Village Voices Nature Note: hidden beauty
03 Aug 2020
One positive thing about lockdown has been realising how much foreign travel you can do very close to home. No need to go to Majorca or Marrakesh - or even Margate. Just set up a moth trap in your back garden overnight and Brindled Beauty you’ll see the most exotic sights in the morning. The Brindled Beauty I caught last night, for example, is just what it says on the tin, though the ‘beauty’ here is not an obvious one. It’s not brightly coloured but has a very subtle combination of textures and patterns that might have appealed to the fabric designers who were leading lights in the Aurelians, the society of moth and butterfly fanciers in the 17th century when many of our moths were given their current names. It’s the same with some birds. Who could improve on the beauty of a wryneck, woodcock or nightjar, each patterned from a palette of browns, greys and black to provide perfect camouflage in their natural surroundings. Subdued in one sense but just gorgeous when you see them close-up.
And talking of fabrics, another specimen in the catch this morning was a Muslin Moth, a male one. There’s an unusually marked difference between males and females in this species: the females are a rather grand ermine-white with just a few scattered black spots to add a touch of class; but the male is a drab, sooty colour, which perhaps accounts for its scientific name mendica ‘beggarly’. Apparently, the males are only active by night and the females by day. Presumably they just meet for breakfast/supper (? brupper), though I can’t quite see the evolutionary advantage in that.
An even more striking discovery was a Poplar Hawkmoth. This is a huge moth, which couldn’t look more conspicuous when clinging to an egg- box, as in this image. The patterning is again very subtle but it’s all there for a purpose. The orange patch just visible on the hindwing can be flashed to startle enemies. The wings themselves look like some advanced aeronautical-like design, but the function is one of camouflage not speed. The forewing is semi- detached from the hindwing, so in its resting posture on a branch the moth perfectly resembles a bunch of dead leaves. Finally it hangs around like that because it has no functioning proboscis and can’t feed. It doesn’t need to because its only purpose in life is to live long enough to mate, lay eggs and perpetuate its genes. Then the same cycle starts (and ends) for its descendants.
When I release the moths in the garden they disappear without trace, like a fading dream. Such extraordinary creatures - and a whole world you can explore without leaving home.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: A Sudden Beauty
01 Jul 2020
I have to start with a confession. This month's 'Nature Note' comes not from Shingle Street but from the west of the county. We happened to be here when the music stopped in March and we thought it safer to stay put. But I've been walking out every day, trying to notice things just the same, and I've been making comparisons all the time with the succession of flowers and birds I know have been appearing on the coast too in this remarkable spring - remarkable both for its extraordinary weather and the worldwide pandemic (respectively the best and worst of their kind in my lifetime). A poignant conjunction that has highlighted for many people the beauty of the natural world we are fortunate enough to have enjoyed as a solace.
I came across one quite unexpected delight the other day. I was walking on a grassy footpath - in fact an early section of the same Suffolk Way that runs past our house in Shingle Street - when right in the middle of the track I saw a most striking plant. It had a shortish straight stalk with a rosette of leaves at the base and two more clasping the stalk higher up like a sheath. The flower blooming on top was a remarkable confection of sculpted blooms, looking for all the world like a bee. It was a bee orchid, not as rare as its exotic appearance would suggest, and surprising in its choice of quite banal settings, often railway sidings, spoil heaps and waste ground, anywhere there has disturbed chalky ground.
The Shingle Street ones, which re-appear most but not quite all years, thrive in a heap of 'foreign' soil imported to repair a sea-wall breach in the Great Flood of 1953.
This fantastical flower evolved to mimic a bee as a cunning device to persuade male bees to alight on the fake female and so pollinate the plant.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: The Sign of Summer
01 Jun 2020
Spring has seemed particularly precious this year. I think people everywhere have been turning to nature as a solace in this time of great stress and uncertainty. We’ve found some reassurance in the fact that life in the natural world, at least, is continuing as normal. There’s a regular annual succession in nature’s calendar which gives a framework to the season: from the first Swifts daffodils to the early butterflies, next the bluebells, and then on to the first swallow (bang on schedule again this year on 15 April). But there is still one more migrant to come, as I write this, one that always seems to me to mark the point at which spring segues into summer. It’s the swift. I get swift-neck at this time every year, scanning the skies to catch my first sight of that black profile scything through the upper air. The poet Ted Hughes always took their safe arrival each summer as a sign that all was still well with the world:
They’ve made it again
Which means the globe is still working
The creation’s still waking refreshed,
Our summer’s still to come.
Sometime around the 10 May you’ll see and hear them, literally screaming overhead as they chase each other over the roof-tops, then whirling up into the heavens, only to bank and dive again at wing-shuddering speeds. They are the most aerial of all our birds. They eat, mate and even sleep on the wing, spiralling high into the sky to take the avian equivalent of cat-naps. Sometimes pilots of planes (remember them?) report seeing swifts at great heights, in a stratum other birds never reach. Incredibly, when the swifts that breed around here have reared their young and leave their nests built in crevices in church towers and the like, they don’t touch down again until they return next year. Their whole lives are spent in the air. They therefore don’t have, because they don’t need, feet that can grip and perch the way swallows can. In fact, if swifts ever land on the ground they find it very difficult to take off again. Their scientific name is apous, meaning ‘footless’. But once in the skies, they are in their true element and are designed with a perfect aerodynamic shape to cut through the air with minimum resistance. A truly charismatic bird – and quizzers might like to remember that as far as I know it’s the only British bird whose full name is an adjective: swift by name and by nature.Let’s hope they return on time as normal, because there’s no ‘normal’ in the human world now.
(PS - 8 May, they’re back!)
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: Silver Linings
01 May 2020
I took my usual daily walk yesterday, rambling along familiar paths and enjoying the sights and sounds of another spring. Everything was the same, but nothing was the same.
First there was the bird song. From a blackthorn clump a blackcap was singing – a lovely clear fluting, as pure as a mountain stream. In the background was the softer trill of a tree-creeper, rounded off with a sweet little flourish at the end, like a signature. While high above, a skylark was unfurling its silken chain of song in never-ending spirals. What was so wonderful was how distinct and well-defined all these and the other bird songs were, with no traffic, mechanical or plane noise to mask and muffle them. Recent research has shown that some birds can no longer breed close to motorways, for example, because they simply can’t hear their own songs. But in this new, pre-industrial silence they are pouring their hearts out.
Toads are now slithering their way over country lanes to their spawning ponds without risking the usual mass carnage from commuter traffic. Hedgehogs too can scuttle across to the nearest garden in safety. In big cities like London, the greatest and almost immediate change is in the improved air quality, now that we’ve temporarily stopped pumping tons of noxious carbon- dioxide into the atmosphere. And we read that in Venice the waters in the canals are running clear for the first time in living memory and shoals of fish are miraculously re- appearing in them, while swans glide serenely under the bridges. In the Welsh seaside town of Llandudno, wild goats have come down from the hills and are wandering through empty streets to browse in the town parks. Even our Nature Reserves are closed to Homo sapiens and really will be ‘reserved for nature’ for the duration. Wildlife everywhere is flourishing in glorious abundance in our absence. ‘Full many a flower will bloom to blush unseen / and waste its sweetness on the desert air’, as the poet Thomas Gray put it. Yes, so they will, but ‘waste’? I don’t think so. One can sense the whole earth breathing again with relief.
What about us? Will we be re-wilded too? A lot of people are certainly finding great solace and delight in nature, often for the first time in their busy and distracted lives. But will we remember this when it’s all over? Silver linings come with golden opportunities. This crisis has bought us some time, but the next one will soon be upon us. We know what it is and we know it’s coming – it’s the climate crisis.
Will everything stay the same or will something change?
Jeremy Mynott