“Despair Dogs Me” or “A Tale of Two Hats”

Lesser men would have broken by now.

I don’t want this to be a sad post, I will just tell you what happened.

Yesterday I shrunk my hat. I had been out three times that day and when I finally got home I thought that my very old and much loved hat was a bit sweaty and dirty, so I threw it in the washing machine.

I should have read the washing instructions, “Wipe clean.”

This might not seem very important because I have two hats but only one of them has character.

These two hats are identical, they are both the same make and style and they were once the same colour. One of them is my hat and it has lived a life of adventure and has become a bit bleached by the sun.

Two years ago I was out shopping with a friend when I saw a copy of my hat in an end of line sale. “You must buy it,” she said, “One day you may lose your hat and I can’t imagine you without it.” So I did.

I kept it in my wardrobe and planned to wear it to weddings and funerals and maybe for the occasional court appearance but since then, well, I haven’t been arrested for ages and nobody has died, I have never worn it. I don’t really want to.

The good news is that today I defiantly wore my shrunken hat out. It was very windy and I found that it was quite an advantage to have a tight fitting hat.

I don’t know where this will end. Perhaps I am letting go of an old friend, gently.

My shoes are looking a bit shabby too.

I expect that you would prefer to hear what Fizz and I have been up to for the last few days. We have been hunting Boars mostly.

Wild Boar have arrived on the farm. I knew that they were getting closer but a few day ago I stepped outside and came face to face with three of them at about two o’clock in the afternoon. They had just walked through my neighbours front garden and were standing in front of our house.

My landlord tells me that it is ten years since he saw a Boar on the farm but they are here now.

They always have been all around us but I have suspected that they were closing in for several weeks now. About three weeks ago I noticed fresh rooting just across the road from the house.

I didn’t really make anything of that at the time, we see a lot of that around here.

Then there was the extraordinary business of an animal eating all of the Arum Lilies.

Just when I was thinking, “What sort of an animal would do that,” I stepped out of my front door and bumped right into them.

They have been here for a few weeks and I am pretty sure that they are here to stay now.

This is a superb opportunity for the naturalist in me, I can actually lie in bed and watch for them in the fields across from me. The trail camera is out.

It is not so good for everybody else. The Boar are not dangerous and they will always try and escape us unless..

A: You corner an animal and leave it no escape.

B: You or your dog attack their babies. They will defend their young and they are powerful animals.

In the wood that I owned in East Sussex a Rottweiller was killed by Boar just before I bought the land. It was an aggressive dog and the owner had taken to walking it in the wood at night to avoid other dog walkers. A Rottie is no match for a female boar with young. I don’t know what a Rottweiller normally weighs but my GSD was forty kilos and a mature female Boar would be about a hundred and twenty kilos and they are not pussy cats.

I have never considered them to be dangerous but then I have never tried to eat their babies. I am just not that stupid.

What it does mean is that there are places now where I cannot walk Fizz off lead (she is that stupid). The farm fields are still good as I can see everything around, tight and overgrown country lanes are out of bounds for a bit.

Fizz does a really good job of protecting me from Bears and Wolves, the very least that I can do in return is to protect her from herself.

Is it still safe in the garden?

It’s safe.

Good girl.

I can walk her amongst the Boar on a lead. They will not attack me and if they come too close I will just pick her up. So we went up to the Bluebell woods to hunt for them.

At this point some sort of trained tracker dog would have been useful but I just had to go with what was available. In the video that I am about to show you (when You Tube has uploaded it) Fizz is really trying to find a Boar for me but she has never seen one and doesn’t realise how big they are. She keeps looking under leaves for them.

I am looking at how Boar relate to the Bluebells. One of the arguments put forward by their detractors is that Boar uproot and destroy bluebell woods and that they eat Bluebell bulbs. My old wood was a Bluebell wood with Wild Boar in it and I have been watching them for fifteen years. They have no interest in Bluebells.

They root up the tracks that run through the Bluebells but they stay on the tracks and avoid the flowers. If they wanted to eat them these woods would be a feast for them. (This is where we filmed the young Boar recently, there are plenty of animals in this wood)

Bluebells are actually poisonous to most animals but then so are Arum Lilies.

We didn’t find any Boars but we did see some nice flowers.

This characteristic one sided droop is often given as an identifying feature of our native Bluebells and it is but…

It is important to note that the flowers grow from all sides of the stem and this elegance is only a stage in their lives.

When the flowers first emerge the stem is completely upright and later as the flowers go to seed it straightens out again.

This next flower is a genuine native Hyacinthoides non-scripta but just at a slightly inelegant stage of it’s development and that happens.

On the edge of this wood the Arum Lilies are giving a fine display.

Either the Boar here have no taste for this poisonous root or they just haven’t found them yet. I like this flower, I think that it is very beautiful and it is a shame to see it singled out for destruction but animals have to eat.

One of the nicest things about this wood is that the walk up here takes us through the farm fields. There is no danger of me being surprised by wild animals here and Fizz gets plenty of opportunity to run and play.

I will leave you with a few images of Fizz preventing me from photographing a beautiful little Speedwell and otherwise doing what she does best 🙂

Get off me you stupid animal!

There is nothing in my pocket!

Contemplating My Navel

Literally the phrase is used to describe somebody who is spending too much time thinking about their own problems but with me, of course, it means something quite different.

We went up to the Bluebell woods today and they were still not quite ready for us, there are plenty of flowers but it is not a sea of blue yet

That is good, it means that we haven’t missed anything. Our Bluebell woods are beautiful and you wouldn’t want to miss them.

A lot of the wood still looks like this..

The flowers are there but they have a little way to go yet.

There are a lot of Bluebells in the hedgerows and tracks around the farm and they are a bit more advanced than this, probably because they get more sunlight.

Our hedgerows seem to retain a lot of the characteristics of ancient woodland,  which they would have been before they were turned into farmland and I see a lot of species that are regarded as “ancient woodland indicators” growing there. Maybe I will do a post about that soon. The Bluebell is one such species.

This is a derelict Sweet Chestnut coppice and this is where we filmed the Boar. I know some much nicer Oak and Beech woods that will also be filling up with Bluebells and we will visit them soon.

So we struck out with the Bluebells, what are we going to do now?

I suggested to Fizz that we might go and contemplate my navel.

She looked impressed.

You probably won’t be much more impressed yourself it is not visually striking.

This is Navelwort.

These first two pictures were taken in February, when I first discovered it.

This is new to me and I have never seen it in flower. I had never even heard of it and that doesn’t happen to me very often so I have been watching it closely. I am very excited about my Navelwort.

It flowers in May and today I saw the flower spikes starting to emerge.

It looks a little bit strange, that is because it is a succulent. Succulents are plants with thick, fleshy leaves and stems that are specially adapted for storing water, like a cactus. They usually live in very dry places and we don’t have many native succulent plants, probably because the UK is a very wet place. This one is special.

It is edible and I have read that it has a very nice flavour similar to fresh lettuce. I haven’t ever tasted it and I will tell you why…

I have actually just been watching a video about edible Navelwort. It started with the presenter going on about what a rare find it was and he hadn’t seen one like this for years and then he ate it.

There is a basic rule when it comes to foraging, unless you are starving, don’t take things that are not abundant and don’t ever take the last one or even most of them. It is common sense.

The Navelwort that I have found is not abundant and most of what I saw in February has been eaten by animals. They don’t respect anything but then most of them are starving.

Another name for this plant is Wall Pennywort (It grows on stone walls) and the Latin is Umbilicus rupestris. It has medicinal uses but I haven’t really looked into that yet and these little flower buds are going to grow into tall spikes of flowers. I will show you when it happens.

Well that is it for today. We did see a lot of other wildflowers and we romped about in fields of golden yellow but those are other posts 🙂

Old Man Dancing

I am so sorry that I have been away from the blog this month. There was a wolf at my door and you know how much I like wolves, I got distracted.

He has  gone now. I gave him a little dog that I found in the garden and that seemed to fill his tummy nicely,

(I have not really fed Fizz to a wolf)

Anyway Wolfie has gone and we would like to get back to nature. I will try to post every day for a while, to make up for my recent absence.

So much has been happening and there is a lot to blog about.

I am glad to find that I have not lost my touch with the Faeries.

Tomorrow we could go up and look at the Bluebell woods.

Or we could video Fizz searching for her yellow ball amongst the Dandelions.

The world has turned beautiful.

Let me put this little animal down….

Whoa! Hold on! I’ll get a ladder.That plant that I am putting him on is Garlic Mustard.

Next to Wild Garlic it is one of the tastiest herbs around at the moment. This is one of the very best reasons to get into foraging. Picked fresh it is better than anything that you could buy in the supermarket. Foraging is not just about nettles and Dandelions, some of it is Caviar (without the fishy taste) and you just can’t buy it in the shops.

It is growing in abundance in my neck of the woods and deserves a post of it’s own.

Oh lookit! A brown Faerie.

That would be a Speckled Wood.

It is so nice to have them back.

I am going to cut this post short because I want to post it tonight.

Sometimes Fizz and I get ourselves into some pretty dangerous situations.

I tend to shut other people out in case they get hurt by the terrible dangers that we have to face.

So I haven’t been reading my email or attending to anything just recently and I am sorry if I seemed to be ignoring you. I will be back on top of everything tomorrow.

I had a stroke of luck and came out on top. I don’t have to leave the farm or Fizz, or do anything that I don’t want to do. So it goes.

All right, Cutie Pie?

I did not fail to notice that you played a good game back there and that you are a reasonable companion animal 🙂

The Deer Hunter

Well, it took six nights but in the end we did get results from the trail camera.

I have lots of beautiful animals to show you tonight.
(Deer Hunter Fizz)

But it is a beautiful day and we are not in a hurry to get to the woods.

The Winner!

Dog worn out, now we can get on 🙂

Here is some of the stuff that we found in the wood.

As soon as we found the camera I could see that we had a result. I can tell what animal has been at the bait. The ground was very disrupted and all of the bait had been taken (Peanuts, Raisins and Sheep Feed) except the bread. So no Boar but I guessed Deer. I was gutted that I couldn’t leave the camera out there but I had run out of batteries. The camera had died, it told me there were 189 videos but the last 50 of those were dud due to low battery power. No matter we got some good stuff.

Don’t despise the little Fox. I would be pretty fed up if I had found 189 videos of him but I didn’t. This is a beautiful wild animal that we rarely get a chance to watch.

There is actually a stack of food there that the Fox can eat, he is just being fussy. This video was from the night before the Deer turned up and there was plenty left for them. That is bread that he is playing with in the video, I put out quite a bit but I hid it under leaves.

The Bluebells are coming up. They are not early, they won’t flower until they are supposed to in April but they always make an appearance around about now. I love the way that they pierce the leaf litter.

We found a bulb that had been rooted up (we replanted it) I was surprised by how big it was.

I have heard it said that Boar uproot and eat Bluebells. I spent a long time looking for evidence of this in my Bluebell wood in East  Sussex and I never saw any evidence of Boar eating Bluebells. They had ample opportunity and so I conclude it is an untrue slur on the Boar.

This next leaf is Variegated Yellow Archangel. It is one that I want to write about for Easy Wildflowers (probably next) so I won’t say too much about it. The leaves are about now and are easy to recognise, they actually remain all winter.

This is another one that will not flower until April, when it does it will look like this.

Now for something that will flower in January (I hope). This is Lesser Celandine. My first pictures last year were February 24th.

Look, flower buds. These could easily open this month.

Okay, beautiful wild animals now. Plenty of video, just watch what you like. I could watch them all night.

Come on then Fizz, it is a long way home.

Me and my shadow.

That’s enough of that 🙂

A Blue Day

Fizz took one look at the morning sky and confidently predicted a lovely day. She was right.

So she had a lot of fun and we spent a long time in the fields practising our recall. She hasn’t quite got it yet. She tends to chase after the ball and then when she has got it she will sit down and wait for me to catch up.

What is the point in running back to him when he is coming this way anyway?

Absolutely beautiful weather, warm and still.

But that was at lunch time, by three o’clock the sun had gone down and it was cold and icy. It is still December.

So I sat down to write about Bluebells, before we get onto flowers here is a little something for the animal lovers, this is a Bluebell Conch.

It is a little Tortrix moth called Hysterophora maculosana.

I know that it doesn’t look much but it is rare. When I took these pictures in 2011 there had only been five previous county sightings in this century.

What was even rarer was to photograph it on the food plant, there was only one other photograph of a Bluebell Conch on a Bluebell in circulation at that time.

Well you know that I believe in sharing my pictures. I uploaded these to Wikimedia under a CC0 license, which basically means that they are free for anyone to download and use as they see fit.

Well, it is important, they are rare and people should see these things.

It is not like I created the moth! I just pointed my stick at it 🙂

Bluebell Conch

I do realise that sometimes I must annoy proper photographers but this was for the benefit of Humanity and to help people to love little  animals and flowers and my images adorn Wikipedia pages around the world, helping people to see the beauty in a little animal.

Mga sumpay ha gawas

Whatever that means 🙂

Here is my story of the blues… (It goes on a bit)

Hyacinthoides non-scripta, The Bluebell

       

As spring flowers go the Bluebell is a bit of a late starter. They begin to appear around mid April and by that time everything is in flower.

Primroses, Lesser Celandine and the Wood Anemones have all but gone. The Snowdrop and Crocus are a distant memory and many of the summer flowers are in full bloom.

My first Bluebell of 2014, this picture was taken on the 13th. of April.

Still Bluebells herald in the new year for me.

They are one of the first plants that I see as their tiny shoots break through the leaf litter.

Bluebells in January.

We are still a long way from the warm scented woodlands of April and May but it has begun and it always makes me feel good to see the shoots.

What happens next takes a little bit of time but there are lots of other flowers to look at, the Bluebells signal the start of it.

        There is an absolute magic in a Bluebell woodland in springtime.

The colour is subtle, it isn’t gaudy, it fits and the scent hangs heavy on a dewy morning.

Hyacinthoides non-scripta is deeply scented,  it is lovely to walk in a Bluebell wood but our woodlands are under threat.

The threat to our Native Bluebell:

About half of all of the worlds Hyacithoides non-scripta are here in the UK. It is essentially a British flower and so we have a responsibility to preserve it.

The problem is the Spanish Bluebell, Hyacinthoides hispanica. The two species have been isolated for about 8000 years but in the last 200 years gardeners have been introducing the Spanish variant and seriously, we are in danger of losing our flowers.

Usually when we talk about the threat of an invasive species we are talking about them encroaching on habitat and crowding our own species out. The threat posed by the Spanish Bluebell is different, It can pollinate native Bluebells to produce a very different hybrid species which can go on to pollinate more flowers. Once hybrids get into the woods the process is irreversible.

The Native Bluebell will hybridise with the Spanish Bluebell and the result is a hybrid called Hyacinthoides massartiana. The Hybrid is fertile and more hardy than the Native Bluebell and it is less fussy about it’s habitat. The hybrid is now much more common than genuine Spanish Bluebells but it shares many of the characteristics and it is very hard to impossible to positively separate the species and sometimes requires DNA analysis.

This is either Spanish or possibly a hybrid.

The Hybrid shares characteristics with both parents but the characteristics from the Spanish side include a strong stem, so that the flowers are held upright and do not droop to one side, an open bell shaped flower and blue to green pollen, (once the pollen is spent the anthers will appear white). The leaves are broader than the native Bluebell and the Spanish Bluebell is unscented and Hybrids have a very weak scent.

        Hybrids can also look a lot like native Bluebells.

Please Note: The majority of Hyacinthoides non-sripta bulbs that are offered for sale are actually hybrids. You need a license to trade in Bluebell bulbs and there are very few licensed growers.

The Guardian, Digging the Blues.

If you want to buy native Bluebell bulbs then be sure to buy them from a name that you can trust. The licensed grower mentioned in the Guardian article above doesn’t sell to the public.

Vera Bluebell

I would trust The Royal Horticultural Society rather than my local market trader although he is a very nice man and I would certainly buy my Petunias from him and pretty much everything else.

There is no reason to ever plant shop bought bulbs in the wild.

How to identify Hyacinthoides non-scripta:

The easiest way to identify a native Bluebell is to look at the anthers of newly opened flowers. The pollen will be creamy white. It is important to look at new flowers, those at the top of the flower spike, as once the pollen is spent they all have white anthers.

        If the pollen is white then it is native, if the pollen is any other colour then it definitely is not native.

Other features to look for, the flower is long and tubular rather than bell shaped like the Spanish variety. The petals are strongly curled back at the tips and the stem is quite weak causing the flower head to droop to one side (but notice that the flowers do not all emerge on the same side)

As the flowers age the stem becomes more upright and it is common to see native Bluebells without the droop and less one directional.

By the time the seed pods have developed the flower stem is completely upright.

Another good way to tell the species apart is colour. Whilst the Spanish flowers introduced into our gardens come in a variety of colours from pink to deep blue the Native Bluebell is always blue.

Except when it is white.

I have read a bit about how rare and unusual it is to find white Bluebells and I can only say that has not been my experience. I have regularly found them in woods all around Southern England and I can usually expect to find more than one in a given wood.

They are not that uncommon and they stand out, they are also quite beautiful.

Hyacinthoides non-scripta is considered to be an indicator species of ancient woodland although locally they seem to grow in every hedgerow and field.

They can increase by bulb division, they produce small offset bulbs from the main one but they spread very slowly and it may take decades for them to advance a few yards.

They also grow from seed but again that is a slow process, it takes about five years for the seed to produce a flower.

The seed heads appear in late May when the flowers are spent and will remain in the woods for months. At first green they dry out to a papery brown shell before discarding their seeds.

       

Taxonomy:

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Asparagales

Family: Asparagaceae

Genus: Hyacinthoides

Species: Hyacinthoides non-scripta

Wildflowers in winter.

(Please notice that I included a Bluebell Tortrix Dog in my last picture)

Now I have got to take her for a walk and it is a stinky, cold, windy day today.

And now it is raining!!!

Bluebell Woods

It was a blistering hot July day yesterday.

Any animal with any sense was lying down in the shadiest place they could find.

Fizz was out in the farm fields with me and a couple of tennis balls and we were having a splendid game of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.”

Lots of water and rest stops were required.

In fact there wasn’t very much else going on at all, just resting and drinking water, I needed a plan.

I know a place where it is very cool and this seemed like a good day to visit. We are going to the Bluebell woods. Yes, to see Bluebells.

This is Sweet Chestnut coppice, well, it is what remains when the coppicing is abandoned.

I am not a big fan of this type of woodland. Sweet Chestnut is not native to the UK and it supports very little insect life, almost none and without insects you don’t get many birds.

This tree is also the arboreal equivalent of Rhododendron. It has one of the largest leaves of any tree in the UK and casts dense shade. When the leaves fall they create a thick leaf litter that is toxic and inhibits the growth of other plants.

Even when Sweet Chestnut is actively coppiced there is very little Spring growth as you would find in native coppice woodland, just a thick blanket of dead toxic leaves.

I do like coppice woodland, native coppice woodland is a wonderful wildlife habitat but it is important to know that not all coppice is the same. Hazel coppices well, Oak, Birch and Willow are the best wildlife trees that we have but diversity is the real important issue and the more species of tree a wood supports the more life it will support. Monocultures of non native species are an ecological disaster.

Having said that, some of my best friends are Sweet Chestnut as part of a mixed woodland it is welcome in my world. It has good nuts.

A Sweet Chestnut coppice is a nice place to visit on a sweltering summers day and a hard place to survive in.

The plants that do thrive here are the Spring flowers, Wood Anemones, Lesser Celandine and Bluebells.

We have come to look at the Bluebells.

This is all that remains of the Bluebells that carpeted the floor of this wood a couple of months back but this is an important part of the Bluebell story.

There is much more to Bluebells than the showy display of flowers in early May. The story starts with the tiny green shoots that pierce through the leaf litter in January and it ends here with these seed pods full of shiny black seeds that will be tomorrows Bluebells.

Well, we didn’t come here to write the Bluebell story, we will do that on a cold January day when there is little else to gladden our hearts. Today we are just collecting some photographs.

Today looks like another scorcher, the plants are buzzing with life, there is lots to see and write about and Fizz and I need to get out there and work on our tans. 🙂

Rambling

You might want to come back tomorrow.

This post is just going to ramble on and on. I will tell you why. Fizz and I have been to some really nice places today and when we got back….

Someone had bought me a bottle of whiskey for looking after Fizz while they were away. Hurrah!

We are going to go out in the fields and set a trail cam up in the hope of catching Foxes and then we are going to explore a bit of ancient woodland but there are jobs to do first.

I had to go and buy some food for the birds. I have an arrangement with my landlord, he has a farm shop that sells bird food among other things and I am allowed to help myself to feed the birds in the garden (and he says I can have the nuts for my Badgers but I don’t take much). While he was away I gave all of his bird seed to the sparrows. (they were hungry)

I have bought a little half a coconut thing and my plan is to take his empty seed feeder down and put my coconut there and he won’t notice that there is no seed left.

I just needed a little bit of help from the Woodpeckers.

And do you love Woodpeckers? I love Woodpeckers.

“Of course! He has removed the seed feeder and put a coconut there to focus on the Woodpeckers. What a clever man and what lovely birds.”

I am considered locally to be a bit of a bird Guru but I am not and I have to go to bird experts all of the time for help. It just stems from one silly little thing. My landlord loves Goldfinches and almost as soon as we met we got talking about birds and he told me about this fascination, he had never had them in the garden but he knew some great places where we could go and see them. Goldfinches love sunflower hearts. He has got charms of Goldfinches in his garden now. I don’t actually like them that much myself, I mean they are cool and I am kind to all animals. i like the Dunnock and the Wren, tiny little brown things that you wouldn’t notice. Modest and beautiful.

Don’t worry about the Sparrows they are eating peanuts now and they pig the worms that I put out for the Dunnocks and Robins and the sunflower hearts that the Goldfinches love.

So that is the birds sorted, next we have to do the caterpillars.

I have got five of them now. Although the nettles seem to thrive I have noticed that after a couple of days the caterpillars seem to lose interest. If I give them fresh leaves they charge around like little monkeys, so, change the leaves.

First I have to make sure that nobody is about to moult or pupate.

Then so long as I am happy with the situation I just have to pop down to the florists and buy a new bunch of nettles.

This is an Ouch Ouch Ouch moment for me. (“I will take you out in a minute, I just have to look after my bugs”)

I have to count them all off the leaves…

Put the fresh leaves in…

Then all that I have to do is watch them for about an hour.

I gave up covering them. Once they have found their leaves they are fine and don’t try and escape. There is just a little transition period when I disturb them and I have to make sure that they settle back in.

Walkies!

There is something about nature that I find attractive. Plus Dogs need walking even if they are not your own.

So here is the Fox-cam.

I surveyed this area a few weeks ago. I left the camera out for three nights and each night it returned sixty videos (The limit of the SD card) This is a bit of a Fox and Badger hotspot.

I have set the camera right beside an abandoned Badger sett that I think has been taken over by Foxes.What I would like to get is daytime footage of the Fox. The Badgers opened up this outlier sett in March but they have moved into the next field. If we get some good weather soon we will go Badger watching. There are some nice Elm trees up by the new sett, they didn’t all succumb to Dutch Elm Disease.

We have to be a little bit careful with the Badgers because DEFRA are continuing with their pilot cull in this area. They are a bit cagey about exactly where they are culling but I think that we are safe because they send out sett surveyors first and we haven’t seen them.

They don’t ask for permission to kill your animals they just send you a letter telling you that their surveyors will be on your land at such and such time and there is nothing that you can do about it. They are rubbish at finding Badger setts though and our main sett is on a public footpath, I don’t think that they can shoot there.

The fields are lovely at the moment. My landlord normally lets them out for grazing in the summer and we have either sheep (short grass) or cattle (long grass) but just now they are being allowed to grow for the grass crop. They will be mown as soon as we get a bit of dry weather and some lucky animals will get to eat a wildflower meadow.

There is a down side to having such long grass when it is wet…

But it is more of a down side when you are a midget.

Happy midget.

So, rambling on, here we are in the forest and it is hard for me to put my camera down.

This is a derelict Sweet Chestnut coppice, we are in the woods behind the farm. The ferns are mostly Broad Buckler but there are Male Fern and Shield Ferns here as well. Much of the green on the floor is what remains of the Bluebells.

The Bluebells are quietly going to seed now.

These seed pods will slowly dry and turn brown, then they will crack open showering shiny black seeds everywhere.

One of the things that I love most about the Bluebells is that the end of the Bluebells isn’t really the end of anything, it is the very beginning of summer.

Well I better wind this up now and go and get my Fox cam, it was good whiskey.

The Crepuscular Hunter

Bluebells, Fallow Deer and Ancient Beech Woodland.

Crepuscular: Animals most active during twilight. (Dawn and dusk)

I wasn’t going to show you these pictures, just because they are not very good. Taken at 5:30 in the morning they are not good pictures of a Bluebell wood and they are not good pictures of a Fallow Deer.

These pictures are a small part of the reason that we get up before dawn and make our way into the forest but it is very hard to photograph because the light is so poor.

But I want you to know what it is like so…

The best thing to do when you look at these pictures is to close your eyes and let your imagination go to work.

Open your eyes for a minute, I just want to set the scene and give your imagination something to work with.

Fizz is on the lead, she is quite happy to be on a lead and she has to be because there are Wild Boar about. Fizz chases the sheep on the farm if she gets a chance, she doesn’t hurt them just chases them round but if she did the same with a sow boar with piglets she would get hurt. The Boar would not hesitate to protect her young.

We have been walking for an hour and about twenty minutes earlier I had been thinking that perhaps I was being over cautious and should let her have a run. Just then I saw an animal in the woods, I think it was probably a deer but all I saw was an animal on the edge of the wood jump back and disappear into the shadows.

Don’t get the wrong idea, I have no fear, this is a magical wonderland for me. I used to own woodland in East Sussex and there were boar on the land. I often slept in my wood. I spent ten years watching them and have had many encounters. I have never ever seen any aggression in the animals and my experience is that they have the disposition of deer and are very difficult to approach. We don’t get to see boar today just a deer.

Close them.

And open.

You need to be able to smell the forest. The air is very still and only slightly cool. We left home in shirt sleeves, it is going to be very warm in another six hours and you wouldn’t want to be carrying a coat.

Bluebells have a sweet scent and when you are surrounded by thousands of them, well… you can smell other plants in the forest as well as the trees and the soil but the Bluebells fill the air, the only thing that I can think of that I like better is Honeysuckle. This is the forest.

Then there are the birds, they are singing their little hearts out and every so often the song is punctuated by the hollow, echoing, rap of a Woodpecker.

There he is, a young male Fallow Deer browsing amongst the Bluebells, what a perfect thing to see.

(Male? I have seen his penis sheath, picture three. You can click on my pictures to enlarge them. With experience you will learn to look for these things)

He is stepping out onto the forest track.

And that is our lot. He has seen us.

I like wild animals.

Goodbye beautiful animal and thanks. I hope that I remember this moment forever.

And that is why we get up so early in the morning. I wanted you to know, even if I can’t photograph it.

What a lucky animal and what a beautiful place to live.

Come on Fizz, we have got adventuring to do.

May is May

Today was beautiful and so Fizz and I went on a flower hunt.

I had promised to take her to see the Bluebells and there is an old Sweet Chestnut coppice not far from here that should do the trick. So that is where we are heading. On the way we are going to look for flowers.

We don’t just want any old flower, we want new ones that we don’t recognise. We want to learn something. So off we go.

This is the track up to the Badger sett. I left a camera out there last night and I want to pick it up on the way.

The first wild flower that catches my eye is Herb Bennet. I know this one and I have photographed it before but these are nice fresh flowers and I can’t resist taking a few shots.

Next it is pick up the camera and it is disappointment again. This main sett has so many entrances and I am just trying to find one that is being used. There seems to be a lot more badger activity in the fields behind the farm but if there are going to be cubs they would be here.

This time we got nothing. A Tramp in the Woods, that’s all.

There is more disappointment to follow as we make our way along the track.

One of the things that I particularly wanted to do today was photograph the female of the species St. Mark’s Fly. It is called that because it usually appears around St. Mark’s day, April 25th and the adult flies only live for about a week so the window of opportunity is quite narrow. They have gone and I have missed that one, never mind, I’ll get it next year.

The white flowers that line the track are Cow Parsley, flies seem to love it.

Okay this is more like it. This is a flower that I don’t recognise. Just what we were looking for.

I think that I know it is a Crane’s-bill because the flower looks exactly like one that I do know well, Dove’s-foot Crane’s-bill but this one doesn’t have dove’s feet.

Now I have to take lots of fairly boring pictures of the leaves, the stem, the form of the plant. I have to get as much information as I can and I will find out what it is when I get home.

That is cool and now I know that this is Cut-leaved Crane’s-bill, Geranium dissectum. I am happy now, I have learned something.

The next flower that we see falls into the same category as the first herb. We know what it is but it looks too good to pass it by.

Herb Robert.

We are nearly at the woods now but first we have one more flower.

It is a Comfrey but I am not sure which one.

Now I just have to spend a little bit of time looking at these flowers

Beautiful. Gardeners love Comfrey and grow it as a green manure. I think this one is Russian Comfrey.

Now I am seeing weird geometric patterns everywhere.

Okay that is just Ribwort Plantain.

Come on Fizz, let’s go see the Bluebells.

The wood is beautiful and peaceful. Birds are singing and it is still and warm. It would be very easy to fall asleep here.

Stupid dog, look at the pretty flowers.

Leaving the wood (I will do a separate post on Bluebells) the next flower that we see is Wild Arum.

Not really a flower but you know that. (it’s a fly trap)

We headed back through the fields towards the farm.

The Dandelions are all spent now, any yellow that you see in the field is Buttercups.

Here we found our final flower of the day.

Red Clover.

And that was the end of our flower hunt.

Tomorrow is another day.

Red Fox

Just a little video from last May.

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…..