The call of the Wild

Following on from our discovery of the Boar tracks in the wood, Fizz and I have been out hunting. We left the camera out for three nights and it returned one hundred and ninety videos. The pesky Fox above made around a hundred and sixty of those. At least it was good enough to show up in the daytime.

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You may have noticed that I have been neglecting the blog in recent weeks. I am coming to a time when I have to think about my future and maybe leaving the farm. It kinda stifles my creativity but everything is fine.

I came here with the intention of taking a year off, following my divorce. Just to give me time to think and get rid of any negative thoughts that may have been bothering me. That worked pretty well, I feel happy in myself but my year off has stretched to sixteen months now.

You know that if I leave the farm, what else I will have to leave, don’t you? It stifles my creativity.

I haven’t spoken to her about this yet. I am working on a plan that will give me another year here and if all goes well, I will leave next April.

Nothing is forever.

When I came here my plan was to take my year off and then seek to rehabilitate myself. Go down to the job centre and start a new life.

There isn’t any work around here, I would have to move into one of the local towns and then with luck find myself a job stacking shelves in a supermarket, something like that. It just isn’t ticking all the boxes for me. I am an adventurer and I am not that afraid of life. There must be something better than that, so I will go and find it.

It all stifles my creativity. But…

and it is a big BUT….

Today life is beautiful and we need to enjoy every moment of it, don’t think that we haven’t been doing just that.

How to track and capture Wild Boar

Hmmmm…

Ah ha!

This ought to work…Watch closely….

The two adult animals in that video are mature sows and I believe they are the mothers of all the little hoglets that you are going to see running around.

There are two other large animals in this sounder, one male and one female. They are last years litter. The female will probably stay with this sounder but the male will leave in the summer. Males are solitary animals.

You can see the two juveniles in this next clip and in case you can’t tell the male is the stroppy one. He is a magnificent looking animal.

Normally we think of a sounder being composed of females and their offspring but the young males will stay with the sounder until they are about sixteen months old and they don’t start growing tusks until they are two years old.

He looks impressive but he is still a lot smaller than his mum as you will see in this next video.

These beautiful animals were kind to me and I got quite a few videos but that will do for now. I don’t want to bore you 🙂

I brought the camera in for the weekend, I might stick it back up there next week. I would quite like to have one more look at them.

I have to be very careful. The local rag printed a single letter condemning last weeks headlines as I expected and that was of course buried on the letters page. It also ran this little story.

What has been reported as an arrow is almost certainly a crossbow bolt, around here that is the favoured tool of poachers, it is powerful enough to kill and you don’t need a firearms licence.

The bottom line is  that you can get £6.50 a kilo for wild boar meat unbutchered. An adult female weighs around 100-120 kilos and 70% of that is meat. At that rate that’s about £450 for one of those mothers, say it’s less, a little one £200. There is an element here that see the Boar as fair game, in fact you would be daft not to take one (regardless of whether or not it is suckling young). Have you seen that film “Whiskey Galore?” Well the Boar are our local bounty. That is why there is so much hatred stirred up against them. When somebody kills one he is almost doing a public service (They eat children, remember)

I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked, “Aye Lad, seen any Boar yet?”

“No mate. Not a one, the old FC must have shot them all.” 🙂

Wild flowers:

We went up to photograph the Early Dog Violets and they were very nice…

On the way up there we found these….

They are the first buds of what will soon become the beautiful and multi-faceted Town Hall Clock (Adoxa moschatellina)

But today they are just buds.

I know that some of you are still up to your necks in snow but here, everything is beautiful.

Let’s skip the Sweet Violets…

“Woke up one morning half asleep,”

“With all my blankets in a heap,”

“And yellow roses gathered all around me.” (Lesser Celandine)

I’m just sitting watching flowers in the rain.

“Feel the power of the rain,”

In amongst the Lent Lilies I found my first Wood Anemones.

They don’t really like the rain.

Suddenly there isn’t any shortage of flowers. I don’t have enough time to post all off the species that I photographed.

The Elm trees flowered, I have been watching them closely and waiting for this.

A lot of the stuff that I do is technical, it is because I want to have pictures of a particular stage in a plants development for my “Easy Wildflowers” blog and it isn’t always easy to understand why I get so excited.

I enjoyed seeing the sepal development on the Tussilago farfara (Coltsfoot)

So my future is riding on a Horse. I have put my entire fortune on a magnificent mare called, “Bendy Peg Leg,” if anyone can do it then she can.

Assuming that she wins, this is what will happen.:

I will stay at the farm for one more year because I want to write Easy Wildflowers. There are not enough local wildflowers to keep me interested beyond a year. I will go homeless next April. I will put my belongings on my back and go into the wild. How long that I will stay in the wild?,  Ha!

I will take a tablet and a solar charger and I will blog from the wilderness and it will be great.

If the Horse loses? She is a sure thing. Bendy Peg Leg, I got it on good authority.

Umm…. Trust me, I know something about animals.

He’s Got Wandering Eyes

And that’s me being nice about it.

Anything with a pretty face… I will tell you about her later. (I have put her up a tree)

He was looking a bit fragile today so I thought that we could go on a nice walk to see some flowers, he likes flowers.

That was his Lesser Celandine.

He says this next one takes his breath away.

I thought that was the smoking. (How can something be beautiful when it doesn’t even have big brown eyes?)

That one is his Common Field-speedwell and I am glad that I am not called a “Common” anything.

One more and then we will get down to business 🙂

This is the one that he is prone to put in his mouth. It is Coltsfoot.

“Everything is beautiful, in it’s own way… la..di..da..di..da,” except for this next one.

Now I like a drink as much as the next puppy (but I wouldn’t mind if you got me something a bit better than mud)

The thing is that I can hold my mud and I don’t go making a donkey of myself with every floozy who bats her eyelashes at me.

Okay I will tell you what happened.

She was leaning on a lamp post at the corner of the lane…

Oh me, Oh my…Cor Blimey! Ain’t you the pretty one.

So I was just wondering…..

How fast can you get up that tree?

Quite fast then.

Faster than me as it turned out.

Watch it Mate!

So all’s well that ends well. I just have to sit here now forever.

Just Flower Power

It has rained a lot in the last couple of days and then today the sun came out again.

That is a Ranunculus, a “Little Frog” called Lesser Celandine.

I found a few interesting things today and so I am going to start with female plants of the Dog’s Mercury.

The sexes seem to like to hang out together. It is either a group of all male flowers or all female and until today I could only find males.

I need photographs of the flowers. When I wrote about Dog’s Mercury earlier in the year, this was the best picture that I could find of the female flower.

That is not really the flower, that is just a pair of swollen ovaries with a stigma on the top. That is what the flower will become.

It is not easy to photograph the flowers, they are small and they tend to lie under the leaves but this is what I got today.

You are not missing anything, there just isn’t very much to the female flower. Three green tepals open and inside there is just a two lobed stigma, (until the ovary develops). I will work on getting some better pictures 🙂

The male flowers are a little bit easier, at least they don’t hide themselves away.

Here is one that you can see. Common Field-speedwell.

I liked this picture of the seedling.

I like it because the floor is covered in little unidentifiable green things and then ever so slowly you begin to recognise them and their mysteries are revealed.

This next one is Hairy Bittercress.It is only when I got home and looked at these pictures that I realised the seed pod at the back of this next picture looks fit to burst, it is something else that I must photograph.

There are a lot of flowers about now. We will see some more on the way back but we have come out here to look for Butterflies.

It was a bit disappointing today, I saw several but I just couldn’t get close to them. I put it down to coming out at lunch time on the hottest day of the year, so far. They had too much energy.

I saw two Red Admirals and then a Small Tortoiseshell. I chased them up and down the track for ages, our walk took four hours today.

Fizz looked after my hat while I chased the Butterflies.

This kinda selfie was as close as I could get today. (There is a Butterfly in this picture just below shoulder height on my right)

There it is 🙂

Pesky animals.

Come on Fluffy, back to the flowers.

Fluffy?

I am putting these in just because I love them.They are the mottled leaves of Arum maculatum.

We can’t have a post in March without Primroses, I am just doing thrums today.

This next one has been nibbled by mice I think.

Then to round off the walk I found something that I absolutely love.

It is Wild Garlic. I won’t dwell on this today because I don’t think my photographs were very good. I need to get decent pictures at this early stage and then I need to eat them. We will be back here soon.

That was it for today. I wasn’t over pleased with the pictures that I got but there is some exciting stuff going on and I am looking forward to having another go at it.

This is a dog tired Dog.

I wrote about Snowdrops for EW. It was a frustrating task because I wrote this post last year but I knew that it wasn’t good enough and that I would have to rewrite it.

It took me about twelve hours to do 900 words but it is done now.

The Snowdrops around here are fading fast but hopefully this will be all right for next year 🙂

Galanthus nivalis, The Common Snowdrop

The Common Snowdrop isn’t native to the UK it is naturalised, that means that it is an introduced species that probably arrived here around about the sixteenth century and has been here ever since. Most people think of it as a native species today.

Galanthus nivalis is native to most of Europe and that is where we got it from.

There are twenty species of Galanthus Snowdrops native to Europe, the last one only being identified in 2012. They all look very similar but the most common species is G. nivalis, the Common Snowdrop.

Identifying the Common Snowdrop:

Galanthus nivalis has narrow leaves (6mm or less) all of the other known species have leaves at least  9mm wide.

So there is a simple rule of thumb.

If the leaf blade is thinner than your little finger nail then it is Galanthus nivalis, if it is wider then it is one of the others.

It is very easy to identify the plant as G. nivalis but the fun doesn’t stop there.

There are dozens of garden varieties that have been cultivated from G. nivalis and so they all have the same narrow leaves. They have names like Galanthus nivalis “Green Tear.” These varieties have been selected because they have some striking difference to the Common Snowdrop and usually that concerns colour or shape.

The flower of the Common Snowdrop is composed of six “tepals.”

(Tepal is a word that we use when the petals and the sepals appear the same or are performing the same function)

The three outer tepals are plain white. The three inner tepals are half the length of the outer ones and they have a green mark at the tip that looks like a little bridge.

To complicate matters further there is a double Common Snowdrop that grows in the wild and can often be found growing amongst the single flowers. It is called Galanthus nivalis f. pleniflorus “Flore Pleno.”

From this species, many more double and semi-double garden varieties have been cultivated and they are all Galanthus nivalis.

So to summarise my “Easy” identification guide: If the leaf blade is thinner than your little finger nail, then it is Galanthus nivalis  and if it has that little green bridge mark and nothing else, then it is almost certainly just a Common Snowdrop.

If you would like to view some of the many variations on this theme then I would recommend a visit to Judy’s Snowdrops. My link will take you to a page showing G. nivalis cultivars but the whole web site is worth exploring if you have the time.

There is one other identification feature that I should mention, The leaves of the Common Snowdrop face each other like a pair of hands clapped together, in a few species the leaves wrap around each other at the very base. I think that for our purposes this is a bit academic, it is enough to do the finger nail test.

NB: If you find one with leaves broader than your little finger nail then it is not Galanthus nivalis and you should take it’s photograph.

The Common Snowdrop description:

The Common Snowdrop has a single flower on a stem (sometimes called a “scape”).  As the flower breaks through the ground it is protected by two bracts with hardened tips and the flower lies between them enclosed in a papery spathe.

As the flower grows it breaks free of it’s paper casing, The bracts will hang above the flower now, usually with the upper side of the spathe intact.

The flower is composed of six tepals, (petals) three outer and three inner. The outside tepals are white. The inner tepals  are half as long as the outer and bear a green mark that looks like a little bridge.

The inside of a Common Snowdrop looks like this.

There are six anthers, covered in orange pollen which surround a single style.

You can see the style better in  this next photograph.

The ovary (where the seeds are produced) is the green bulb at the base of the flower.

This is the fruit of the Snowdrop, it will contain two or three seeds. The flowers die and drop off in early March and the leaves die back soon after but the seeds won’t be ripe until June. Until that time the fruit will lie on the ground, it will yellow when  it is ripe and then it will open.

Early Snowdrops :

The French call this little flower perce-neige which literally translates as pierce-snow. The tips of the leaves are hardened to allow them to break through the cold frosty ground.

Unlike the Primrose, Early Crocus and Coltsfoot, I can’t really see this flower as one of the “first signs of spring,” it doesn’t wait for spring, it flowers in the winter.

Kew Gardens have been monitoring the arrival of the first Snowdrops since the 1950’s and at that time Snowdrops opened late in February, by the 1990’s they were opening in January. In 2014 Kew announced their first Snowdrops on December 5th. Winters really are warming up.

The Snowdrop flowers very early in the year, when there are few pollinating insects around, as a result the plant usually spreads by vegetative means (from the small bulblets that form at the base of the main bulb) rather than from seed production.  However they will last into March and do provide a very valuable source of nectar and pollen for early Bumblebees, Honeybees and other insects.

Snowdrops react to the sun. On a warm sunny day they open their outer tepals wide and release a scent that is like warm honey. They are doing their best to  attract any insects that are around.

Taxonomy:

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Asparagales

Family: Amaryllidaceae

Genus: Galanthus

Species: Galanthus nivalis

       Winter wildflowers in the Spring 🙂

 

Happy Face

It is like a Spring day out there today. It is like it is March and the sun is shining 🙂

In March the Butterflies come back and so today we are going out to look for them.

Fizz has got her happy face on.

I haven’t seen that face for a long time. She is not really happy (well, she is always happy) she is hot and she is panting and it hasn’t been hot for a very long time.

It didn’t take us long to find a Butterfly. This is a Red Admiral.

The Red Admiral is a migrant species that arrives here in the UK in May and June flying in from Europe and North Africa.

It is only fairly recently that it has been considered a resident species, they don’t like our cold winters.

Butterfly Conservation says on it’s website, “There is an indication that numbers have increased in recent years and that overwintering has occurred in the far south of England.” That needs updating.

This animal has survived the winter in Gloucestershire and hopefully I will soon see a lot more. Hurrah for global warming 🙂

It does look a bit tatty but so would you if you had been outside all winter.

We better find it some nectar plants. You can try some of these.

Lesser Celandine.

Dandelion

Common Field-speedwell

There is another one, a Small Tortoiseshell.

Oh Joy. The flowers are flowering, the Butterflies are coming back and Fizz has got her happy face on.

Primrose

ColtsfootNow Fizz and I are tired of all this sunshine and Butterflies and flowers.

We are going up on the bank to get our photographs taken with the sheep.

On the way we find another little flower that we haven’t seen yet this year.

This is Hairy Biittercress.

It’s good for Butterflies.

Okay, let’s make some selfies.

Everybody crowd in.Our shadows are getting very short, mine used to be about ten sheep long.

I have written about Stellaria media today but I have had to leave quite a lot of important stuff out because I just didn’t have the photographs. I haven’t seen it in flower yet but it won’t be long and then I shall get the pictures and update the post.

Stellaria media, The Common Chickweed

Common Chickweed is a member of the Stellaria genus of flowers. It is a very small flower, about a quarter of an inch in diameter (6-9 mm) and in common with other Stellaria species it has five white petals.

The  five petals of Stellaria media are divided right down to the base, giving the flower the  appearance of ten petals and note that the petals of Common Chickweed are shorter or no longer than the sepals and that the sepals are hairy.

(Common Chickweed, Stellaria media 6-9 mm)
Compare Common Chickweed to two other Stellaria species that are commonly found here.

(Lesser Stitchwort, Stellaria graminea 7-12 mm)

(Greater Stitchwort, Stellaria holostea 15-25 mm)
Common Chickweed has three styles that sit on a green ovary. The number of stamens can vary from three to eight.

(Stellaria media, 3 stamens)

(Stellaria media, 8 stamens)
Common Chickweed has a weak stem, it will often trail along the ground but it seldom rises more that about eight inches. It is a small plant but if you find it growing in any quantity it is worth remembering that it is a tasty edible. The leaves can be eaten raw in salads.

The leaves are oval and smooth edged with a point at the tip, they grow in opposite pairs along the stem. Leaves at the base of the plant have quite long stalks and toward the top they are stalkless.

Common Chickweed has a tradition of use in herbal medicine and is most commonly used to treat skin conditions, cuts, bruises and burns

It is a valuable wildlife plant, a food plant to several moth species it is probably best known as being favoured by birds. Chickens eat both the plant and the seeds and that is how it gets it’s name, many small birds like finches eat the seeds and you can also feed it to cage birds.

        Taxonomy

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Caryophyllales

Family: Caryophyllaceae

Genus: Stellaria

Species: Stellaria media

Wildflowers in the Springtime 🙂

We like Springs and Yellow Things

All of the flowers in this post are in flower today.

All through the winter I have posted flowers and sometimes people leave comments about all the wonderful winter flowers that we have in the UK. Well, we  don’t have winter flowers, I was just trying to cheer winter up but today we do have flowers.

The trick is, not to look out of the kitchen window, then you don’t know that you are being pestered 🙂

First wild flower of the day and it is yellow, it’s a Taraxacum.

Don’t worry, if you read all of the way to the end of this post then you will know more than your mum about the Taraxacum. (Except for Sarasin of course because her mum will also read this post)

Another Asteraceae in flower now, this one is a Daisy.

The very, very beautiful and commonplace Bellis Perennis.

This next one absolutely brought joy to my heart. I missed you like I missed the warmth of the sun.

That is the Lesser Celandine. Now do you believe that it is Spring?

A Blue one.

A Speedwell, of the common-field variety. They are well established and they are here to stay.

Now I gave Mudface a bit of a hard time in my last post, on account of her love of mud.
It wasn’t really fair and so to make amends, yesterday I bought her a new toy.

It is a squeaky ball. Does she like it? Who can tell?

I am going to skip most of the stuff that we saw and we did but I have to show you a couple more flowers.

Red Dead-nettle, it is only a little weed but I find the colours absolutely charming.

The Tommies are coming up.

Okay that is it, one last thing.

Today I discovered something wonderful…. I can put Fizz up a tree and she doesn’t fall out.

No, that wasn’t it. I am never cruel to animals. I just put her in the tree for a minute to stop her pestering me.

This is it. Navelwort.

This is a new one for me and I love that.

It is a succulent, native to the UK and it flowers in May. I took dozens of photographs but I will bore you later. Also known as Wall Pennywort, I found it growing on a wall.

One other thing that I just have to tell you. I am getting along well with taming my Robin. He lands on my hand now and takes food. He has started following me around when I go out, only in the farm yard, he doesn’t go far afield. When I brought Fizz back today He was there to welcome us back singing and following.

He costs me a lot of worms but I don’t think that I have made a mistake. It is hard not to love this little animal.

Heck of a long post, it is going to get longer. Here is my wild flower. Take care my friends.

Taraxacum species, The Dandelions

It may be that the Dandelion you see most often is Taraxacum officinale, the Common Dandelion, however there are more than 230 species of Dandelion in the UK and the differences between them are small and very complex.

It is not possible to identify a Dandelion to species from a single photograph. Many different things have to be taken into account.

The character of the leaves for instance. Some species have alternate lobes and some are opposite and there are some species that don’t have lobes at all, some have a purple central rib and in some it is pale.

      When you understand the leaf you then have to cross reference that with all of the other parts of the flower. The pattern of teeth on the end of each floret for instance.

There are so many factors to take into account that identifying a Dandelion to species is a job for the experts. To us it is just a Dandelion, (Taraxacum species).

So can we even tell that it is a Dandelion?

Yes of course we can. Dandelions belong to the Asteraceae (Daisy) family and they have quite distinctive characteristics.

Like other members of the Asteraceae they have a composite flower head made up of many smaller flowers.

This next picture is of a Common Daisy (Bellis perennis) and shows the arrangement of central disc florets (yellow) and the outer ray florets (white), each “petal” and “disc” is a complete flower in itself and together they make the flower head that we call a Daisy.

A Dandelion has no disc florets. It is composed solely of ray florets.

This next Dandelion lookalike is quite obviously not a Dandelion because it has central disc florets and it is in fact the flower of Coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara)

The other easy to spot and important characteristic is that unlike other lookalikes there are no leaves on the flower stem and it is unbranched, each flower head is carried on a single, bare stem. that will rule out the Hawksbits and other pretenders like Cat’s-ears.

Dandelion (Single flower head on a bare stem)

Cat’s-ear (Multiple flower heads on a branched stem)
If you remain unsure then cut it. The Dandelion is the only yellow member of the Asteraceae with a hollow stem and it exudes a milky sap.

Dandelions secrete latex, not very much in the wild varieties but scientists have developed cultivars for the production of rubber and there are tests being carried out today with tyres made of Dandelion rubber.

At the base of each flower there are a series of down turned bracts. These are sometimes mistaken for sepals but remember that this is a flower head and not an individual flower, each ray floret has it’s own sepals at the base which will eventually become the parachute that will carry the seed.

Let’s look under the bonnet.

Each “petal” is a whole flower. It has all that is required to make a flower, a corolla (fused petals) male reproductive parts and female parts too and an ovary that will become a seed.

So what are all of these pointy bits coming out of the flower? They look like styles but they are covered in pollen, so that would make them stamens, right?

These are the styles, the female part of the flower and they are covered in pollen that they picked up from their own anthers.

I have to do a drawing to show you how this works. The anthers develop first and they produce pollen on the inside, The style grows through the middle of the anthers and collects the pollen. The style has two receptive surfaces that are pressed closely together, the pollen collected on the outside does not affect them. So the style carries the pollen.
This is the best photograph that I can find to show you the anthers on a Dandelion.

Dandelions produce a lot of pollen.

Strangely all of this sexual stuff is not really necessary, most Dandelions are capable of asexual reproduction and their seeds do not require second party fertilisation but it is fun.

With 230 plus species in the UK you can pretty well find Dandelions in flower at any time of year, they don’t all flower at the same time, however there is a season.

April is the best time to look for Dandelions, the fields are full of them.

By May they will be spent.

You will never see a Dandelion with some petals and some seeds, the transformation seems to be instant and total, they close as a flower and when they open again they are a seed head.

The seeds are called achenes and the parachute is called a pappus and the parachute is actually made from modified sepals of the tiny flower called a ray floret. Between the seed and the parachute is a stem called a beak. The whole of this structure has grown from the style that both distributed and collected pollen for the flower.

These are the Dandelion clocks of our childhood, you can tell the hour by the number of breaths it takes to disperse the seeds. They are not firmly attached so it is usually early.

The Dandelion weed is without doubt one of our most beautiful wild flowers.

I am not really sure why it hasn’t been modified and cultivated for the garden. Dandelions are a very good weed to have in the garden, they have a very deep tap root that draws nutrients up to the surface and makes them available for other, more fancy, flowers. They also attract pollinators.

Dandelions are the food plant for at least twelve species of moth and many other invertebrates. They are rich in nectar as well as pollen and are an important food source for bees.

They are also good for us to eat, all parts of the Dandelion are edible.

There is something that I should tell you about this beautiful and useful wild flower, it has a wicked side.

If you pick a flower and chase your sister with it then she will scream and run away because if you can successfully touch her with the flower then she will be fated to wet the bed. (Dandelions are a lot of fun)

The common French name for a Dandelion is “Pissenlit” and “lit” is the French word for bed. There is some logic in this, Dandelion root has been used in herbal medicine as a diuretic and it does indeed make you piss en lit.

Our own common name Dandelion is derived from another French name “Dent de Lion,” meaning Lion’s tooth and that is a reference to the shape of the leaf.

The Germans call it Pusteblume (Blow Flower)

BTW In case you wondered, that lump that you sometimes see in the centre of a new flower is just ray florets that haven’t opened and expanded yet.

Taxonomy:

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Asterales

Family: Asteraceae

Genus: Taraxacum

Wildflowers in the Spring 🙂

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 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 🙂

 

 

 

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…..