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 🙂

 

 

 

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.

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 🙂

Hawthorn

I didn’t set out today to capture a Hawthorn, I was on a very different kind of mission, I was getting myself some new pets. I will show you them later.

Seeing the tree like this almost bereft of leaves and so heavy with fruit I just had to photograph it. This post might be a bit red.

It is quite a lot of photographs but then, I think that I may need these images in the future. I hope that you liked them. 🙂

Wild Ivy

I noticed this one flowering in a garden the other day. Fizz and I don’t really do gardens but we guessed that if it was flowering in the garden it would be doing so in the wild too and so yesterday we set out to capture some wild Ivy.

This is Common Ivy, Hedera helix also known as English Ivy or just Ivy. Well at least that is what it used to be.

I have had a word with the experts and there are now apparently about fifteen different species in the Hedera genus. They can not agree between themselves exactly how many sub species there are and they all at one time or another were called Hedera helix but now you can’t actually recognise Ivy when you see it.

Baloney is a type of sausage originating from Italy and very popular in the United States but that is a subject for another post.

They look like little snow flakes just before they open.

I know that this is not the most spectacular of flowers, being a very unspectacular green one but there is a very good reason for noticing the Ivy flowers.

I shouldn’t really show you these next pictures. They were taken last January and there is precious little to photograph in January but this is the reason for noticing the flowers.

The beautiful berries are poisonous but this is one for the annoyers rather than the murderers, they are not highly toxic. All the same you should not eat them. Birds eat them.

Wikiwotsit says when speaking of the damage that Ivy does to buildings, and I quote, ” it also houses Mice and other unwelcome creatures.”

Yes it does. It harbours Bats as well and is a wonderful wild life plant for giving homes to many. Ivy draws it’s nutrients from it’s roots and doesn’t take anything from the trees that it scrambles over.

I know that people believe that Ivy chokes trees. I am not sure how it does this as trees do not have the same sort of respiratory system as Humans and are hard to strangle but I am not arguing. Dead wood is the single most important wild life habitat and a dead tree is much more useful than a live one but fortunately we can have both. I am not going to set myself against Mother Nature. If Ivy does kill trees then it takes a very long time to do so and ultimately it has done a good thing. That is natures way and many insects and birds will benefit.

When I was taking these photographs the Ivy was buzzing very loudly. At first I thought that I had found a Bee’s nest but it wasn’t a nest, just hundreds of insects taking the nectar. Mostly Honey Bees but the animal in this next picture is a Dead Head Hover Fly.

Beautiful little flowers from a lovely leaf that go on to be wonderful fruit. What more could we ask?

 

 

Conkers

This is a post about a Horse Chestnut Tree and things that fall off it and there is a reason for this post.

I was having trouble getting inspired today.

I took Fizz up to the Badger cam and collected another card, put some more bait down. There were some lovely videos of the animals, I am very fond of wild animals but I didn’t really want to do another Badger post just yet. A Pheasant spent two hours in front of my camera (at first I was a bit peeved but as I watched the videos I started to like him, we might yet have pheasant for supper). There has been a development. The farmer who rents the fields has put sheep in there. That could make leaving my camera in that spot untenable. Sheep could just trigger the camera constantly and the batteries will die before nightfall (We will have a hundred and twenty vids of sheep) but I have left it there today, maybe there will be some interaction between Badger/Fox/Sheep in the night, I love interaction.

I had three interesting interactions with Humans today. The first was with Margaret, Fizz’s owner. The local shops don’t sell balls for Fizz to play with and I have been struggling with supply. I decided to order her some from the internet. 50 used tennis balls £25. Now some dog owners don’t like their dogs to play with tennis balls. They used to use lead in the dye for them and they are pressurised with nitrogen (They don’t use lead any more and nitrogen is harmless and part of the air that we breathe), before I lumbered myself with fifty tennis balls I just thought that I should check that she didn’t mind Fizz playing with them. Margaret said that was fine and she would give me something toward them when she had some change and I told her not to worry about that.

When I got back from walking Fizz today there was an envelope for me with £25 and I dig it. It has nothing to do with money, she owns a farm, land and house and can easily afford it, I had already afforded it and didn’t expect anything in return. Margaret was just saying thank you. I get it. I accepted the gift graciously and felt the love.

I met a fellow sitting on a stool outside of a small terraced house. It was a beautiful sunny evening and he was looking intently at a book in his lap and he was singing. He had a wonderful rich voice but was singing quite quietly and so I stood and listened for a while. I wasn’t sure that he had noticed me but after a bit he looked up and smiled and said, “Hello, I am singing.”

Finally I met a fellow beside a busy road, picking stuff off trees. “Hello,” I said, “What are you doing?” He told me that his wife had sent him out to collect conkers. I showed him where there were some better trees. That was my inspiration. I spent some time looking at this tree before deciding to photograph it.

I think that it is a beautiful tree, you decide.

 

A lot of love passed by today and I got conkers.

Blue

Blue is for Sloes. Blackthorn is the most wonderfully photogenic tree.

Blackthorn flowers appear before the leaves. Hawthorn, which looks very similar from a distance, gets it’s leaves first and then flowers. So when the hedgerow first turns white in March, that’s the Blackthorn and when it does it again in May that’s the Hawthorn.

But this isn’t Spring this is Autumn and today we have berries. There is no confusion at this time of year. The fruits of the Blackthorn are big and plentiful and very beautiful.

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…..