FOCUSING -IN

 

FOCUSING –IN .

A lifetime of itchy feet, indulged in the past fifty years by frequent travel, now has to be radically modified. Not that I don’t appreciate the endlessly varied landscapes of this country, nor even our immediate home patch; after all, I cut my teeth in the English countryside. But I have always, after settling back home for a few months, have again had the overwhelming urge either to revisit favourite places  or to investigate new ones. In the past, this was always followed up with plans, preparations, and departures.

Now, the urge has to be translated into sessions of gardening or a short officially-allowed walk. The focus is close-up, the attention on familiar things sharpened. Just wait a minute! Pause, look carefully, listen, think!  There is always something new to be noticed, or the already-known to be appreciated more fully with sharpened senses.

 

 

My earliest flower memory is of primroses and particularly of their sweet demure fragrance. This must be from family holidays in South Devon at Easter, seeing and picking primroses from the banks. These holidays stopped in 1939 so I can’t have been much more than three. We didn’t have primroses in our part of Hertfordshire, my home county. The delicate scent of these flowers takes me right back through my life every time I smell them now. Flawless in their simple form, humble tone rather than the more strident value of so many other yellow flowers, they were my first lesson in botany! Mum would point out the pin-eyed and thrum-eyed forms. Later I learnt that the ‘thrums are the stamens up in the top of the flower tube, ready for the pollen to be picked up by a foraging bee and transferred to the  stigma, the ‘pin eye’ on another plant, thus ensuring cross-pollination.

 

Thrum-eyed, with stamens showing.

 

Pin-eyed, with stigma showing.

 

Onions! Another smell, evocative of spring. Ramsons grow rampantly in many woods and damp places especially in the west country. To walk among them is to send the smell of mild onion into the air. The round heads of white flowers and the shiny oval leaves can be eaten in salads. They propagate madly from tiny slim bulbous offsets and once in the garden are almost impossible to get rid of. Eating them just doesn’t keep up!

 

Ramsons (Allium ursinum) or sometimes known as Wild Garlic.

 

In spring, and a sound now, the clear sweet falling cadence of a Willow Warbler, newly returned from its winter in Africa. These little greenish warblers are best differentiated from the similar Chiffchaff by their very distinctive songs. I don’t think they are as common as they used to be but we can always hear a few on the scrubby slopes of Kit Hill nearby.

Willow Warbler

 

Running water, tumbling, rushing, trickling, bubbling, gushing, roaring, crashing... so many ways of combining the sound and the ever-mesmerizing sight of moving water, from soothing to exhilarating. 

 

River Fowey, rushing down off the moor at Golitha Falls.

 Look at the delicate tracery of veins on insects’ wings. Some species can only be identified but the pattern of the veins.

A Mayfly (Green-winged Olive)

 

An Ichneumon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Painted Lady Butterfly

 

 Touch is one of the most sensuous of our senses. Stroke a silky Pussy Willow catkin in the early spring. Their silvery silk shines against a blue sky. It’s only the male catkins that look like this, and only before the golden fuzz of stamens emerge from the silk. The female catkins are a knobbly greenish mass of stigmas before producing a myriad silk-born seeds which float past in a breeze like a thin mist.

 

Silky male catkins of a 'Pussy Willow'

 

 Or stroke the velvety wing feather of an owl or buzzard. The feathers have a soft furry surface designed to muffle the sound of their wing beats as they pounce on their unwary prey. 

 A delight on a dewy  morning in late summer, to find before anyone else, a harvest of new button mushrooms. The small ones still conceal the baby pink gills under the domed white cap. I like to eat them raw, savouring the delicate flavour with the almost crisp plump feeling as you bite into them.

 

Field Mushrooms

  

Taste the salt on your skin after a day’s exertion in the heat. Tropical sweat bees home in to get the salt. Tiny and black, they can be intensely annoying; they tickle but don’t sting.

All five of our senses can be harnessed in this close focusing. I feel in my bones we have another, sixth, sense that hasn’t got a name and its site is somewhere in our sensibilities if you let yourself tune in. It can crop up in all sorts of circumstances. Count the rings on a felled tree trunk. Look at the distance between them, telling a story of the good and bad years it has lived through; the history it has witnessed.

 As a child, my most vivid impression from the Natural History Museum in London was the varnished cross-section of a giant tree, showing the long history of memorable events throughout the world that this tree had lived through. 

Our local landmark, referred to as “up by the Beech Tree” clung onto the top of a high retaining bank up our lane. As the years passed, ever-bigger lorries scraped their way past, damaging its roots. Every few years the great plates of a bracket fungus Grifolia erupted from the roots. I don’t think this fungus is a killer but it may have been weakening the tree. One night coming home in the dark from a meeting, we almost ran into it. It had fallen across the lane.

 

This Spruce tree shows good steady growth as a youngster. The closer rings show steady but slower growth as it got older, as it put on more height and girth.

 

Our landmark beech tree. The discoloured area indicates some sort of stress or disease, maybe caused by the bracket fungus. The Highways men had to saw off the trunk when it fell across the lane.

 From the long life of an ancient tree to the ephemeral beauty of the sparkling crystals of hoar frost on a cold quiet morning. Just breathe on them, and they are gone. 

Seize the moment!

 

 

 

 

IN SEARCH OF SPRING

IN SEARCH OF SPRING

How we used to take the freedom of movement for granted. One year, we’d planned to explore the Northumberland coast. The weather ‘Up North’ was vile and the forecast promised more of the same. By the time we turned north past Exeter, already heading towards a blackening sky we said ‘This is Stupid!’ and we turned round at the next junction and headed home. We picked up our passports and caught the next Brittany Ferry to France  for a several weeks’ trip in good weather!

Another year that freedom allowed us to escape the tail-end of a long and dreary British winter and to go to the unfolding spring migration in the south of Spain. We’d heard about the spectacle of migrating raptors coming over from Morocco across the Straits of Gibraltar so we booked into a small hotel between Algeciras and Tarifa, a bit to the west of Gibraltar, hired a car and had a look.

 

     View from our hotel balcony, looking down on a scrubby valley with the mountains of Africa in the near distance catching the last of the afternoon sun.

. Cetti’s and Blackcap song came clear above the sound of the stream below. Four or five, and later up to about fifteen Griffon Vultures circled high in the sky. The finale was a bunch of about six Storks, flying high.

In some ways  it was a good situation for this migration, but not so easy when it came to a more general look-round the area. The only main road was the very bendy, busy and fast coastal road. Access off it was mainly gated and padlocked farm tracks going inland and short spurs down to the coast on the other side.

However, despite these constraints, we managed to see plenty! Our first priority was to have a look at the raptor movement.  From the log:  “There are a series of lookout points along this stretch of the road with posters on boards illustrating the various raptors. Access is only legally possible from the correct side of the road. You aren’t supposed to cross the road nor park alongside it, though as we have known from other trips, Spanish roads seem largely to be constructed well up off the original ground, with a sudden and deep drop-off at the edge. No gentle pulling off to have a look at a bird or a plant; you’d smash the sump!’

From one of the lookouts.Africa looks very close, especially through the telescope.

  

According to the weather conditions we found that the birds’ directions and behaviour varied. Sometimes the following wind took them out of sight towards Gibraltar, sometimes too far west for us to see them well from our vantage point down a rough track below the coast road. If the wind was off-shore, they didn’t tackle the crossing; 

                                     If it was fine, the thermals lifted them high up.

If the weather was less promising they came in from the hills in Morocco, flying low over the sea and then rising with an effort, over our heads, to get over the ridge of land up behind us. These were the best views. Most days, we were conscious of various raptors flying over. There seemed to be a constant trickle rather than mass movement. 

Short-toed Eagle coming in low and lifting overhead to fly over the ridge behind us.

 

 This ridge just inshore in places was lined with wind turbines. The potential for slaughter seemed great, but we did watch Black Kites tackling this problem and they flew below the blades. Nevertheless, one worries.

 

 Rain and poor visibility drove us further west one day and we came upon the extensive ruins of a Roman city Baelo Claudia, in a bay. 

The ruins of Baelo Claudia

 

 We sat out the rain in the car park, watching Crested Larks running around on the gravel, undeterred by the weather.

The sun soon shone again and we got out among the flowers.

 

We explored the deserted ruins of a city we learned was a thriving commercial port in the early centuries AD before repeated earthquakes and pirate raids from across the straits made life unendurable. An important process and a valuable export was Garum. This is a pungent concentrated liquor derived from fermented fish offal and greatly prized in the Mediterranean countries in those times. The processing vats, together with well-preserved remains of a thriving city were fascinating. 

The fish-processing tanks.

 

 Temples, a theatre, a great paved forum, houses, shops, streets and the aqueduct bringing water in from the hills were all to be seen. They even had a system for running waste water and sewage down to the sea. There was a comprehensive info. centre too. 

 

A mosaic from an important house showed images of seine netting fish. It was quite moving to see the same method in use 2000 years ago. The info board told us tuna were caught in large quantities as they migrated though the Straits and they were salted in circular stone vats and exported to Tangiers.

We had the whole place to ourselves.

 

Inland the country was a mixture of hillsides with scrubby slopes and a few flowers but we suspected it was a late, wet spring and we were getting a lot of cold NW wind.  Birds were elusive. We kept seeing glimpses of Sardinian Warblers  and probably other species flitting up and diving into the depths of the bushes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scilla peruviana, a native of Spain despite its name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The coast road alternately passed stony cliffs and bays with dunes and blowing sand with low-lying and sometimes flooded farm land and huge wind farms.

From the log: “ Behind us was a great limestone crag, nearly vertical and heavily fissured. A shadow passing over made me look up, and near the top were two Griffon Vultures, one looking outwards, the other facing the cliff with outstretched wings like a cormorant. Trying to warm up in the cold wind. More shadows showed an Egyptian Vulture which did a couple of turns then flew off and two more Griffons flew in. In the middle of all this we saw a bright male Blue Rock Thrush sitting on a crest above, and a Wryneck called in the bushes below.

 

On the way back down we came across hundreds of metres of Iris germanica (Barbary Nut) now opened in the sun”

 

   The sandy ground at the head of the beach had a lovely dune flora with a few butterflies. It comes to something when you get excited about a few Large Whites! Some beetles (looking them up later they were Darkling Beetles) and masses of a handsome big Broomrape. Gannets and distant Shearwaters were flying out in the bay. 

 

Handsome Broomrapes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Darkling Beetles were quite common here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Spanish Festoon butterfly was a nice change from all the 'Cabbage Whites'.

 

 From the log on another day  " Went west again to the little town of Facinas , with tortuous narrow streets and white, flat-roofed houses. Soon we were out of it and up a very pot-holed track for a couple of Kms to a very muddy reservoir. Almost at once we saw Collared Pratincoles quite close. They were flying around, perching in the grass across the track among the cattle with their attendant Egrets.

Collared Pratincole.

  

Their white rumps and forked tails, elegant swooping flight made them quite distinctive. They repeatedly flew round and came to perch on the bank near us. In the half hour we lingered, we saw a Flamingo, a Greenshank in its dark summer plumage and several Yellow Wagtails were running around in the wet-lying ground at the side of the track. They had very dark slaty-blue heads, giving rise to much discussion about their race. These wagtails never quite seem to match up with the book!

Further along, clumps of Tamarisk were alive with finches and warblers.

A man passed us with what looked like a bag full of Allium triquetrum and further on again two chaps were sitting down and apparently cutting out the fleshy midribs of what looked like Artichoke leaves. There were great tufts of these Cardoon-like plants growing here. The men discarded the leaf-blades which they left in wilting heaps. Shortly after, the track was flooded and we turned back, stopping to look at a mixed flock of Corn Bunting, Linnets, Goldfinches, Spanish Sparrow and a Meadow Pipit.”

Going inland along the road to Vejar, we stopped to look at the comings and goings of a lot of jackdaws which were nesting in the clefts of a jagged roadside cliff. We had lovely views of both Booted and Short-toed Eagles apparently coming from the Gibraltar direction to the east of us. There was much activity gathering and wheeling over the hill crests behind us as if they were re-assembling after the crossing, to make their way onwards.  A tree-lined river ran below, with the fluffy outlines of juvenile Egrets perching in the branches. Looking back at the cliff we were puzzled by biggish black birds which looked like ragged flue brushes. We were astonished to see they were a couple of pairs of Bald Ibises 

We learnt later that these endangered birds, extinct in Europe and just hanging on in the Middle East and N. Africa, were introduced some years ago and have naturalized.

 

 Continuing from the log: “We turned off south on our way back to the hotel on what started as a good causeway above an area of rice paddies.

 

 

Wash-and-Brush-up time.Cattle and Little Egrets and a couple of Shovellers in the water.

 

Spoonbills.

 

  It was all heaving with Egrets, Herons, Storks, Mallards and Sacred Ibises. The road soon became badly pot-holed, then alternating stretches of dirt, cobbles and flooded dips. 

 

Cattle and their attendant Egrets.

 

We pressed on cautiously, lured on by the birds. Eventually after some heated discussion about the sense of going on, we found a (luckily unlocked) gate back onto the main coast road. We guessed from the amount of surface water that they’d had a lot of rain pretty recently. The hotel staff’s English wasn’t up to much discussion about the recent weather, and our minimal Spanish was no help. They seemed more interested in assuring us of ‘sunny tomorrow”

The only day we saw much of other people was on the Sunday when we went to the headland of Cape Trafalgar going towards Cadiz. From the log:“Parking up in a popular ‘Recreation Area’ we had a coffee  sitting at a cafe table among cyclists and walkers heading off among the pines. 

Then set off among the trees.

 

  We heard a Yaffle and Crested Tits and a found a  little orchid like a Twayblade. There were plenty of birds hiding in the canopy, and heard, eventually saw, Bee-eaters flying overhead. People were wandering about among the trees looking intently at the sandy ground and now and then stopping to stoop and cut something with pocket-knives. Then we tumbled to it. They were cutting wild Asparagus shoots  --  very wispy but no doubt young and tender. Perhaps the Artichoke leaf-stems we saw them cutting out the other day are a sort of ‘poor man’s asparagus’.

 

Strange fungus Clathrus ruber.

          A blue cousin of the Scarlet Pmpernel.

No visit is complete without a Hoopoe.

 

We found the week’s visit interesting despite the less-than pleasant weather and the difficulties of access, but there was a good variety of habitats. With hindsight, how we took those trips away for granted! Now, Locked Down in the depths of winter we have to change our mindset.  To learn to engage more with our immediate surroundings; ‘Less is More’, no bad thing even though it takes a bit of working at.

 I follow these Blogs:

www.northcornwallnaturalist.blogspot.com

www.musingsfromhigherdowngateandelsewhere.blogspot.com 

www.downgatebatman.blogspot.com