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!

Britain's Larger Moths...

This week I've moved back up to London, and an extremely messy room. I shan't put pictures, because it's somewhat horrifying the amount of stuff I've accumulated over 3 years, from uni and also all the things I left behind in the first place. Anyway, long story short, with all the tidying I've been doing, I found a few interesting bits and pieces amidst the carnage of old toys, university notes, books and god-knows-what-else.

The thing that caught my eye the most was a publication from the Butterfly Conservation on "The State of Britain's Larger Moths 2013". Okay, so it's a year out of date, but still fairly recent and very relevant in ecology.

 

Image from UKButterflies.co.uk

In the past couple of years, I've started to get much better at lepidoptera identification (moths, not so much, but I can do some of the basic ones), so this is a pretty interesting read. I haven't actually gotten through it all yet, but it's not too long; 30 pages. First off, its focus is larger, macro, moths, rather than micro-moths- there are more species of micro-moth in the UK, but they're much harder to identify, and a lot less striking than some of the big macros we get like Tiger, Silver Y and Burnet moths. 

Sadly, like a lot of reports I've read over the past year (mostly for my dissertation or ecology modules at university), numbers of many species are declining. 2/3 of 337 species of larger moths declined over the 40-year study recorded in this report, which is a pretty dire situation, given the usefulness of moths in the environment, playing a key role for plant pollination, and insectivores that rely on moths as a food source. It's quite evident that habitat loss and reductions in biodiversity of many areas are not doing moths any favours at all. Agricultural intensification and changing woodland management largely seem to have negative impacts on moths, with fragmentation of habitats causing declines in species numbers.

     

Dusky Thorn, Spinach, Lackey, Garden Tiger, Grass Rivulet and Autumnal Rustic species all have declined by over 90% in the past 40 years. Images from UKmoths.org.uk

It's not all doom and gloom though; the report also shows that the 1/3 of moths that aren't declining in numbers are actually increasing. Homogenization of the moth species pool of the UK isn't great, but at least it's good news for some species, and not all are becoming rarer. As well as these moths on the increase becoming more abundant, their territories are also expanding, with species such as the Dingy Footman having a more widespread range.

I need to give this paper a bit more of a read (I'm still only halfway through clearing the piles of stuff all over the place), but a quick skim through shows it's not all bad for Britain's moths. I'll be interested to see what they suggest in the last couple of pages as ways to conserve moths, as a lot of public friendly leaflets tend to focus on small-scale changes you can make in your own back garden, rather than a larger impact that, from a glance, seems to be the focus of this paper.

Dingy Footman, Image from Suffolkmoths.org.uk

You can read the full report here.

Jurassic Coast

 There's this little tiny beach near me called ZigZag beach, which not many people at all know about. It's actually kinda nice that it's such an unknown spot, because when it's tourist season and all you want to do is relax by the sea in peace without a crush of a thousand grockles around you, there is actually somewhere you can go.

Once you've managed to find your way down the extremely steep (and slippery, if it's rained, or is even dry, because it's covered in leaves) path to the beach, there's a flat area just before you go down to the beach itself. The beach isn't actually the main point of this post; there's something much cooler to be seen. Up an even tinier, steeper and slipperier path from the flat BBQ grassy area (I say BBQ; it's more an area that you can light a fire on if the last bit of the path to the beach is too difficult) you can find a real dinosaur's footprint!

It's inverted in the rock, so instead of being flat-down on the ground, it's actually upsidedown, where the rock's slowly turned over since it was formed! You'd never ever know it was there unless you had been told about it before, which I think makes it cooler- a secret treasure of Swanage. The middle toe is really long, so it's quite distinctive. I don't know that much about dinosaurs though, so I wouldn't be able to tell you which species had made it. It's about the size of a hand, maybe a bit bigger, so certainly not something tiny...

The slide back down is not something to be sniffed at...