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Village Voices Nature Note: Web Sights

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When you see a spider do you go Oh, Ugh or Aaaaaaaaarh? Wherever you are on that ladder of reaction, let me try and talk you down to a rung where you might just say Hi oreven Wow!  Fear of spiders (arachnophobia) is quite common.  It could be a primitive instinct evolved when our distant ancestors lived in caves in Africa and might have trodden on seriously poisonous spiders.  Or maybe we learn it as children from nursery rhymes like the one about Little Miss Muffet, who was put her off her curds and whey by an abseiling spider. But relax.  None of the common spiders in the UK are dangerous to humans.  Certainly not those big house spiders that can appear overnight in the bath or dash across the living room floor at an impressive top speed of half a metre a second; nor the Daddy Longlegs that get into odd corners of rooms and twizzle rapidly in their untidy webs; nor all those tiny spiders that balloon around on invisible filiaments of silk – on the contrary, these are the ‘money spiders’ that are supposed to bring you good luck.

Orb web spider
Orb Web Spider. Photo: Laurie Forsyth

Most of the UK’s 650 species of spider – bet you didn’t realise there were so many – live outside anyway.  Among the wonders of autumn are those soft , misty mornings when you go out into the garden and see a perfect spider’s web outlined with beads of dew.  The architecture of these silvery webs is breath-takingly beautiful.  The spider first puts in the spokes to establish the structure and tether it securely to its moorings, then adds the complex spiral strands with a special sticky kind of silk that will trap unwary insects.  The spider herself has anti-stick feet – all eight of them – to navigate the web. As a construction material the silk has extraordinary properties.  It’s five times stronger than steel, weight for weight, but so light in density that a strand of spider’s silk stretched right round the earth would still only weigh the same as a bag of sugar.  You can make bullet-proof vests from spider’s silk.  It has medical uses, too, as a gentle anti-septic for binding wounds.  Miss Muffet may in real life have been the daughter of the famous sixteenth-century naturalist, Dr Thomas Muffet, who discovered this property.  Shakespeare knew about it anyway.  In his Midsummer Night’s Dream he refers to the curative powers of one of Titania’s attendant fairies called Cobweb (‘Cob’ is the old name for spider).  And we honour spiders, at least metaphorically, by naming one of the most important modern inventions after their magical creations – the World Wide Web.

Jeremy Mynott
7 October 022 

Village Voices Nature Notes: Moth Matters

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I’ve had some big game in the garden at night recently – two elephants, three tigers and a leopard for starters. Also a menagerie of smaller creatures, including: a fox, puss, kitten, mouse, some tabbies, several hummingbirds and peacocks, lots of pugs and even a shark, though I’m still hoping for my first lobster and goat. No, this isn’t some radical Shingle Street rewilding exercise; these are just a few of the weird and wonderful names of the moths that grace our gardens every night and lurk unseen in them by day. Mention moths and most people immediately think of clothes moths. These are the moths referred to in the Bible, where we are advised not to lay up our treasures on earth ‘where moth and rust doth corrupt’. But there are only two kinds of clothes moths in the UK – really tiny ones, and in any case it’s their larvae (caterpillars) that cause the problem. You might be amazed just how many other kinds of moths there are out there – some 2,500 kinds in the UK as a whole. And with the expert help of Nick Mason, our local moth-er (don’t forget the hyphen), I’ve found a remarkable tally of over 350 different species just in my own back garden. Most moth species were first identified and named by naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and they bequeathed to us this wonderful lexicon of names, not just the animal ones mentioned above but a whole treasure-house of footmen, quakers, wainscots, rustics, lutestrings, carpets, fanfoots, tussocks, darts and daggers. There are also some wittily intriguing ones like the Uncertain, the Suspected and the Confused. How splendid to know that we have living amongst us a Setaceous Hebrew Character, a Pebble Prominent and the lovely Merveille du Jour. 

Peppered moth. Photo: Jeremy Mynott

Moths matter. They’re an index of the health of our environment. Readers of my generation will remember the ‘moth snowstorms’ we used to get years ago on our car windscreens. Not anymore. Despite the captivating diversity I mention above, moth abundance has declined dramatically in recent years. Disastrously too, since moths are a key part of the larger eco-system: they pollinate plants, and their caterpillars are a crucial food-source for birds, just as the adults themselves are for bats and for birds like our heathland nightjars. Hence the elaborate camouflages they adopt – as in the featured Peppered Moth blending perfectly with the blotches on my paving. 

Moths are also beautiful when you see them close-up. Take a look at the ones on the Shingle Street website under Gallery.

Heretical to say it, but they make the gaudier butterflies look almost vulgar.

Jeremy Mynott
August 2022

Village Voices Nature Note: Survival Tactics

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You have to be tough to survive at Shingle Street – if you’re a plant on the shingle banks, that is. Just imagine. You’re regularly doused with salt spray, exposed to constant winds and parched by the sun; there’s no fresh water and almost no soil; while the shingle itself is unstable and constantly shifting.  It’s an extreme environment, a desert of stones.  Yet there is a community of plants out there that have evolved specialised tactics to cope with those harsh conditions:

  • Lie flat to shelter from the winds (orache and sea-pea)
  • Have very deep roots to suck up moisture (sea-kale, whose roots can go two metres deep)
  • Have shiny leaves to reduce water loss (sea-beet) or hairy ones (yellow-horned poppy)
  • Grow in matted clumps to bind you firmly to the shingle (sea-pea, stonecrops and sea-campion)

We are blessed by our thriving shingle bank colony of these rare and beautiful plants.  It’s one of the most important in Britain, which is why Shingle Street is designated an SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest). We therefore inspect the plants regularly to check on their condition and a dedicated team of local volunteers has just completed the latest detailed survey, whose results will appear in due course on the Shingle Street website.

We did observe several changes.  The sea kale is now very abundant, popping up everywhere like huge cauliflowers.  The sea pea has spread too and there are large drifts of it in new areas.  Its clustered purple flowers fade to blue later and are then succeeded by succulent seed pods, which are said to have once staved off starvation on the Suffolk coast during a famine in the seventeenth century (but they can cause paralysis if eaten in quantity, just in case you were tempted).  Scattered amongst these are other shingle specialists like orache (much scarcer this year), sea beet, sea-campion, curly dock, viper’s bugloss, buckshorn plantain, stonecrop and the striking yellow-horned poppies (beautiful, but classified as a toxic weed in North America, and containing hallucinogens).  

The most striking change, however, is in the expansion of the grasses that now cover the shingle ridges nearer the houses.  That is evidence that the banks have accumulated depositions of soil and have to that degree stabilised – with the further benefit that hares and skylarks are now exploiting this new emergent habitat, along with various butterflies, moths and bush-crickets.  That’s all the more reason to ask visitors to help us conserve this precious environment. For there is one other tactic these vulnerable plants need to survive, this one more under our control than theirs: 

  • Don’t get trampled on.

Thank you.

Jeremy Mynott
5 July 2022

Village Voices Nature Note: Time to Fly

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I hardly left Suffolk during lockdown – well, why would you? But this May I finally ventured out as far as another lovely county, Dorset, to try and catch up with a local celebrity there. I went to Giant Hill above Cerne Abbas, where a huge naked male figure (very naked, very male) is inscribed into the chalk hillside. That area is now fenced off, I was told, because women had taken to sleeping within the outline of the mighty male member hoping thereby to get pregnant. But I was in any case more interested in the lower slopes, where one of Britain’s rarest butterflies, the Duke of Burgundy, might be performing its own mating rituals. The Duke was never common in Britain, but in the nineteenth century it could still be found in several ancient Suffolk woodlands, like those at Reydon, Bentley and Bradfield. The last confirmed Suffolk sighting was in 1973, since when nothing. It’s hanging on at Giant Hill, though, breeding in very small numbers on the scrubby grassland where its favourite foodplants, primroses and cowslips, flourish in glorious yellow profusion. The Dukes are tiny but very beautiful, just thumbnail size with orange-and-brown chequered wings. They are the only European representatives of the Metalmark family, so called because of the distinctive glittering spots on the underwings.

You have to be at just the right place and time to see a Duke of Burgundy nowadays. The time is a short window in mid-May, and this is one of the few places. You have to be in the right posture, too, which is on your hands and knees, peering around to catch sight of the male perched on a stem, from which it sallies forth in short bouncy flights, to drive other males off its little kingdom. Just think, you have the whole of southern Britain to choose from and you have to defend to the death your minute patch (maybe a parable coming on here). The weather wasn’t great. Butterflies need it to be at least 14° C to warm their bodies sufficiently to fly and it was a cool, blustery day, threatening rain. But the clouds parted briefly and there was a sudden pulse of warmth from the sun. Almost immediately butterflies appeared, as if from nowhere: peacocks, tortoiseshells, red admirals, small brown jobs like grizzled and dingy skippers, and at last … yes, a freshly minted Duke, clinging to a buttercup.

The vision lasted only a few minutes. The clouds closed in and the rain came. But as the great Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore said, ‘The butterfly counts not in months but moments, and has time enough’.

Jeremy Mynott
7 June 2022

Village Voices Nature Note: a Local Success Story

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I see that the Minsmere bird reserve is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.  Congratulations!  It’s a haven for all kinds of wildlife, of course – some 6,000 different species at the last count – but its long history has been especially associated with one particular bird, the avocet, surely one of our most charismatic national species.  Avocets are quite unmistakable.  They’re tall, graceful wading birds, a picture of elegance with that pied black-and-white plumage – both bold and delicate at the same time, like fine porcelain.  They have unusual upturned bills, which they swish from side to side, sifting the saline pools for small crustaceans and invertebrates, and they have those lovely long legs in an extraordinary shade of pale blue.  Even the name sounds attractive.  It’s derived from the Italian and sounds so much more elegant, as you might expect from the Italians, than the old English names of scoop-bill, clinker, yelper and barker. Avocets are impossible to miss if you are near a colony, since they keep up a chorus of soft fluting calls should you approach too close.  In fact, if they think their chicks are threatened they can become quite aggressive and the avocets turn into exocets, dive-bombing the intruder. 

Even if you’ve never seen a real avocet you must have seen an image of one, since they have long been the official RSPB logo and appear everywhere on their badges, signs and products.  This was a very shrewd commercial choice by the RSPB, since not only are the birds beautiful to look at but they are also the perfect symbol of a great conservation success story.  Avocets disappeared from Britain as a breeding species in the nineteenth century, as a consequence of human persecution and wetland drainage, but they miraculously reappeared in 1947 just after the end of the war, ironically returning to a habitat of flooded farmland and marshland which had been deliberately created as part of our coastal defences.  They found their own way back to the Suffolk coast at two places:  Minsmere, which is now the premier RSPB reserve in the country, and Havergate Island in the Ore estuary, where they bred successfully under conditions of high security (the RSPB even had a secret code name for the place – Zebra Island’).  Since then avocets have spread along the East Anglian coast in suitable habitats, but they still need our protection in the breeding season, especially from uncontrolled dogs on the local seawalls – we had a tragic incident at Shingle Street a few years back.  Let’s help preserve our avocets as a happy symbol of national recovery and regeneration – the return of a native. 

Jeremy Mynott
11 May 2022

Village Voices Nature Note: In Praise of Life

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One of these days we shall wake up and hear that David Attenborough has died.  There will then be deep and widespread national mourning, since he has become a sort of secular saint – a new St Francis of the birds and animals.  But one should praise people while they are still alive and with us, not just write solemn obituaries when they are dead, so here goes.  

For years Attenborough has been our guide to the natural world – infectiously enthusiastic, knowledgeable and, what is not at all the same thing, wise.  It has become a sort of televisual cliché, but now an addictive one: the camera shows us some impossibly remote and inhospitable terrain from a great height; we pick out a tiny, distant figure in the wilderness of ice, marshland or desert; the picture zooms slowly in; and there is Attenborough, spreading his arms outwards to welcome us in, swaying around somewhat erratically to emphasise his words, and telling us, almost confidentially, in that so familiar, slightly hoarse voice, ‘And here, even in these extreme conditions, there is life, abundant life, and just over here behind me is something really quite extraordinary …’ .   

In his autobiography he tells the story of his first job-interview with the BBC.  His interviewer recommended that he be given a job, but should on no account be allowed in front of a camera, because of his peculiar facial movements and body language.  This is precisely his great charm, however.  He has the priceless gift of conveying his sense of wonder and excitement about the natural world in a way we can share and can see to be genuine.  He is the perfect guide and intermediary, who invites us in and then lets us see what he saw and enjoy our own reactions.  So many other presenters seem over-rehearsed by comparison.  They spend more time presenting themselves than the wildlife, and their flirty chit-chat and highly staged conversations just get in the way.

I once heard Attenborough give a talk.  The hall was packed, of course, and at the end of his spellbinding performance the chairman invited questions.  A little boy at the front shot up his hand and asked in piping tones, ‘Please, Sir, how can I be like you when I grow up?’  The audience collapsed.  But the great man took him seriously and said, ‘Well, the first thing you might do is go outside in your garden and look hard at something.  I mean look really closely, for a long time, and then try to draw or write down what you saw and think of some questions to ask.  It may become a habit.’

Jeremy Mynott
12 April 2022

Shingle Street Settlement (from Village Voices)

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As regular and long-time visitors to Shingle Street, many of you will be very aware of the significant changes we all saw last year in both the number and nature of visitors to the hamlet. Lockdown, increases in local housing and hot weather all contributed to this, and we noticed a marked shift away from the respectful leisure use of the beach towards much less considerate behaviour, with associated problems of littering, use of the natural area as toilets, damage to protected plants and landscape, and dangerous and thoughtless parking.

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