Nature Notes

Some mild November days have brought out insects including butterflies and bees.  These little animals have had a hard summer with so much rain and little sunshine.  This will have had a knock-on effect on the insectivorous vertebrate animals such as bats, birds and reptiles.  The wet summer will also have encouraged fungi including the infectious types such as the ash die-back fungus.  Please do keep a watch out for this disease.  A forester told me the other day that there are many diseases of trees that are taking effect this year; it is likely to be due to the unusually wet summer weather.

Honeybees are still active, collecting nectar and pollen mainly from ivy at this time of the year.  However, apparently, ivy honey tends to go hard quite quickly, and often needs diluting.  I was stung by a honeybee yesterday. Some colonies of bees are more aggressive than others.  One of the research objectives at the University of Sussex honeybee research lab is to produce colonies of passive bees that are also hygienic.  Hygienic bees are ones that remove dead bees and bee larvae from their colonies, and generally keep the hive clean.  If dead material is left in the hive, it will decay and harbour disease.  We also working to understand how bees communicate with each other, and police the behaviour of nest-mates.  Bees communicate by dancing; this dance tells nest-mates how far food is from the colony, which direction it is and an estimate of the quality of the food.  Receivers of this information are expected to go straight out and get some more.  If bees become lazy, other bees will jump on them and shake them to encourage them to work harder.  If lazy or sick bees will not work, they are often killed by other bees and thrown out of the hive.  Newly emerged bees from the waxy brood comb will take some time to learn what they have to do, and go on practice flights, a little further each time until they learn to find nectar and pollen for their queen and nest-mates.  All ants, bees and wasps that we see running or flying around looking for food are females.  Males only emerge in the summer for short periods to make a nuptial flight and mate with a queen. Males cannot sting.  When the queen decides to swarm, a new queen is raised and left behind, and the old queen takes about half the colony to find a new nesting site.  When swarming, bees rarely sting, even if the swarm looks quite frightening.

November’s cooling shortening days bring naked trees which exposes the evergreen holly with its stunning red berries and English racing green leaves.  Ivy is also apparent like Christmas decorations in the brown and grey deciduous timber.  First frosts have happened, and the non-hardy plants are done for the year.  However, the birds are looking at their best, because they have moulted and grown their winter plumage.  With the leaves coming off the trees there is no better time to go bird-watching, and any food you put out in the garden will attract beautiful, willing visitors.  Do not worry if you have cats around, as it is better to feed the birds than not, as there will be more pairs of beady eyes looking out for predators and if one is spotted, the bird will give an instant warning call which will confound the cat.

I spotted two ravens this morning at Falmer where I work, this is a rare sight in Sussex.  Ravens used to be common, but were persecuted to extinction in previous centuries.  Now they are protected, and are coming back to Sussex.  They are the biggest passerine or perching song bird.  Many bird books record them as larger than a buzzard.  Ravens are highly intelligent shy birds that tend to nest on remote cliffs away from people.  Their ‘kronk kronk’ call/song is evocative of mountains and truly wild places.  They generally feed on dead animals, and apparently pair for life which can be more than 20 years.

The berry crop is good again this year, some say that it is a harbinger of cold weather to come.  I am not sure about that, but it will bring in the migrant winter visiting birds such as redwings, fieldfares, blackbirds and song thrushes.  Yes many of our winter song thrushes and blackbirds are just visitors from a frozen Scandinavia.  Because Britain is bathed in warm winds and sea water, it is warm for its latitude.  On a par with Moscow and Saskatoon we should be getting winter temperatures of minus 25° Celsius.  However, we do not, and the birds know that, and flock to our shores in their thousands from the frozen lands of the north and east.  Many waders winter on the mud-flats of the Thames estuary which abounds in worms, seaweeds and shellfish.  Many politicians do not seem to realise this when they support the building of an airport there.  A bird in a plane engine will die and cause the plane to crash.  How will politicians keep the birds away?

The days are getting dramatically shorter now as we enter the season of autumn, in the old days known as fall.  Spiders seem to be everywhere with new webs every day to walk through.  They are mopping up the insects before the frosts come to kill them off.  Honey bees and hover flies are making the most of the ivy flowers which yield copious amounts of nectar at this time of the year.  The robins seem to call tip tip tip every day, and sing when most birds are relatively quiet.  Dormice are attempting to grow fat on the mellow fruitfulness spoken about by John Keats in his poem ‘To Autumn’ 1820:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

While the insects buzz their way into spider’s webs, the birds are changing guard with the summer visitors flying south and the winter visitors arriving to make the most of our unfrozen mudflats and lush berries.  Reptiles and amphibians will all go into hibernation, as will the dormice, hedgehogs and bats.  Those insects that do not die will either hibernate or fly south like the painted lady and red admiral butterflies.  Many spiders will hibernate, and can be seen with a torch on mild winter nights hunting on trees.  The birds wintering in Britain will tough it out, as will most terrestrial mammals like foxes which grow a winter pelt of fur to keep themselves warm.

August to September is a time when days are getting shorter, but some of them can still be quite hot.  Fruit and seeds are ripening, and most birds are in moult.  Insects abound everywhere, and spiders begin to proliferate.  Swallows and house martins are still pumping out babies, but the swifts have gone back to Africa.  It is the height of the pigeon breeding season.  Let’s dwell on these maligned birds for a while.

There are five species of pigeons in Britain, these are, from large to small: wood pigeon, stock dove, rock dove, collared dove and turtle dove.  It is worth taking a moment to understand these enigmatic birds.  All five can produce milk!  This is crop milk that they feed to their young beak to beak, and is secreted through the walls of the bird’s crop.  All five produce just two white eggs at each nesting attempt, as would have the dodo which was a flightless pigeon that lived on Mauritius.  All five can drink by inserting their beak in water and sucking.  All other birds have to scoop water and lift their head to let it run down their throat by force of gravity.

These five pigeons do have many differences as well; wood pigeons have a complex courtship that involves a dance and lots of cooing.  They will nest in a flimsy platform of twigs that sometimes you can see the eggs through from underneath.  Many woodpigeons are winter visitors from the continent.  Stock doves are a bit like wood pigeons but are rarer, resident and have no white on them, and they nest in holes in trees, or sometimes in barns.  Rock doves live on wild cliffs, usually on the coast, and make their nests in cavities in the cliffs.  Rock doves are the ancestors of all the domestic pigeons including fan-tails and racing pigeons.  Feral pigeons are simply domestic pigeons/ rock doves that have decided to look after themselves in towns.  Collared doves are a new colonist in Britain, arriving in the second half of the last century.  Also known as Turkish doves, they were domesticated by the Turks, but went feral and spread across Europe, They are always associated with human communities.  Finally turtle doves are our only summer migrant pigeon.  Sadly declining in Britain, this beautiful bird likes to breed in early successional woodland such as we find on Ashdown Forest.  Many get shot as they fly from Africa to Britain, but there may be other reasons why they are declining that we do not understand yet.