How did I miss this?

I've walked in the countryside for many years, and yet I've no clear recollection of seeing this before this autumn - and I'm sure I would have noticed and remembered it, given the almost unreal colours and brightness of the berries. It's the spindle-tree (Euonymus europaeus). How could I have missed this? It wasn't like I've been walking around with dark glasses on all the time!

More to the point, if I've missed something as obvious as this, what else have I missed?

Berries

Black Bryony (Tamus communis)


Walking across the fields to Girton and back earlier this week I was amazed by how many berries I saw. I know it's been a good year for plums and damsons in gardens, but obviously it's been a good year for the wild fruits too. I counted nine different species: bittersweet, blackberry, blackthorn (sloe), black bryony, buckthorn, guelder rose, hawthorn, rose hips, and spindle-tree. Some of the berries are starting to look a little end-of-season and wrinkled, but there's still plenty there for the wild creatures to feed on when the weather turns cold.

Blackthorn (sloes; Prunus spinosa)

Blackthorn (sloes; Prunus spinosa)

Bittersweet (Solanum dulcamara)

Buckthorn (Rhamnus catharticus)

Buckthorn (Rhamnus catharticus)

Blacberry (Bramble; Rubus fruticosus)

Wild Cherry

Taking a closer look

Have you ever gone out to do one thing and then got totally sidetracked into doing something else? Because that's what happened to me today. I went out intending to photograph berries and ended up taking pictures of hawthorn leaves instead.

We don't usually think of hawthorn as one of the big autumn leaf colour players. The berries can be spectacular, but the leaves don't usually look much.

Until you look closer, as I did today. See for yourself!

Who was that masked bird?

“What’s that bird?” asked my daughter, pointing to a small dark speck winging its way upwards from the stubble field.

“That’s a woodpigeon.”

“How do you know it’s a woodpigeon?”

Good question. How did I know? Because of where it was, because of what it was doing, because it just looked and moved like a woodpigeon, even though it was a long way away. The jizz just said ‘woodpigeon’, and no argument about it.

It got me thinking about how we recognise things. A decade or so ago, when my son was rising two and just learning to talk, his favourite word was ‘dog’ (usually screamed in loud delight when any unfortunate canine hove into view). On holiday in Spain we saw lots of dogs of all sorts, big and small, from Chihuahuas to wolfhounds, and he never made a mistake. They were all dogs, and all recognised as such. He never called a cat ‘dog’.

But how did he know they were all dogs? They all looked so different. Was it their context? But they were by no means all on leads and accompanied by humans. They were by no means all doing the same thing when he recognised them. He just knew, from a selection of subconsciously-noticed signs that made up a pattern, that they were dogs. He’d got their jizz.

“So how do I learn to tell which is a woodpigeon, then?” my daughter asked again.

Just keep looking all the time. Keep your eyes open, notice things, and one day it’ll come to you.

Sweet Chestnuts and squirrels

There's a small copse of trees near the main road which contains several large sweet chestnut trees (Castanea sativa). Walking past there today, I stopped to watch about half-a-dozen squirrels foraging through the leaves for the abundant fallen chestnuts (it looks to have been a good year for the sweet chestnut harvest this year).

The squirrels were all grey squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis), which are abundant in the village. One of the squirrels was black - not a different species, but a melanistic form of the grey squirrel not uncommon around here.

It's worth noting that this scene is a completely non-native one: the sweet chestnut is thought to have been introduced to Britain by the Romans, while grey squirrels were introduced from the USA in the late 19th Century.

Article for village newspaper, November 2009

Man’s Most Constant Companion

If you spend any time enjoying the scenery of the village green, you may have noticed that the suburban wildlife present includes more than just mallard ducks and moorhens. You may have been lucky (or unlucky!) enough to spot one of the world’s most successful mammals – a brown rat.

Those of us who are keen gardeners with compost bins, or who keep rabbits or chickens, or who feed the birds regularly, will probably already be familiar with the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus). He’s an opportunist, eating just about anything he can get his paws on and his teeth into, and he lives pretty much wherever humans live (brown rats are found on every continent except Antarctica). The number of rats present in an area depends on the supply of food available, with numbers tending to increase in built-up areas. It has been estimated that here in the UK there are 1.3 rats for every human being, with these high numbers being attributed to rats being able to survive our relatively mild winters.

The success of the brown rat isn’t just due to its ability to eat anything and everything. Brown rats breed prolifically, with a well-nourished female being able to produce up to five litters a year of up to fourteen babies at a time. This means that, even if a large proportion of a local rat population is exterminated, the remaining rats will quickly restore the population to its previous level.

So what exactly is the problem with rats? Why is the hedgehog, another relatively common small mammal who visits our gardens, welcome, while the brown rat is so reviled? The answer, of course, lies mainly in the rat’s role as a spreader of disease - brown rats are associated with the spread of a variety of diseases, such as Weil’s Disease, Q Fever, cryptosporidiosis, and toxoplasmosis. (It should be noted, however, that the Brown Rat was not responsible for the spread of the Black Death, the outbreak of bubonic plague that killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe back in the 14th Century – that was the black rat, Rattus rattus, which is now found mainly in warmer regions of the world.)

Rats are present on the village green because the location provides them with both shelter and food. The pond-side vegetation provides living space and somewhere to hide from the village cats and dogs, while litter dropped around the green and bread left over from feeding the ducks provides food – as do the ducks themselves in season, with the opportunistic rat not being averse to taking a duck egg or duckling if they get the chance.

What can we do to keep rat numbers down? While it is almost certainly unreasonable to expect to get rid of the rats entirely, we can all do our bit to help keep rat numbers at a reasonable level. In addition to pest control measures put in place by the local authorities, we can be careful not to drop litter (and preferably take it home for disposal), and refrain from feeding the ducks. Depriving the rat population of easy pickings will make it harder for them to survive and breed, and go some way towards preventing this fascinating little survival expert from becoming a public health problem.

References for the resources used in compiling this article are available on request.