BIRD'S EYE WITH HAIRY LEGS

Germander Speedwell is also known as Bird's Eye as it looks out at you from the grass.

It is the largest of our speedwells 

and there is a way of testing to be sure it is Germander Speedwell.

It has two rows of hairs along the stem.  

Hold it against the light one way and the hairs are almost invisible.  

Twist it 90 degrees in your fingers and the two rows of hairs appear.

Double Mohican hairstyle

 

YELLOW ANTS

Our olive tree wasn't doing too well in its pot so we repotted it.

I tipped the soil out on to a tarpaulin and . . . .

. . . . the soil was alive with yellow ants.

They were really disorientated and wandered about with no obvious sense of purpose.

There are about 15000 species of ant worldwide but the most common in Britain are red ants (Myrmica rubra), black ants (Lasius niger) that nest under paths and paving slabs, and yellow meadow ants (Lasius flavus) that make those tumpy anthills in rough grassland.

I suppose they thought the flower pot would be a good anthill.

SOFT SHIELD CROZIER

The opening croziers of Soft Shield Fern remind me of the dragon figurehaeds of Viking ships.

 

DRONE FLY

With the windows open in this hot weather, there are unfortunately a lot of pollinator deaths and bug demises.  They get trapped inside the house.  Unfortunate for them but interesting for an old bugger like me as a whole lot of interesting specimens that I would otherwise have overlooked become available

.

The photo below is of a recent victim, the Drone Fly (Eristalis tenax). 'Drone' because it resembles a male honey be or drone, not because it is a remote controlled flying object.  As you can see, the colour soon fades when they die.

It is one of the commonest hover flies and is quite colourful when alive as in the photo below from my 'Collins Pocket Guide' by Michael Chinery.

Drone flies are part of a closely related group illustrated below in which there is a noticeable u-shaped kink in one of the veins in the wing - a useful identification tip.

 

OAK APPLES

This is an oak apple, home to several gall wasp grubs. It is soft and spongy and rather larger than the hard marble galls found on young oak saplings.  These were found on oak trees up at the viewpoint at Filnore Woods.  The grubs will emerge as adult mini-wasps in June and July and the oak apple will drop off and decay, unlike marble galls which persist on the tree.

Here are some marble galls, photographed in February.

 

MORE TREE LEAVES

While you're up at the viewpoint check out a few more tree leaves to improve your tree identification skills.  The Field Maple has five-lobed leaves like lots of maples but the lobes are rounded, not pointed, a bit like over-sized hawthorn leaves.

Dogwood is more of a shrub than a tree.  The leaves have veins that don't quite make it to the edge of the leaf before turning towards the leaf tip.  They contain a resin that solidifies on exposure to the air.  If you pull the leaf in half you can see the solidified resin like a thread of spider silk.

And the hornbeam with neatly toothed leaves and very parallel veins.  Mature hornbeams are in flower now with copious catkins.

 

WYCH OR ENGLISH

Up at the viewpoint we have two species of elm growing.  The Wych Elm (Ulmus glabra) has large leaves with double toothing towards the tip.  Often there are two particularly long teeth either side of the point of the leaf.

And the bark is smooth - glabra means smooth.

  

The Common or English Elm (Ulmus minor var. vulgaris) is the one worst affected by Dutch elm disease.  You see the dead ones lining the hedgerows.  It has much smaller leaves, which are rough to the touch and have one side of the leaf further down the stalk than the other.

  

The bark on this species is corky on the stem and along many of the twigs.

  

That's yer elms then.

 

EARTH MOVING

Not all earthworms burrow down in the soil but this, I think, is Lumbricus terrestris, our largest earthworm and it makes permanent vertical burrows with side chambers.  This one occurred in a large flower pot when the soil was emptied out.  Please excuse the irritating whistling noise.  It's a terrible habit I seem to have developed when videoing invertebrates.

It seems quite keen to get out of the bright sunlight.  It has bristles on each segment.  These grip the soil so that it can use muscular contractions to move along at quite a pace.  They mostly only come out at night to avoid predation by birds, slow worms, frogs, newts and toads.  Unfortunately for the worms,  foxes, hedgehogs and badgers are also nocturnal, and moles are after them all day and all night.  

They collect decaying leaves, which they drag back to their burrows,  In autumn you can see leaves half sticking out of the ground, and at this time of year bundles of skeletal dead leaves are the product of earthworm foraging.  Ash, poplar and aspen are their favourites followed by maple.  Oak is less palatable. 

Mating is another nocturnal activity - for worms too.  Worms are hermaphrodite but have to find a neighbour to mate with.  They keep their tails in their own burrow and stretch out to meet the significant other, also anchored in its home burrow. Eggs are laid in the saddle, a pale swelling on mature worms,  which slides off to make a cocoon.

They are important soil conditioners, improving aeration, drainage and nutrient recycling.  Worm casts are great for promoting the root growth of young seedlings.

Sorry about the whistling!

THE LITTLE CHILDREN'S DOWER

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,

All will be gay when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children's dower

Robert Browning: Home Thoughts from Abroad

 

THAT'S THE WISE THRUSH

Listen

Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge

Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray's edge -

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

Poem - Robert Browning

Video - ~Wildlife & Birds UK

RED CAMPION

Note the leaves when you see a plant in flower, then you will recognise the plant before it flowers and know where to expect it.  Red campion overlaps with bluebells and follows on when the bluebells fade.

This species is dioecious, meaning the male and female flowers grow on different plants.  Apparently you can tell which by looking in the centre.  Are the white bit stamens or stigmas? 

 I don't find it that easy.

 

WEBS

A heavy dew can reveal the wonders of the spidery world.  An orb web fixed vertically between plant stems or an intricate sheet web placed horizontally in the grass. 

As the year asdvances the spiders will get bigger and so will their webs.

 

CORN SALAD - another unobtrusive wild flower

By the time you notice Corn Salad (Valerianella locusta) in flower it is past its best as a salad vegetable.  It is grown commercially,especially in France, and picked when it is just a rosette.  Other names are Lambs' Lettuce, Mache or Doucette. 

Corn Salad in the wild often grows in rather infertile ground and so not so succulent.

The tiny, pale blue flowers are in clusters, and almost invisible they are so small.  Give yourself five points if you spot one of these plants.

 

LARGE RED DAMSELFLY

You can tell this is the large red damselfly rather than the small red damselfly because: 

(a) it is the first damselfly to emerge in spring - a welcome touch of colour, 

(b) it has a black band near the end of its tail, the small red is all red, 

(c) the small red is a weak flier and frequents only a few places on heathland bogs and streams - the large red is very widespread.

This photo was taken in my garden, which is not a heathland bog !

Like most insects they like a bit of sun to bask in, 

but this character kept moving and didn't want  a close-up taken.

 

GROUND IVY

A lively blue clump of low growing flowers may be Ground Ivy.  

Not related to ivy but it does spread by creeping stems.   

These were growing in the skatepark field just next to Filnore Woods.

.

Apparently the leaves used to be used to flavour beer 

until hops were introduced to Britain in the 16th century

 

BLACKCAPS AND BROWNCAPS

 As well as the blackbird, robin, wren and goldfinch, there is another very tuneful warbler, the blackcap.

Photo: wikimedia commons, quoted on community rspb

Only the male blackcap has a black cap.  The female's headgear is chestnut brown.

Photo: Chris Romeiks

The birds that breed here in summer spend the winter in Southern Europe or North Africa.  But in recent years, when they are away south, we get a different population of blackcaps in winter from Eastern Europe, especially Germany.

The male blackcap builds several nests and waits till his mate approves one of them by adding nesting material herself.  They both incubate the eggs but only the female does so at night.  They feed their chicks on caterpillars and craneflies.

The song is one of my favourites.  Fluty like a blackbird but less organised.  The alarm call is a tut-tutting cry.

Listen to Maurice Baker's youtube video here

It's 4 minutes long so although it would be good practice you might not want to listen to it all.  The alarm call is at 1.40 and you can see both sexes together at 3.35.

JACK-BY-THE-HEDGE

Jack-by-the - Hedge or Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is one of the few plants outside the Allium genus that has a smell or flavour of garlic or onion.  You can use the leaves in salads but they are best picked before the flowers open.

It's a biennial so it produces a rosette of heart-shaped, tooth-edged leaves the first year, and then shoots up to produce its small, white, four-petalled flowers the following year.

As its name suggests, it frequently grows alongside hedges, especially shady ones and unusually it always stands to attention.  The stems stay vertical rather than spreading outwards or leaning.

 

COBWEB SPIDER

The Coweb Spider or Daddy Longlegs Spider (Pholcus falangioides) stays indoors over winter and so is full size at this time of year.  Outdoor spiders are usually at their peak in the autumn.  

This character was in a web with the remains of a recent meal of woodlouse, skilfully captured here in my fiendishly clever spider trap - a glass tumbler.

Although they look frail they are the main predator of the big hairy Tegenaria house spiders, as you can see in this photo by Neil Massey.

Pholcus throws silk at the larger spider, or any other prey, 

and when it is safely wrapped Pholcus injects the venom.

 

TRUMPETS ANNOUNCING SPRING

 Lady's Smock is also known as Cuckoo Flower or Milkmaids but the flowers remind me of loudspeakers on a stand or trumpets blaring out "SPRING" in all directions.  The colour varies from white to pink.

  

I photographed the flowers above just outside the entrance to Thornbury Golf Centre.  They prefer damp ground and you can find several in the ditch between the footbal pitches at Mundy/Poulterbrook fields.  

There are several large clumps of them in the field with the seat overlooking the vale.

STITCHWORT

We don't seem to have any stitchwort at Filnore Woods.  This was one of several patches of this delicate flower growing alongside a hedgerow near the Mundy Playing Field

The five petals are deeply cleft and the stems are as weak as stitches of thread and so need the support of surrounding plants to get up to any height.

This is actually the greater stitchwort (Stellaria holostea) but there is also a lesser stitchwort (Stellaria graminea) with similar but much smaller flowers.  They are related to chickweed but stitchworts have narrow pointed leaves in pairs - almost like short grass blades.