Tussocking

The cold weather that has been going on for so long it has depressed almost to nil the number of insects I find as I go about the garden.  Today, despite the still lying snow, I decided to take a tussock of cock's-foot grass from Emthree and see what I could find in it and to alleviate my invertebrate withdrawal symptoms

Tussocking is a time-honoured technique for finding invertebrates especially during the colder, wetter months.

The method is simple: the tussock is cut off just below ground (I find a bread knife with a serrated edge is best for this), put in a bag and brought to some place where it can be examined (the dining room table is often quite handy).

This excision leaves a hole of course, but this might fill up with interesting things in due time.  Or you may even find something in it - I found a mauve plastic clothes peg, a survivor from the days when a washing line passed over the area.

Once indoors the tussock is teased out and shaken in a garden sieve over a white sheet like a tea towel.  Any insects that fall through the mesh onto the white can then be pootered up.

Today's tussock was far from the best I have ever had but it contained two garlic snails Oxychilius alliarius; several Entomobrya nivalis springtails; the bark louse, Lepinotus iniquilinus; two rove beetles, Stenus flavipes and Tachyporus chrysomelinus; two herb hammock spiders, Neriene clathrata;and a woodlouse, Trichoniscus pusillus.

The bark louse, the garlic snail, the spider and the two beetles are new records for Emthree and the only other records of the bark louse in Sussex are from our house and green house here, though I expect it is widespread.

It just goes to show what can be found even under snow (I had to get the snow off the tussock before I could cut it.)

Snow again

For the third time in the last four months we have had heavy snow.  Last night it was mainly east Kent and East Sussex near the coast that was blessed and we woke up this morning to a deep white mantle.

It is very cold too: an unusually hard winter.  I rather suspect the effect on Emthree will be beneficial rather than the reverse.

Still a cold winter

Now well into February, it has been snowing much of the day and promises to do so much of the night.  Phenology aside, most things seem to be delayed by cold - crocuses, hazel catkins, snowdrops etc are not yet in bloom in our area.

The pictures below were taken on 1 February after a hard frost when a dawn snow shower spread writhing plaits of white powder across the hard ground.

When there is any amelioration - temperatures up to 5 centigrade or more - there is a scatter of invertebrates.  Winter gnats and midges swarming in the lee of the hedge, the occasional green flash of a leaf-hopper (Empoasca vitis) darting from the cover of the evergreen box.

Midsummer Pond has frozen several times.

The leaves of heath speedwell (Veronica officinalis) always stand out well after frost.

Campion miner

I noticed today that two or three leaves of the red campion (Silene dioica) had been mined by what turned out to be larvae of the agromyzid fly Amauromyza flavifrons.

The fly larvae clearly find red campion leaves more palatable than rabbits do as these mammals seem to leave them strictly alone.

This is a new record for Emthree and only the third on the Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre's database.  However, I suspect the species is actually quite common in Sussex.

Hungry birds

Today I noticed that some of the lichen/moss sward on the top of Butterfly Rock was missing and I found these patches of fairy cup lichen, Cladonia pyxidata, lying higgledy piggledy on the ground.

 

Undoubtedly they had been cast aside by hungry birds searching for insect larvae.

It is often written that Cladonia pyxidata is, or was, used as a cure for whooping cough.  This seems to originate with John Lightfoot who wrote in his Flora Scotica (1777) "A decoction of this moss is sometimes given by the vulgar to children to cure the whooping cough but the good effects of it are not supported by proper testimonies.".  However, under the rubric pyxidatus he included what sounds like several different species of Cladonia which he called 'common cup-moss or lichen' (lichens in the 18th century were thought to be kinds of mosses).

Diffugere nives again

The snow is melting, the blackbirds are singing again. There was a non-stop pattering of water to the north of Emthree as the snow on top of the garden hedge melted.

The ground is now patterned with snow patches as it thaws. With their irregular curving shapes they create a highly distinctive landscape, but not one that is much admired or loved.

The old wooden pole that the black bryony has climbed for the last six years has broken near its base, perhaps under the weight of snow and Submespilus Pit is full of cold water.

Judging by the evidence below, the birds must have been eating some of the berries.

Brambles crushed by snow

The very heavy snowfalls since the 1 January have deposited a considerable weight of material on trees and bushes.

In the picture above the snow has crushed the bramble hedge along the south of Emthree, reducing it from chest height to knee height.

No doubt it will bounce back to some extent after the thaw, but it will have to grow up to chest height again and its general configuration will be permanently affected.  Ultimately it should be thickened and strengthened.

Snow, if and when it comes, is an important part of the natural dynamic, not only altering the shape of trees and shrubs but often breaking off branches large and small to provides homes on the ground for invertebrates and fungi, and tears and tree-holes above for the species associated with those.

The cold and snow will also, no doubt, reduce numbers of birds and animals with all sorts of poorly understood knock-on consequences.

A hard winter

We had snow before Christmas and it has been lying continuously since New Year's Day.  On most days we have had additional snowfall and it has been blizzarding here on and off all day with more forecast tomorrow and for several more days at least 

This, of course, should be quite beneficial to most wildlife, though the birds in our garden are looking cold and hungry.

Insect East Enders

The Square Metre has risen to great heights over the Festive Season with an outing on ITV1's  Harry Hill's TV Burp on 26 December under the title Insect East Enders.

It is on Watch it Again for a while about a quarter of the way in:

http://www.itv.com/itvplayer/video/?Filter=114248

Orange, red and wet

A note on the Emthree after quite a long gap.

t has been raining for days and everywhere is awash: a carpet of sodden leaves and mud.  And still it rains - I can hear it outside as I type.

The overall gloom is enlivened by two splashes of colour on the edge of Medlar Wood.  At ground level there are the first berries in a split pod of gladdon (Iris foetidissima).

In the branches of the medlar tree above there are some bunches of black bryony (Tamus communis) like bunches of small scarlet grapes.

So far these bright fruit have been left alone by the birds (who undoubtedly sowed their original seeds), but as the weather hardens I expect they will quickly disappear.

Sixth anniversary of the project

Today was the sixth birthday of the project and the area really does look different from day one, though many of the plants are probably the same.

 15 September 2003

15 September 2009

I wanted to record something new by way of a celebration and managed to find some small, round microfungi on fallen leaves from the box. They were Mycosphaerella buxi, like small white drum tops with a brown rim.

Flowers now include only some closed up smooth hawksbeard, a late heath speedwell, square-stalked St Johnswort and one white herb-robert behind Midsummer Pond.

The trees, not surprisingly, have grown to some size and in a few more years the area will be a coppice with one birch standard.

Butterfly Rock is its usual tapestry of moss and lichen, somewhat refreshed by recent rains. Surprisingly two small Crepis capillaris plants towards the northern edge of the top plateau have survived the long dry summer. Do they get moisture and sustenance from earth formed by the lower plants, or have they sent questing roots down the north face into more fertile ground?

The medlars are falling: it is almost autumn again and I wonder if the Metre and I will travel together for another six years ... or more.

More than one rose?

Granddaughter Ellie came to the Square Metre with me today and here she is jumping over the yew log to show me Wilson (who lives in Medlar Wood) cupped in her right hand.

Since my earlier assault the brambles against North Wall have all grown up by half a metre of so with new primocanes. I cut them all back including, inadvertently, the wild rose which has slowly been gathering strength since I moved it from the centre to the corner of the Square Metre itself on               1 November 2004, nearly five years ago. It has another cane left, so it should be alright and would, in any case, sprout again.

It is, I think one of the dog roses (Rosa canina aggregate), but I have recently noticed what looks like a field rose (Rosa arvensis) near the north east corner of Butterfly Rock. I will have to wait a year or two before I feel certain.

Sean Saul-Hunt has put a new log of wood across the Square Metre to place the now almost vanished birch of White Log. The newcomer is cherry-plum wood (Prunus cerasifera) and as a non-native I am not entirely happy with it, but it might stay.

Something had turned the doll’s head over since my last visit and I think we are getting regular visits from deer, who might be the culprits.

There is still no sign of the two seedling oaks in Medlar Wood and I guess the oak mildew must have killed them.

Before we went Ellie insisted on taking a picture of me sitting in front of the bramble hedge.

A swarming of ants

A quiet moment in Emthree on this our 50^th wedding anniversary, the golden wedding. The rowan and spindle to the east are full of ripe, or ripening, berries.

It was a sultry afternoon and the ants decided to swarm. At first I caught sight of a glitter of wings on my sempervivum tufa rock that sits above the stump that collapsed under me the other day and that the wrinkled ant queens, males and workers were coming up from there.

Some 15 minutes later, when I was sitting down again I heard an almost continuous rasgueado of feathers from the side of the ancient yellow meadow ants’ nest to the east of Emthree. A non-stop flight of queens and males were heading up into the sky southwards from the hill and the bristly scraping sound was coming from a young blackbird that was enthusiastically anting by gathering the unfortunate insects in his beak and rubbing them under his feathers.

After a few photos I returned to my seat only to discover a new congregation of the same species of ant milling about on Butterfly Rock. All these flight episodes began and ended very rapidly – 15 or 20 minutes maybe – and it is one of the very few times I have seen the yellow hill makers out in the sunshine in any numbers.

So far as I could make out the males are small and black (see top right of the picture, on the leaf) and the queens much larger with black thoraxes but yellowish bodies both in contrast to the wholly yellow wingless workers.

The whitethroat isn't there

As I stood in the 9am sunshine yesterday, having just given the tortoise his lettuce, a small  bird flew into the tall Thistle Heath birch.  It was a whitethroat (Sylvia communis), of the most delicate mouse-beige with a paler puffed out throat and breast where it kept all its songs.

It had something white in its beak - a moth maybe - and was trying to dash its brains out on a slender branch while keeping a wary eye on me.  After a few seconds, satisfied with its impending breakfast, it retired to the thicks of the medlar tree.

Sylvia communis can be roughly translated as 'the common woodlander' and, though common enough, it was bird I had not seen in Emthree before.  Though not currently threatened, according to the British Trust for Ornithology "a drought in the western Sahel region of Africa in 1968 caused a 90% drop in the number of whitethroats breeding in Britain; a crash from which numbers have still not fully recovered."

This bird inspired me to take the picture below of the Thistle Heath birch (not including whitethroat), a plant that appeared in the Square Metre in the summer of 2003