New lichen, Lecanora campestris

Standing idly in the rain yesterday, I noticed a sort of grey smear like some distant nebula on the sandstone rock in The Waste. There have been various stains of an indeterminate nature on this rock and others in Emthree, but today I could clearly see the small brown jam tart-like fruiting bodies that revealed Master Smudge's identity as a lichen.

Consulting with books led to the conclusion that it might be Lecanora campestris and this was confirmed by Simon Davey, the Sussex Lichen Recorder. L. campestris is an abundant species in the south and, among other habitats, it likes to grow on nutrient enriched silaceous rocks. In this case the repeated cracking of snails by our garden thrush must have produced a rich patina of snail juice and bird poo that has no doubt fostered the growth of this lichen. At this rate it will be no time at all before we have a layer of soil on the rock.

Phaonia on Hypericum

Having said in an earlier posting that I saw rather few insects on the square-stalked St John's-worts in M3, today I noticed this muscid fly, a Phaonia species (see above) enjoying its afternoon tea on one of the flowers.

There are many members of the genus Phaonia, so I am not going to hazard a guess at the species, though it is one of the common ones.

Square-stalked St John's-wort, Hypericum tetrapterum

This hypericum reaches its best in mid-August and is a distinctive mixture of flower and fruit. The seeds pods turn boot-polish brown as they ripen which adds to the effect. The plants (which are said to prefer marshy places) have increased steadily in the past few years and it seems quite at home both in M3 and in The Waste.

Not many insects visit the flowers, but there are various things that feed on the leaves. One is the larvae of the tiny Johnswort pigmy moth, Fomoria septembrella, that make distinctive mines on some of the leaves. I have brought one leaf indoors to see if I can breed out an adult moth.

Too deep for tears

There is a great summer stillness under the high cloud blanket. It is our 48th wedding anniversary and that distant commemorated day seems such a long time ago.

An autumnal theme is starting to prevail in M3: dry grass, leaves fading from pale buff to umber black, often fretted with holes by July insects or scribbled with their leaf mines.

There are a few weary bees on the flowers gathering the last of the honey and pollen.

I sat thinking about the reasons why some people respond passionately to nature while others are little moved, or indifferent. Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgement (1790) argued that ‘enjoyment’ is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be ‘beautiful’ has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging our capacities of reflective contemplation.

The ardent naturalist seems often to be moved to a deep and meaningful contemplation by what is perceived as the beauty of wild things.

Maybe Wordsworth had read Kant. His Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood completed in 1804, the year of Kant’s death, ends with the lines:

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Today was hay-cutting day ...

Today (31 July) was hay-cutting day for Mice & Red but I was busy and out a lot and I forgot. No matter, I will go for it on 1 August.

I did make a brief evening visit and simply sat there and enjoyed the relative coolness; enjoyed watching a rosy-flounced tabby, nectaring with evident satisfaction on flowers of ragwort. These attractive little pyralid moths, Endotricha flammealis, have been much in evidence this year.

July we learn has been the hottest month on record in Britain since records began in 1914 with an average day and night temperature of 17.8°C. The main effect this seems to have had in M3 is that some of the July flowers are going over to seed more quickly. This, of course, may be because there has been an almost continuous opportunity in the daytime for insect pollination rather than the heat per se.

I have bought a simple rain gauge and have set it up near M3 to see how much rain we actually do get. On this last day of July we did have a heavy shower at about 8pm and there was more rain overnight: it won’t fill the reservoirs, but it might help some of the plants along.

A dusk visit

I try to visit M3 every day and usually write enough words to fill up a side or two of a standard 5 inch x 3 inch index card. Today I said:

A dusk visit after a day at Woods Mill. Wild silver y moths dash through the still, cricket-haunted air on a grey blur of wings. There are quieter midges and mosquitoes too like dust motes in the gloom.

Blackbirds sound the alarm in the wood and somewhere there are crooning pigeons.

No rain today and the ground looks brown and dry, but high above the quintet of flowers – ragwort, hogweed, rosebay, knapweed, hypericum - plays on like the band on the deck of the Titanic.

Ragwort in the heatwave

In the hottest part of the day the leaves on the ragwort Senecio jacobaea in The Metre all turn upside down, exposing the somewhat silvery underside to the sunshine and presumably thus reducing water loss.

It is remarkable that they do not simply wilt but actually manage to turn through 180 degrees. This indicates there is some mechanism within the leaf stalk that twists one way or another as the temperature rises.

There was a little rain this evening, but it scarcely wet the ground. However, most of the plants do not seem particularly stressed yet.

A conopid fly - Thecophora sp.

Late this afternoon I was giving some detailed scrutiny to the ragwort in M3 when I noticed a small, unusually-shaped fly visiting some of the flowers. I tried to photograph it, but is was too fast and eventually I caught it.

It turned out to be a Thecophora species parasitic on solitary bees.

Again, as with the smaller plants, I often first spot things like this through binoculars having sat quietly for a while. Many entomologists, I suspect, walk through an area, but rarely stop, wait and watch, so they just do not see many of the things that are about.

I originally had this down as Zodion cinereum and I am grateful to Jere for correcting this.

Heather and holly

In cutting back some of the longer vegetation I have discovered two plants in The Waste that I have not previously recorded in this project. One is a holly, Ilex aquifolium, and the other (I think) bell heather, Erica cinerea.

The first of these is growing close to the southern edge of M3 while the other is in the bare soil of Great Plantain Desert. Both were discovered using close focus binoculars and the heather in particular is very tiny and inconspicuous.

Holly seeds have a long and complicated germination pattern. The seed may travel through the gut of a bird in winter and the embryo starts to develop during the following warmer months. It then needs a period of cold stratification before germinating in its second spring. So, at a minimum, the seed of my holly settled into its position in winter 2004/5.

The bell heather is, I think, unlikely to be a natural arrival as our nearest wild heather patches are some way away. We do grow a few plants in the garden, or it may have come in as seed on my boots - who knows. Given the right conditions I think this and ling, Calluna vulgaris, are quite good at spreading themselves provided they can find open,non-calcareous soil.

Two-spotted neb moth, Eulamprotes atrella

As I sat contemplating life, the Universe and all that by M3 this evening, I noticed a small black insect resting in a leaf axil of one of the square-stalked St. John's-wort plants. I managed to get a photo before it flew off and saw it again a few moments later on a figwort leaf.

It was a two-spotted neb moth, Eulamprotes atrella, a tiny micro whose larvae feed on St. John's-worts. I made no attempt to capture the insect and am confident that it can be safely determined from the photo. This is a first for M3 and the only previous Sussex record in the Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre's database is from Cow Gap at Beachy Head.

Aspects of ragwort, Senecio jacobaea

As the ragwort plants in M3 come up to flowering, they present a variety of forms from the rich purple stems below to the tightly packed buds above and the intricately cut leaves in between.

The plants will flower for many weeks, until deep into the autumn and, judging by previous years, will attract a wide range of invertebrates.

After flowering they will die and this is one of the best ways of getting rid of ragwort if you don't want it as the seeds normally only germinate in bare, scuffed ground (like overgrazed horse fields).

The red ant Myrmica ruginodis

This insect is one of the most intrigueing in M3 as it moves about en masse from place to place and occasionally disappears altogether. In the warmer months these ants are often busy under Gingerbread Refuge, a piece of wood at the base of the north wall of logs. Once I saw them winding their way in a column up the dead stalk of a marsh thistle plant like pilgrims ascending the outside stairway of the Malwiyya, the spiral minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra.

In winter they go to ground somewhere and emerge during the first warmer days of spring. Recently they abandoned Gingerbread Refuge, but a few days ago they started coming back and today I found them with the brood of larvae (see photo above) which, I suspect, must have been brought up from secret chambers somewhere underground to be in a warmer place so as to complete their development more quickly.

As with the slugs, it is difficult to understand quite what these and the other ants live on. Whatever it is there must be plenty of it, but all I ever see is the stray worker lugging some bit of detritus towards the nest.

These red ants are often accompanied by tiny, white springtails called Cyphoderus albinus that rush around among the workers like an animated pieces of scurf. When the ants go Cyphoderus goes too like a camp follower.

These ants put up with a lot from me as I turn over the various refuges under which they shelter, but they are great survivors and I admire their industry and tenacity and their long season of complex activity.

Smooth Hawksbeard, Crepis capillaris

One of the most characteristic plants of M3, the smooth hawksbeard, is now flowering well and, if it is reasonably mild, it will continue into January. Like many composites (Asteraceae) the flowers of this widespread plant open in the morning and are usually closed by mid-afternoon whatever the weather.

The leaves are very bitter and, while they are sometimes used in salads in mainland Europe, they are eaten by very few animals and there are always many undamaged wintergreen plants. I have seen recipes for a country wine made from the flowers too (like dandelion wine), but I suspect there are far better options for the home wine-maker.

The plant is surprisingly polymorphic, some examples having quite deeply serrated leaves while others are almost smooth in outline. M3 has flowering plants over a metre tall and some less than 10cm. Mostly they are biennial, but some plants appear in spring and flower by late summer.

The flowers at this time of year are usually crowded with the small, black Meligethes beetles shown in the picture, but so far in 2006 they have been rather scarce. I am trying to find out if this fall in number is widespread.

Common figwort beetles

Recently the two plants of common figwort, Scrophularia nodosa,in M3 have started flowering. Not exactly showy things, but with a quiet, velvety brown and green beauty.

This morning I spotted several slug-like caterpillars in the flower head of one of the plants where they had been making a fine mess chewing the blooms to pieces. I think they must be larvae of one of the Ciona weevils,probably C. scrophulariae, but I shall have to wait for some adults to absolutely sure.

By the evening they had all gone, either to pupate, or because they had been eaten by something.

An old bone

Today I found an ancient, or fairly ancient, piece of bone about 6 or 7 metres to the south of M3 on the other side of the path through The Meadow. It looks like the sawn off head of a cow's femur.

I cannot recall ever buying anything like that, so it may have been transported into the garden by a fox or badger or one of the children. Anyway, I have put it on a high point of newly cut Waste in a sunny position between Butterfly Rock and the Lyon Stone. I particularly want to see if lichens or special mosses develop on it, though a fox or badger or child may take it away before this has time to happen.

As time goes by this project looks more and more like a bower bird's nest.

A lesser housefly, Fannia similis

Every summer I come across dozens of flies like this in M3. Although they look similar – the little brown jobs of the fly world – they have many small differences between species. In the case of this group it is particularly the bristles of the legs, head and thorax that help to define each species.

The genus Fannia has many species ranging from orange yellow to jet black. They breed in a wide range of decaying vegetable materials and other substrates and present the entomologist with that fascination of subtle variations on a theme that one often encounters with wildlife and, indeed, many other areas. Stamp collectors, for example, often pay large sums of money for stamps with minor imperfections or variations and there are many sought after forms of our ordinary, non-commemorative British postage stamp (the Machin definitive).

This is the sixth Fannia species that I have recorded in the Square Metre.

Smooth tare, Vicia tetrasperma

The smooth tares in M3 are now in full flower, though that seems a bit of an overstatement for something as tiny and inconspicuous as these blooms.

In close up they are attractive and patterned with what look like pollen guides, but I have never seen any insect make a visit (though this can sometimes happen after dark). However, they set plenty of seed so are presumably self-pollinating. Soon their four-seeded pods will develop: mouse peas as they were sometimes called.

Common cardinal beetle, Pyrochroa serraticornis

Every year a few of these beetles appear in the Metre at the end of May and beginning of June, having spent their early stages in dead wood somewhere nearby.

Usually they are very active in the daytime scrambling over the vegetation like slow acrobats. They are quite large beetles and they weigh plants down, so they sway in gentle parabolas from one stalk or leaf to another. There is a scarcer relative, the black-headed cardinal beetle. It does occur in the neighbourhood, but I await the pleasure of welcoming one to M3.

An orb web spider, Mangora acalypha

A very attractive small orb web spider, Mangora acalypha, appeared in The Waste today spinning a web between one of the rosebay plants and some grasses.

Although widespread in southern England, often in heathland locations, there seem to be rather few Sussex records, from the heaths in the centre and west of the area and in my own parish of Sedlescombe about 500 metres from home

The June view

I thought it might be worth posting a photograph of the Square Metre at the beginning of each month just to show what it looks like. So here is the June picture taken square on from the south. Trouble is the photograph does not really look much like the real thing with the eye constantly focussing and re-focussing on the detail.

Features in the picture include the tall, 5-stemmed ragwort towards the right and the dead ragwort from last year left of the birch tree. Bits of box are poking through the brambles trained up North Wall. In front there is the wire netting guard to stop rabbits eating the dandelion, Taraxacum pseudohamatum. The wire could go now.