Tales of the City

Streatham in bloom

2012-03-11T15:46:00.000Z

Spring has come to our south London streets. The daffs are out, and in our road a magnolia is coming into bloom, its waxy, blush-pink petals bursting out of their downy carapaces which litter the pavement below. There are grape hyacinths in the churchyard, and creeping violets in shady corners. The bees are busy, weeds are germinating and the first of the cherry trees are in bloom. I love this time of year.

A lark ascending

2012-03-04T13:27:00.004Z

A reminder today of how capricious spring can be: we woke, in Shropshire, to driving snow. At 700ft above sea level, halfway up the Wrekin, we were engulfed in a snow cloud that turned the tops of the hills white but left the houses and farms lower down the road untouched.

Eventually it turned to icy rain which left lacy patterns in the snow where it lay on the grass. We walked out of the village across fields of maize stubble, the sky louring overhead and a cold wind whipping into our faces off the Clee hills. Water rushed off the Wrekin, forming fast runnels in the ditches; here and there disks of water stood in the winter fields like sheets of steel.

And then, impossibly, a skylark, the notes unfurling distantly, stitching the slate-grey clouds together like a bright needle. There he was, ascending foot by foot as though on an invisible pulley, pouring the notes down onto the freezing fields, his tiny body whipped by wintry rain, and singing, despite everything, because it was spring.

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A traveller

2012-03-01T19:09:00.000Z

Coming home in the dark just now, at half past six, I spotted a frog on the pavement outside our house. It was too dim to see his colouring, but his skin was smooth and he had the alert, upright posture and wedge-shaped head that told me straight away that he wasn't a toad. I nearly missed him, so much did he look like a leaf; only years spent studying frogs and toads as a child readied my eye to pick his shape out in the dark, as a birdwatcher spots the 'jizz' of a familiar species although it may be winging its way past him at some distance, or obscured by trees.

A couple of minutes before coming across the frog I had passed a neighbour who has five British bulldogs. He was taking them all out for their evening walk – with the usual wheezing and panting on their part – so I decided to move the frog out of harm's way before they came up the road. Since it's possible to burn a frog's delicate skin by touching them, unless you wet your hands first, I picked him up using a tissue and put him in our front garden underneath the hydrangea, where he will hopefully find a damp place to hide.

It's been a warm couple of days, and spring is definitely in the air: I had heard my first blackbird of the year just ten minutes before. He was singing from a tree on Rush Common in Brixton, his fluting notes unmistakeable above the engine of the bus I was passing in. I wonder if this frog was responding to the same instinct as the blackbird – the urge to breed – and was making his way, in the cool of the night, to the pond in which he had turned so magically from spawn to tadpole to frog, perhaps last year, perhaps the year before. If that's the case, he won't stay; I only hope he makes it OK. It's a concrete jungle out there, after all.

Rituals

2012-02-18T19:09:00.001Z

The first of the spring bulbs are coming into bloom, using the energy they store under the ground to power their way through the cold soil so they can take advantage of the light before the trees they usually grow beneath come into leaf. It's a key moment for me, and for many people: the first flowers of the new year, and the first nectar for early insects. Spring starts here.

Each year I pick an early snowdrop and bring it into the house; my mum used to do the same. I've been thinking recently about these little rituals, and how important they can be in marking the cycle of the year: for me, seeing my first swift is a sign of summer. Kissing under the mistletoe is a remnant of an old tradition of dressing houses in evergreen leaves (holly and ivy too) for Christmas. We should do more of this kind of thing.

Every autumn conkers find their way into my pockets, and in summer I like to pick sweet peas to put in vases; a search of my house would also turn up pine cones, skeleton leaves, dessicated pussy willow twigs, honesty seed pods, interesting stones, feathers and all sorts of other natural treasures that I've picked up and haven't quite been able to let go.

Scandinavian countries celebrate midsummer and midwinter with bonfires, and until quite recently, we did too. I'd like to find more ways to mark the changing seasons, and maybe bring a little bit of the outdoors in at key times of the year. It's a good way to stay in touch with nature, especially in a city.

Pigeon street

2012-02-12T18:43:00.000Z

Their peak breeding season is between March and July, but feral pigeons can breed all year round – and judging by the sudden territorialism of the three who seem perpetually to be in our our back garden these days it's not far from their minds. This morning we witnessed a full-on pigeon fight, one bird pecking and holding the back of another's head and walking it around the lawn much as a bouncer might walk a punter out of a bar with his arm twisted behind his back.

Our hanging bird feeder has recently become a prime spot for pigeons; they have learned how to cling on to it, while flapping their wings, and eat the seed directly from the apertures. I wouldn't mind so much, but the smaller birds we are trying to see through the cold snap aren't getting a look-in, and we're refilling it almost daily. And when there's not a pigeon on it there's a fat squirrel, hanging upside-down and gorging itself. All it would take is a rat and we'll have the triumvirate of urban-dwelling opportunists. Who knows, perhaps we already do.

2012-02-05T16:40:00.000Z

After record low temperatures for night after night, finally a little snow, and immediately things warm up. It's been strange: -11 at night, a biting wind but very dry and no frost. As soon as the snow began to fall the wind dropped and it got a little warmer. Now the snow is melting, although it will probably refreeze tonight.

On Tooting Common crows patrolled the areas of snowmelt under the dripping trees, and parakeets screamed from the black branches. We heard a blue tit calling like a squeaky wheel, and there were reports of a woodpecker high in a poplar – though all we could see were half a dozen starlings all facing in the same direction.

And everywhere, footprints. Dogs of all sizes, mostly, and birds – gulls, pigeons and crows – but here and there we also saw the neat, oval prints of a fox: on the way to the common they led under or between railings and hugged the sides of buildings; on the common itself they made little chains leading directly from cover to cover. Scent lingers longer in the snow, and Scout stuck her nose right into each padmark, inhaling, analysing, inhaling.

Give us a song

2012-01-30T20:32:00.000Z

Nearly February, and although spring feels very far away, the birds know better and are starting to sing. Click here to hear the calls and songs of 13 common garden birds.

In Sir Edward Grey's wonderful 1927 book 'The Charm of Birds', he notes that February 5 is the date on which he usually expects to hear the first chaffinch of the year, and that, later in the month, one may find the first blackbird singing, the start of their brief but wonderful four-month stint.

Until then, we must make do with robins, great tits, blue tits, coal tits and wrens for company.

Bloody foreigners

2012-01-15T12:56:00.000Z

An interesting piece from The Guardian here, about invasive non-native species that are threatening some of our British plants and animals. The usual suspects are all present and correct: harlequin ladybirds, grey squirrels, signal crayfish, water primrose. And it's hard not to worry in the face of such gloomy predictions for the UK's unique habitats and local ecosystems.

Yet plants and animals have moved around the globe for millenia, particularly in mainstream Europe, and have naturalised perfectly well in their adopted countries: neither rabbits, nor apples, nor horse chestnuts are truly local to the UK, after all, but we treat them as 'honorary natives'. So isn't there the merest whiff of jingoism about our current horror of being... invaded?

My guide, as in many ecological issues, is Richard Mabey, whose breadth of knowledge and astuteness of understanding take some beating. "The fact is, there is no absolutely clear line between native and introduced species, or between their effects," he says. "Most exotics aren't especially pushy, and prosper only if they find a vacant niche – as did, for instance, the little owl (introduced from the Continent in the 1870s) and the collared dove (arrived under its own steam from south-east Europe in the 1950s)."

He goes on: "What is disturbing is an ideological opposition to introductions simply because they are foreign; and a conviction that conserving biodiversity means fossilising species, turning habitats into isolation wards, ecological theme parks. Biological diversity evolved by exactly the opposite process, by species mutating, developing, cross-breeding and radiating out." The fact that we are an island nation should not, I think, lead us to attempt to halt that process in its tracks.

Two recent attempts to curb 'invasive' species spring to mind, neither of which are very edifying. A hedgehog cull in the Western Isles of Scotland provoked outrage: after all, these charming animals have fallen in numbers on the British mainland by nearly 90%. And the ruddy duck, a lovely blue-billed waterfowl, was recently deemed to be interbreeding with the white-headed duck, and within a few months was all but eradicated from British waterways.

Is this approach either ethical, or sustainable? I'm not sure. Perhaps it's worth looking at our own role as 'invasive species', and the damage we as humans do to fragile ecosystems worldwide.

Green shoots

2012-01-12T14:41:00.000Z

There are reports on the radio of daffodils in full bloom, but ours are still a little way away. It was nice to see their green spears pushing up through the leaf litter in Hillside Gardens this morning, though, and to picture the yellow battalions they will soon become.

Two robins sang nearby, one from a young sycamore and the other perched on a litter bin, their fluting, reedy notes the battle cries in a struggle for territory that, unlike other birds, goes on all winter long.

Having been silent for so long the wheezy, unmistakeable sound of a great tit somewhere overhead was, like the daffodils, a much more reliable harbinger of spring.

2012-01-03T13:31:00.001Z

We are being battered by a winter storm, with winds gusting to 80mph, hail and lashing rain. Our garden fences have finally collapsed, and in Palace Road Nature Garden a young silver birch has come down.

There's hardly a bird to be seen outside; most are sheltering from the wind and rain. With no leaves on most of the trees they put up less resistance to the wind and are better able to stay upright, but provide less cover for birds, which need evergreens, shrubs and ivy to hide in at this time of year.

Hopefully the storm will pass before it gets dark; birds that miss an entire day's feeding at this time of year may well not survive the night.

Birds of a feather

2011-12-23T12:02:00.000Z

Image courtesy RSPB

A flock of about 30 goldfinches in the garden the other day, twittering excitedly to one another. In six years I've never seen a single goldfinch in the garden before, so this was something of an event.

In winter many birds flock together to feed. Without the need to defend territories for breeding, there is safety in numbers, and winter flocks often consist of several different species all seeking food together. Goldfinches love thistle seeds; I don't think we have any in the garden, but perhaps they found some other seed-bearing plants to feast on.

In contrast, robins will defend a territory all year round – both males and females. Last night I was walking our dog at dusk, just as the street lights were coming on. On every street, it seemed, the liquid notes of a robin filtered down from a leafless tree. Some people say their song is less strident, more melancholy in winter, and last night I was inclined to agree.

Birdstrike

2011-12-11T12:21:00.000Z

A bang from the back of the house the other day, and alarm from the dog, her body language making it clear that something unusual had happened. Yet I could find nothing out of place – until I saw, on the French windows, this faint, powdery impression:

The breast feathers are clearly visible, as are the two upraised wings. But it's the feathered legs that really give it away as a bird of prey – probably a sparrowhawk, swooping down to try and take one of the pigeons that patrol for dropped seeds beneath our bird feeder, then rising out of its stoop and attempting to fly into our living room. I looked around, but the bird itself was nowhere to be seen, so I presume it wasn't badly injured by hitting the glass.

Not all birds produce the powder that leaves these impressions, but most birds of prey do, which is why they seem to hit our windows more often; other species simply leave no trace. More birdstrikes can be seen here.

The silent season

2011-12-03T19:28:00.001Z

At this time of year it is the birdsong I miss. On an hour's walk around the South London streets this morning I heard only a gull crying to its mate above the rooftops, a blackbird's alarm call and the distant twittering of what I suspect were long-tailed tits, invisible in someone else's garden.

There was no robin's silvery trill, although they do still sing at this time of year; no thrush's rattle or repeated notes, no wood pigeon with its comforting coo. And, of course, none of the summer migrants: no swifts screaming high overhead, no chiff chaff singing its own name. Even our great tits won't shout 'teacher! teacher!' again until spring.

Trees of life

2011-11-20T15:19:00.000Z

It's official: research in The Lancet shows that access to the natural environment directly affects our health, and even our lifespan.

It's been known for some time that hospital patients with a view of trees or plants recover faster than those with a view of buildings, although the process by which this occurs is not yet understood. It's also recognised that outdoor play can directly benefit children suffering from behavioural disorders (not to mention reducing childhood obesity), and the term 'nature deficit disorder', coined by Richard Louv in his groundbreaking book 'Last Child in the Woods', has been in currency for some time now.

We have failed to protect the natural world for its own sake, and we seem to be failing to protect it as the medium in which we exist. Perhaps, as evidence mounts of its direct to our health, we will finally be moved to preserve our living environment – for our own sake, if nothing else.

Water works

2011-11-13T19:07:00.000Z

To Sydenham Hill Wood today, which smells richly of wet leaves and rot. At this time of year the sun is low and the shadows long; if it wasn't for the deep green of the remaining leaves and the mushrooms and fungi everywhere you could almost think it was spring.

A notice announces that a generous grant has allowed work to begin on the Ambrook (a tributary of the Effra, now mainly underground), and Dewy Pond, which it feeds. The pond has been in sorry state for years, in full shade, choked with leaves and covered with duckweed. Very little lived there.

Light now filters down, and around the edges of the new liner, London clay is revealed; it forms the area's marbled, orange and grey-blue foundations, and dictates what can and can't grow here:

I didn't even know there was a stream, which is in the process of being dug out. Right now the water is just a trickle, but hopefully the project will bring it back to life.

It's thought the works will take three years, but the result will be living water, full of invertebrates which will in turn provide food for birds, amphibians, and for the wood's prized colony of seven species of bat.

Remember, remember...

2011-11-05T14:07:00.000Z

It is Guy Fawkes' night, and with it come the annual reminders to check your bonfire for hedgehogs before setting light to it. The chances of inadvertently baking a hedge-pig, Romany-style, get less with every year: yet this is no cause for celebration, but an indication of how few of these lovely little animals we have left.

They've survived here for over 70 million years, yet we've gone from about 30 million in the 1950s to perhaps a million today. That means we have lost over 95% of the country's hedgehogs within living memory. At the current rate of loss, the hedgehog will be extinct in this country by 2025.

The reasons are complex. Tidier, landscaped gardens, better maintained fences, our increased use of pesticides (including slug pellets), increased road traffic and (perhaps) an increase in fox and badger numbers may all play a part. We've even slaughtered them in their thousands in one of the last places they were doing well, the Hebrides, because we favoured the birds whose eggs they were eating.

But by far the greatest problem for hedgehogs is our implacable greed, our determination to turn everything to our own use. Our gardens, our parks, our roads, our fields, our copses: all managed for us, according to our whims and priorities, and damn everything else that relies on them to live.

For me, hedgehogs are a real marker species, a measure of how good (or bad) things really are. They're unique in this isles, utterly charming, useful (for pest control), and most of all, harmless. We think they're all around us, but they are fading away. Our children are likely to grow up without ever having glimpsed one in the wild, let alone rescued one from a bonfire. Personally, I don't want to live in a country that can't make room for hedgehogs. Do you?

To find out what you can do to help your local hedgehogs, click here.

Life and death

2011-10-30T12:37:00.001Z

In the parks and public places around us, pyracanthas have caught sudden fire. These tough, easycare shrubs are much favoured by councils: they withstand pollution, grow slowly and can be persuaded to fan out and cover ugly walls and fitments.

Happily, firethorns are also great for birds, particularly our native blackbirds and thrushes, and migratory redwings and fieldfares, all of which use them to stock up on body fat before the depradations of winter.

Elsewhere, bright colours mean decay, not life. As the green chlorophyll in leaves breaks down, the brighter oranges and yellows of carotenoids are revealed, and, in some species, red or purple anthocyanins are also synthesised – at some cost to the tree. Finally, mould begins to consume the decaying leaf – although sometimes all three processes occur at once, as on this London plane leaf.

Despite all our sophistication, debate still rages about this most simple yearly phenomenon: the changing colours of autumn leaves. Are the red anthocyanins a warning to overwintering aphids, a method of protecting the tree's last stores of chlorophyll or even a way of stunting the growth of competing trees? We don't know. But we enjoy their red blaze nonetheless.

Apple day

2011-10-23T19:30:00.000+01:00

Elizabeth Blackwell, 1739

Thursday was Apple Day, and there were celebrations all over the country, from cider stalls to nursery sales and from lectures to longest peel competitions. At our house we marked it in characteristic South London style, with a crumble made from stolen apples and supermarket plums.

For more on Apple Day, click here or get hold of Common Ground's wonderful Apple Source Book.

If you missed Apple Day this year, consider celebrating your local orchards by wassailing at Christmas and New Year. After rattling pots and pans to scare off evil spirits, pour cider around the roots of the biggest tree and sing a wassailing song to ensure a good fruit harvest next year:

Old apple tree, we wassail thee,
And hoping thou wilt bear
For the Lord doth know where we shall be
Till apples come another year.
For to bear well, and to bear well
So merry let us be.
Let every man take off his hat,
And shout to the old apple tree!
Old apple tree, we wassail thee,
And hoping thou wilt bear
Hatfuls, capfuls, three bushel bagfuls
And a little heap under the stairs
Hip! Hip! Hooray!

Senescence

2011-10-16T18:35:00.006+01:00

Cow parsley seed-heads

Today we went to Selborne, the Hampshire village that was once home to parish curate and parochial naturalist Gilbert White. There, everything is in abundant decay, from the leaf mould carpeting the beech hangar on the high chalk hill to the stump of the famous Selborne Yew, thought to be around 1,500 years old when it was blown down in a gale in 1990.

When I call Gilbert White 'parochial' it is with heartfelt respect. The term was coined by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh: "parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals", he said. "To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience."

White knew everything about his parish: which day the swallows would return (though not where they had been); where the bats roosted; why the martins favoured some eaves over others for their nests. He observed, minutely, how animals and plants lived their lives; moreover, those everyday creatures overlooked by other gentlemen-scholars of the time. His diaries and letters remain an invaluable resource, and his contribution to British natural history was immeasurable.

The colours of the mast

2011-10-09T13:31:00.001+01:00

The hot weather last week dried the acorns in their cups and sent them thudding to the ground. Now, beneath several of the big oaks on Tooting Common, there is a carpet of brown oak-nuts.

Oak trees begin producing acorns when they are about 40-50 years old, and in a good year (a 'mast year') a mature oak will produce up to 50,000 acorns – although very few will go on to become mature oaks themselves.

High in fat, protein and carbohydrate, acorns are an excellent food source for animals like squirrels and jays, which sometimes aid in their dispersal and germination by caching them for future use; a spell underground can also help to leach bitter tannins from the acorns by allowing rain and groundwater to soak into them. Although an oak seedling will get more light if it germinates away from its parent's canopy, oaks are known to co-operate by sharing water supplies through their root system in dry years; there is some advantage in the acorn not falling too far from the tree!

Pigs are another animal that loves acorns, but large amounts can be poisonous to sheep, cattle and horses. In the New Forest the ancient right of pannage is still extended to commoners; this is the right to graze pigs on the common land, so that they can eat the acorns, for sixty days.

Beech nuts (pictured above) are another type of mast, less bitter than acorns. In beechwoods the mast and shells create a dry mulch on the forest floor which, along with beeches' dense summer canopy and slow-rotting, non-nutritious leaves, make it very difficult for other species to colonise the undergrowth layer, reducing competition for the trees, but opening up the forest floor to spring species such as anemones, oxslips, wild garlic and bluebells, which are most often found in our beechwoods.

The last swallow of summer

2011-10-02T20:21:00.000+01:00

Today I saw what must surely be the last swallow of summer. He was perched on the weathervane at Sissinghurst Castle, for all the world as though he was trying to work out which direction was south.

Most of Britain's swallows are long gone; the National Trust staff told us that there had been two nests at Sissinghurst that year, but that both broods had flown three weeks before. So why hadn't this chap migrated? Hadn't he got up to a good enough weight to make the trip to Africa? Or was the unseasonably warm weather keeping him here?

After watching him for a few minutes the reason became clear. He was holding his left wing awkwardly, and although he did take off twice, for short flights before returning to the weathervane, he was having to flap his wings more than he should have on such a fine day and with such good thermals. His ability to fly had obviously been compromised by his injury.

We speculated about how such a strong flier could have damaged his wing. But in the hop barn, a chalkboard headed 'wildlife sightings' told the story. 'Hobby:' it read. 'Frequent visitor'.

The autumn equinox

2011-09-24T14:38:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, September 23, was the autumn equinox, the day on which the hours of darkness and daylight are almost exactly the same. From now on the nights will lengthen into winter; at the North Pole the sun will not rise again for six months.

The Romans dedicated a feast day to Pomona at the autumn equinox, the goddess of fruitful abundance – specifically orchard fruits, at their best at this time of the year. In Japan, people remember their ancestors at both the autumn and spring equinoxes, while closer to home, several ancient traditions still surround this time of the year, many marking the end of the harvest – for instance, the making of corn dolls, the slaughter of a fatted goose and the observation of the harvest moon.

I never mind seeing a season out; I always feel excited about the changes to come. Every part of the year has its own beauty, distant enough from each other that you greet them anew each time. Listen to the wild excitement in Gerard Manley Hopkins' voice, from Hurrahing in Harvest, written in 1877:

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

Mellow fruitfulness

2011-09-17T16:57:00.000+01:00

All over London apples are ripening. In the streets around my house, in Streatham Hill, there are four large trees loaded with apples; hidden in back gardens must be many more. Most will go unpicked, something that would have been unthinkable not so long ago, the fruits left to rot on the ground.

I will be writing more about our national fruit next month; October 21st is Apple Day, the height of the season and a day when all over the country there will be tree dressing ceremonies and apple fairs. Suffice to say, for now, that there are thought to be well over 6,000 varieties of apple in Britain, some local to only one village and unable to survive even five miles away; some with only one known tree surviving. More than any other tree or plant, they are local, linked inexorably to one county, one valley, one place.

Since apples can live for up to 350 years, it's interesting to speculate about the origins of the mature trees around us. Some may be the remains of orchards; indeed, when an 'apple hunt' was organised in north London to identify fruit trees planted by Dame Henrietta Barnett in 1899, over 40 varieties (hundreds of individual trees) were discovered – the remnants of her extensive orchard. Some may have been domestic specimens, planted to supply fruit, either for eating or cider, to individual households. And some may be 'wildings', grown from a discarded apple core, or from a pip excreted by a bird or animal, many miles away from its parent tree.

If you're interested in finding out about the fruit trees near you, Fruit City is an interactive project aimed at identifying the apples, damsons, cherries and quinces in London's public spaces. Click here to look at, and contribute to, their map.

Red alert!

2011-09-10T13:17:00.000+01:00


From now until spring, the robin's will be one of the only songs you'll hear. Picture by Helen Cowdy

Conkers – so tactile and irresistible!

In autumn, mushrooms can spring up almost overnight

Firethorns are much planted in cities, and, with rowans, are important in helping birds such as thrushes and blackbirds to survive the winter

Crab apples are high in pectin, prized for centuries for setting jams and preserves

Fading hydrangeas have one last flush of colour before going brown

Many London councils leave dead wood in parks to encourage stag beetles. It works – the capital is one of their last strongholds

Holly berries are already ripening. Hollies with untoothed leaves are often very old

Rosehips are very high in vitamin c, and in WW2 were collected and turned into syrup to combat rickets in children as fresh fruit was often in short supply

Poppies and cornflowers growing (incongruously) in Brockwell Park

The leaves of Virginia creeper turn almost impossibly red in autumn

Out of this world...

2011-09-05T18:37:00.001+01:00

Right now, just before dawn, you can see Mercury rising briefly above the horizon; just north of due east, as pictured here courtesy of Jodrell Bank. It's normally lost in the glow from the sun, which it is the closest to of all our planets, so seeing it is more difficult than you might think.

In London you'll need either to get up high, or find somewhere with a good view of the horizon, unobstructed by buildings.

Acorn season

2011-08-28T13:51:00.001+01:00

On Tooting Common the oaks are swollen with acorns. Some are large and hearty, almost bursting out of their cups; others small and nut-like. Some are subsumed almost entirely within galls.

Oak galls are very high in tannin, and were used for centuries to make dyes and inks. In fact, traditional oak gall ink can still be bought today.

Beneath some of the oaks on the common today I saw that the ground was stained black where the galls had fallen and leached their tannin into the soil.

Biodiversity 2020

2011-08-20T12:44:00.000+01:00

The UK government's plan to create 200,000 hectares of 'priority habitats' as part of a push to improve biodiversity has been criticised by environmental groups including the RSPB, the Campaign to Protect Rural England and Friends of the Earth as being too vague, in conflict with current planning priorities and lacking proper funding.

With little new money for the programme, the onus will fall mainly on farmers to opt in to subsidy schemes as part of the common agricultural policy, although the newly identified 'priority habitats' will be improved and restored. Urban green spaces are also earmarked for special attention.

Neil Sinden, policy director of the CPRE, told the Guardian: "Delivery will be frustrated, if not impossible, without a fundamental rethink of the government's proposals for planning reform," while Mike Clarke, chief executive of the RSPB, said: "We need a more determined focus on the health of individual priority species."

The UK is the first EU member to publish a biodiversity strategy following the international biological diversity conference last year in Nagoya, Japan.

To read the government's strategy document in full, click here.

Westward ho!

2011-08-18T20:29:00.001+01:00

I'm in Dorset, from whence I've written a guest post on Herb Lester's lovely website. It features photos of prize-winning vegetables, cows, wolfhounds, sloes and poultry. Click here to read it.

After the riots

2011-08-13T13:29:00.000+01:00

It's been a terrible week in London, and in other British cities, too. Lives have been lost, homes destroyed, businesses ransacked and historic buildings burned to the ground.

London will pick itself up, though, as it always does. Already, funds have been set up to help traders whose shops were looted and citizens, mobilised using social networks, have come together to clean up their local areas.

Nature, too, moves quickly to heal the scars left by the worst of our behaviour. After the Blitz, rosebay willowherb, or 'fireweed', became the first plant to colonise the bomb sites. In fact, fire helps its dormant seeds to germinate, while the young plants thrive on ash.

As the Blitz wore on, rosebay willowherb wreathed the mourning city in purple, and it remains today the county flower of London.

An all conkering app

2011-08-06T17:20:00.000+01:00

If you have a smartphone you can now help scientists who are trying to halt the spread of the leaf miner moth, which is devastating horse chestnut trees across Britain.

The Conker Tree Science: Leaf Watch app now lets you identify, photograph and submit geo-located data to scientists at the universities of Bristol and Hull, who are hoping to understand the progress of the disease across tree populations and find ways to defend them from attack.

You can download the iPhone version here, and the Android version here. Both are free and simple to use, and a great example of 'citizen science' in action.

Early plenty

2011-08-01T22:21:00.000+01:00

The pavement opposite our house is tacky and stained under a neighbour's plum tree. The plums ripened ten days ago, and have been falling ever since. Last year some Asian ladies came and picked them, but this year they seem for the most part to be falling unheeded.

Our damsons are purple, albeit still tart, and everywhere the berries on the rowans are bright orange. We've even eaten blackberries from the Common.

Everything is ripening early this year. But what of the creatures that depend on the late summer fruit? Will a feast now be enough to sustain our local thrushes and blackbirds through the winter, and will there be anything left for the redwings, fieldfares and waxwings when they arrive?

The road less travelled

2011-07-31T13:11:00.000+01:00

A couple of months ago a small tree came down on Tooting Common, blocking one of the paths. In line with current environmental thinking, and because there was plenty of room, the council left it where it fell, and since then people have been going around it. Now the curving course of the detour is firmly established, though the 'ghost' of the old, straight path, quickly filling in with grass, can still just about be seen.

These kind of accidents have always determined the course of paths and tracks, and in some cases the resulting kinks have survived for hundreds of years. As the landscape historian Oliver Rackham says in his seminal book, The Illustrated History of the Countryside, "Ancient roads, Roman or otherwise, usually have a course consisting of a series of small wobbles... over the centuries, travellers have gone round fallen trees, sloughs, holes, muckheaps... and dead horses; they have continued to go round after the obstruction has disappeared."

Palace Road goes online

2011-07-25T14:03:00.000+01:00

I was very pleased to hear today that Palace Road Nature Garden, the setting for a key scene in my book Clay and the place where I recently heard tawny owls, has a Facebook page. There's lots of information about the plants, animals and birds that live there, as well as about plans for a nature trail.

What's especially heartening is to see from this page how important to people even the smallest urban green spaces can be. PRNG is only a half-acre or so, yet it supports a vast amount of plant, animal and human life.

A sting in the tale

2011-07-23T16:03:00.000+01:00

One of the oaks in Brockwell Park has had a ring of barriers placed around it. A sign explains that the 'facility' (that's the tree) is 'closed' due to an active wasps' nest, which is awaiting fumigation.

Leaving aside the Orwellian linguistics of this notice, I'd like to consider the further implications. Why has the barrier been erected, and why is the nest being fumigated?

Lambeth Council is clearly worried that someone will be stung by a wasp and then sue them for negligence in failing to control the behaviour of every wild creature in its parks and green spaces. Sadly, encouraged largely by the relaxation of rules concerning compensation, we now believe that there is no such thing as an accident, and someone can be found to blame for everything – even an insect bite.

Hence, the barrier. But why are the wasps to be killed? A quick Google search of 'why kill wasps' returns thousands of results – all of them answering the question 'HOW to kill wasps', as though the question of why is so obvious as not to need answering. Many sites even ask, 'What is the point of wasps?' – as though every living thing must have a point, must be useful to us in some way. To which I'd say: 'Your children: what is the point?'

You many bridle, but the fact is that life needs no point, and wasps are part of the ecosystem in just the same way we are. They have a perfect right to exist, but to those who insist on some kind of utility, it's worth bearing in mind that not only are they extremely efficient pest controllers, but they're pollinators, too. And we really can't afford to lose any more of those.

Untamed London: a Herb Lester map

2011-07-16T13:46:00.000+01:00

My copy of Herb Lester's wonderful 'Untamed London' map has arrived! Subtitled 'Where nature still runs wild in the big city', it's a wonderful evocation of the city that exists in my mind almost more clearly than the one with the usual landmarks like Oxford Street and Tower Bridge. On a practical level, it's a great guide to getting out and seeing some wildlife in London, and it's also a beautifully designed work of art in its own right.

Produced in association with one of my favourite websites, Caught By The River, I'm proud to say that I contributed some locations to the map. Regular readers of this blog will know all about Palace Road Nature Garden; 'Untamed London' also features Tooting Common and Happy Valley in Coulsden, with its dormice and orchids and skylarks.

There are 82 locations in all, dotted all over the city. It really brings home what a wild place we Londoners live in, and how lucky we are to be so surrounded by nature. Order your copy for only £4 by clicking here.

More owls

2011-07-12T18:33:00.000+01:00

After the BBC picked up on a story about a woman in Kendal who came home to find the impression of a tawny owl on her window, other readers sent in photos of their own ghostly bird shapes.

You can access the entire gallery here.

The night owl

2011-07-02T16:46:00.000+01:00

Two nights ago, while walking my dog, Scout, late at night, I heard a tawny owl. You might not think that's very noteworthy – but I live in Streatham, only five miles south of the financial district, in a built-up (and pretty run-down) area of London.

What makes it all the more extraordinary is that nearly three years ago, when I started writing Clay, I imagined what it would be like if there were tawnies living nearby – somewhere tangled and abandoned, somewhere like Palace Road Nature Garden. What if there were owls in the city, in grimy old Lambeth, and nobody knew? The possibility went on to become a central tenet of the novel.

When I heard the distinctive 'kyyick... kyyick' call I stopped dead in the darkened street. So did Scout, her body tensed, her ears forward. It came again, and I could pinpoint their direction. On the other side of the houses I was walking past, I realised, was the Nature Garden. They were right where I'd pictured them all along.

Hay fever

2011-06-27T22:41:00.001+01:00

The grass in the uncut meadow area in Brockwell Park is tall and lush, thick with seedheads and brimming with life – as evidenced by the swifts jinking and scything low over it at the weekend in the hot sun, the only spot in the park where they were hawking so low. Just walking through it you could hear that it was abuzz with grasshoppers and bees, and tiny spiders were probably drifting up from it on silk lines, too, aerial plankton for them to hoover up like sleek little basking sharks.

The grass will soon be cut for hay all over the countryside. Calculating when to do it is a tricky task; overall this spring has been very dry, and the meadow grass in London certainly isn't as high as it was this time last year, but it is now in seed which means it's the right time to cut. Sunday and today have been very hot (32 degrees), but it feels as though the weather is about to break in spectacular fashion. Wet grass is hard to cut and can rot in the fields or in the bales, so the farmers will need to decide whether to cut it now – or whether to risk holding out for another hot, dry spell in the next 10 days or so.

As right as rain?

2011-06-18T16:56:00.001+01:00

Rain at last – but too late to save this year's struggling harvest. The UK's arable farmers are being hit hard by the second dry year in row, and the second driest spring since records began. Cereal crop yields are likely to be well down this year, compounding the misery for farmers whose costs – seed, plant hire, fuel, fertiliser – remain the same, no matter what the weather.

Many livestock farmers are no better off. Some have had to buy in winter fodder for their animals for two years running, as snowy conditions meant they had to take them under cover for long periods, and their stocks of hay, harvested from already drought-hit summer pasture, ran out.

So spare a thought for the country's farmers next time you find yourself moaning about a spring shower. It may be an inconvenience for many of us, but it's crucial when it comes to the livelihoods of people who work on the land – and who, after all, put food on our plates.

A bird in the hand

2011-06-13T22:26:00.000+01:00

I've been away for a week, but this piece on swifts in the Guardian by Mark Cocker was a nice thing to come back to – especially as every town we visited in the Minho, northern Portugal, was alive with them, screaming high over our heads, dogfighting above the streets and darting up under the red-tiled roofs to their nests.

Here in London modern building techniques rarely leave room for swifts, which need shelves or ledges to make their homes in – they don't build mud houses, like swallows and house martins do, or tunnel into sandy banks, like sand martins. Fewer places to nest means fewer swiftlets, which means fewer breeding pairs in years to come – until the skies above cities are empty all summer.

There are ways developers can help, though. Installing nest boxes or swift bricks during the construction process can mean these most breathtaking of birds will be able to make a new building their home. Boxes can also be retrofitted to buildings, under the eaves – and given that a swift can live to 20 and their young will return year after year, just think what a difference to our city skies each box could make.

A briar engagement

2011-05-30T12:58:00.000+01:00

The sunny, dry spring has brought the brambles into bloom – far earlier than in previous years. All over the city, in parks, gardens and on waste ground, dense bramble thickets with their arching, thorny stems are studded all over with dirty pink flowers.

It's great news for pollinating insects, including honey bees, like the one pictured here, but also bumblebees, hoverflies, butterflies, moths and lacewings. Brambles also support buff arches, peach blossom and fox moths, all of which lay their eggs on it, and many birds and small mammals nest in its protective tangles.

Later in the year birds will eat the blackberries, including blackbirds, thrushes, robins, magpies, crows, wrens and finches, as will mice, voles and even foxes. I'll be there, too, collecting wild, organic blackberries for my freezer. And if I get enough I'll eat apple and blackberry crumble all winter long.

Blowing in the wind

2011-05-22T17:35:00.000+01:00

It's still bone dry, still fine, but winds are battering the country - and they couldn't have come at a worse time for birds. We saw three chicks within the space of an hour this morning, all of which had been blown out of their nests before they were quite able to fly. One was this handsome young greater spotted woodpecker:

Scout found it in a dry ditch on Tooting Common. At first I thought she'd found a little water and was having a drink; when I looked more closely I saw the chick, weak, but with his already formidable beak held open threateningly against her questing nose. I scooped him up and put him high in the crook of the nearby willow tree, in some ivy, as close as I could to where I'd heard tweeting coming from on previous days. I hope he had the sense to stay there; I hope his parents found him and fed him, maybe encouraged him back into the nest. I hope he's OK.

Nearby, on the grass, we came across the head of a male stag beetle. The body had been cleanly removed and, presumably, eaten; the massive mandibles and one set of forelegs opened and closed still, like a mechanical toy running down. Crows often patrol the grass nearby, another bird with a formidable beak; it seems a shame for such an impressive and rare beetle, six years in the making, to end its days in such a manner, but one can only hope that it had a chance to breed before becoming a snack.

Nature, it seems, is red not only in tooth and claw, but in beak, too.

A mystery

2011-05-14T19:01:00.000+01:00

I found a dead squirrel in my garden today, a fully grown, lactating female. She had no marks on her at all, and was well nourished and of a good weight. Her fur was glossy and thick, and apart from the fact that she was dead she looked perfectly healthy.

Most squirrels die of malnutrition before they are a year old, although in captivity they have lived to be 20. The next most common cause of death is on the road, followed by predation.

Very rarely a squirrel may sustain injuries - or even die - from a fall, but usually from a height of at least 30ft. This one was underneath a shrub as tall as a person, and a six-foot garden fence.

Could she have been poisoned? If so, I consider myself very lucky to have found her before my dog did.

Swifts

2011-05-07T10:39:00.000+01:00

They're here! They're here! They're here!

The summer migrants

2011-05-03T21:17:00.001+01:00

There are whinchats nesting all over Dartmoor, handsome summer migrants in from Africa to nest among the gorse. Tinder-dry after weeks without rain, let's hope it doesn't go up. Half of County Down, it seems, is in flames; what of all the ground-nesting birds?

While we were in the West Country my mother-in-law heard a cuckoo: clear as day, the two notes taking possession of a sheltered Devon valley like a diffident clarion: spring's here... spring's here...

And there's more. We saw swallows and house martins in East Sussex last weekend, flickering through the herds of cows and scything high above the fields. It's the swifts I'm waiting for now, and it's my bet that within a week we'll see them over London, tiny black sickles circling on the city's thermals, beaks open like sleek little basking sharks quartering shoals of aerial plankton. I can't wait.

Spring forward

2011-04-24T15:17:00.001+01:00

Spring has swept across the UK from Land's End to John O'Groats, and this weekend it's felt as though summer has chased in close behind.

Temperatures like these (28 degrees yesterday) over a bank holiday weekend are rare, and the country is luxuriating in the heat. Yet it is high spring, rather than summer. The swifts aren't here, the oaks and ashes aren't in leaf; the beds are still full of forget-me-nots and gone-over spring daffs. The birds are still in full song, and the grass has only recently started growing; usually, when it's this hot, it's going to seed.

Spring travels east and north at a rate of about a third of a mile per hour - a little slower on upland areas. It takes eight weeks, on average, to cover the country. With weather like this it's hard to believe anywhere in the UK could still be left behind.

Flights of fancy

2011-04-17T17:47:00.000+01:00

Image courtesy Ernst Vikne

I saw a common blue butterfly in my garden yesterday. Despite the name they're not all that common, and April is early to see them flying. There are far fewer butterflies around these days than when I was a child, so I count any of them as a blessing; and here was a beautiful azure insect flickering through the ivy covering our back fence.

Much commoner was the cabbage white (or, more properly, the large white) that was blundering about today. It's amazing how bad some butterflies seem to be at flying, but there's a good reason for it. Those that are unpalatable - that have evolved bad-tasting toxins to protect themselves from predation - advertise the fact with slow, ungainly flight. It is only the tasty varieties that need fast, evasive and direct flight, and the greater energy (and requirement for food) that such flight demands. Insectivorous bird species have generally learned which butterflies (and caterpillars) are worth eating; the cabbage white, and its larvae, are not.

Butterflies and moths have one of the most miraculous life cycles of any living thing. We're all taught at school that the caterpillar makes a chrysalis out of its own skin, emerging from it as a butterfly, but the details of its transformation are truly bizarre. Inside the chrysalis the caterpillar isn't merely growing wings, legs and a proboscis; it melts itself down into a kind of DNA soup, then reconstitutes itself from scratch as a new creature. The butterfly DNA, present in the caterpillar but 'switched off', is finally expressed.

Watch a one-minute, time-lapse film of a cabbage white emerging from its chrysalis and inflating its wings here. It's narrated by David Attenborough, so you know it's going to be good.

At the beech

2011-04-09T19:08:00.000+01:00

In one of the little parks near our house the leaves on the beech hedge are opening like tiny, corrugated fans. Bright, acid green, it is only when they emerge that the previous year's leaves are dislodged; all winter long the hedge has been tan-coloured and rattly in a stiff breeze, and now, suddenly, it is fresh and green.

Beech makes an attractive ornamental hedge in gardens and parks, but is rarely used in the countryside as the leaves are much prized by all kinds of stock animals, who, left to their own devices, will eat the entire hedge. Having said that, one of Britain's most notable hedges is of beech: the Meikleour beech hedge in Perthshire, Scotland, the tallest hedge in the world at 30m high.

London's secret wildlife

2011-04-06T13:55:00.000+01:00

I'm not a big fan of the Daily Mail, but today they've published a lovely series of photos by Alex Saberi of wildlife in Richmond Park, and it's well worth a look. Click here for a great reminder of how much 'proper' wildlife there is only a few short miles from the centre of London.

The city singers

2011-04-02T15:18:00.002+01:00

Image by Malene Thyssen

One of my favourite things about April is that the birds are in full song. Many people don't realise this, but with a few exceptions such as the robin, birds don't sing all year round. They may call to one another, either for contact or to raise an alarm, but they only actually sing during the breeding season, to attract a mate and defend a territory while they raise chicks.

Once the chicks have flown - and some species may rear several broods - many birds go into moult, shedding old and damaged feathers and replacing them with new ones. It's a vulnerable time when their ability to fly may be impaired, and most birds hide away; they certainly don't sing, as that would attract attention. August, therefore, is known as 'the silent month', but even after the moult is over and birds are seen again in parks and gardens, most will be rarely heard from until the following spring.

But now is the season of birdsong, and of all the city birds, the blackbird is the one whose song most defines the urban streets. At dusk every evening they take up position all over the city: usually somewhere high, like a roof tile or a lamp post, so that their song will carry. They'll pour out a carillon of notes, cock their head to the side and listen for their rivals' reply; then answer it with a phrase even more intricate, more complicated, than his.

Blackbirds pick up sounds almost as easily as starlings, and you'll often hear the notes of a car alarm or mobile phone among their repertoire. They do it, quite simply, to show off: it's a way of saying, "Look how far I've travelled, look how much I've seen and heard: consider how fit and strong I must be to have done so."

Male blackbirds establish a territory in their first breeding season and will try to hold it for the rest of their lives; so the bird you see in your back garden today could well be the same one you saw last year, and even the year before that. It's hard to tell by looking, but if you listen out it's fairly easy to tell one from another by their songs. We can recognise one who sings in our damson tree by the fluting trill he finishes many of his phrases with, making his song instantly recogniseable from the bird who sings a few doors down.

For more on the blackbird and its beautiful song there's a short film here (warning: contains Titchmarsh).

In Praise of Boredom

2011-03-29T11:01:00.000+01:00

A little while ago I was asked to contribute a guest post to Strictly Writing, a collaborative blog run by a fellow writer, Caroline Green, whose book for young adults, Dark Ride, will be published in May by Piccadilly Press.

At the time I was struggling to get started on my second novel. Everything in the world seemed more attractive than sitting down, clearing my head and really thinking. What I needed was a good dose of doing nothing. I wrote my guest post, and then I started book two.

A mystery

2011-03-27T14:29:00.001+01:00

It's full spring now, although autumn still lingers here and there. The beech hedges rattle with dead leaves, and in Palace Road nature garden the ground is strewn with these mysterious and beautiful wooden roses:

What are they? They are the remains of pine cones, nibbled down to the base by squirrels keen to get at the tasty seeds inside.

Yet a few yards away a comma butterfly was basking in the spring sunshine amid the young nettles it had, until recently, been eating as a caterpillar.

Unusually for a butterfly (rather than a moth), this one was resting with its wings open. Newly emerged from its chrysalis, it was pumping blood around its brand new wings, ready for flight.

The comma is named for the small white shape seen on the dull, speckled underside of its wings, making it look, when its wings are held upright, like nothing so much as a dead autumn leaf.

Sakura, or cherry blossom

2011-03-20T18:06:00.000Z

The cherries are coming out all over the city, bridal white or blessing the pavements below with palest pink. Before long they will bloom in Japan, where the tradition of hanami, or picnicking beneath flowering cherries, is centuries old. Perhaps the disaster-hit country will have no time for hanami this year; after all, the short-lived blossoms also represent mono no aware, the fleeting nature of life; but perhaps this year the indefatigable cherry blossom will be a sign of hope. As well as being a symbol of mortality, sakura is also an omen of good fortune, after all.

Here, cherries are much favoured by town councils. They are cheap and low maintenance: they rarely exceed a certain height, need little care and their blossoms make them a favourite with the public. Many street cherries are bred to be sterile, so that nobody slips on the fallen fruit and brings a compensation case against the council. Other varieties produce inedible fruit; well, inedible to humans - the opportunistic birds love them. Lucky is the householder who moves into a house with an edible cherry in the garden.

Our native cherry, the gean or prunus avium, has simple, single white flowers that are a world away from some of the showy, chrysanthemum-style blossoms produced by Japanese varieties (see photo). The gean bears small, dark fruits; they're edible, but not as sweet as the orchard varieties. It grows wild in woodlands across the UK, where its blossom, appearing amid bleak winter branches, is one of the first signs of spring.

Please make a donation to the Red Cross's Japan Tsunami Appeal here.

Happy as the grass was green...

2011-03-13T11:39:00.000Z

The grass is growing again. It's hard to believe, when the back garden is a muddy morass and the common floods after each night of rain, but look closely and you can see the fresh new growth coming up around last year's tired and broken blades.

Everywhere the verges are thickening up, regreening South London's streets and parks. With the grass comes weeds; nettles and goose-grass are on their way, and on the commons cow parsley is pushing up its leaves like chervil. But before long, dandelions and daisies, the bane of tidy gardeners, will be in bloom, and later buttercups and clover will appear to remind us city-dwellers of the meadows we have lost. I can't wait.

Hedge fund

2011-03-06T15:44:00.000Z

We are in Shropshire for the weekend, where the traditionally laid hazel hedge we saw under construction last spring has thickened up nicely and is coming back into bud.

The technique, called 'pleaching', involves cutting saplings (usually hawthorn, blackthorn or hazel) almost all the way through, then pushing the cut stems down so they lie nearly horizontally and securing them with stakes and plaited bindings. The cuts quickly heal and the stems send out new twigs which, in time, become an impenetrable, stock-proof hedge.

Hedge-laying is an ancient skill, and much less common than it once was. To lay a hedge takes time, but the results are beautiful and long-lasting, as well as providing a great habitat for wildlife.

Cutting machines trim hedges only from the top, thus concentrating new growth there and leaving the base of the hedge to become leggy so that animals may pass through. Then, farmers may be tempted to replace old pleached hedges with electric fences instead, but a traditionally laid hedge, properly maintained, will do its job naturally, and beautifully, for generations to come.

The BBC Radio 4' Living World' archive

2011-02-28T20:35:00.001Z

The wonders of Twitter. My friend Bob Doherty has discovered that the entire archive of Radio 4's 'Living World' series is available online to listen again, here.

From dippers to hen harriers and from lampreys to boar, it's a lovely, discursive series, full of detail and description, which makes a fantastic introduction to many of the British countryside's familiar - and less familiar - species.

I will begin either with 'The World's Largest Slug' or 'The Natural History of the TT Race'; I can't quite decide...

Flower power

2011-02-20T13:44:00.001Z

They may not constitute a host yet, but I've seen my first daffodils in full flower - not an imported or forced bunch in a supermarket, but blooming in a South London front garden.

Daffs are among our earliest spring flowers to come into bloom, and the reasons are twofold. Like crocuses, bluebells and snowdrops, they appear before the trees are in full leaf so as to take advantage of any early spring sunshine before taller plants crowd out the light.

But daffs have also evolved a clever evolutionary trick all of their own, not to do with sunshine, but with bees.

It's February, and cold, and there aren't many pollinating insects about. Those that do emerge early in the year are at real risk from frost, especially during cold nights; if they can't find enough nectar they will weaken and die.

Daffs not only provide a good early source of food, but their yellow trumpets trap sunlight, and by protecting the inside of the flower from air movement can actually generate a microclimate up to 15 degrees warmer than the outside air. This makes them especially attractive to early bumblebees, who will often sleep inside daffodils, emerging covered in pollen which they then unwittingly carry to the next bloom.

Unlike rival bees, who must either wait for the ambient temperature to increase before they can fly, or expend valuable energy vibrating their flight muscles to warm themselves up, bees who have slept in daffodil trumpets can get going straight away, giving them more time to collect nectar at less cost to themselves; and the daffodil ensures its genes are carried on, despite having opened so early in the season. Everyone's a winner.

Frog spawn

2011-02-10T12:26:00.000Z

Photo courtesy Ray Tomes

The first reports of frogspawn are coming in to the Phenology UK website; as is usual with spring records they are from Cornwall, Devon and South Wales. Across the country, records show that frogs are spawning an average of ten days earlier now than in the middle of the last century.

Each batch of spawn numbers 2–3000 eggs, of which only five or six adult frogs will survive to return and breed again the following year. The eggs are black, helping to absorb available light; this boosts the embryo's temperature and speeds development. The eggs will be frogs in 6–12 weeks, depending on the weather and available sunlight; spawn rises on sunny days, and in cold weather may sink in order to protect it from freezing.

Once the tadpoles (or 'pollywogs') have swum free from the eggs they will eat algae until ready to undergo their main metamorphosis. During this process they will lose their gill pouch, their jaw will grow and teeth will appear, their gut will shorten to that of a carnivore's, their eyes will move up and grow eyelids, their skin will thicken and they will develop an eardrum and some bones. This amazing process takes only 24 hours.

At the end of their metamorphosis they will need to breathe air and will be seen near the surface of the water. They still have a tail, but not for long; it is finally absorbed, and its material used to grow the frog's legs.

Devon

2011-02-06T15:13:00.000Z

The skies over Totnes are heavy and grey. The clouds move perceptibly west, and the top branches of the young plane trees between the flat and the town below wave gently, their few remaining seed balls dancing. In one a crow sits, hunched and heraldic. Gulls wheel endlessly over the houses on the other side of the valley, riding the weak thermals the buildings send up into the chill February air.

Down in the town a bare ribes bush near the church was coming into bloom, and I saw two etoliated purple crocuses in our front garden as I left the house to catch the train west. Yet a day as dim as today, and with such a bitter wind, feels further away from spring than snowfall in January ever did.

The Big Garden Birdwatch

2011-01-30T17:25:00.000Z

This weekend families all over the country took part in the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch. I spent an hour this afternoon recording the maximum numbers of each species in the garden at any one time, scoring three blackbirds, a blue tit, two feral pigeons, two great tits, two long-tailed tits, two sparrows and two magpies.

I was disappointed not to be able to record any coal tits, which are regular visitors now, and no robins, woodpigeons, starlings or wrens. We're lucky to have the sparrows, though: they are in such steep decline all over the country; starlings, too, are at their lowest ever levels - in gardens, at least - since 1998.

Are we nearly there yet?

2011-01-22T17:32:00.001Z

The grass is mere mud, the beds are choked with sodden and blackening leaves, but piercing the sleeping earth are bulbs, pushing through in phalanx after phalanx and promising flowers where all, now, is decay.

Overhead, too, life is returning. There are buds on many of the trees, and the tits are overjoyed, eating them as fast as they can come. Light levels are still low, and often it's the smaller shrubs that come into leaf first, keen to make what they can of the sun's energy before the tall trees shade them out.

We're not there yet, though. Next month will see the snowdrops come out, and the cherries and magnolias will come into bloom - and only then can we say that spring has begun.

Bloody foxes

2011-01-16T12:51:00.000Z

January is peak mating season for foxes, and right now the streets around us echo at night to their unearthly sounds. The alarming scream is produced by the vixen and is used to call dog foxes to a 'clicketting'; they also emit a 'contact bark' to keep in touch with each other. Several dog foxes will usually arrive to a clicketting, and compete for the vixen's attention. Sometimes this involves fighting, but as that's a high-risk strategy for a wild animal the winner will more usually be decided by posturing and threats.

After mating the dog and vixen remain together. Pregnancy lasts for around 53 days, and during that time the pair will choose a den. When the cubs are born the dog fox will bring food for the nursing vixen, who remains with the cubs until early June, when they usually emerge. The family will stay together, both parents teaching the cubs how to hunt and survive, until late September when the young foxes must disperse and, if they survive, establish territories of their own.

Hips and haws

2011-01-09T15:30:00.000Z

The trees are bare, the grass muddy and thin, and for the most part the gardens around us are a sodden tangle of rotting leaves and frost-blackened foliage, with here and there the odd new shoot or catkin presaging things to come. Yet January is also a time of plenty, if you know what to look for. Some fruits - quinces, medlars and wild service berries, for example - need to be bletted by frost, meaning January is often a good time to gather them.

Rose bushes, if they are not dead-headed, are laden now with hips, the fruit of the rose. These oval red or orange fruits, with their hairy seeds removed, have long been turned into a sweet pulp or puree; during the Seconed World War they were collected by volunteers and processed into a syrup which was distributed to children, as one cup of rosehip pulp contains more vitamin C than 40 oranges, and citrus fruits, imported from overseas, were very hard to come by.

The hairy seeds inside the hip also have their uses, and have been dried and turned into itching powder by generations of schoolchildren. 'Itchy-coos' even found their way into a song by the Small Faces in 1967.

In contrast, haws are the small red berries found on hawthorn trees and hedges, also part of the rose family. They are just about edible as they are, and used to be called 'bread and cheese' - bread being the leaves, the berry being the cheese; more commonly they are used to make jellies and preserves. Birds find them much more palatable than we do, and haws are an important winter food source for many species - particularly thrushes and waxwings, one of our most glamorous winter visitors and one that does appear, from time to time, in London parks and gardens.

Along with the berries of pyracanthas, rowans and cotoneasters - thankfully all common in urban areas - hips and haws help sustain thousands of birds through the hard winter months.

This week in wildlife

2011-01-04T14:46:00.001Z

January 4th and to all intents and purposes it's winter. Yet this morning I heard great tits and blue tits singing, the first insistently, the second wheezily, and a few doors up from us a winter jasmine is struggling into bloom and there are fat, fuzzy catkins on the pussy willow.

In our garden, here and there among the mud and dead leaves, the cold ground is pierced by tiny green spears that will soon be snowdrops. And under the hellebore's sheltering leaves tiny round buds are forming.

Under the ice

2010-12-28T16:34:00.000Z

All the water on Wimbledon Common was frozen hard on Boxing Day. The small lake near the road looked to be solid to a depth of over a foot, and we walked out gingerly across it.

The water had frozen, melted, and refrozen several times, and the edges were a mass of chunks and shards of opaque ice held fast in a transparent and treacherous lacquer.

Cold water holds more oxygen than warm, and fish require less of it than in warm weather. They were probably at the bottom, far under the ice, in a slow, deep torpor. As long as light can penetrate the ice the pond aquatic plants can continue to respire; a blanket of darkening snow over the ice is worse than a freeze. Amphibians like frogs and news will usually leave water if it is going to freeze, and burrow down into mud or hide in nearby vegetation.

Closer to the centre the ice was smooth and opaque, and marked all over with the wandering tracks of people, dogs and birds, probably made when a light coating of snow had covered the ice which had since melted and refrozen. They were like the prehistoric footprints found at ancient mudflats and shores around the world, made in a moment and preserved by a freak of weather to become a strange and haunting reminder of life that was recently here, and has now gone.

Tracks and trails

2010-12-19T16:58:00.004Z

Pigeon tracks - magpies' long tails
would leave a drag mark

Last night I watched two young foxes tussling and playing in the snow. It was late, the common was deserted and unlit and had the ground not been white I wouldn't have seen them. That's probably what they were banking on; they let me get quite close, probably assuming themselves to be an invisible as ever. They nosed the snow carefully; one dug away at it with his front paws for a moment, then froze, intent. But no kill. The other followed a scent trail, head down, into the trees.

Cat, dog and people prints

The snow holds scents for longer, so that a trail of footprints is even more vivid to a fox's nose than to its eye. It's the same with my dog; she is distracted, enraptured, by the web of smells around her when I walk her in the snow. For us the clues it gives up are purely visual: the small, neat prints of a cat, the oval pads of a fox, the right-left-right of birds like magpies and pigeons or the hopping marks of a blackbird.

Under the insulating blanket, life goes on. Voles and shrews make little paths between their burrows and winter food stores, or simply to get around and hunt: grass or ground underfoot, snow above. If it lies for any length of time the ghostly runs can sometimes be discerned, for a day or two, when it melts.

Ammil

2010-12-18T16:56:00.001Z

More heavy falls of snow; London a white whirl this morning, the cars at a crawl. The wind, bringing in a weather front from the north-east, helped with the finer details, too, and when the air cleared the trees wore white on one side of their trunks only, the twigs loaded asymmetrically and the air, finally, whisper-still.

Late afternoon and in many of the streets the distinction between road and pavement has been lost. It's academic, anyway; in the snow the city is at a standstill, post-apocalyptic. Lights burn dully in the tower blocks, the sky pressing dark against the high panes. The winter sun slowly ebbs and fails.

Where are the birds? Huddled, motionless, invisible. A magpie, calling 'cchhack' overhead, breaks the muffled silence, and a crow, beady-black, patrols the white sweep where once the road was. But the trees and thickets are still. Why burn energy when there's a freezing night to get through, and who knows how many more after that?

In the winter of 1947, and again in '63, songbirds fell dead from the sky and Arctic owls flew in from Norway to pick over the frozen animals in our fields. In the city we switch on the lights and turn the heating up. But we forget how fierce and near the wild is at our peril.

Clay

2010-12-10T13:15:00.004Z

I have news. Bloomsbury are to publish my novel, Clay, in 2012.

I began writing Clay two years ago. At first it was a collection of short pieces which drew on the South London streets where I live for inspiration. Slowly, a set of characters emerged, and I began to explore the way their lives might intersect. Last came the plot, growing out of the characters and the themes behind the book - ideas about nature and our relationship with it, about childhood freedom and neglect, and about what's really important in life.

Turning myself into a writer was like turning myself inside out; it was terrifying and painful, but necessary at the same time. Clay seems almost to have written itself during that process, and I'm profoundly grateful to my husband, Anthony, for giving me the space and the support to do it.

Thaw

2010-12-05T16:43:00.001Z

In the city the snow is melting patchily and unevenly, and revealing its cargo of unswept litter, lost gloves and dead leaves. Dirty mounds are all that's left of snowmen, while by the kerb linear sheafs mark where the bonnets of parked cars, finally driven away for the first time in days, lost, in the process, their coverings of snow. Outside one housing estate a doll's head suffered the elements with all the strange dignity of death.

Some of the pavements are clear, even dry; others, without the weak winter sun on them, are still ice-bound and treacherous.
The reddish grit spread on them after the first fall bleeds through now, and dog turds lurk here and there, uncovered by the retreating ice like ancient fossils breaking through the glacial moraine.

Here and there are harbingers of spring. One patch of ice, on Palace Road, was stained here and there with bright fluorescent yellow, where pine catkins, trapped in the snow, had spent their pollen fruitlessly into the ice. And from a nearby holly thicket came the faint 'chee, chee' of a blue tit, fooled by a blue sky after days of snow, calling as though the mad days of March were already here.

Snowfall

2010-12-02T15:35:00.014Z

The pond at the Nature Garden

Snow has been falling steadily for two days and nights now,
and lies about five inches deep in our garden.
Since last night there's been a steady sift of the tiny white
grains known as graupel. These accumulate gradually on the ground to form a soft, dense layer, quite unlike the wet white blanket that results from the usual large clusters of falling flakes.
Briefly last night there was even a shower of snow pellets: brittle white balls that bounced very slightly as they reached the ground and could just be heard, like faint static, as they hit the windowpanes.

The beautiful, star-shaped crystals we're familiar with from picture-books are known as stellar dendrites. There are a range of basic forms, each one decorated differently, but they usually have six branches. This is dictated by the shape of the water molecules from which they are formed. Snow crystals also come as twelve-pointed stars, prisms, flat, sectored plates, ice needles, tubes or spool-shaped capped columns. Their shape is determined by conditions in the upper atmosphere, where they form; the basic rule is, the faster they form the more intricate the shape.

A snow crystal can be up to 5mm across, although the 'snowflakes' one sees drifting down are nearly always agglomerations of dozens of individual crystals. As they fall, they may melt slightly, ice up or join together, until what we see, melting on our glove, is a tiny miracle of physics, a living illustration of the natural forces going on five miles or more above our heads.

A song in winter

2010-11-29T12:58:00.002Z

Right now, any birdsong you hear (songs, as opposed to alarm calls or contact calls) will almost definitely be a robin. They are one of the few city birds - few birds anywhere, in fact - to sing through winter.
The blackbirds and wrens, the dunnocks and thrushes, all are quiet now. Their chicks have flown and their territories are abandoned until spring, their focus simply on staying alive. Many, for instance the great tits, blue tits and long-tailed tits, will flock together through the long, cold months.
Not so the robin. Both sexes hold territories and defend them all year round. That thin, silvery song you hear pouring down from the street light at dusk, or carrying reedily to you over the sound of the early morning traffic: that's a robin. I'm here, he or she is saying; I'm alive. This is my manor. Deal with it.

Rowans resurgent

2010-11-21T17:18:00.003Z

The rowans are hanging on to their bright berries, despite the wind and rain. One around the corner from us is completely leafless now, yet hung all over with clusters of orange-red berries. Like baubles they blaze out against the November sky.

A tiny rowan seedling in our garden, invisible for much of the year, declares itself now among the mud and dead leaves by its flaming orange leaves. A few inches high, it's protected from the whipping wind by the shrubs around it - although it won't hold on to its orange pennants forever. It probably grew from the dropping of a thrush or a blackbird who ate some berries last autumn, or the one before, and then came to sit on our fence. It could well be the offspring of the tree around the corner.

Rowans have long been considered sacred, and the Celts called it 'the wizard's tree'. It grows in churchyards and is planted to protect homesteads. Cutting down a rowan has long been thought to bring bad luck. And it's not just us, here in the UK; the rowan is thought to have protective powers against evil spirits right across Europe. In Finland, this is said of it:

In the yard there grows a rowan.
Thou with reverent care should'st tend it.
Holy is the tree there growing.
Holy likewise are its branches.
On its boughs the leaves are holy.
And its berries yet more holy.

Also known as mountain ash, rowans will grow at higher altitudes than any other tree, sometimes as epiphyte, growing in the crevice of another tree. They are useful, with strong, durable wood and edible berries that are used to make rowan jelly. They make a fast-growing, compact and well-behaved street tree, too, with two seasons of interest (spring blossoms and autumn berries), and so are much planted in cities, where they nourishes the urban birds as they prepare for winter and, who knows, protect us city dwellers too.

This week in wildlife

2010-11-14T19:55:00.002Z

Suddenly, the long-tailed tits and coal tits are back in our garden. The long-tailed tits come in small, excitable flocks, their arrival heralded by their 'tsee tsee' contact calls, their little pinkish bodies crowding the damson tree and dipping across to the cherry near the house. They are lovely, gregarious visitors, although their crowning achievement - their amazing, teardrop-
shaped nests, made from hair and cobwebs and camouflaged with lichen - have not so far been built in our garden, more's the pity.
And our coal tits are back, hitting the bird feeder on the French windows with a little thud as they ply back and forth for sunflower seeds, their particular weakness. It's one of the only birds brave enough to come so close to the house, although blue tits will join them occasionally, and when we had a nut feeder there too it was plundered by jays. The spadgers, though, they just won't do it, and so the shy coal tit pair has the run of the window feeder, and if we are in the living room and hear a little thud and scrabble, we keep extra still so that the coal tit has time to grab a seed before taking fright and making for the cover of the cotoneaster again.

Decay

2010-11-07T14:17:00.001Z

We've had rain and sunshine this week, wet followed by warm: the ideal conditions for the things of summer to start to rot. And that's what autumn is all about, really: mould, fungus and decay, the process not by which things die, but by which next year's life is born.

Everywhere, fungus, mould and bacteria are breaking down the leaves and the dead plants and turning them into soil again; meanwhile worms pull the leaf litter down into the earth, aerating and fertilising it. Every corner teems with rot, algae blooms on the fences and moss slowly colonises the damp and secret recesses of the city.

Ghost leaves

2010-11-05T12:38:00.002Z

I spotted these this morning:

Where leaves have been left to lie on the pavements, rain has leached the tannins out into the slabs, leaving ghostly marks; all that remains of the leaves that hung above us all summer long.

Only connect

2010-11-01T15:12:00.002Z

The National Trust's 'Outdoor Nation' campaign aims to reconnect Britons with the natural environment. In a piece in today's Guardian, Fiona Reynolds of the NT discusses what's at stake.
The distance children stray from their homes has decreased by 90 per cent since the 1970s. One in five children has never visited the countryside, as many have never climbed a tree, and two-thirds of children play outside less than once a week.
To me, this is both heartbreaking and terrifying. What kind of parents will these children be - what kind of politicians - who have grown up with no connection to the natural world?

__________________________
Sent from my phone

Sutton house

2010-10-31T16:08:00.000Z

To Sutton House for a wedding yesterday, a beautiful sixteenth-century brick-built Tudor house right in the middle of Hackney. Inside it's all wood panelling and the remnants of ancient, decorated plasterwork; there's a lovely courtyard, too, swagged with vines, the small, dark grapes catching the clear autumn light against the warm stone. We went exploring, and found ourselves in a dank, vaulted cellar; "It looked wonderful with all the hops hanging in it," said an NT guide, appearing out of nowhere, as they do.
For centuries hops were grown all over this country; every kitchen garden would have a set of hop-poles to train the plants up, and farmers devoted large portions of their land to what was then a very lucrative crop. Hops are what make beer different from ale; they allow it to be preserved for longer, and thus transported further; allowing, effectively, for a viable brewing industry. Kent, in particular, was famous for its hop fields, and many people migrated to the fields from urban areas for September's harvest. In fact, during the hop gardens’ peak in the mid to late 19th century, over 80,000 men, women and children travelled to Kent every year to work as hoppers.
Once picked, the hops needed to be dried. In Kent this took place in oast-houses, designed to maximise the throughflow of air. Then they needed to be stored somewhere cool and dark - for instance the cellar at Sutton House, which is still dressed with bunches of hops each September.

This is a lovely thing to listen to. Keep your ears pricked for the skylarks!

2010-10-28T17:13:00.000+01:00

Simon Emmerson’S ‘Weirdy Birdy’ Mix. Corncrake Studios, West Dorset. 11/10/10 by Folk Radio Uk on Mixcloud

This week in wildlife

2010-10-25T23:06:00.001+01:00

Now is the time of the first frosts. This is one of the waymarks in the gardening calendar, the late-October date by which tender plants should be taken under cover, wrapped in fleece or sacking or, as an insurance policy, have cuttings taken from them in case they do not survive the hard winter months to come.
The first frost doesn't just affect garden plants, though. Annual weeds will start to wither, although they're far from beaten - they've all released their seeds by now, tens of thousands of them. Most plants, including trees and shrubs, will cease to grow and become dormant for the winter once the daily mean temperature is below about 6 degrees.
The sap falls in the stems; the leaves of deciduous species drop; some plants die back above ground altogether, life ebbing back to a stronghold in the roots, or in corms or bulbs deep underground.
Cold weather is pushing down from the frozen north. Birds flee before it to overwinter on this little island, and further south. But even here, even in the sheltered city, life retreats, falls back for the long months to come, and readies itself to muster again in spring.

An inchworm

2010-10-17T16:01:00.002+01:00

Last night I found an inchworm.
It was about 10.30 at night and I was bringing Scout back from her evening walk, when there he was, hurrying across the pavement ahead of me with that unmistakeably comic looping walk. It's the arrangement of their legs that gives inchworms their curious, measuring locomotion: just one pair at the front, two at the back. I hadn't seen one since I was about six or seven.
Using a leaf, I picked him up and brought him home for a better look. As I did so he stiffened and stood erect, hanging on to the leaf stalk by his back legs only. With his smooth, dull brown skin and knobbly shape, he looked exactly like a twig.
Inchworms are the caterpillars of geometer (or geometrid) moths, of which there are about 300 in the UK. It's possible he was a scalloped hazel - or will be - but it's hard to be sure without raising him to maturity. We put him in the back garden, where, with luck, he'll overwinter as a pupa (or chrysalis), within which he will melt himself down into a kind of DNA soup before reconstituting himself entirely from scratch as a moth.

2010-10-14T09:39:00.003+01:00

Yesterday our road grit hoppers were filled up and the grass on Rush Common and by the roadsides got its final mow. Winter is coming.
__________________________
Sent from my phone

Mid-October afternoon

2010-10-10T16:14:00.002+01:00

South London looks glorious on a day like today. The autumn sun is low and bright, the light golden, and it blazes through the half-undressed horse chestnuts and sends their shadows long across the leaf-strewn streets. After the recent rain the grass is lush and high again, and in every forgotten corner new nettles stand four inches tall; it's like a last-gasp attempt at spring, but too little, too late, for each day shortens now and it will be winter soon. Tell that to the nasturtiums and marigolds, though, pushing through the dieback summer bedding in the front gardens; tell that to the sedums blushing pink by the paths and the last tomatoes ripening on the vines. It's warm, and the sun shines, and on every street somebody is washing a car. But the afternoon sun is low, and by seven it will be dark, and not tonight, but in a few nights' time, will come the first frost of the year.

This week in wildlife

2010-10-09T16:06:00.002+01:00

News from Sheffield: the first redwings have arrived. Chipper little thrushes carrying a red-top paper under their wings, they fly in from Scandinavia each October, some merely stopping off before continuing as far south as Spain and Portugal, some overwintering here, patrolling our winter fields and stripping the hedgerows of berries until spring. Like starlings they roost in huge communal gatherings, and can often be heard over cities at night, when the traffic diminishes enough for their 'tseep! tseep!' flight-calls, designed to have a long range, to filter down to urban gardens from invisible flocks far overhead.

2010-10-05T15:42:00.001+01:00

This morning I found a lovely group of shaggy scale-heads growing at the base of a willow on the common - proof that, as predicted, it's turning out to be a good autumn for fungi.
They're slightly poisonous, causing digestive upsets if eaten, and are mildly parasitic, too, the spores entering the tree through wounds in the bark.

Rain, rain, rain...

2010-10-03T15:49:00.002+01:00

It's probably safe to say that the annual movement of the jet stream has occurred. Each year it moves south in autumn, bringing low pressure to the UK and causing wet and unsettled weather. It rained all day on Friday, and all Saturday night into this morning, and the ground is waterlogged.
The grey days mean it's unlikely the autumn colours will be spectacular this year. The colours are partly a result of an excess of sugar that becomes trapped in the leaves, but the weather means that photosynthesis will naturally slow down before the leaves fall, so that they simply turn brown and drop rather than lighting up the landscape with reds and yellows. Heavy rain and winds will also weigh them down and strip them from the trees, while in some areas they've fallen already due to dry conditions earlier in the year.
But all is not lost. It'll be a good autumn for fungi, and birders are rejoicing at the thought of the unsettled weather blowing migrants off course and into our shores - though one has to wonder if an unscheduled pit-stop is really ideal for the birds themselves, or just for the twitchers with their scopes and their notebooks.

This week in wildlife

2010-09-26T14:08:00.005+01:00

Last night was cold, and today has been windy, the air fizzing with wild equinoctal energy. Near the station the wind has torn the ragged horse chestnut leaves from the trees, and the pavements below are littered with conkers. On Tooting Common the grass is yellow and dry, and bright yellow poplar leaves strew the path.
The undergrowth on the common belongs to the wrens, whose alarums - dit-dit-dit! - sound from every thicket as you pass. Crows patrol the open areas singly or in pairs, while the treetops belong to the parakeets, a bedlam of birds, raucous and brassy and whipped to excitement by the buffeting wind.

Migration news

2010-09-19T16:55:00.001+01:00

The first substantial flock of the autumn migrations has arrived: 500 or so pink-footed geese, coming in from Iceland to overwinter in our milder climate. They were spotted at Martin Mere in Lancashire, where they'll stay until April next year, their numbers swelling to around 20,000 or so at that reserve alone. During the winter days they'll graze on grass and grain in the fields nearby, returning to the safety of the Mere at night, and so avoiding the harsh winter conditions in Iceland, where they will breed next summer.

This week in wildlife

2010-09-12T17:09:00.001+01:00

To Wimbledon Common today, which for the most part still looks summery, especially on a bright, warm day like today. Recent rains have left the ground damp, though, and everywhere there are mushrooms and fungi, from bracket types to puffballs and, in the woods, a fairy ring surrounding one old holly, which looked healthy enough but was probably doomed.
We found a badger sett deep in the woods. There was sand around two of the entrances, too yellow-looking to be from underground; most likely it had been left there by somebody hoping for prints. Scout stuck her head into the holes as far as she could and came out wild-eyed and excited. We did find musteline claw-marks, but not in the sand, which for the most part had been disturbed by dogs and people; a few yards away, though, were some shallow scrapings in which the marks of long nails could easily be seen.
The long grass of the open areas, partly green, partly tawny, has stopped growing, and here and there the heather is out. Despite the rain the pond near Wimbledon Village is low; as we left a small, dark heron was stalking its margins, his head a perfect spear perfectly poised.

This week in wildlife

2010-09-05T16:55:00.002+01:00

Apart from the rusty horse chestnuts, most of the city's trees are still green - but the acer in my garden tells a different story. Each day there is a little less light, and soon there won't be enough for photosynthesis to take place. So it's starting to get ready for winter, when it will become dormant, by stopping cholorphyll production so that the existing stores in the leaves simply break down, leaving the oranges and purples of anthocyanins and, in the maple family, glucose left over from photosynthesis, which gives the leaves their red tint. Soon they will start growing a little plug of cork at the leaf axil so that when they drop, the twig is not damaged; and before long the trees will be bare black skeletons again, and for months it will be hard to imagine them threshed and castled in green.

2010-08-29T18:39:00.001+01:00

Today I labelled up three jars of damson chutney, made with the small, sweet fruit of our damson tree. It's the first year it's been mature enough to give us more than a dozen or so damsons, but has made up for the delay by loading its tall, upright branches with purple fruits that we have shaken down, kilo after kilo. The first lot went towards a crumble, tart and delicious. We'll give the chutney away at Christmas - and eat some ourselves.
The tomatoes are starting to ripen, too - as usual, too late for the salad season. Six plants will now yield more than we can eat, after months of having to buy them. But we'll make passata, and freeze it, and in the winter we'll have pasta dishes infused with a whole summer's sweetness.
We've got chillies, too, full of vitamin C and fire, and lemons in the porch, and herbs, of course. And we've had blackberries from the common, for crumble and a sweet coulis that's perfect on porridge. There really is nothing like food you've grown - or pilfered - yourself.

This week in wildlife

2010-08-21T15:54:00.004+01:00

Image courtesy Chris Lipscombe

I miss the blackbirds at this time of year. After finding their voice when the weather began to warm up, in March, they have been singing all summer, from sill, chimney and gutter, pouring down those unmistakeable liquid notes each afternoon, and especially after rain. Yet now, in August - the month we consider to be summer's grand apex - they are almost invisible, and the city streets and gardens seem silent and deserted.
Like many other birds they are in moult, shedding their feathers bit by bit and waiting while a new set grows in. In spring they have mates to find, territories to defend and young to feed, but now the apex of their year is over, and they need to have a full set of new feathers to get them through winter. And so they skulk about, trying not to draw attention to themselves while their ability to fly is so compromised. Robins sing all year, but we'll hear little from the blackbirds again until winter has passed.

This week in wildlife

2010-08-13T12:45:00.005+01:00

In South-West London the horse chestnuts are turning brown. They're one of the earliest trees to come into leaf, way ahead of the oak, ash or even sycamore, and so in some ways it's no surprise to see their leaves begin to colour first.
But things aren't as simple as that: drought can cause leaves to turn prematurely, and this has been one of driest summers on record, so perhaps the early colour is more a sign of summer than autumn. Worse, leaf miner moths (Cameraria ohridella) have hit horse chestnuts in London and the South East hard, turning whole trees brown as the larvae dig into the leaves, which eventually fall. The vigour of the tree is thought not to be affected, as the problem generally occurs too late in the growing season to cause more than cosmetic damage, although repeated infestations could well slow the tree's growth.
The same can't be said about bleeding canker fungus (Pseudomonas syringae), also rife among horse chestnuts in the UK and a threat estimated by some to be as great as Dutch Elm Disease was in the 1960s and 1970s. It's estimated that up to half the UK's horse chestnuts may be affected, with over three-quarters of those in the South East showing signs of infection. Once the bark is breached, the necrotic tissue spreads throughout the tree, with rusty, bleeding wounds on the trunk and branches, weak growth and premature leaf-fall.
Yet according to Pauline Buchanan Black, director general of the charity the Tree Council, the greatest threat to our much-loved conker trees isn't drought, leaf miners or even bleeding canker. It's local councils. "The combination of these diseases over a period of time will see trees being declared dangerous by authorities and being felled. Unfortunately, some councils don't have proactive tree policies and are much more likely to take a knee-jerk reaction to tree care. That will often mean that [when a problem is reported] the response will be 'quick, let's eradicate the problem by eradicating the evidence of it.'"
Don't let your local council cut down the conker trees. They'll only plant 'lollipop trees' in their place - easycare cherries and inoffensive rowans. It's rare to find myself agreeing with Brian Sewell, but a city without big, mature trees is not a city I want to live in.
[with thanks to The Guardian]

2010-08-06T18:12:00.003+01:00

Great piece here on nature photography - how important it is, and the power it can have to change things for the better.

Fortune favours...

2010-08-03T11:06:00.004+01:00

... those who go hunting for genetic mutations. I found a four-leaved clover yesterday; I had rather hoped to find one, and was idly running my eye
over the clumps at the margins of a wheatfield, when there it was, the one
in ten thousand with an extra leaf. Apparently, examples have been found with up to 21 leaves, which rather casts my find into the shade; also, I now discover, it's five-leaved clovers that
are considered lucky these days.
And you're not supposed to try to find them, either; only stumble across them. I feel lucky, nonetheless.

This week in wildlife

2010-08-01T23:40:00.004+01:00

The Wrekin, Shropshire: thousands of years of human activity have left this huge hill scarred with deep tracks and pitted with quarries. The slopes are clothed in bracken and heather, just coming into flower; there are Scots pines, beech, birch and holly, and ancient oak and ash coppices. The air, just now, is thick with flies, and near the pools and gullied streams the very young and the impossibly old congregate together: tiny lacquered frogs and clambering toads, and prehistoric horsetails, 300 million years old.

This week in wildlife

2010-07-28T13:09:00.001+01:00

The grass is brown and straw-like right across the city. With so little rain the blades have withered and died, although the roots live on. A good week of rain and the parks and gardens will re-green, though they won't return now to spring's lushness.
In autumn you can re-sow; there's just enough time for new roots to establish before winter. The ground must be damp, though, not hard-baked and cracked like it is now. The seeds sown in our garden a month ago just bleach and blow about, dessicated and eaten daily by opportunistic pigeons.

This week in wildlife

2010-07-19T21:24:00.002+01:00

Watering the garden in the evening raises moths, blind-beating away from the hose's impudent spray.
The heat has called up ants, too. Bloated and black, they have blundered up all day on vile and sticky wings or crawled in futile circles on the baking pavements. The moths are lovely; made of dust, they are the ghosts of butterflies. The ants I have no love for, no love at all.

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A death

2010-07-18T22:44:00.001+01:00

A healthy-looking wood pigeon at the back of the flowerbed, dead. From its position it had clearly fallen from the fence, head first; some time during the day, or a fox or cat would have carried it off. But why had it died? Had it sustained an earlier injury? Had a heart attack? Died of old age? It's so rare to find birds that have died naturally, it feels like something of a mystery.
Scout had been at the back of the bed; she'd sniffed it, but left it alone. Perhaps she found it as strange as we did.

This week in wildlife

2010-07-14T22:53:00.001+01:00

It's thought there are tens of thousands of ring-necked parakeets living in the South-East, and they're certainly much in evidence in Teddington, where dozens of them screech and gibber at the staff arriving for work at the television tudios each morning, calling down from perches high in the big horse chestnuts and ash trees by the river. Richmond Park has huge flocks, several hundred strong, and even at our house in Streatham they fly over, often in pairs, screaming to one another like strange intimations of the tropics in grimy South London.
They've been breeding here for over 40 years and each year their numbers increase and their range grows. It's thought they outcompete other species for food, and some studies have shown a decrease in numbers of other cavity nesting species in the parakeets' strongholds. There's been talk of an organised cull, and they've been reclassified as a pest species, making it legal for farmers to shoot them if they are posing a danger to crops - along with gulls, crows and magpies. It's certainly true that they're noisy and brash, but you'd have to be pretty damned joyless not to let the sight of a tree decked in bright green birds lift your heart.

This week in wildlife

2010-07-05T15:17:00.003+01:00

For the last couple of weeks the streets have smelled of privet, an intense, unmistakeable fragrance that to me has something of déjà vu about it. Yet according to a 2007 survey, 36% of people asked would be put off buying a house by the presence of privet, and in New Zealand it's actually banned from sale or cultivation due to the effect its pollen has on hayfever sufferers. This seems a little extreme; I can't help thinking that if the plant had a commercial value beyond mere hedging it would not be so reviled.

Image courtesy Frogboots365