The End of Scruffbag

There is not an awful lot to report today.

We have had new visitors to the garden. This is a mixed pair of Bullfinches (Pyrrhula pyrrhula). Apologies for the quality of the pictures but the weather was awful, I offer these as a record of species.

(male)

(female)

It has been about a year since I saw a Bullfinch in the garden, then it was just one male and he didn’t stay. These have been around for about a week now and obviously I hope that they do stay. Bullfinches are very fond of buds, especially of fruit trees and we have an apple orchard at the bottom of the garden, so hey, what’s the problem? At the moment they are digging into the sunflower hearts and the seeds are sticking to their faces, I don’t know if it was just because it was raining when I took these pictures but they look like babies plastered with food. I hope that they nest here.

Now I am a famous Botanist, Entomologist and Big Game Hunter (Heck, I am probably even an Astronaut, I haven’t checked) but despite all of my qualifications, most people still come here to see Scruffbag. So here is Scruffbag in the weather.

It has been very up and down, that’s all I’m saying.

BTW. This post is called “The End of Scruffbag” because tomorrow my valued associate is going to the beauty parlour to get fixed, after today you won’t recognise her.

So Fizz is planning a post on FB saying that I only love animals that eat worms. That is not really true, there is plenty of room for one more animal in my life and soon there will be three of us writing this blog and that will be better than two.

We spent a lot of time playing “how close will you get?”  Then yesterday the bird started eating out of my hand but.. It is not perching on my hand yet. I have to put my hand on the floor. This is just awkward because it involves a lot of me being on the floor and it is uncomfortable but we are getting there.

Wildflowers next and after a very slow start things are picking up.

On Sunday I found my first Wood Avens, I would say, out of season, but I did find a few early flowers last year.

Monday brought White Dead-nettle and…

My first hazel flowers. (female)

Tuesday brought Red Dead-nettle and about time too, this one is two weeks late..

There are still no Primroses though but please don’t write in on this subject.

In the garden we have got yellow ones, red ones, we have even got a blue one and have had since the beginning of January. I am just not finding them in the wild.

My area is at a bit of altitude and a good two weeks behind sea level so you may well have wild primroses around you, plus they will come out in the open before they come out in the woods but I was photographing them here on February the third last year.

Okay, say goodbye to Scruffbag.

and for those who really can’t get enough of her, here is a video.

You are only going to want to watch this if like me you are a student of animal behaviour or if you like big eyes. She is keeping the ball from me but she doesn’t just run off with it, she walks a few paces and waits for me to catch up and as I bend down she takes another few steps out of reach and waits for me again.

If you think that is weird you should see her play the gate game. There is a gate on this track, she crawls under it and waits for me to climb over. As soon as I climb she crawls under the gate and sits on the other side watching me. She thinks this is so funny 😀

So I wrote about Hazel. In February I am having trouble keeping up with the wild flowers as they appear, White Dead-nettle isn’t on Easy Wildflowers yet. It is pretty obvious that I will fall behind in the summer. Oh well, I will just do my best.

I left a lot out of this post, there are no leaves or bark, I am not even sure that I mentioned that Hazel is a tree. It is one that I will come back to.

Corylus avellana, The Hazel Tree

Hazel catkins are an inflorescence of small flowers that form in the autumn and are with us all winter, they can begin to open in January if the weather is mild.

(Catkins in November)

(February)

Each catkin is a flower head, comprised of about 240 small flowers. Each flower is covered by a triangular downy bract, beneath the bract are four stamens and each stamen has two yellow anthers (the pollen producing male part of a flower).

A single anther will produce around nine thousand grains of pollen and one catkin, nearly nine million. A Hazel tree produces a lot of pollen.

Hazel is wind-pollinated and not reliant on insects so most of the pollen produced is blown away and doesn’t find it’s target.

        The target for the pollen is the style of the female flower.

The Hazel tree is monoecious, meaning that each tree has both male and female flowers. The female flowers grow in clusters from small buds above the catkins. Only the red styles of the flowers protrude from the buds and the female inflorescence typically measures 2-4 mm across, It is a very small flower.

Despite anything that you may read to the contrary (or that I may have told you in the past) the location and timing of the female flowers has nothing to do with avoiding self pollination. Corylus avellana is self incompatible, it cannot self-fertilise.

Each female flower has two red styles (The pollen receiving female part of a flower). Each bud contains a cluster of between four and fourteen female flowers. Only the styles emerge from the bud.

        Once pollinated the female flowers produce the fruit.

Hazel nuts in July.

Unripened Hazel nuts are white and appear either singly or in small clusters. They are surrounded by a leafy, green sheath called an involucre.

        The fruit begins to ripen and turns brown in August.

Note that in this next picture, taken on the twentieth of August, next year’s catkins are already growing on the tree.

In December a few nuts remain.

Now the trees are characterised by the dried involucres that stay on the tree long after the nuts have gone.

There is a mass of misinformation on the internet. I used the following sources to verify the accuracy of my post.

Acta Agrobotanica Vol. 61 (1) 33-39 2008

Molecular Biology Reports April 2012 Vol. 39 Issue 4 pp 4997-5008

Taxonomy:

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Fagales

Family: Betulaceae

Genus: Corylus

Species: Corylus avellana

Wildflowers in winter 🙂

A Proper Winter’s Day

It was one of those bright blue, freezing cold, but still warm in the sun, days today.

Step out of the sunshine and there is frost on the ground in the afternoon, perfect! (For December)

We still needed to find something to photograph and that entailed climbing over barbed wire fences… (Very cool)

And what is good about barbed wire is that nobody is going to find my berries.

I don’t want to photograph Holly in the sunshine, I want a nice festive setting, a bit of snow. So this is a good tree, we have just got to wait for some bad weather.

That is all that you are going to get today, most of the time we just played ball. There is not much life around at this time of year.

I have spent a lot of time writing for my Wildflower guide, which just means that I have added three more flowers and if you want more nature they are here….

       Lesser Celandine

       Town Hall Clock

       Arum Lily

But don’t worry about what I am doing over there because that is not a blog it is a work of reference.

We will try and have a good adventure tomorrow 🙂

 

 

 

Frosting the Dog

Well, it wasn’t really much of a frost and I think we may have to put off declaring a “State of Emergency” for a day or two.

There was some frost on the little things.

Frost can be quite destructive and Spindle berries were dropping off the tree as I was trying to photograph them.

A few of the remaining flowers were totally frosted and I don’t think that they will last much longer.

It feels a bit like we are saying goodbye to the colours of Autumn and hello to the greyness that is Winter.

Today wasn’t very cold.The Puddles were not frozen…

(There is nothing like a cool drink of mud to set you up for the day)

There was no frost at all under the trees. They have a warmth of their own, trapping warm air and protecting their surroundings from exposure to the cold night.

I am not really sure that this is frost on the grass and not just cold dew.

But Winter is coming…. and the Sloes will taste sweeter.

Fizz got an extra walk and she has got insulation so she doesn’t mind the cold and when we got home I had some toast (In case it gets bad later)

 

 

Spindle Revisited

The fruits of the Spindle tree are hanging around and although I try to ignore them they are just too vibrant to pass by. Anyway we have had Sloes and Hawthorn on here loads of times, so why not more Spindle berries?

This tree caught my eye because it still had lots of green leaves on it (I will show you in a minute) and I thought that I could do a post on how to identify Spindle.

It will be a short post.

I don’t mean how to identify it when it is covered in pink and orange berries…. I was thinking more about identifying it in Winter.

It is still going to be a short post. Spindle has very distinctive bark.

So here are some photographs that I took in March of this year when the leaves were just starting to appear.

There isn’t anything else in the hedgerow that looks quite like this.

These are young shoots the older wood loses some of the distinctive ribbing and green colour but it will still be evident on parts of the tree.

The leaves, when they start to open, are quite distinctive in themselves but green stripy bark is a dead give away.

Although I could find these trees quite easily in the winter and early spring as soon as the hedgerow started to grow I lost them again. It wasn’t until the fruits appeared in the autumn that they came back. Now I have a much clearer picture of their locations and plan to photograph them throughout the summer next year.

So that is the “Identification in Winter” bit done, that was just an excuse really to post more pictures of berries.

Berries and green leaves.

Good Mud

I have been seeing some amazing posts from the US of the snowfall there. Here in the UK we will be lucky to get any snow this winter but we do get good mud.

This was going to be my “The Hunt For Red November” post and it was going to be an account of our search for Buddy and what we found whilst we were searching. However I now suspect that I have been duped and that the whole thing was a set up.

I have been leading the investigation into the abduction of the puppy and the first thing that I had to look at was who had the most to gain?

There was no ransom demand and for a while it seemed to me to be a motiveless crime.

In fact the only one who benefited from his imprisonment was Buddy’s best friend and companion Fizz. She got to spend most of Sunday and many hours of Monday helping me to search for him.

She also had the opportunity, if anybody was going to be with Buddy on that fateful Sunday morning it would have been his constant companion. She could easily have nudged the door shut after Buddy was inside.

She doesn’t have an alibi. It was Sunday morning, people were working in the yard and all of the gates were open, the dogs all had free run of the place.

Forensics didn’t turn up anything. Her paw prints were all over the scene but she always has access so you would expect that.

Unfortunately my investigation has to end here. Buddy is not going to say anything. He spent the night in a warm barn and then got treble fussed over when he emerged and Fizz is just giving me Angel Face (How could I think such a thing?)

Could these two be conspirators? We will never know.

One thing that we do know is that Fizz had a lot of fun searching for Buddy and many extra hours of walks and Buddy is now out of intensive care and playing in the yard with his new toys. Plus the Humans have learned a valuable lesson that we must spend more time playing with the dogs and give them much more love and attention.

Here is Red November.

We targeted our search around the Beast’s lair at the end of Badger Alley. For the puppy to disappear without trace like that he would have to have been eaten by something quite big, that was my reasoning.

I took this opportunity to revisit the Guelder Rose because following my recent post I had received a tip off to go and look at the seeds.

Who would know that inside the berries were these beautiful little heart shaped jewels?

I am told that when washed and allowed to dry they fade to a delightful pink. Many thanks to Mar’yana Svarnyk for that information.

Our next red was the Bramble.

This sign was just like a red rag to a puppy.

Who made Sign the boss?

Well, you know about Fizz and timber stacks.

In “other reds” there were some lovely Roses….

and in the depths of the Beast’s lair Ivy was doing  it’s bit for Red November.

It was too dark and wet to do the Ivy justice but I know where there is some very colourful Ivy growing on Aspens and we will look at that soon.

Oh and I forgot to tell you… Fizz got muddy 🙂

A Guelder Rose but no Gorillas.

We had to revise our plan for today. It was a bit misty.

It just seemed too dangerous to take Fizz out on the road, we could get knocked over and traumatise a motorist.

There was a little dog sitting underneath my window who wanted me to come out and play..

Plan B then. The fog was coming down heavy. We would go and look for Gorillas in the mist (that’s where they live. Right?)

I put Fizz in charge of watching the trees, we don’t want anything jumping down on us and I was in charge of the little things.

The first little thing that I found was rose hips, from a proper rose a Dog Rose.

But not all of those berries are tasty rose hips, some of them are Black Bryony.

We are going to see a lot of berries today.

Hawthorn berries are everywhere.

This next little mushroom is one of the Mycena. That is a genus of fungi with several hundred species. Many of which can only be separated with a microscope. I can’t get it to species from these pictures but it is a pretty one. These are often collectively referred to as Bonnets.

Keep watching the trees please!

I am bent over examining the ground and at any moment something big might jump down and land on my back with a thump. What’s my lookout doing?

Messing about! Although, I am not sure how much she can see out of her haircut anyway.

There are many more berries to come. These are Black Bryony again. The profusion of these poisonous berries delights me.

All around I am seeing signs of winter. These Ivy berries will be a feature of January when they have ripened.

Lambs Tails are forming on the Hazel ready for January too.

Behind these catkins is the plant that we have come to see.

I first photographed these berries in January, there were far fewer berries then and there were no leaves on the tree. I didn’t know what it was and so I told myself that I would come and look at it in the summer and then I forgot.

This time we have leaves.

These are the fruits of the Guelder Rose, Viburnum opulus.

It is a member of the Adoxaceae family. That means that it is related more closely to the Elder tree and the lovely little Town Hall Clock than to the roses.

Well, I have missed the green leaves of summer and the white flowers that would have bloomed in June but at least we have got the berries and we know what it is.

These actually look like they must be related to Elderberries, don’t you think?

This post just goes on and on, I just want to show you one more thing and then we will head back.

We are right at the end of Badger Alley now and this is where I think that the Beast of Badger Alley lives. On one side of the track there is woodland.

On the other side of the track there is impenetrable scrub. This is a tangle of Brambles, Hawthorn, Blackthorn anything with thorns on it.

Last winter I tried to press into this scrub, just a little bit to photograph some bright rose hips and as I went in an animal was startled and went crashing deeper into the bush. It was making more noise than me, it was big. Not a Fox, it was the Beast of Badger Alley but I didn’t see it, I only heard it moving.

Okay we had better hurry back now.

Just ignore the pretty little bird. It is just guarding it’s territory.

I took loads of pictures of this Common Hogweed but we will rush past this one as well.

And the last thing that we won’t look at will be little Herb Robert.

That’s it. We were out for ages and we still didn’t see a Gorilla. Maybe Fizz scared them all off.

I was going to show you how muddy she was when I dropped her off but you can probably guess.

 

17/11 Update: We received a tip off from the very kind Mar’yana Svarnyk in the comments section, advising us to take a look at the beautiful red seeds of the Guelder Rose. Thank you so much. (These pictures will be in my upcoming post, “The hunt for Red November” but also here for anyone searching for Guelder Rose)

Take care when extracting the seeds, I recommend wearing eye protection. The fruits are very juicy.

Lying in puddles

There has been a simple misunderstanding here. I was not lying in a puddle, I was moisturising . Even tough guys have to look after their skin. She is only a puppy so I understand….

She is not really a water dog.

I see that I’ve changed my Gravatar.

No, it’s cool. I thought maybe that we could have one with both of us in it. I have got one that I use on Google….

The weather has been really against us these last few days but I thought that you would enjoy these excerpts from our walks.

We are not walking along a stream bed in this next video this is a footpath.

I few days ago I started a conversation with a fellow in Australia. I became fascinated with their practice of burning grassland and brush before the available fuel builds up to dangerous levels. It is so different from the UK. Here dead wood habitat is vital to our biodiversity and burning dead wood is the worst waste of a very valuable and scarce resource. Australia is a very different country and the UK is very wet. I shouldn’t complain.

The other silly thing that happened to me was that I offered to help a fellow set up a CCTV system because he was borrowing my trail camera and I wanted it back. Wow that went pear shaped. I had told him that I could do it but then he wanted the system to run through his lap top and that created big problems until yesterday we went out and bought a monitor. Ever said that you could do something and then wished that you hadn’t volunteered yourself?

So it is seven o’clock on Saturday morning and outside it is tipping down. We are so lucky to live in this green and pleasant land.

Catch up Poochy!

Spring is coming.

Winter is coming

Heh heh 🙂 But it is not here yet.

I would love to have a cold winter. Hard frosts and clear blue skies, blizzards and deep snow. Fizz and I have never played snow balls or made snow angels or built a snow dog. That would all make for some memorable photographs.

I think that we are going to get mud. That’s what we had last year. Grey skies, rain and floods and mud on mud. It’s not so good.

It’s sunshine Fizz. You remember sunshine don’t you?

It’s warm and it makes you feel sleepy.

She can have a little cat-nap while I photograph some berries.

These are Sloe Berries, the fruit of the Blackthorn. They are traditionally used to flavour Sloe Gin but I like to eat them straight of the tree.

They do have a large pip but also a lot of flesh and they are very juicy. The have an astringent quality, they leave your mouth feeling dry and puckered, the only cure for this is to eat another one.

A lot of people find them too tart and they are just a nibble for me, I have never sat down and ate a bowlful. The flavour is supposed to sweeten after the first frosts but I can never wait and I have been eating them since the end of August.

This has been a very good year for Sloe berries.

Wakey wakey 🙂

Come on we have got sunshine to see.

It is nice out but recent rains have left the tracks a bit muddy. I suppose that it is time to get the old Wellies out of storage.

We shall look back and laugh at this soon.

Looking back at old photo’s I think that perhaps this year I should invest in waders or a full body wet suit. In this next picture she thinks that I am drowning and is trying to administer the kiss of life.

Come on it is not that wet yet. Well, not for me anyway 🙂

Our next berry is Black Bryony. This one is deadly poisonous of the painful blistering variety, you wouldn’t eat one. Now that leaves are falling from the trees this is becoming more evident as it scrambles about in the hedgerow.

You might want to clean yourself up a bit, I can’t really take you home like that.

Good Girl.

Get Your Spindle Berries Here!

I woke up this morning to disaster. Clear blue skies, the first that I have seen for weeks.

I checked the weather forecast and it told me the sun would only last till mid day.

I had promised to go to town with my landlord this morning to help him to purchase a CCTV system for the farm  shop. (He doesn’t like technology)

But not until ten, there was time.

There are a few Spindle trees out on the common. This one was still in the shade but the light was good and it works for me.

We also have a small tree in the front garden and I thought that as I was doing Spindle that I should take a few shots of that one too.

Spindle berries are quite poisonous and would be great in poison pie (I am thinking of a colourful berry flan now). It causes liver and kidney damage and can lead to death.

Well that was my early morning rush about and I am very glad to have seen the sun for a few hours. As I am about to post this the sky has gone black again and it looks like rain but never mind…

At ten o’clock my landlord rung me and said that he couldn’t go to town today as he had some stone being delivered and so I took Fizz for a walk and the sun shone on us for another couple of hours. There might be another post today 🙂

My Cute Little Diplolepis Rosae

No this isn’t a post about Fizz, it is too dark to photograph her.

For the very same reason I am not going to show you this next picture.

This weather has got to break soon, I don’t need bright sunshine just a little more than midnight at midday and a little less rain. Then I will attempt to do this beautiful tree justice. I just know that I can do it better and there is no point in trying to do it today.

So I am stuck indoors, except for walking Poochy. I have been working on my Easy Wildflowers project. That has been on the back burner for some time because I anticipated a down turn in the weather and thought that it would help to fill the winter months. It is nearly that time.

Do you remember our Rose Bedeguar Gall? Robin’s Pincushion?

Well, I found myself writing about roses and one thing led to another.

The little Diplolepis rosae larvae should be going to sleep by now. In late October they stop feeding and go into a prepupal stage (a sort of stage before they become a pupa) and they over winter like that. Then around about February they moult again and become pupae.

Well I wanted to have a look inside a pincushion and this is late October so it seemed like a good time to do so.

This is the one that I left behind (a bit wet and bedraggled)…

and this is the one that I brought home to live with me.

Then I cracked it open to look inside.

Wow! Little animals!

This one with the pretty face is my favourite 🙂

They are not supposed to do anything now until February. I have put their Gall back together and wrapped it in leaves for now and I have put them in a flower pot in an outbuilding so that they know it’s winter.

I haven’t exposed all of the cells, most of them don’t even know that they have been captured. I want to photograph the adult wasp, it is only 4 mm long and I don’t have much chance of finding one in the wild and so I have borrowed some larvae.

In the Spring I will bring them back indoors and put them in a jar and I shall watch them every day. I haven’t figured out how I am going to photograph the wasp yet but I would really like to see one and so I have to try.

So this is my plan for Easy Wildflowers. On our dull winter days I shall work on it and then I shall do a sort of resume of my days work for Tramp and it will look like this.

Hi, today I have been writing about the Town Hall Clock, Adoxa moschatellina and it looks like this…

Have you ever tried to get all five faces into one shot?… because I have and it is not possible.

Anyway I am not going to show you that today but I am looking forward to a bit of summer sunshine on those dark winter days.

I want to get the design right before I invest months of work into it and I am not very confident. What I have done looks good on my PC but everyone sees something different.

I have used thumbnails quite a lot and I don’t really know if this works on other devices. I don’t want to learn CSS so I might just have to abandon the thumbnails.

If you have time then please have a look and tell me if it is any good before I spend months creating a massive pile of ….stuff that doesn’t really work. I may still have to rethink the layout. Say and I shall listen 🙂

Easy Wildflowers

When the sun shines I shall photograph this beautiful tree for you and for me.

Animal Magic

“Just like that”

It’s your destiny

The Swallows have fledged, or at least they are fledging. They are still in the nest today but they have been out and they can fly.

It has taken me a few days watching and all that you get are a couple of short video’s but for me, my understanding and the pleasure that I got from watching them makes a few days just a drop in the ocean. It was time well spent.

Anyway you should be glad that you don’t have to watch the whole twenty hours of video, that I now have to sort and delete from my machine to free up space.

Here are the best bits.

Yesterday morning there were five birds on the nest, there were five birds on the nest and then there were four birds on the nest. I had missed the very first flight and only realised when number five returned to the nest.

This first video starts with the mother calling for them to leave the nest, there is a little comic interlude of the way that they follow flies, their little heads bobbing in unison and in the last bit the second bird to approach the nest is the returning chick. Does he bring food back or do the others just think that he has?

This next video shows them leaving the nest and returning. They spent most of the day fluttering around inside the little alley way that has become their home and by the end of the day they were all settled back on the nest but this is fledging. Today I think that they have ventured outside and seen the blue sky but they still return to the nest.

These birds have made me think a lot about nature as a whole thing and about life and death in the wild. The caterpillars that I am trying to raise are falling to the parasitoid flies that these Swallows depend on for food and survival. The parents have done a really good job of raising them given the wet weather we have been having. I have often looked out in the pouring rain and wondered how they are managing to raise a brood and now this, flight.

I am so in in love and in awe of them and so damned jealous.

I am jealous because they get to eat those delicious crunchy flies, or perhaps because they can raise offspring in a matter of weeks and not the 26 years it usually takes us. Maybe I am jealous of something else altogether…..