Seven-Spot ladybird

First ladybird of the year, albeit a hibernating one found amongst leaf litter in the small bed outside the back door. It's a seven-spot or Cocinella septempunctata. In fact, I think this is the first Coleopteran or beetle to make it onto the blog. There are more species in the order Coleoptera than any other order: about 400,000 so far, with more being discovered regularly. If you want to discover a new species, this is the order to focus on.
I remember the summer of 1976 when there was a 'plague' of ladybirds following an aphid bloom. Once the ladybirds ran out of aphids they started preying on humans. I distinctly remember being bitten by them as they invaded houses and buildings.

Sweet Violet

This is the other 'hairy' violet: sweet violet or Viola odorata. The main differences are that this one has stolons (shoots above the ground that root when in contact with soil to form a new plant) and the hairs are slightly shorter and don't stand up as much (they 'lie down' - are adpressed).This clump are growing just outside our back door.
There are also hybrids between V. odorata and V. hirta which are intermediate in all characters, although quite how one would be sure beats me.
The flower was associated with Aphrodite and her son Priapus because scent suggested sex to the ancients.

Nursery Web Spider

A new taxon - the spiders or Araneae. They form the largest order in the class Arachnida. I always thought spiders were synonymous with Arachnida but the class includes scorpions, harvestmen, ticks, mites, and solifuges. I confess that they're not my favourite group but perhaps by getting to know them better they'll grow on me. 
Spiders differ from insects in having no antennae. Their bodies are also divided into two parts rather than three: the cephalothorax and abdomen. They're also unusual amongst the arthropods in having no extensor muscles, extending their legs instead by a system of hydraulics. 
This chap (or chapess, I'm not sure how you tell) was making the most of the sunshine this morning by basking on our railway sleeper wall in the garden. I am lucky to have a friend who's something of an expert on spiders. He identified it as Pisaura mirabilis or the Nursery Web spider. Thanks Dave!

Common Woodlouse

'At last another crustacean!' I hear you cry. This time it's the larger cousin of the first to be featured on the blog. The common woodlouse, Oniscus asellus, is, oddly enough, the commonest woodlouse in the British Isles. It's also one of the largest. 
The pale yellowish spots on their backs are calcium storage areas. 
Moulting is a game of two halves: first the rear, then the fore. They usually eat the exuvia afterwards. Nice.

Early Bulbous Iris

These come out every year in our garden and must have been planted by the previous owners. Iris reticulata is a native of Russia, the Caucasus and northern Iran but has been widely cultivated.
They are absolutely stunning close up but easily overlooked due to their diminutive nature and brief flowering period; they're at their best for about a week. This year they are brightening my birthday in the early spring sunshine.  

Birch polyphore or Razorstrop Fungus

This is Piptoporus betulinus found growing on a decaying birch stump on Chailey Common. They are multi-layered because the fruiting bodies persist from one year to the next with a new one forming each year. You can see the remains of the oldest ones rotting away in the top left photo. The original would have been much prettier; toasted on top and creamy white underneath. It is a very common fungus found on birch throughout the British Isles.
Interestingly bits of this fungus were found amongst the possessions of the 5500 year old mummy discovered in the Italian/Swiss Alps back in the 1990s. Otzi may have been carrying them to sharpen blades or possibly for its antibiotic properties.

Goat willow

Salix caprea is also known as the pussy willow because of its furry catkins or pussies.
Willows are dioecious and this one is a female with grey pussies.
It also provides equine services as a scratching post.
This was growing on Chailey Common and is quite a mature specimen. 

Grey willow (S. cinerea) is very similar but a key distinguishing feature is that if you peel the bark of a two-year old twig and run your fingernail around the wood you can feel ridges, whereas goat willow is smooth. 
I remember this by thinking of a smooth old goat. Why old goats might be so described is utterly irrelevant.

Scot's pine

 

 It was somewhat remiss of me to return from Scotland without a picture of the Scot's pine, but here's some growing on heath in Sussex. Chailey Common to be precise, a lovely stretch of greensand heath overlying the wealden clays. 

Pinus sylvestris is another of our three native conifers. (I've done one already so there's the customary big money prize for guessing the third. It grows locally on the steep south-facing slopes of the A27 road embankment just outside Brighton.)

It's very late so that's all today. Will flesh this out a bit more tomorrow.

Still very late so perhaps tomorrow...

Jelly Ear

This is the first non- lichenized fungus. It's quite common, can be found all year round, and grows on deciduous trees, especially elder, which these are growing on. Its Latin name is Auricularia auricula-judae, which is probably the most politically incorrect binomial of any organism (big money prize for anyone who can identify a more offensive one). It wasn't that long ago that the common name was Jew's ear, but I note that the current edition of Phillips (see useful books) refers to it as Jelly ear. I wonder if the ICN will catch up and change the binomial?
My thanks to Mr James von Leyden for pointing this specimen out.

Daffodil

What else could it be on St David's day? Narcissus pseudonarcissus or the daffodil. I'm not entirely sure which subspecies this is, but it could the the Tenby daffodil, N. pseudonarcissus ssp obvallaris.
They used to be in the lily family but are now in the  Amaryllidaceae. Most are garden escapes or have been planted, with the majority of native plants found in the west. 
I remember seeing the native ones for the first time when we met my parents in Newent and did the daffodil trail; it seemed unbelievable that such a stunning flower could have evolved in our climate.
Having just acquired a copy of Geoffrey Grigson's superlative work The Englishman's Flora I must include his quote from Gerard Manley Hopkins who, on espying some growing in Lancashire, wrote: "The bright yellow corolla is seeded with very fine spangles which give it a glister and lie on a ribbing which makes it like cloth of gold." Mr Grigson gives the derivation of the common name thus: 'through Mediaeval Latin affodilus and Latin asphodilus, to the Greek asphodelus, the name of the plant which grew across the meadows of the underworld and which belonged to Persephone, the Queen of Hell.'
These were growing on a bank surrounding the car park on Chailey Common on Friday. The ones in our garden are yet to break bud. Iechyd da everyone!

Annual Meadow-grass

A first from this taxon - the Poaceae or grasses. This one is famously ubiquitous and flowers year round. It is Poa annua or Annual Meadow-grass and is evolved to colonise any disturbed ground rapidly. It can grow and set seed in as little as six weeks; a single plant may produce up to 20,000 seeds or as few as 10; seeds may germinate immediately or can remain dormant for a long time; it is native and is naturalized around the world, being found on mountain tops in the tropics. 
The terminology for grasses is bewildering for the beginner and I struggle to key out new species. To give you a flavour here are some excerpts from the entry in BSBI Handbook No.13 - Grasses of the British Isles for P. annua: "...procumbent culms rooting at the nodes;... sheaths compressed and keeled, smooth; ligule ...blunt; blades thin, flat or folded, glabrous, often wrinkled when young, abruptly pointed or hooded at the tip. Panicle ovate or triangular, loose and open or rarely lightly contracted, the branches solitary or paired, rarely 3 together, smooth, spreading or reflexed at maturity. Spikelets ovate or oblong, 3 - 6 flowered; glumes unequal, acute at the tip, the lower lanceolate to narrowly ovate, 1-nerved, the upper elliptic or oblong, 3-nerved; lemmas semi-elliptic to ovate in profile, ...sparsely to densely hairy on the keel and lateral nerves below, rarely glabrous, blunt at the tip; palea with curled or crispate hairs on the keels, these dense or sparese, rarely absent; anthers 0.6-1.1mm." Luckily there are excellent illustrations.
The grasses, Poaceae, are the most important plant family from an economic point of view. They are part of the order Poales, which includes the sedges and rushes.

Lesser Celandine

Always a pleasure to see the first ranunculus (Buttercup family) in flower, and it's invariably Lesser Celandine or Ficaria vernus. 
Here it is flowering on 24th February at the base of the prison wall in Lewes along with the purple dead-nettle and ivy-leaved toadflax. 
Gilbert White saw it flowering in Selborne on 21st February, but it usually flowers from March onwards. It is quite common but the flowers only open when it's bright enough. Pilewort is an old name for it because its roots apparently resemble haemorrhoids, for which it was used as a treatment: the good old Doctrine of Signatures. 
Greater celandine is totally unrelated. It belongs in the poppy family. 

Ivy-leaved Speedwell

This was also flowering at the base of the prison wall not far from the red dead-nettle. It's Ivy-leaved Speedwell or Veronica hederifolia, its species name deriving from the ivy-shaped leaves (see 19th January). It's a bit like Slender Speedwell but it is hairier and has  distinctly palmate veins on the leaves. Compare it with the other speedwell posted on 22nd February - Common Field Speedwell. 

Red Dead-nettle

This is an early flowerer: Lamium purpureum or Red Dead-nettle. The Dead-nettles are a big family with the Latin name Lamiaceae (also known as Labiatae). It includes the mints, thymes, woundworts, marjorums and sages.
The true nettles, Urticaceae, are a different family. Telling them apart can be useful. 

Red Fox

Fox study 6" by Peter Trimming

The red fox, Vulpes vulpes, is the most widespread member of the order Carnivora. It is also the largest member of the Vulpes genus. It is the third species in this blog on the IUCN  world's most invasive species: points and a huge money prize for anyone who can name the other two! 
It is also the species responsible for the demise of one of our chickens on Sunday.
The carnivores are the most diverse in size of all the mammalian orders, from 25g (Least Weasel) to 5000000g (Southern Elephant Seal).
The reason they get on the list is their shenanigans in Australia (clue to one of the other species on the blog on the list).
We are blessed/cursed by having a pair of foxes resident at the bottom of our neighbour's wild garden, although to be honest if they weren't there, there would be foxes elsewhere in the locality presenting a risk to our chickens.
Most of the anthropomorphic ideas about foxes in our culture stem from the stories about Reynard the Fox, first written down in the twelfth century. His debut in English was, surprise, surprise, in Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale where he appears as 'Rossel'.

Chicken

I couldn't help include our other 'pets' - their lives very much tangled up with ours and the local foxes. So here is the domestic chicken, Gallus gallus ssp domesticus. 
There was a grey one until Sunday. She was the master of escapology and this was her undoing. Chicken-keeping is subject to fox predation in most areas, no matter how many precautions one takes.
We have had a good run - two years without trouble - but now it's time to tighten security. It's a shame for our chooks as it means more time in the restricted safe-zone as we'll only really be able to let them out when were are in the garden. But when I go half-time at work this will be a great deal more than at present, so they'll just have to wait until the summer.
Chickens have been bred from the red junglefowl, Gallus gallus, a native of Asia. This is thought to have occurred at least 5000 years ago and they spread rapidly throughout the world in pre-historic times. Who says globalization is a modern phenomenon?

Hen Harrier (female)

This is a female hen harrier, Circus cyaneus, and I saw one this afternoon on a walk from Rodmell to Southease along the bank of the river Ouse. They are one of our rarest breeding raptors and in very real danger of extinction in the UK. This is in no small part due to the nefarious activities of the grouse-shooting owners of moorland where the birds breed.
The females have an obvious white band at the base of their tails and as a result are known in the birding world as 'ringtails'. This autumn/winter is the first year I've seen them in the lower Ouse valley. The first time I saw one was back in October when it was accompanied by a marsh harrier, another first here. They are sometimes mistaken for each other but a glimpse of the white tail base is a clincher. The male hen harrier is quite different looking: pale blue-grey with black wing tips. They have broad, owlish faces.
If you're interested in curtailing driven grouse-shooting in this country, something a handful of tax-avoiding mega-rich pay to do for a few weeks of the year at the detriment of these and other highland birds, follow this link to sign a petition before the end of March 2015.

Common Field Speedwell

Yesterday's species (I know, getting a bit sloppy on the daily posting) is this speedwell. I found it flowering back on 10th February and have been meaning to put it in.
Speedwells, or Veronica, are the largest genus in the Plantaginaceae family (they used to be in the Scrophulariaceae) with around 500 species. There are 26 listed in Stace (see useful books) and I find even the common ones not that easy to tell apart without a hand lens.
This is Common Speedwell, or Veronica persica. I had posted it as Grey Field Speedwell but on reviewing it I think it's Common Field Speedwell. The reasons being that the flower stalks are much longer than the leaves and there are no glandular hairs on the capsule.

European Jay

Luc Viatour / www.Lucnix.be

The third corvid in this mini-series (catching up on missed posts) is an absolute corker: the European Jay or Garrulus glandarius. The European races have streaked crowns. Their stunning blue wing markings are borrowed from the kingfisher's back and beloved of fly-fishermen. Up close through binoculars it just strikes one as bizarre that such markings could have evolved through some process of selecting an advantageous feature: they appear entirely aesthetic.

Their name derives from their haranguing alarm call. If you ever hear a pair fighting it out in the woods it sounds like someone's torturing children. They have been coming to our garden daily over the winter but we rarely see them during the breeding season.

Magpie

Not my photo I confess, but kindly put on the web by Benutzer123.
When I was a young teenager my friends and I came across a pair of nestlings at the foot of a tree with a nest in. They were a long way from fledging and we couldn't get back up the tree to replace them so we took them home and put them in a cardboard box in the 'boiler room' and brought them up on baby food which we spoon fed them from the little jars.
When they started flapping about in the room we took them back to the fields and 'taught' them to fly by running down the slope and releasing them much as one would a model aeroplane. From memory it took about three or four training sessions then they were off. They almost immediately re-assimilated into the 'wild'. What I remember most is the smell in the boiler room: not exactly nauseating, but not pleasant either. A bit like baby-sick mixed with Farley's rusks.
Magpies make a terrible racket but have a beautiful iridescence to their black feathers. They are also in the crow family.

PS On 4th March there was a commotion in one of the smaller trees close to the house: looking out we counted 13 magpies sitting in its branches! I'm guessing this was part of some pre-breeding pairing off ritual. A few years ago when I was carrying out a winter survey of a local tetrad for the BTO Bird Atlas I witnessed over thirty magpies in a hawthorn in a field hedge.