TRIGGER WARNING (contains pictures of spiders)

Now I know some people that read this don't like spiders. My apologies, but these are particularly pretty and slightly exotic spiders, namely the wasp spider (Argiope bruennichi) which, as the name hints, is a recent visitor to these shores from the mediterreanian. 

These were all photographed at Bradbury Rings (iron age hill fort, managed by the National Trust as mentioned in the previous couple of posts). Paul, the ranger there, had fairly raved about the wasp spiders there and Elise, who I was busy ragwort pulling with, spotted one. I then spent a very long time kneeling in brambles, trying to persuade my ageing iPhone to focus on a spider's web and eventually got a pic that was in focus.

Here it is:

We spotted a few more of it's (actually her's, as the stripy ones are female) friends and relations around and about, in the 'rings' part of the hill fort, where it is relatively sheltered. By the end of the day it was getting a bit 'meh, there's another one'.

Anyway, I love the name 'wasp spider' - partly a name designed to breed nightmares, partly one of those "What does it look like? Uuuuuh... kinda waspy. Ok, wasp spider, that'll do" sort of species names.

More on wasp spiders: https://www.buglife.org.uk/bugs-and-habitats/wasp-spider

http://srs.britishspiders.org.uk/portal.php/p/Summary/s/Argiope+bruennichi

http://www.janvanduinen.nl/argiopebruennichi-engels.php

'Spiders' by System Of A Down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqZNMvIEHhs

Amphibians

Spotted today, worryingly close to a bonfire: a common toad and a common frog. We looked for a common newt to match the set but couldn't find one.

The Beauty Of Brambles

I was out marshalling a push bike race last weekend. Bike racing has been a big thing for me for a good few years now and my now defunct previous blog, Gordo's World Of Zoom (http://zoom-gordo.blogspot.co.uk/?view=flipcard) was all about bikes and bike racing. Anyhoo, the act of marshalling a bike race involves standing on a corner or a road race circuit and stopping the traffic every time that the race comes through. This was about every 15 minutes on this particular circuit and so the rest of the time is spent chatting to the other marshals about the Tour de France and such, as well as appreciating the local wildlife.

The circuit was around the grounds of Lulworth castle and, with the grounds of the castle on one side of the road, on the other was the fairly nondescript hedge pictured above. The bindweed was in full flower and looking very pretty indeed and it occurred to me that, in this bit of hedge, there was bindweed, bramble and nettles. Add in ground elder (which was not far away) and you have pretty much everything that a gardener hates. They're all classic 'thug' plants, that will take over a garden given half a chance and against which you are fighting a constant war. And yet, in full flower and out in the countryside, would you not say that they look as beautiful as any formal garden?

Ok, so I may have some gardener friends that would argue that point. But still, some while ago I was investigating gardening for wildlife and read up on what sort of plants were best for wildlife. The results came back as brambles, nettles... basically, the best thing you could do for wild life in your garden is put your secateurs down, put the kettle on, put your feet up and let nature do the job for you.

This may be great for biodiversity but was less good for my future job prospects. But, joking aside, brambles are food for caterpillars of the green hairstreak, grizzled skipper and holly blue butterfly, while nettles are the same for the (deep breath) comma, small tortoiseshell, peacock, painted lady and red admiral.

There is an exhaustive list of larval food plants for butterflies on the UK Butterflies website http://www.ukbutterflies.co.uk/foodplants.php which is worth a read through just for the stupid names of both the plants and the insects (for example: common stork's-bill is a food plant of the brown argus).

Meanwhile, the Butterfly Conservation Trust - based about half a mile away from where these pictures were taken - has a handy guide to gardening for butterflies http://butterfly-conservation.org/11908/gardening.html. It even mentions buddleia, aka the butterfly bush, which is another bane of the gardener's life but I digress.

More Orchids. Morchids.

When I said a couple of posts ago that orchids just litter the roadside around here: here's a fairly extreme example of that.

This is a common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) which, as the name suggests, is one of Britain's commonest wild orchids. The roadside that I spotted it next to was the main road between Stornaway in the Isle of Lewis and Tarbert in Isle of Harris. Technically, they're the same island - as in there is no water between them - but while Lewis is predominantly flat, Harris is not. The road winds up the side of a mountain over looking Loch Seaforth and we stopped to admire the view. 

You can't blame us, really, can you? Harris makes Lewis look like the garden of eden. This, we joked, was 'troll country' and were listening to Norwegian band Wardruna just to add to the effect.

I went for a short wander up the hillside and spotted this little beauty on the marshy soil. Photographing the picture at the top came at the expense of my knees, kneeling in the damp bog but I think it was worth it.

Still more orchid pictures to come.
The Common Spotted Orchid http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/species/common-spotted-orchid

Wardruna. The song's about Odin and sung in old Norse.

Pretty Pictures Of Flowers

In yesterday's post, I mentioned 'matter', which was the 'fertile plain' between the alkaline sea and the acid moor? Well here's an example of that. The yellow-ochre patch to the right is seaweed and I'm afraid I don't know a damn thing about seaweed so can't help you on that. To the left is grass (I'm guessing marram grass) and the pink flowers are thrift (Armeria mafitma). Thrift is tolerant of salty sea water - I've seen it quite happily living underwater in a nearby loch - and so can handle the occasional high tide.

This is the same patch of land, showing the large tussocks and the channels of water running between them. The area is prone to very violent winter storms, and these patches are built on tiny patches of earth on a bed of very tough rock. The rock in question is lewisian gneiss, which is a type of granite and igneous, if you remember your geology from school. Some of the oldest rocks in the British Isles apparently, although I thought they were all pretty old.

Now, moving inland, the place where we are staying comes with a croft, which is a patch of land that comes with the house and is intended for agricultural purposes. It is used occasionally for agricultural purposes - specifically grazing sheep. However, a quick jaunt around provides some surprising finds. Not just the northern marsh orchids as described in the previous posts (I've counted six in the immediate garden of the house alone) but such beauties as these:

This is Red rattle (Pedicularis palustris) or marsh lousewort, which was very prolific on the site. This is a 'hemi-parasitic' plant, which attatches it's roots to the roots of nearby grasses and 'borrows' water and mineral salts. Back down south, it  and it's cousin yellow rattle are often sewn into fields to improve biodiversity, as the grass there would otherwise crowd out everything else. Here, it just grows of it's own accord in a scrubby, rush infested bit of sheep grazing land.

According to the 'Reader's Digest Field Guide To Wild Flowers of Britain', which I found on the shelf here, it got the name 'lousewort' from a theory that it infected sheep with lice. However - and again according to the same book - lousewort is popular with snails and snails are carriers of liver fluke, which can infect sheep. Unhealthy, liver fluke stricken sheep would have been prone to catching lice and then spreading lice through the rest of the flock. Happily for sheep, shepherds and wildflowers, sheep are inoculated against liver fluke these days.

This is a round-leafed sundew (Drosera rotundifolia), which is a carnivorous plant. The leaves are covered in red hairs, each of which is covered in a droplet of sticky liquid. Midges mistake them for water and get stuck, where upon the leaf curls inwards and the insect is digested. Like all carnivorous plants, it also photosynthesises, so the insect-eating is an addition to, rather than a replacement for, the actual nutrient factory of photosynthesis. Chomping the occasional insect allows the plant to thrive on a highly acid bog with very few essential plant minerals.  

So there you go. There's more, much more but we'll get round to that presently.

Orchidorama

Just to get everybody up to speed, I'm on holiday on the Isle Of Lewis in the outer Hebrides at the moment and am keeping my eye open for anything interesting. We'd already spotted porpoises, jellyfish and a dead monkfish before we'd even got there and, on arrival, we were not disappointed!

The western Isles, which are a very remote, wet and windswept place are renowned for their machair, or beds of wildflowers. This is from the gaelic for 'fertile plane' and represents a flat bit of coastal land, stuck at a fairly neutral pH level between the alkaline sea and the acid bog of the inland.

To expand briefly on that, all soil is either acid, neutral or alkaline. Soils such as chalk, which is the predominant soil type down where I live on the south coast, are alkaline while "good" soils tend towards either neutral or very slightly acid. It's one of those things you get a lot in ecology, where a healthy soil helps maintain a healthy soil. Plants die and are eaten by various critters, down to and including microbes, which creates a rich hummus that is ideal soil for plants to grow in.

It's one of those weird, chicken and egg type situations, where perfect harmony is perpetuated somehow. However, in some places, heavy and persistent rain will wash all these nutrients out of the soil. The western isles are all about heavy and persistent rain. And wind. This makes the soil very acid indeed and, as we know acid and microbes do not get along very well. The rain washes nutrients from the soil, making the soil more acidic, which inhibits microbial life in the soil and microbial life is basically the bottom of the pyramid that all life rests on. Without it, nothing happens.

Last time I was up here, it was February 2015 and I was moving stones around amongst other things. Down south, even in February, when you moved a stone, lots of little critters like woodlouse and centipedes would scurry out of your sight but here... nothing. Not even worms. It was one of the best illustrations of a line in a text book that I'd ever seen. Without microbes, stuff does not rot and so you get great, springy, squishy matts of peat building up over the centuries. Remove a core from these bad boys and you can bring up seeds going bucket just after the last ice age.

So, just to recap, rain washes out nutrients, creating a highly acidic soil. This creates a difficult environment for most plants - the interior of the Isle of Lewis is not thick with fields of wheat, for example - however, this makes it a just fantastic habitat for plenty of rare plants. Orchids, for example.

The four pictured are in the driveway of the place where we are staying. Just to confirm that: in the place where we are staying, there are at least four wild orchids IN THE DRIVEWAY. The one in the picture above is a good foot high. According to my research, it's a northern marsh orchid, on account of the fact that it looks like one, it's in the north (we're about 20 miles south of the most northerly point in the British isles) and it's on a marsh. Dactylorhiza praetermissa to give a species name, though be warned I am not an expert, just a bloke with a book on wild flowers.

This one was probably a common spotted orchid, although according to this same book, they tend to grow on lime soils, which this very much is not. But putting all that aside, isn't it pretty? And they're all over the place. Literally: you look in a roadside verge and think 'oh, another orchid'. Back home, I got quite excited when I saw a few on a roadside verge that had specifically been planted for wildlife. Here... they just grow.

Anyway, just to wrap up, this is not the machair that I described above. That is mostly buttercups and daisy as far as I can tell. This is on the acid bog that covers most of the island. More to follow... stay tuned.

Another Part Of The Heath

Despite being very familiar with Heathlands, having spent the last 3 winters volenteering on two National Trust owned ones, Godlingston and Holt Heath, I'd not actually seen them very much in the mid summer. Therefore, last Thursday came as a pleasant surprise.

We were ragwort pulling on Holt Heath and the bleak, brown, ant-filled wastes of winter had given way to a beautiful panorama of rare plants, buzzing insects and skylarks singing above us.

This is common cudweed (Filago vulgaris) which is a heathland specialist - quite rare although not protected like broad-leafed cudweed. I must admit it took a lot of searching through wildflower ident books to find it.

The whole heath was covered in spider's webs. I believe this is the web of the labyrinth spider (Agelena labyrinthine), a handkerchief-sized web with a funnel in the middle.

And fox gloves (Digitalis purpurea) which were growing through the gorse bushes and looking very lovely.

 Info on these plants and animals looks pretty sparse, so I recommend you cut and paste the latin name if you want more info.

Over The Hills And Far Away

Another day, another nature photography expedition with the missus. This time to Hambledon Hill, an iron age hill fort near Blandford. 

This is classic calcareous grassland. Chalky soil, so alkaline, free draining and with a very thin soil layer. This makes it good wildflower habitat, as we can demonstrate:

This is Bird's Foot Trefoil. Also known as 'bacon and eggs' for some inexplicable reason. Although bird's foot trefoil is hardly the most obvious name either. Also 'granny's toenails', although I'm seriously wondering at this point whether whoever wrote my wildflower ident book was taking the mickey.

Read more: http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/species/birds-foot-trefoil

This is classic grassland. As mentioned above, due to the thin soil and chalk beneath, it's not very fertile. Basically, if you are grazing cattle and sheep on these hills, there is a limit to how much it can be grazed, as the grass will have to recover. It's all about how many animals you can have on how large a patch of land.
Then some time around the early twentieth century, artificial nitrate fertilisers were invented and suddenly, you could take a patch of thin soil such as this, plough it up and seed it with rye grass or something similar, fertilise it regularly and graze cattle much more intensively. This was called 'improved grassland' and was great for farmers, great for cheap lamb and beef but not so great for wildflowers.

The flowers and plants that had traditionally grown on this sort of soil had adapted to a marginal, very frugal, environment. So, if you then suddenly made that environment less marginal and invited an extremely virulent grass onto the scene, those marginal plants found themselves crowded out.

 

And so now we roll onto grassland restoration, which attempts to return these areas to their previous species-rich status. It mostly involves not fertilising the soil and maintaining grazing on the land but at a much less intense level. On this evidence, it seems to be working. 

Read more about calcareous grassland restoration HERE

Have a look yourself sometime if you're in the area. It's a beautiful place and has some fine views of the county. Reminds me of a song, in fact.

Games For May

Out with the dogs and the missus again, this time on the road running past Bradbury Rings. Bradbury  is an iron-age hill fort and, running past it is the main road between Wimborne and Blandford, which runs through an avenue of beech trees. It's a Dorset landmark and looks kinda like the road to King's Landing would if it was a 60mph A road.

The road, the avenue of trees and the broad grass verges are all National Trust owned and looked after by my old work colleague Paul. 

Here's the whole family in one shot. Mrs Zoom to the left, Maeve the Irish bog whippet in the foreground, Emerson the galgo or Spanish Greyhound ahead of Maeve and Mochi the Podenco on the right.

There's a lot of cow parsley about. Or Queen Anne's Lace if you want to be posh. Anthriscus sylvestnis if you want to be really posh.

Some Devil's Bit Scabious (Succisa pratensis) and some cuckoo flower (Cardamine pratensis). And some grass, obvs.

Some hawk's beard, or possibly buttercups or - even posssiblyer - both.

DIY Ecology

 No rhodo bashing this week. I'm a bit over rhodo bashing. So, instead, here's a pretty little bit of meadow grass. Lovely, isn't it? Some brome, a few cuckoo flowers...

......Aaaand pull back and reveal that it is in fact, the side of my town's bypass. To the left of this pic is a bridge with the River Stour running through it while, over the top runs the A31. Over the other side of the road is an industrial estate.

To the best of my knowledge, no one ever planned or planted this up, it just sprang up as it's own little nature reserve. Rewilding in action, before your very eyes.

Further on is this field, which is managed to some extent. It's grazed by sheep through the winter and right now is awash with buttercups and silverweed.

It all just goes to show, it's not just about the big, showy reserves. Nature is right there all around you. Sometimes you have to give it a helping hand, sometimes it just gets on and does it itself.

A Short Whinge

A short, slightly rambling, college assignment-related whinge: back when I were a gardener, I always use to be a little sniffy about the whole concept of garden design, which seemed to me to be a way of making something very simple complicated in order to justify your consultant's fee. There were three important things: what do you want there, will it grow there and does it look nice and the rest is all just guff to make you sound like you know what you're talking about.

Currently, I am writing about 'landscape character' which, similarly, seems to be about thinking up the correct adjectives and crowbarring a landscape into an arbitrary set of values decided by somebody else. Generally speaking, the longer ago a landscape was shaped, the more value it has and therefore the more worth it has. Quaint and pastoral is 'good', anything else is bad.

Personally, I have my own, slightly eclectic, views on landscape beauty. I quite like post-industrial wasteland, for example. As well as this, I have a very pragmatic 'well, this is what we've got' attitude to dealing with it. Make what you have beautiful and biodiverse. Preserve by all means but everything changes with time and you can never be sure that our attempts to correct the mistakes of our recent ancestors will not also be condemned by future generations.

Hey, Did Everything Just Taste Purple For A Second?

We've been on orchid watch for some weeks now, at a particular grass verge along an main road that we drive down regularly. The patch in question is next to a woodland owned by Dorset Wildlife Trust   and so we can thank them for this particularly beautiful little patch.

The orchid in question is an Early Purple Orchid, (Orchis mascula) which, as well as sounding great in Scottish, is one of those plants that I strongly suspect was named on a Friday afternoon. ("It sprouts early and it's purple. That's good enough, isn't it? Right, let's get to the pub.") To photograph it without accidentally destroying any more more orchids involved walking down the main road, then finding a gap in the traffic to crouch down to take the pic. These are just some of the risks I am prepared to take to to write this blog.

And, having risked certain death on a main road, we may as well nip in for a poke around the woods, with it's carpet of bluebells and wood anemone, plus a fallen oak tree that seemed far too good timber to waste on beetles! Kudos all round to the DWT. If you want to have a look yourself, it's called Ashley Wood and is near Tarrant Keynestone: 

http://www.dorsetwildlifetrust.org.uk/Ashley_Wood_Nature_Reserve.html