to add
to crocuses and daffodils also seen.
Yesterday I saw hawthorn leaves breaking bud and heard a
great-spotted woodpecker hammering in Nightingale
Wood. Today I visited Rye Harbour Nature Reserve, and
among the groups of herring and lesser black-backed gulls I
saw black-headed gulls with black heads, which they only
develop when getting ready for the breeding season in the
spring. Many spring plants are pushing through.
The Alexanders has been bushing up for some time, and its
relative, cow parsley is already carpeting some woodland
floors. Birds singing on territory include blue tit,
song thrush, blackbird and mistle thrush. Chaffinches
are also singing on territory with the full song. They
take time to develop their song in the spring, but they have
developed early this year. House sparrows are eagerly
cheeping and chasing each other through garden
hedge-rows. Almost every living thing was delighting
in the good weather today.
Meanwhile, in the lagoons of Rye Harbour, I was delighted to
see about 100 golden plover, and similar numbers of grey
plover and lapwing. There were little grebes and
tufted ducks diving under the water for food, and flocks of
dunlin flying around changing colour as they changed
direction again and again just for the joy of living.
There were dozens of oyster catchers and curlews loafing on
the islands and giving their occasional ethereal call, and
redshank calling as if they were telling someone off for
being there. Then to my delight towards the end of my
visit, I saw three gadwall ducks, two males with their black
bottoms and one female (all brown). This scarcely seen
duck is beginning to breed in Sussex in recent years, but
used to be mainly a winter visitor. But its breeding
stronghold is Rye Bay.
February 2014:
We are experiencing a rather mild January
this year. This is thanks to the tropical air whisking
across the north Atlantic Ocean and picking up a great deal
of moisture on its way. This moisture is being dropped
on the British Isles making us all feel rather damp.
This offshore group of islands sticks out into the Atlantic
Ocean protecting countries such as Holland, Denmark, Sweden
and Norway from the full force of Atlantic winds and tidal
surges. There are advantages and disadvantages to
this. The advantages include good irrigation and
generally mild weather that rarely gets too hot or
cold. The disadvantages include the potential for
floods and wind damage. In short we have a Maritime
Temperate Climate, which has served us well in the past and
generated a successful seafaring nation with fertile
farms. No-one in this land is more than about 70 miles
from the coast.
However, our close neighbours on the continent have a
Continental Climate, and because of the enormity of the land
mass from France to China, the sea has little influence on
it. The consequence of this is that less moisture and wind
get into the interior. This leads to greater heating
in the summer with temperatures in some areas approaching
50° Celsius and cooling in the winter, when the planet tilts
Eurasia away from the sun and temperatures in some places
drop to -50° Celsius in the winter. Sometimes, the
wind changes, and the continent has a greater influence on
us than the ocean. When this happens we get a
temporary heat wave in the summer or a rather cold spell in
the winter as we did last year, and this carried on until
well into April, during which the temperature did not exceed
6° Celsius for several weeks.
All this influences our wildlife, and we have a biodiversity
that is unique. Sea-birds and other wetland birds love
the British Isles, and millions come to our shores and
wetlands for the winter to escape the ice, which is one
reason why an airport in the Thames Estuary would be a bad
idea as the risk of bird-strikes would make low level flying
there rather dangerous. The mild often damp summers
mean that we have plenty of insects which attracts
insectivorous birds such as swifts and swallows from Africa
to come to our islands to breed. In short, in general,
we have a rather interesting green and pleasant land!
January 2014:
It is mid-winter, but the dawn chorus has
started. The songthrush was singing loudly this
morning, as was the robin. Robins are unusual as the
female also sings during the winter, and both sexes defend a
feeding site. Robins have become closely associated
with humans, and quickly become tame if a relationship is
established. Robins are not averse to entering
buildings especially during the winter:
“The north wind doeth blow and we shall have snow, and what
will the robin do then, poor thing, he will sit in the barn
and keep himself warm, and tuck his head under his
wing. Poor thing.” (Anon).
Now is the time to keep the bird table stocked with
food. Birds particularly like fat during the winter as
they use it for insulation and energy store. Because
the nights are so long, most birds cannot feed during the
night, so have to stock up on high energy food during the
roughly 9 hours of daylight. As knowledge of the food
supply spreads through the local avifauna, you will find
that you are rewarded with visits from increasing numbers
and varieties of birds. Probably the first bird to
find new food will be a robin, but blue tits, house sparrows
and starlings may soon be close behind. Then there
will be blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens, chaffinches,
greenfinches, goldfinches, great tits, long-tailed tits and
great-spotted woodpeckers. Woodpigeons will also visit
if you are near trees, and collared doves may also visit as
they, like robins, are usually associated with people.
You may also have visits from the local squirrel who will
dominate the table if given half a chance, and all this
activity may attract the local sparrowhawk who also needs to
survive in the only way it knows, and that is to eat small
birds. After all we eat chickens, ducks, pheasants
partridges and quail, so we should not begrudge a
sparrowhawk a meal. It is difficult to not have
favourites as an ornithologist, and to make value
judgements. Some people still persecute magpies,
sparrowhawks, crows and pigeons. However, nature has a
way of establishing a balance, and we should not usually
interfere with that on the grounds of favouritism.
These animals do not choose their parents (as far as we
know) so they have to live according to the genes that they
inherit. It is not their fault. I know I would
not like to be shot for being human.