garden – Grantham Ecology

2017 Retrospective – The Rest!

December 31, 2017Grantham Ecology1 Comment

I like to take the opportunity which the end of the year presents to look back over what I’ve seen and encountered. Some fall nicely into groups so do check out trees, wildflowers, butterflies, bees and invertebrates on their own posts!

The remainder are individual species or places which don’t form a group, but which are an important part of the year just passed. I hope you enjoy!

Easegill Bat Surveys

I was lucky to be invited along to a hibernation check in the caves in Easegill, Cumbria by a friend in the bat group there. We found a number of hibernating myotis and brown long-eared bats in the various cave systems, along with the tissue moths, herald moths and cave spiders which use the same habitats over winter. It was a great day out in some stunning scenery, and the opportunity to do a spot of caving whilst searching for wildlife was a real treat! You can read more, and watch a short compilation video, on this post from January 2017.

Snowy walk along Stanage Edge

It takes around an hour and a half for us to get to some of the most stunning walks in the Peak District; a bit of a trek but always worth the visit especially if there’s snow to line the fields and de-mark the landscape with its series of hedges and stone walls. I love too how the hills in the far distance can give an illusion of mountains when they become snow-covered!

Smooth newt – Lissotriton vulgaris

I couldn’t resist this photograph when we were undertaking translocations at the beginning of the year. The legislative driver behind the translocation is the great crested newt, but we take the opportunity to move any species we encounter to a place of safety. With the juveniles, such as this little smooth newt, you need to keep a sharp eye to make sure you spot them all!

Common frog – Rana temporaria

Spring is one of the most rewarding times to have a garden pond – when the croaking begins and the surface is a mass of calling frogs. This was taken on a cool March day when the frogs had decided that spring had sprung! In this photo, I tried to capture the turbulence of the water which these amorous amphibians bring to a placid garden pond.

Slow worm – Anguis fragilis

We encountered this slow worm under a piece of corrugated metal in the woods near Woodhall Spa in the early summertime. There had been a rainshower which caught us out and the slow worms too had taken shelter. As the sun came out and the corrugated metal began to warm, the chances of catching one reduced significantly as they are anything but slow when they want to be! These reptiles are in fact legless lizards rather than snakes. Their habit of sheltering beneath these artificial refugia forms the basis of the reptile survey technique we use in ecological consultancy to find out whether reptiles are present on a particular site.

Dandelion seedhead before the full moon

The was taken at Muston Meadows at midnight when the moon was full and I couldn’t resist a walk. The dandelion seedheads glowed white against the dark grass but I was struggling to capture this in a photograph – then I thought this might make an interesting angle!

Shropshire Hills

We spent a few days over the May bank holiday in Ireland for a wedding, coming back via Anglesey and spending a night in Shropshire on our way back east. We walked over the Long Mynd at dusk, heading back towards our campsite, and this was the view as we began to descend.

Church of Saint Mary, Whitby

A weekend camping near Robin Hood’s Bay in the summer found us in Whitby before walking back along the coast. This is the taken at the Church of Saint Mary – set above the town and referenced in Dracula. I was struck with this view of the tombstones dark against the long meadow grasses and wished this was a more common sight – cemeteries and churchyards can be beautiful places full of life after death, if they’re managed sensitively for wildlife rather than manicured as bowling greens!

Curbar Edge, Derbyshire

We had a survey site which saw me out in the Peak District until 7pm one evening in August – after which I took the opportunity to see the heather and take a walk along Curbar Edge at sunset. This is the view out across from the Edge as the sun was sinking low on the horizon.

Vancouver Island

The following are a few photographs from Vancouver Island this year – we encountered some spectacular wildlife and were amazed by the scenery. You can read more in my blog posts here, but below are a few highlights.

Anna’s Hummingbird in Victoria

American red squirrel at Long Beach, Tofino

Black squirrel in Stanley Park, Vancouver

Orca’s from Victoria

Grey heron reflection against the vending machines on the marina in Vancouver

Slow worm – Anguis fragilis

This tiny slow worm was one of this year’s juveniles – we were surveying a site in Somerset and this was one of seven young ones which appeared under a single survey mat where the sun warmed a bank at the edge of the site. When I picked it up, it wrapped itself around my finger but was so small that the nose and tail didn’t quite meet!

Sunrise on the day of Storm Ophelia

This photograph was taken of the countryside in Warwickshire on the day Storm Ophelia swept across the UK. At that time, I didn’t realise what was causing the effect but was just taken by the colours – it turned out that the day was to be filled with the pseudo-apocolyptic light brought on by the Sahara sands.

Cattle at Muston Meadows

Muston Meadows is an ancient haymeadow and a National Nature Reserve in Leicestershire. The site is managed with a late-summer hay cut and is grazed in the winter by cattle. I visited one frosty morning in December and they were delighted to have a visitor, charging over before stopping and checking me out. They then accompanied me all the way off the site so perhaps their role is security as well as site management!

Icicles under Burbage Bridge

On a snowy cold day in December, I took a walk through the white from the Longshaw Estate in Derbyshire, through woodland and across tors and encountering these beautiful icicles hanging beneath the bridge which takes the road over Burbage Brook.

Clematis seedhead – Clematis vitalba

These are also commonly known as old man’s beard and it’s easy to see why! I came across these seedheads in a hedgerow on a survey site in Bedfordshire where the wind had left them with this shape over time – I liked the feeling of motion which they held even when still. It seemed appropriate for seeds which are waiting for their time to take to the wind and begin a new plant elsewhere in the landscape.

Teasel seedheads – Dipsacus fullonum

On the same site as the clematis above, I also found an amazing stand of teasel seedheads. These striking plants are excellent for wildlife – in the summer they provide an abundance of nectar for pollinators such as bees and butterflies, and the winter seedheads will play host to flocks of goldfinches foraging for the seeds.

Red mason bees

May 11, 2016Grantham Ecology1 Comment

Red mason bees are solitary bees which are commonly found in gardens and urban areas. Many people will have seen the bee hotels which you can buy now from many garden centres and similar locations which are perfectly designed to create a nest site for this species.

There are several species of mason bee in the UK but the red mason – Osmia rufa – is the most common. They are prolific pollinators – estimated to be 120-200x more efficient than the honey bee which makes them a real benefit to any garden, especially those with fruit trees whose flowering period coincides well with the time that these bees are on the wing.

Red mason bees naturally nest in hollow plant stems or holes in cliffs. They also make use of the crumbling mortar of old buildings but their needs can be easily accommodated in the hollow tubes which are the common constituents of bee hotels. After mating, the female bees lay their eggs in the nesting tubes. Each egg is laid and provisioned with pollen and nectar for the young to eat when it hatches. After each egg is laid, a mud-wall is created between it and the next cell which she lays to that the tube, when complete, is a series of individual nest cells. Think a packet of rolo’s where the wrapper is the tube, the chocolate is the mud partition and the caramel inside is the egg, nectar and pollen!

In order to build these cells, the mason bees need to gather mud from a source close to the nest. I found such a ‘mud mine’ down by the banks of the River Witham in Grantham. Close to the waters edge, where the mud is damp, there were small holes which were visited by several bees at the same time, all intent on extracting mud. They scrape this from the surface, roll it into a ball and carry it back to their nest in their mandibles. They seem very faithful to a good location – some of the bees were scraping the mud from the banks on their own, but many used the same spot which had clearly been excavated by several bees over many trips.

Red mason bees are on the wing from around March until June so keep an eye out for them in your back garden and, if you can, provide them with their own nesting site in the form of a bee hotel. If there is no mud source nearby, you can help them out with a tray of damp soil which they will use to line their cells. Your payment will be the services of a highly efficient garden pollinator!

Juvenile blackbird practising nest building?

Video June 4, 2014Grantham Ecology2 Comments

I left a trailcam recording a blackbird nest after the chicks had fledged, hoping they might return to have a second brood. The parent blackbirds have subsequently set up a new nest elsewhere in the garden for a second brood but I have a few clips of this juvenile blackbird apparently practising repairing/building the abandoned nest it was born in – after these clips it wasn’t recorded at the nest again for the following week and no further use of the nest has occurred so far. I thought this was rather interesting behaviour – it reminded me of a child playing with a doll’s house as though it was practising for when it was grown up! Any thoughts or observations on this behaviour would be welcomed!

Brimstone butterflies – the perfect harbinger of spring

March 11, 2014Grantham Ecology7 Comments

Brimstone butterflies are the perfect harbinger of spring. They are typically the first butterfly seen in most years – excepting the occasional tatty small tortoiseshell or peacocks – and they always look pristine. Perhaps the connection with spring is so strong because they confirm our own perception of the first spring day – they need the warmth and clemency of sun and still blue-skies in February or March to take to the wing.

I saw my first brimstone of 2014 a couple of week ago but they were out in abundance last Sunday – settling on the south-facing hedge in the garden to warm up and bask in the sunshine. A short drive across the Vale of Belvoir saw almost every hedge graced with at least one which bobbed and bounced around the periphery of the foliage.

The brimstone is one of five or six species of butterfly which hibernate in the UK. You may see much tattier and battered small tortoiseshell, comma and peacock butterflies at this time of year along with the occasional clouded yellow and, increasingly, the red admiral. All of these, excepting the brimstone and the clouded yellow, are in the Nymphalidae family – a group which includes many other familiar UK butterflies including the fritillaries and the browns. The brimstone is in the Pieridae family which also includes the whites.

Hibernating peacock butterflies which find dark places such as sheds, roof spaces, tunnels and tree cavities to close up their wings and wait for spring to return.

Brimstone butterflies are a single brood species – the adult butterflies emerge in August and are on the wing, feeding and building up fat reserves, until they go into hibernation at the end of autumn. The butterflies, also called imago, re-emerge early in the spring to mate and begin their life cycle once more.

The comma and small tortoiseshell butterflies, in the Nymphalidae family, tend to have two broods in a year – that is the first batch of imago will mate and lay eggs which hatch and give rise to a second batch of imago in the same year. The red admiral has a single brood but the prevalence of imago is affected by migrating butterflies from the continent. The peacock has rather a similar life cycle to the brimstone.

It is always noticeable that the brimstone butterflies look pristine in spring, whereas the commas and small tortoiseshells often look much more battered and tatty. I was hoping this might be explained simply by the Nymphalidae butterflies being older – that is they had been on the wing longer in the previous season before hibernation, but the phenology doesn’t seem to bear this out for all. It could explain the particularly tatty comma and small tortoiseshell butterflies, if some of these are surviving stragglers from the first brood of the previous year.

There is still a difference in family between the brimstone and all of the other hibernating butterflies and I wonder whether the brimstone is simply a more structurally sound butterfly, with stronger wings which are less likely to deteriorate than the other species. The species is the longest living of the UK species, at a year, so the imago would need to be hard-wearing! I would be fascinated to know an answer to this if anybody can advise.

The brimstone butterflies feed on a range of nectar sources – as they are so early to emerge they rely initially upon long-flowering species such as dandelion, or early flowering species such as bluebell, cowslip and primrose. The key food plant in the autumn is thistles with a range of other species also used.

The larval food plant is surprisingly specific and not abundantly common – they require buckthorn or alder buckthorn. The species name for the butterfly eludes to this link – rhamni which refers to the latin for buckthorn – Rhamnus sp. This is a shrub which can be found in hedgerows and woodlands but is not nearly as common as other similar species such as hawthorn or blackthorn. I do not know of any buckthorn in the area but the presence of the brimstone butterflies clearly proves its existence! The comparative scarcity of buckthorn has been directly addressed by Butterfly Conservation in the past with planting programmes to increase their presence within landscapes and this has had a positive effect on the brimstone populations.

The female is much paler than the male – I saw one in the distance on Sunday which I at first through to be a large white until I crept closer and saw the distinctive veined, contoured folded wing which looks so much like a leaf.

Don’t forget the bats in National Nestbox Week!

February 22, 2014February 22, 2014Grantham EcologyLeave a comment

This week is National Nestbox Week which encourages people to put up nest boxes in their gardens. This is a great idea and focuses attention on providing these features as the birds first start to pair up and scope out nest sites. We have birds nesting in various locations around the garden but, for some reason, I had never got around to adding some more purpose built nesting habitats for them – something I have now rectified!

But why stop at providing habitat for garden birds? Don’t forget that gardens are vital to some of our most common bat species, such as the common pipistrelle and the brown long-eared. Attract bats to your garden and you will be able to watch fantastic aerial displays as the sun goes down throughout the summer. There are lots of tips from the BCT on how to attract bats to your garden.

There are many designs of bat box on the market and plenty of designs which you can make for yourself. I realised that the offcuts of wood we had in the shed provided everything I needed to make a Kent Bat Box – one of the simplest designs and one I would strongly recommend to anybody putting one together for the first time. This box is very simple and creates cavities which small bats such as common pipistrelle can use as a roost. This video shows the kind of tight niches which are used by pipistrelle bats.

Bats fly in the garden regularly throughout the summer and one of them – probably a brown long-eared – uses the porch as a feeding perch. I know this from the little piles of moth wings which suddenly appear some mornings, often 5-10 of them. The bats bite off the wings of the moths they have captured, eating only the nutritious bodies of the moths and leaving the wings to flutter down. Just opposite the porch is a holly tree and this struck me as the ideal place to put a box, seeing as I know the bats use this little niche of the house and garden.

Moth wings in the porch - they have caught on the spider's web on their way down but there are tell-tale signs that a bat is responsible - especially as so many appear overnight in a single night! — Moth wings in the porch – they have caught on the spider’s web on their way down but there are tell-tale signs that a bat is responsible – especially as so many appear overnight in a single night!

I also put up another box on the tree beside it, facing the opposite direction. We were recently called out to climb a tree to check a bat box where the tree was to be removed. The bat box had only been up for a few months and was clearly un-used so we were able to inspect it and take it down without causing disturbance to any bats. There was nowhere else on the site to place the box so I have put it up in the garden instead – I am interested to see if either of the boxes are used and whether a particular design might be preferred.

If you are putting up a bat box, make sure it is high above the ground (at least 4m if possible) to deter predators and ensure that there is not too much disturbance to the bats as you use the garden. Another important point is to ensure that there is a good fly-in and fly-out route for the bats. This can be achieved by imagining the bats dropping from the entrance in an arc which is 1-2m out and 2-3m down. If you have left this space for them, they should be able to enter and exit the box. Another important point is to allow them to emerge into some cover, if possible, or out along a hedge or tree line. Bats use these vegetative features for commuting around the landscape and placing your box in such a location should increase the chances of a bat moving in.

The designs for the Kent Bat Box can be found here and all you need is a plank of wood, some smaller wood for battons, a saw and a drill (or hammer and nails). The design is very simple to follow but below shows the step-by-step progress of the construction.

The log shed with offcuts we've been given for the log burner - but there is a Bat Box there just waiting to be built! — The log shed with offcuts we’ve been given for the log burner – but there is a Bat Box there just waiting to be built!

The constituant parts of the Kent Bat Box, cut to size. At the bottom you can see the three boards of varying lengths, at the top right is the top for the box, top left are the battons used to create the cavities.

This shows how the main pieces fit together - the battons are attached to the long-sides of the boards which are going to be placed one on top of the other onto the longest back-board. — This shows how the main pieces fit together – the battons are attached to the long-sides of the boards which are going to be placed one on top of the other onto the longest back-board.

The pieces constructed in the last image are placed, one on top of the other, with the smallest at the top and the largest (the backboard) at the bottom to create the two cavities which will form the roosting sites for the bats. These are drilled securely together.

Attach the top. As with all bat boxes, the crevices will be downwards facing as bats will land and climb up int the crevices to roost. The top will keep the cavities dry.

A view from the base of the Kent Bat Box showing the crevices which will for the roosting opportunities for the bats.

The chosen location for the bat box - after a bit of 'gardening' to clear leaves and twigs away from the fly-in to the box. — The chosen location for the bat box – after a bit of ‘gardening’ to clear leaves and twigs away from the fly-in to the box.

The new bat box securely attached using a bungee cord to ensure that the fixing does not damage the tree as it grows. The box is about 4m off the ground with a clear fly-in below, opening onto further shrubs and cover for the bats.

Awakening ladybirds

March 26, 2012Grantham EcologyLeave a comment

Anybody who has been out in their garden over this weekend of beautiful spring weather will probably have noticed quite how many ladybirds are waking up and sunning themselves. They have hibernated through the winter, in clusters, but they are spreading around once more.

The ones photographed here are the commonest UK species – the seven spot ladybird. Their scientific name is another example of a nice agreement between the latin and the common names; Coccinella 7-punctata – punctata meaning a point. Interestingly, the seven-spot ladybird can have between 0 and 9 spots but 7 is the most common.

Ladybirds are useful additions to anybody’s garden – their larvae are voracious predators and be very happy in the greenhouse devouring aphids and other small pests.

There are 46 different species of ladybird in the UK but you would recognise 26 of them as ladybirds with their distinctive shape and colouration. There are several online guides to the other species including an app for the iPhone. The FSC field sheets are a brilliant handy guide to many common species and habitats and their app includes the ladybird ID guide for free, with the option to buy more ID guides within the app. You can also use the CEH’s online ID tool or a simple sheet showing you the different species from the ladybird survey website.

Some species of ladybird are in decline in the UK and experts want to know how much of an impact the harlequin ladybird (Harmonia axyridis) might be having on the native species. The harlequin is an invasive species from North America and is easily distinguishable from the natives. There are plenty of harlequins around Grantham, including these which woke up on the windowsill in our office. You can record sightings of harlequin ladybirds at this website and help to keep chart the spread of this species.

The UK ladybird survey also welcome records – if you are unsure of your ID, you can send them a digital photograph and this can be used by their experts to determine just which one you have. Their website, with links to recording forms, is here.