St James' Park

St James' Park in London, at first glance, looks pretty standard; but once you get to the lake, there are some really interesting ornamental ducks. In the 1930's, oriental ducks were introduced to St James' Park; today there are over 250 waterfowl on the lake. The most exotic of these are certainly the famous great white pelicans that once ate a pigeon (not for the faint hearted). There are 4 pelicans in the park today; clipped on one wing to stop them from escaping into London and causing chaos- which they used to do quite regularly, flying over to London Zoo to steal fish from the birds there! We were lucky enough to come across all four pelicans on our London adventures.

It's not just the pelicans that are awesome about St James' Park though. There are loads of smaller ducks that aren't found very frequently, and are really very cool. On an island in the middle of the main lake there's a bird breeding sanctuary. Visitors can't go and see the birds breeding there, but on the water it's easy to spot red-crested pochard, wigeon, mandarins (ducks, not small oranges), egyptian geese and possibly my new favourite, the fulvous whistling duck. The park also has booming populations of canada goose, swan (black as well as white), shag, heron, coot, moorhen, mallard and heron. Despite being in the middle of London, there's a huge range of birdlife! There's about 114 species annually, with around 90 extra rarer birds on top of that that sometimes visit.

 

The squirrels are well known for being some of the boldest, tamest around in this park as well. Bring peanuts at your peril, because they're absolutely everywhere, and won't hesitate to come and mob you for free food. They don't care at all if you creep up to get some close photos, although they are very curious! Too close, and they'll swipe at your camera lens.

 

It then leapt on my arm before skittering away when it found it had made a mistake

The pigeons are very tame too, and always on the lookout for food. We didn't even have anything to feed them, and they were all over our feet!

The best time to see the waterfowl is between November and April, because the drakes (male ducks) are in their breeding plumage, so are really brightly coloured. There are a couple of small cafes in the park to go and warm up in afterwards if it's a chilly day, so it's definitely something awesome to go and check out if you're ever in London for the day!

We went on a bear hunt...

This isn't really my normal sort of post, but at the moment London is covered in bears. Paddington bears! There have been a lot of sculpture trails in the past (you name it, there's probably been a sculpture trail of it), but these ones are pretty cute to go and visit a few. We actually came across another couple who were running around visiting all the sculptures within one day, who had already visited 20 when we found our first in Covent Garden at 10.30am! They were hoping to end up at the O2 dome by the end of the day having seen them all.

Covent Garden, Rainbow

The bears are in London from the 4th November to the 30th December, so they're still around for a while to go and visit over Christmas! There's 50 spread across London, a lot of them around Soho and Marylebone, so that's a good place to start if you want to see a lot in one go. There are also London Buses all over the place too, so tying the two together as one big sculpture trail could be a great day out exploring bits of London you might not normally end up in! We were heading towards the British Museum anyway, so a cheerful bear was an extra bonus to find outside.

British Museum, Bear Necessities

After running around the British Museum for a couple of hours, and then back to Covent Garden for lunch, the next place we happened across a Paddington was Regent's Park. I've got another post coming about Regent's Park itself, and its fantastic collection of ornamental waterfowl. This little bear was sitting outside by the Cabinet War Rooms though, providing more interesting stuff to look at outside the park as well as inside it.

Regent's Park, Paddington Jack

After wandering around Regent's Park a little bit, we headed back towards South Bank for the evening to see the Christmas Market via Big Ben. We managed to find another bear by surprise, which I think was my favourite one of the day. He was attracting a lot of interest when we turned up (which I think made him easier to find), but we managed to snap a quick picture when a few people wandered off again.

Westminster, Good News Bear

Jays

I've been quite surprised, after moving back into Hertfordshire, at the number of jays roaming around. Down in Dorset and up in Birmingham, a jay was a fairly rare sight for me; magpies and crows were much more common, and it was quite exciting to see a jay bouncing along a tree branch, or picking up leaves off the floor. Here though, while I keep expecting the terrible chak-chak-chak racket to be one of the former two birds, it normally always turns out that in fact it's a jay.

Image from RSPB.com

For all the commonness of them here, they still seem to be completely under the radar of most people- the first bird I tend to go for when the question's asked 'what's that big colourful bird?' is jay. I am always surprised by their unknown status by most when you take into account a jay's striking plumage; they must be one of the brightest large birds found in a garden, almost on a par with the green parakeets of London. I find these aren't quite as bold though, even if they are really very very noisy still!

Image from Wildlifephotographic.com

Jays are actually one of the biggest planters of acorns, collecting and planting up to 3000 acorns each in a month! This may be the reason for why I've been seeing so many around recently, as it's peak acorn time- and there are a lot of trees around where I live too, their preferred habitat. Jays, like all corvids, are clever birds. Although they don't use twig tools to get at food like crows do, a study by Cheke et al (2011) showed that they could actually learn to use tools if they wanted to. Multiple birds in the study learnt to use tool when they got an immediate reward, but less understood how to receive a reward when multiple different tools and stages were needed. Individual differences obviously had an effect. This was only a small study though, using five different birds, so conclusive evidence that jays can or cannot use tools to extract rewards shouldn't be taken from it. It can be said that they are very clever birds though!

Map from Birdforum.net

Jays are spread really widely across the world; the one we have in this country is the Eurasian jay (or just a jay, it's the original jay after other species in different countries are named). They're pretty birds, and I do enjoy seeing them, but they can make you jump with the noise they make!

The day I fell in a bog

I was in Guildford for the weekend visiting my boyfriend- with sunday being pretty good weather (November, and didn't need coats! Not expecting a snowy winter this year...) we decided to head out on an adventure and see what we could find
Heading north out of Burpham (where his flat is), we walked along Clay Lane towards Jacob's Well and Worpleston. The area was completely new to us; the only reason we knew of Worplesdon is because the train from Woking stops at Worplesdon sometimes. There are vegetables growing on the platform too, which is pretty cute.

About halfway between Burpham and Worplesdon is Whitmoor Common, our adventure spot of the day. Whitmoor Common is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) on the edge of the Bagshot Beds, a sandy soil formation. A mix of sandy and peaty soil means that there's a mixture of dry and wet heathland plants on higher and lower areas. It's fairly big, and pretty boggy in the winter- especially this Sunday, when it had just rained all day Saturday. We had to take a couple of backtracks heading into the common, because it was just absolutely impassable without wellies! The mud and puddles meant I got some pretty cool macro shots with my camera though.

Despite balancing somewhat precariously to take these, it wasn't until we were walking back along this path a bit further up that I fell over. I was pretty lucky that I mostly just got a bit wet, and not absolutely coated in mud. We carried on though, finding a slightly less sodden path- and a rope swing too, which we quickly took advantage of!

Heathlands always have very diverse flora; there are the big plants like heather (and each heather is slightly different- you don't have just 'heather', there's also bell heather, cross-leaf heath and ling, so quite a range!) and a few trees like silver birch. It's very easy to miss the smaller plants though, that are extremely varied once you actually start looking. It's the smaller plants that allow such a high diversity of other organisms to survive on heathlands too- bees, ants and other insects really depend on smaller plants.

The heath turns into wet woodland at the northern edge. Perhaps it wasn't supposed to be quite as wet as it actually was. The lichen makes quite nice patterns on the north side of trees where it's colder and moister; there's less on the southern side of trees because it's more prone to drying out in bright sunshine.

You can see the orange lichen on the north side of the trees

By the time we made it out of the woods, it was starting to get quite cold and dark- the evenings draw in so quick these days! Just made it home before a few drips of rain.

More adventures from Lickey Hills

I have more adventures from Lickey Hills- same trip as last time, just a few different pictures. I took too many pictures that weekend that are way too nice to not use!

Lickey Hills covers 524 acres on the edge of south Birmingham, and has some pretty interesting geology that my friend Laura could tell you a lot more about in her blog. That means you get a lot of different trees depending on the soil types around- the south-west of the park is mostly deciduous trees like oaks, beeches and birch, while the eastern side is more coniferous. The southern end of the park actually counts as Ancient woodland is really important for some communities, as they house species that colonise and disperse slowly, so aren't supported in new forested areas. Ancient woodlands support flora such as bluebells- in the spring, Lickey Hills is covered in this purple flowers!

Inside a den to avoid the rain!

At the top of the park by the visitors' centre there's an awesome view across the whole of Birmingham (you can see the University of Birmingham's Old Joe!), and lots of heathland. Apparently people head up there in late summer to pick bilberries from the bushes there, although I've never been around at the right time to gather some myself. The heathland also supports common lizard and adder populations, which like to bask on hot summer days.

They always have loads of fun activities on up at the park, especially at the weekends. I'm probably most biased towards suggesting the GeoChampions (again, Laura knows more about this than I do), who look at the geology of Lickey Hills and do all sorts of fun things with that. There's volunteer work parties that clear scrub and brush too though, and kids events on- especially during holidays. There's a tai-chi group that meets on sundays by the Monument too! Basically it's a pretty cool place, and if you've been to the woods a lot, there's always new reasons to go with their events happening so often.

Lickey Hills Adventure!

Despite rather grey-black clouds hanging around Selly Oak, while I was in Birmingham last weekend I managed to persuade a few friends to take the train out to Lickey Hills. Although it's only about 15 minutes away on the local train, a couple of them hadn't been out there at all in three years of uni, so it was cool for them to discover somewhere new. I'd been there a few times before now, but not in the middle of autumn (it was even more muddy than normal!)

The leaves were really bright, especially in the arboretum. An arboretum is a type of botanical garden that contains lots of different species of trees, with some housing extremely rare species. None of Lickey Hills' trees are particularly rare as far as I know, but they were lovely with the autumn colour change of leaves!

The most striking trees are definitely acers. I've always really loved these elegant trees, with very fine leaves. Originally from Japan, they're very popular in Japanese gardens, and grow slowly- so they're often not the largest of trees. They're fairly hardy, and really give splashes of colour to gardens filled mostly with trees, which are much less colourful than borders and semi-formal gardens. Sheltered spots under other trees are ideal, as they thrive in semi-shaded places, so can be matched with bigger trees really easily.

Acers only make up a few of the 70 trees in Lickey Hills' arboretum though. Pines are some of the commonest trees in the park as a whole; there are big sections of the park that are coniferous, although there are also areas of deciduous trees to the south. Some of these trees were pretty great to climb- you always have to be careful and make sure to test your weight on branches, and climb with other people around just in case. It's awesome to see the forest from a slightly different view to just walking through the trees though.

A quick rundown of important tree-climbing things (I would say rules, but they're not really):

• Make sure someone's with you, just in case you injure yourself if you lose your footing and slip
• Wear sensible clothing & shoes- trainers are a good shout, as they're fairly grippy
• Don't climb in the rain, snow or ice! Cold can freeze up your hands and your reactions
• Don't go higher than what you're comfortable with; you need to be able to get down again!
• Watch out for broken branches, any that can't take your weight, and especially thin branches closer to the top of trees

The CVG crew leave their computers for an afternoon

I have loads more pictures from Lickey Hills, so there might be another blog post about our adventure next week!

It's definitely autumn

It's definitely turned very autumnal in the past month, after the summer really stretching out into September this year. Definitely my favourite thing about autumn are conkers. Even though I have absolutely no use for them whatsoever, I always find myself just instinctively bending to pick them up where-ever I go, whether they're big, small, shiny or muddy.

Stock from dreamstime.com

Amusingly, my nieces have also picked up this habit. Maybe it runs in the family. I don't think I should be quite as relieved that I'm not the only one to come home with pockets rammed with conkers when they're nine and four.

It is quite noticeable that conkers have been getting smaller over the years though. While you can still get substantial conkers that'll definitely win a game, most of them just aren't the size they used to be- the result of a few nasty diseases that have spread through the UK since 2000. One of the most uncommon, unsightly problems is the horse chestnut leaf miner.

Image from Naturespot.co.uk

This beastie (Cameraria ohridella) arrived in the UK in 2002, and has spread across pretty much the whole country since then. It's still thankfully rare in Scotland, but has become very prevalent in some parts of the country; the rate of infestation is around 40-60km per year, so it's a real threat to large parts of the country that aren't currently affected (Forestry.gov.uk, 2014). Often horse chestnuts are the first trees to take on the golden reddy colours of autumn, or look like they do from the sheer number of leaf mining burrows across their canopy.

Image from Devonmoths.org.uk

Although this obviously looks unhealthy, so far there doesn't seem to be much evidence for the moths having a detrimental effect on the trees- there are much more dangerous diseases like bleeding canker. Obviously the presence of leaf miners when other diseases attack contribute to failing health of a plant though. Going back to the conkers, smaller ones are less likely to germinate successfully. Thankfully birds are starting to learn to use the leaf miners as food though, acting as natural pest controllers to these invaders.

Image from mostlyscarce.tumblr.com

Read more about horse chestnut diseases at ConkerScience!