peak district – 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.

Heather Hanami anyone?

September 1, 2017September 1, 2017Grantham Ecology4 Comments

One of the cultural aspects I love about Japan is the observation and celebration of the seasons. This is manifested perhaps most strongly in the Hanami – flower viewing.

In the springtime, the cherries across the country put on spectacular displays and people flock for celebrations and selfies. There is a blossom forecast on the weather report to allow people to plan their visits; people gather with friends and families to have picnics and parties under the trees in the parks; and there are special blossom trains to take you on scenic journeys through the cherry orchards.

Whilst cherries are popular as street and city trees in the UK, and are occasionally planted in such numbers as to be worth of a pilgrimage, I wonder whether our most appropriate focus for Hanami might be heather viewing.

Many of our upland areas are transformed in August and September as heath and moorland are washed purple with the flowering of heather. The effect is truly spectacular and well worthy of a pilgrimage one sunny late-summer day. Putting aside the question of ‘naturalness’, and certainly the practises which are predominantly responsible for the habitat, the flowering of the heather represents an easily accessible way for everybody to appreciate nature and reconnect with the shifting of the seasons.

Before the autumn leaves turn – a phenomena equally enjoyed by the Japanese as momojigari – I’d suggest a sojourn to the uplands to enjoy one of the last great shows of summer while you can!

If you do take a trip – keep your eyes peeled for the smart little heather colleges bees which time their lifecycle around the flowering of this species. Find out more about them in my blog post here!

Heather Colletes bees

September 8, 2016September 9, 2016Grantham Ecology2 Comments

August is a fairly spectacular sight in the Peak District – up away from the arable fields, the heather turns the landscape pink and purple amongst the gritstone. Such a vast resource does not go un-tapped by the natural world and one solitary bee in particular has evolved to exploit the nectar wich underpins this aesthetic abundance.

The heather colletes bee – *Colletes succinctus*

This beautiful little solitary bee is known as the heather colletes – Colletes succinctus. These are slightly smaller than a honeybee but have a similar banded pattern to their abdomen. They are a member of the colletes family – known as the plasterer bees.

These sandy paths, studded with gritstone and lined with heather, offer ideal nesting sites for the heather colletes bees with open substrate for burrows and a plentiful food source just next door.

One of the first misconceptions about solitary bees is that you will find them in isolation. Where the conditions are right however, many species of these bees form dense nesting aggregations. The ‘solitary’ epithet refers to the fact that they do not partition roles in the same way as the social honey bees, such as workers and queens. As we walked the sandy soils of the National Trust‘s Longshaw Estate, we saw these little bees feeding on the heather – their bodies curled almost foetally around the flowers – and soon started spotting their nesting holes too!

At first we saw a few holes here and there, but soon we were coming across dense aggregations of the pencil-sized nesting burrows. Much to the bemusement of a group of American tourists hiking up to the tor, I spent the next 20 minutes on my knees watching their coming and going – the video below shows some their entering and leaving their nesting holes.

The males emerge a little before the females, who themselves appear in August to co-incide with the flowering of the ling. I watched the females leaving their holes and flying up to the heather in whose roots they were nesting. Here they gather nectar and also pollen to stock the larders of their nesting burrows. The females layer their burrows with pollen and then lay their eggs which overwinter as pre-adults (eggs to larvae) to emerge the following summer.

Heather colletes bee emerging from a nest burrow amongst the heather roots

The males hang around the nesting burrows and mate with the females as they fly to and fro – sometimes a mating ball will form where several males will attempt to mate with a single female, grappling together until one wins out. I did not manage any good images of this behaviour, although I would recommend a read of Phil Gate‘s Guardian Country Diary piece which has a cracking photograph of the mating bees.

As the weather warmed up, the previously empty holes increasingly revealed their inhabitants which responded to the changing conditions and began to pop out

One thing which was noticable was the difficulty the bees had in keeping their footing on the loose, sandy soil. Often they would slip and fall, or otherwise engage their wings just to stay positioned on the ground. Coupled with their propensity for nesting on bare ground, an opportunity often afforded by well-walked paths, it much be a feat of engineering to maintain the integrity of these burrows in such substrate. The video below shows a couple of such incidents in slow motion:

I took a few more slow-motion videos of their flight as they enter and leave their nesting burrows. They would often land close to their burrow and the look around a while before successfuly locating their hole. I wonder how they know which is their entrance, amongst so many others. From watching other mining bees prviously, they seem to use landmarks in such a way that adding or removing something from the immediate vicinity of the entrance, such as a twig or leaf, can leave them apparently unsure about their home.

Just a few clips of them leaving in slow motion to finish off! As always if you want to find out more about a bee species in the UK, including these heather colletes, I would suggest checking out the BWARS species accounts and Steve Falk‘s Flickr page including images and the text which accompanies the images in his excellent book.