Water Horsetail

I was down on Lewes Brooks RSPB reserve early this morning doing a WeBS survey and noticed the water horsetail, Equisetum fluviatile, was coming up. It has yet to develop the whorled branches but is not difficult to identify. Not all the stems develop a terminal cone. In cross-section the stems are hollow with a thin circular wall. 

Great Horsetail

 











I found this on my Ouse riverbank walk the other day. It's Great Horsetail or Equisetum telmateia. 
It's in the same division as the ferns (Pteridophyta) as it reproduces by spores rather than seeds. It's one of two species in the genus that produce non-green cone-bearing shoots in Spring before the green, branched shoots that appear in Summer.  It is one of the living fossils, being the only surviving genus from a class of plants that dominated the land back in the Carboniferous period when coal was being formed. Some species were trees reaching 30m in height.

"Equisetopsida" by Rror Licensed under

 CC BY-SA 3.0

Herring Gull

For those who live in a seaside town plagued by herring gulls nesting on roofs and stealing food from their hands, the idea that they're a Red List species comes as something of a shock. Yet the population of Larus argentatus has plummeted over the last two decades. One reason given is the loss of open land-fill domestic waste sites.
They are impressive birds, flying at close quarters to us humans in a way that eagles and other large species of bird seldom do. No wonder Jonathan Bach chose a seagull as his protagonist.

Large Bee-fly

Another harbinger of Spring: the large bee-fly, Bombylius major. 
I love these funny creatures with their ridiculous permanently protruding proboscii. They hover about before zooming in to drink nectar from the primroses and cherry blossom. When they've had sufficient they choose a sunny patch of bare earth or wall to kick back and relax.
Apparently they're a mysterious bunch, the bee-flies. Prolific in species terms but poorly understood scientifically in terms of life-cycle. The majority are parasitic at the larval stage, with some being host-specific while others are more opportunistic. 
They belong to the order Diptera, the true flies. Estimated to contain around a quarter of a million species of which only about half have been described. They are distinguished by having a pair of wings on their mesothorax and sucking mouthparts.
This is the first fly on the blog and surely one of the most popular! 

Cuckoo Flower or Lady's Smock

Another spring classic, this is found in damp grassy ditches and field margins. Cardamine pratensis has one of the longest lists of local vernacular names in Mr Grigson's master work. It appears to be widely associated with bad luck if picked so is not really used medicinally. In the old days smock was use as innuendo for a female desired sexually, as in 'a bit of skirt'. 
It's part of the Brassicaceae or cabbage family, formerly known as the Cruciferae or crucifers on account of their having four petals arranged in a cross. I found this today walking along the bank of the Ouse.
The more I reflect, the more it's as if some massive switch was thrown whilst we were away in Morocco, signalling the start of Spring proper. This has been especially noticeable with the garden bird-feeders. Before we went I was re-filling the big seed feeder every two to three days. I filled it when we got back and

more than a week later it's still not empty, with the ones nearest the house virtually untouched. The peanuts have been shunned completely. 
I'm sure the reason for this is the dispersal of wintering flocks now that the breeding hormones have kicked in. The birds have all become territorial and consequently anti-social (barring the house sparrows, wherever they are). 
On my walk today I saw two crows' nests with sitting birds, along with magpies and blackbirds gathering nesting material. I also heard the first willow warbler of the year, saw three peregrines at the same time (a male and female with another male somewhat apart) and a buzzard. Yesterday I saw that the ravens have two fledglings only days away from leaving the nest.
Nice.

Two-Toothed Door Snail

I love this photo. I was looking at the lichens and bryophytes at about head height on a mature oak on the Downs a couple of weeks ago. Imagine my surprise when I saw this sticking out of a hole in the lichen. 
 

Initially I thought someone must have put it there, but removing it soon revealed it was alive and well.
It's the first land mollusc on the blog and nice to have such a groovy one: the two-toothed door snail or Clausilia bidentata. I don't think I've seen one before but they're fairly common, found throughout the British Isles, usually in woodland. They are most active at night or when it's wet. It had rained heavily before my walk and this encourages them to climb trees to graze on lichens and algae.
Molluscs are the second largest phylum in the animal kingdom after arthropods. However there are 85,000 described species compared with 1.2 - 10 million arthropods. Snails are in the class Gastropoda and the family Clausiliidae.

Tulip

Spring for most of us means tree blossoms (Prunus spp.) and flowering bulbs (snowdrops, daffodils, hyacinths, etc.). 
Of the latter, the tulip, Tulipa x gesneriana, is surely one of the best known. The lady we bought our house from was very keen on cut flowers from the garden. As a result we have impressive numbers of tulips. They have recently come into flower and will continue to flower for the next six or so weeks.
They don't smell, but they are pretty.

Hyacinth

Just before they go I thought it'd be nice to include the old hyacinth, Hyacinthus orientalis. I like the smell.
 

Marsh-marigold

Two rather over exposed pictures of Caltha palustris or Marsh-marigold. 
It is an almost garish, bold yellow flower which is a magnet for insects, the identities of which seem unknowable to me. 
However, they are one of the joys of the 'new' pond (it's two years old). 
Another late post. It's funny: I tried to do this (identify a new species each day) a few years ago, but was writing my findings down in a book. It wasn't long before I started missing days and long before March I'd stopped altogether. Despite the fact that I know of only a handful of friends who look at the blog from time to time, it's a remarkable psychological trick that makes one feel the need to post each day. A sort of 'invisible hand' peer pressure!

Small Tortoiseshell

Not the greatest picture but I was very excited to see the first butterfly in the garden this year. It's a small tortoiseshell, Aglais urticae. It is one of our commonest butterflies in the British Isles and, in the south at least, has two broods per year. The second brood emerges in September - October and hibernates over winter to emerge in the first warm days of spring. Unlike many species these are not colonial breeders; rather they range about and lay eggs whenever favourable habitat is encountered. They sometimes travel considerable distances, regularly crossing the English Channel. 
They are creatures of habit: the males get up around 10am (when it's nice weather), fly around for a couple of hours feeding and enjoying the sun, then after lunch they find a suitable territory in a sheltered sunny south-facing spot near nettles and fly up to check out any other small tortoiseshells flying past. If male, they have a 'fly-off' which involves spiralling up just behind and above the opponent before diving down and repeating. The winner stays put, but if after about an hour and a half he's had no luck with the ladies he finds another territory and hangs out until around tea time when he calls it a day. 
Should a lady pass she is pursued at great speed, sometimes for up to three hours, before getting down and dirty in the nettle-patch. The lady then spends the rest of her time selecting with great care the ideal nettle leaf to lay eggs on. They lay 60 - 100 eggs at a time, usually underneath the topmost leaf on an edge of a nettle patch in full sun. 
The Large Tortoiseshell used to be widespread in the wooded areas of southern Britain but mysteriously declined and became extinct around 40 years ago. 
I must just put in a pitch for the book from which the above information was gleaned: The Butterflies of Britain and Ireland by Jeremy Thomas and Richard Lewington. The former is Professor of Ecology at Oxford; the latter is surely one of the best wildlife illustrators around today. The illustrations in this book are exquisite and the text is distilled deep knowledge about these creatures. It's published by British Wildlife Publishing who do the British Wildlife magazine and several other field guides which are highly recommended.
So we're more than a quarter of the way through the year and approaching the hundredth post. To be honest it hasn't been that difficult finding species and I suspect it will be difficult deciding which to leave out as spring progresses, but I do find myself wondering which new species I'll be able to find next January, February and March.

Wood Spurge

This is Wood Spurge or Euphorbia amygdaloides. It is a striking plant and as a result has suffered the attention of horticulturists to provide a variety of cultivars. I suspect this is one such as it was growing at the end of a driveway just round the corner. The genus has distinctive flowers with weird 'glands' and large bracts (which might be mistaken for green petals) which look a bit like ruff collars. The glands are the small crescent-shaped things around the flower.
The flowers are borne in an umbel.
I've done two today to bring up the number of species posted to the number of days in the year. At least I think that's right. Will double-check that tomorrow.

Cream-Coloured Courser

"Cream-coloured Courser" by Shah Jahan - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0

Although I didn't manage to decent picture of the adult birds and have used one from the interweb, the one of the babies was taken on the way back from the Chiggaga dunes in eastern Morocco. Ahmed, our driver, stopped and picked them up for a minute to show us. 
They are Cream-coloured Coursers, Cursorius cursor. I'd never seen one before but my brain must have absorbed their image and name from the bird books I've looked at over the years because the name 'courser' came immediately to mind. 
There are other coloured coursers, of course, but they are not named by their colour, if you see what I mean. (e.g. Temminck's courser.)

Northern Raven

Common Raven by Diliff Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Just to complete our local chalk-cliff nesting birds, the common or northern raven is presented.
They used to be common but ten years ago there were only five pairs nesting in Sussex with all apart from the Lewes birds nesting on coastal cliffs. They mate for life, which can be more than twenty years. 
Apart from their great size they can be identified by their heavy roman nose bill and shaggy breeches. In flight they have a very distinctive call, usually rendered as "prruk" in guidebooks. "The gentle prukking of the ravens" is a phrase that has stuck in my mind from somewhere. It is a sound best heard in remote silent mountain valleys. 
As a footnote: I published this when on holiday in Morocco from the south-east side of the High Atlas mountains en route to the desert. In the desert the most noticeable birds were the ravens. They were of the subspecies C. c. tingitanus and are the smallest of the raven subspecies.
 

Dromedary camel

"Camel, NSW, 07.07.2007" by Jjron - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3. 

Most people know that this is a camel, and that there is another camel with two humps. This is the dromedary camel, Camelus dromedarius, which is native to the Middle East and the horn of Africa. It has been widely domesticated in dry regions. The other is the two-humped one, C. bactrianus, which is found in Central Asia.
They both belong to the genus Camelus. The family they belong to is Camelidae and this contains four other species all from South America: llama, alpaca, guanaco, and vicuña. The family is part of the same order as the one sheep belong to: Artiodactyla or even-toed ungulates. 

I'm posting this as we've all just come back from Morocco where we drove from Marrakech out over the High Atlas to Skoura, Zagoura and a night camping (or should I say 'glamping') in the Dunes of Chiggaga.

Unfortunately internet connection was virtually non-existent so I had pre-prepared some posts which I managed to publish from Zagora as a 'batch'. 

More unfortunately I got food poisoning yesterday and still feel very poorly! So this will be all for today and I'll catch up with two tomorrow.

Peregrine

Californian Peregrine falcon by Kevin Cole

We are blessed in Lewes by having had peregrines, Falco peregrinus, nesting on the chalk cliffs just south of the Cuifail tunnel opposite the Railway Land. They share the cliff, after a fashion, with hundreds of jackdaws and a long-suffering pair of ravens. The peregrines really don't like the ravens and spend a significant portion of their non-hunting time dive-bombing the unfortunate corvids. Sadly they sometimes take the raven chicks before they fledge. 
There are a lot of superlatives applied to this bird and if you get the chance to spend time getting to know them you will understand why. It's fastest recorded speed is 242 miles per hour, making it easily the fasted animal on the planet.
My first experience of them was in Melbourne. A pair nested on a skyscraper in the central business district. We were walking up the main drag when a dead pigeon fell from the sky, landing on the pavement about six feet from us. Today I saw a pristine male (tiercel) sitting on a ledge on a cliff in an old chalk pit. He had bright yellow legs and bill and looked, to use an over-used adjective perhaps appropriately, awesome.
They were nearly wiped out by poisoning from pesticides in the 1950s and 60s. DDT was the main culprit. Last year I picked up a fine first edition of J A Baker's classic The Peregrine which immediately made it into the top ten 'next books to be read' list.
They have a fairly distinctive cry in flight:
  

Jackdaw

Corvus monedula - London by Maxwell Hamilton

Given there are about 700 - 800 jackdaws in and around Lewes, sharing the chalk cliffs with the peregrines and ravens, and their calls are part of the background noise of life in the town, I thought I'd do them next. 
The common name derives from 'jack' meaning small, and 'daw' which is the vernacular English name for the bird. The Latin specific name comes from moneta, meaning 'money'. 
They cause a bit of a nuisance when they attempt to nest in chimney pots. Lots of houses in town have wire mesh covering them to prevent this. One of it's dialect names is the chimney sweep bird.

 

Cleavers or Goosegrass

Many a country walk with children involves sticking cleavers or goose grass on people's backs, ideally without them realising. It's a common plant and one of the first out of the gates in spring. It's also difficult to get rid of once it gets a roothold in your garden, even though it's an annual.
It's actually edible and has been used for all sorts of things, from stuffing mattresses and making sieves, to dying cloth red (the root) and providing a coffee substitute (roasted seeds).
It's binomial is Galium aparine and it's in the fourth biggest family of flowering plants, Rubiaceae. Coffee and bedstraws are siblings. The family belongs to the order is Gentianales after the gentians, which themselves are named for the Illyrian king Gentius. I hope that's clear.

Sheep

Sheep, Ovis aries, are the 'without-which-not' of the South Downs. They created the short turf which, after a couple of hundred years, can contain more flowering plant species in a square metre than any other habitat. If we were all vegetarian for the next three hundred years we would lose a significant portion of our flora! Once ploughed, however, the ecosystem is destroyed. The owner of Offham Down tried to plough his ancient grassland and got more than he bargained for. Amazingly after 'unploughing', it continued happily as before. So much of the Downs was ploughed during the Second World War that this unique habitat is now scarce, with most of it having some kind of protective designation. 
The pond is a 'dew pond'. These are a feature of chalk grassland and were so called because it was believed they were filled by dew: sadly the more prosaic explanation that it's simply rain actually holds true. They were created by hollowing out the chalk and lining it with clay and straw. Their purpose was to provide water for the sheep so it's somewhat ironic to see them now fenced out.
Sheep really took off, so to speak, in medieval times when monasteries made millions out of the wool trade. In the last 100 years the Australians and New Zealanders have done much the same, although wool production in Australia has more than halved since 1990. They are in the same family, Bovidae, as other cloven hooved ruminants such as cattle, antelopes and goats. They started being domesticated from wild mouflons about 10 000 years ago and there are now over 200 recognised breeds. These are Suffolks if I'm not very much mistaken, and not the famous Southdowns bred locally by John Ellman of Glynde.

Alexanders

Is this the first of the Umbelliferers to flower? Smyrnium olusatrum or Alexanders was introduced by the Romans and used as a celery substitute. It apparently prefers a maritime climate but it certainly thrives in Lewes. Grigson notes that it is often found near monastic sites and one wonders if it was cultivated at Lewes Priory and naturalised from there. In medieval times it was known as parsley of Alexandria. It was cultivated up to the 18th century then replaced by celery. Although not unpleasant tasting it apparently leaves a very bitter after taste and to reduce this, should be blanched by earthing up the lower stem. 

Common Whitlowgrass

Another pavement specialist, this is common whitlowgrass or Erophila verna. The picture on the right is of one of the seed pods which I've opened down the middle of the flattened 'belly' to reveal the seeds. These are attached by tiny stalks in two rows. 
It is a member of the Brassicaceae/Cruciferae or cabbage family and gets its common name from it being used to treat whitlows back in the day. In common with (nearly) all its siblings it has four sepals and petals and six stamens. It is unusual amongst its siblings in having deeply notched petals. It lives fast and dies young, being impossible to find after April is out. 

Groundsel

I thought I'd make the photo extra large as this is quite a small but incredibly common plant. It's one of the pavement plants, part of the footpath flora we walk past every day. Senecio vulgaris is one of the ragwort crowd and a member of the daisy family, Asteraceae. The key identification feature is the black tips of the short outer bracts and (less obvious) long inner bracts. It is an annual so must be declared something of a winner given its ubiquity, despite invariably attracting the epithet "weed".

Ivy-leaved Toadflax

 

















This has just started flowering in sheltered, sunny locations. It is Cymbalaria muralis and my photos don't do justice to the flowers. If you follow the link to the Wikipedia page you'll see what I mean.
It is another unassuming little plant that now grows almost universally on old lime-mortared walls, yet is was only introduced from southern Europe in the early seventeenth century. One nineteenth century writer had it that it was introduced to Oxford from Italy when sculptures were imported and that it rapidly spread around the college walls. One of its names is Oxford weed.
However Mr Grigson has the first record accorded to one of the best known amateur gardeners of his time, Mr William Coys, who was growing it in his Essex garden in 1618.
It has evolved to thrive on walls/rock faces by growing towards light until after flowering when seed is setting; it then becomes negatively phototropic, turning back in towards the wall and any crevices where seed can best germinate.  

Xanthoria polycarpa

x20 Xanthoria parietina

Here's a picture taken with my phone through one of the eyepieces of my 'new' secondhand Seben stereomicroscope (an absolute bargain at £64). I think this is going to increase my enjoyment of natural history by a considerable margin. Looking through both eyepieces gives an almost hyper-real image of what you're looking at. Even the kids ("God Dad, you're such a nerdy loser!") have been "wow"ing and "ooo"ing. 
The first thing I looked at was a hawthorn twig (like this one) with Xanthoria polycarpa on it. I'd picked it up on a walk several weeks earlier. Imagine, therefore, my surprise when a tiny insect appeared from beneath the foliose 'leaves' of the lichen and scurried off-field! I have no idea what it was, but when I later viewed an even older specimen of 'King Alfred's cake' fungus there were loads of them (I'm pretty sure they're the same species) crawling all over it. It came with x10 and x20 eyepieces and the object lenses are in a turret which can be rotated from x2 to x4. To be honest, x20 is all I've really bothered with so far.
It's widely found on twigs, especially elder (Sambucus nigra). In full sun it is incredibly bright yellow. In shadier areas it's more greeny-yellow. In the photo you can see the fruiting bodies (the cup-shaped things with darker yellow centres) which contain the spores.

Apricot

Another quick post limited to what I have photographed in the last few days on the phone: our apricot tree growing on a south-west facing wall. They're very early flowering so frost is always a worry. This is Prunus armeniaca 'Hargrand/Torinel', which we bought from Agroforestry research back in 2007. We've not had many apricots from it, but the ones we have had have been enormous and delicious. Although this one is self-fertilising it would be better if we had another tree nearby. It's certainly more successful than the almonds we bought at the same time.
The name derives from the fact that they are believed to have been introduced into western Europe from Armenia.

Holm Oak

 Another naughty non-native. Just a quickie as I'm late again and have other stuff to do before bed. 
Found this growing up on the Downs near the old racecourse. It's a Holm Oak or Evergreen Oak - Quercus ilex. It's a Mediterranean species widely introduced and self-seeding in the south of England. I suspect this will have self-seeded as it's younger than the end of racing when specimen trees may have been planted. It's not the only foreign Quercus on the downs either.
The oaks are actually in the Fagaceae or beech family. The name ilex comes, as you no doubt know (20th January), from the Latin for holly.