Author Archives: Julie Lane

Salcey forest birdsong walk 24 May 2016

Willow Warbler, by Harry Appleyard, Furzton Lake 4 May2016

Willow Warbler by Harry Appleyard, Furzton Lake 4 May 2016

Sixteen of us met in Salcey forest this Tuesday and spent the evening concentrating on brushing up our birdsong ID skills. Martin Kincaid and Peter Garner were our experts and we had a great evening strolling along the rides listening to the evening chorus.

The thrush family were in full voice with mistle and song thrushes and blackbirds singing beautifully. As were the warblers with numerous chiffchaff, willow warblers, garden warblers and blackcaps  warbling away in the undergrowth! But the highlights of the evening were a grasshopper warbler in full song in an area of scrubby willow, a male cuckoo calling and flying around and a female heard very briefly, and a group of about four ravens that we disturbed in an area of conifers.

We went home happy, having all learnt a bit more thanks to Peter and Martin.

Use this link if like to learn about grasshopper warblers and hear their song.

 

Julie Lane

THE ONE THAT LIVED TO TELL THE TALE by Martin Kincaid

On Wednesday 6th January I arrived at Campbell Park Pavilion to be greeted with the news that a RSPCA officer wished to speak to me about an otter that had been picked up in Ouzel Valley Park. ‘Great’, I said, ‘another dead otter – a great start to 2016’. However, for once this was not the case – the creature was very much alive.

A quick conversation with the RSPCA officer, Sam, revealed that the young otter cub had been found by a couple walking along the Ouzel between Walton Hall and Woughton on the Green on the afternoon of Tuesday 5th. The cub had been lying, apparently lifeless, right next to the gravel path. The good Samaritans bundled it up and took it home where they warmed it up in warm towels before Sam came to collect it at 6pm. She then took it directly to Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital near Aylesbury where it remains.

When first found the cub, which we now know is female and no more than 5-6 weeks old, was very lethargic and could only produce faint squeeks and slowly open its eyes. It was probably not far from death. Speaking to staff at Tiggywinkles yesterday I was delighted to hear that she is now a bundle of energy, guzzling down milk (still not fully weened) and a real handful! Apparently they very rarely get otters brought to the hospital, certainly not cubs. The youngster has a long road ahead of her before, if ever, she can be released into the wild. Teaching otters to hunt and feed themselves is a major challenge, but at least her chances of survival have sky rocketed.

My guess is that with the heavy rainfall over the first weekend of 2016 and the rapid rise in river levels, the mother otter was forced to move her young from her holt or den and somehow this little one was left behind in the panic. I wonder if she knows how lucky she is!!

Books recommended by society members for our book review evening 15th September

 

Cocker, Mark (2014)  Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet Jonathan Cape

The book consists of 140 columns over a 12 year period from The Guardian, The Guardian Weekly and other publications. It’s written like a journal and most of pieces are based on his experiences and observations in and around the village of Claxton, Norfolk although writings about other places to which he has travelled, are included.  Mark Cocker says ‘Claxton is above everything a book about place, but is also a celebration of the way in which a particular location can give shape and meaning to one’s whole outlook.’

Contribution by Mervyn Dobbin

 

Trilobite! : Eyewitness to Evolution by Richard Fortey, HarperCollins Flamingo 2001, ISBN 0 00 655138 6.

Contribution by Steve Brady

 

The Dragonfly diaries – The story of Europe’s first Dragonfly Sanctuary

by Ruary Mackenzie Dodds

 

Gods of the Morning: A Birds Eye View of a Highland Year

By John Lister Kaye

Contribution by Julie Lane

 

H is for Hawk – Helen Macdonald

Published 2014, Vintage

ISBN 978-0-099-57545-0

Look forward to seeing you at Hazeley Wood, 10.30 on Tuesday.

Contribution by Jean Cooke

Six books recommended by Mike LeRoy (see below – apologies for the layout but there was some annoying formatting that I couldn’t get rid of!)

 

    1. ‘Meadowland: The private life of an English Field’
  • On Midsummer’s eve he had had what he describes as “one of the strangest moments of my life” (page 143) … but I will leave you to find out about that for yourselves.
  • In July, he fits a T-bar cutter alongside his ancient tractor to start cutting his meadow, but it is broken irreparably on a stone. He can’t get a replacement for days and all his neighbours are hard at work mowing their hay, so can’t help him. He gets out his scythe and over four days scythes 3 acres, getting up at dawn and working right through, with bloodied hands and aching limbs. “Nothing in the last ten years of farming has given me such satisfaction.” (page 173). He found out why hay-cutters tied up their trouser legs when they were scything. A vole ran up his leg and only vigorous, noisy dancing shook it off before it climbed all the way up his trousers.
  • John Lewis-Stempel shares one of my pet hates: people who move to live in the countryside, then subject the roadside verges outside their hedges to be closely-mowed lawns.
  • Sometimes he gets a surprise: “There was an unexpected visitor in the field today. As I walked down the bank in the morning haze the blackbirds were clamouring their liquid alarm, then: dismissive wasp-yellow eyes. Scaly yellow legs. Black metal talons. All these things flashed before me. I am not sure who was the more surprised, the female Sparrowhawk or I as she came up over the hedge. I could feel the displaced breath from her wings as she flicked up over my head, then away, a sullen grey bullet. Certainly I was the more scared; for malevolent verve the Sparrowhawk is unrivalled. They are always coiled, ready, dangerous. When the first gunsmiths needed a name for a small firearm they settled on the falconry term for a male Sparrowhawk. A musket. …” (page 99)
  • Once, when watching, a shrew runs over his leg and he watches it for ages: “In the shaded but desiccated land of the hedge bottom, where I am crouched, a dun shrew runs over my leg. She is careless of my presence and pokes around in the old leaves in an amphetamine frenzy. Over the next ten minutes this tiny, long-trunked mammal puts on a horror show, although one can only admire her murderous dexterity. She dismembers five beetles with rapid movements of her jaws, before rubbing and rolling a grey slug with her snout, presumably to tenderize it. Occasionally she nips it; her saliva contains a poison that immobilises and eventually kills the victim. She also wolfs down woodlice, preferring the Philoscia muscorum louse to Porcellio scaber. Between the courses she washes assiduously. No dunce, she refuses to snack on a large black beetle that looks capable of fighting back.” (pages 129/130)
  • He can write … vividly … ecstatically. He tells his account of his meadow taking the months of the year in sequence. His writing is of closely-observed nature, mixed with snippets of history, country lore and knowledge of wildlife. This is a man who watches nature for an hour or more, sat still under a field hedge. He knows his patch of land intimately. He feels the back of a hedgehog … and gets one of its spines up his finger-nail. He observes wildlife at close quarters. He works out that the Moles straight gallery parallel to a ditch enables it to pass through soft ground full of worms to eat, but not too damp to flood (page 64). His description of the call of the Wood Pigeon is (page 131) “take-two-cows, taffy-take-two”.
  • ‘Meadowland’ is a book by a countryman and farmer whose family have lived in the same Herefordshire valley for at least four centuries. John Lewis-Stempel is also a writer and a highly-observant naturalist. The book is ‘Meadowland: The private life of an English Field’. He lives on and works a small-holding in which is a 5.7 acre field called Lower Meadow, a wet and rather unproductive flood-meadow skirted by the little river Escley. I often used to travel through the broad valley where he lives. The Golden Valley is as far west as you can get in Herefordshire and to its immediate west are the Black Mountains of Wales with Offa’s Dyke Path leading across its ridges on its way north to Hay-on-Wye.
  • by John Lewis-Stempel (2014: Doubleday)
  • ‘Meadowland: The private life of an English Field’ by John Lewis-Stempel (2014: Doubleday).
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  • ‘The Moth Snowstorm: Nature & Joy’Former environment editor of The Independent, winner of an RSPB award for ‘outstanding services to conservation’ and awards from BTO and ZSL, in 2008 Michael McCarthy wrote the captivating book ‘Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo’. In his new book, ‘The Moth Snowstorm: Nature & Joy’, he intertwines personal experiences, both testing and joyful, which have shaped his life. Above all he aims to explain how crucial is our relationship with nature.
  • by Michael McCarthy (2015: John Murray)

 

    1. ‘The Naming of the Shrew: A curious history of Latin names’John Wright’s book is all about the names we give to living things. He explains the long history of their Latin names, why they are like this and how they have changed. He tells us about Linneaeus and many other fathers of taxonomy and finishes with challenging material about taxonomy, cladistics and what difference DNA is making to our understanding of species and how we name them.
  •  
  • by John Wright (2014: Bloomsbury)

 

    1. ‘The Fly Trap’‘The Fly Trap’ takes you into the remote world of its Swedish author on the remote island where he lives and to his absolute focus on finding Hoverflies. It is a wacky book, showing a wry sense of humour that also takes us back to the extraordinary lives of some significant entomologists such as René Malaise. It is a meandering but engrossing account.
  •            
  • by Frederik Sjöberg (2014: Particular Books)

 

    1. ‘The Ash Tree’Oliver Rackham probably knew more about ancient woodlands, their history and ecology, than anyone. He died in February this year and completed this small book only last year. He was a brilliant botanist, plant ecologist and historian and had a close knowledge of plant pathology. He had long warned of the risks of importing plants from all around the world. He once wrote “The greatest threat to trees and forests is the tendency of Homo sapiens deliberately to mix up all the world’s trees and inadvertently to mix up all the world’s tree diseases”. When he wrote ‘The Ash Tree’ this enabled him to say about the Government’s belated response to Ash dieback disease “I told you so”; but the book does much more than that, it tells of the history and importance of this tree, with a candid view of its future.
  •  
  • by Oliver Rackham (2014: Little Toller)

 

    1. ‘Nature in Towns & Cities’David Goode was once deputy to Derek Ratcliffe when he was Chief Scientist to the Nature Conservancy (now Natural England) when they took on the government about thoughtless tree planting across the rare Flow Country peat bogs of northern Scotland. Then he set up the London Ecology Unit which pioneered urban ecology that had a huge influence on good ecological management of London’s open spaces. His career concluded as director of environment to Ken Livingstone when he was Mayor of London. His book ‘Nature in Towns & Cities’ pulls together all this knowledge and on-the-ground experience in a volume in the prestigious Collins New Naturalist series. Milton Keynes gets some positive mentions, and a map of our greenspace and a photo of Shenley Wood. He is more of a bird and ecology specialist than an entomologist, but there is a limit to how much can be fitted in such a wide-ranging and informative book as this. It has been described as the best book on urban ecology. It is certainly readable and informative and probably well deserves that accolade.
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  • by David Goode (2014: William Collins, New Naturalist)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Man-eaters of Kumaon

by Jim Corbett

Contribution by Linda Murphy

 

The Old Ways – a journey on foot

By Robert Macfarlane

Contribution by Viola Reed

 

2 books by Roger Deakin

‘Waterlog: A swimmer’s Journey Through Brittain’

‘Wildwood: A journey through Trees’

 

Contribution by Michèle Welborn

 

I have not included the full details of all these books but they are easy enough to find online.

Julie Lane

Howe Park Family Wildlife Day held in memory of Bernard Frewin

Howe Park Family Wildlife Day held in memory of Bernard Frewin

Howe Park Family Wildlife Day held in memory of Bernard Frewin by Julie Lane

Howe Park Wood Education and Visitor Centre

Howe Park Wood Education and Visitor Centre by Peter Hassett

This day was held on Saturday 4th July in memory of Bernard Frewin who was a founding member of our society and who did so much to promote and protect wildlife in our local patch.

Milton Keynes Natural History Society display boards at Howe Park Wood

MKNHS display boards at Howe Park Wood. Photo courtesy of The Parks Trust

The day was held in conjunction with the Parks Trust and was a great success with many families with young children turning out to enjoy a day in the sun, spending their time wandering around the environs of the lovely new Education centre and the beautiful woodland. Displays including Owls (all rescued birds), reptiles, bats were located around the centre. Inside the Centre the MKNHS display (beautifully maintained by Tony Wood) took pride of place alongside some lovely photos that Harry Appleyard had taken in the wood. Then in the wood itself there was a small trail consisting of a selection of locally caught moths by Gordon, a Nature Detectives Quiz put together by myself and Jo Handford, a wonderful little grass snake and information on local reptiles courtesy of Martin Kincaid and finally some local bird ringers  who were delighted when they caught many more birds than they would normally expect at that time of the day. There were also wildlife walks led by our experts Roy, Harry and Alan Nelson.

Eileen, Bernard Frewin’s wife came with her extended family and was delighted by the way the day had turned out and I am sure Bernard would have been thrilled to see so many people enjoying themselves.

So thank you to all who took part and helped on the day and a particular thank you to The Parks Trust for hosting the event. It was a wonderful collaborative effort and one it would be good to repeat sometime.

Julie Lane

Ouse Valley Amble 23rd June

The weather was wonderful – one of those still balmy summers evenings that are rare indeed!

We set off at a leisurely pace past Olney church and the Mill house and along the beautiful river Ouse.  My one slight reservation about the walk was that the fields beside the river are full of rather large bullocks, but they are placid beasts and I wasnt particularly concerned. However what I didn’t count on was the presence of the farmer in his truck who had really stirred them up and at one point we had 50 plus huge beasts gambolling merrily around us  – not an experience for the faint-hearted!! But society members are a sturdy breed and no-one seemed unduly worried.

The river bank was alive with banded demoiselles, red eyed damselflies and other assorted damselflies and we even saw a signal crayfish lurking in the water (not such a welcome sighting). The evening really stepped up however when we spotted three hares in the field on the opposite bank, followed by a bevy of 30-40 twittering house martins collecting mud from the river’s edge and then a sparrowhawk flying over hoping to catch out an unwary martin. Common terns patrolled up and down the river occasionally plunging down into the water for minnows and we saw one male goosander and a few of the resident barnacle geese.

We ambled on to the bridge over the river to Clifton Reynes and managed to locate Roy’s slender tufted sedge down by the water’s edge. The river is lovely on this stretch as the opposite bank is wooded and was alive with birdsong (thrushes, chaffinches, black caps etc ) as the evening drew in. The reflections of the reeds and trees in the river were perfect as there was not a breath of wind.

Eventually we turned for home having had a truly magical evening.

Julie Lane

Guess the goose updated

photographed in Emberton Park by Julie Lane.

Hybrid goose

Above is a photo of a goose taken by Julie Lane on 4th May. I think it may be a cross between a Canada and a domestic goose as both are in the park but maybe its just a melanistic Canada goose. He/she was all alone so obviously not accepted as a partner by any other self respecting goose!

Ian Saunders has has emailed that in his opinion “Guess the Goose” in News – despite its slim build, I don’t think that Julie’s bird is a Canada hybrid, as all the ones I have ever seen have been dark, and look more like Canadas “gone off” than this mainly white bird (which would be albinistic, rather than melanistic).

Judging by its leg and bill colouration (which are both dark in Canadas), I would guess that it’s more likely simply an “ugly” domestic goose, or a hybrid between two (or more) domestic breeds.”

Ian invites other members to submit their opinions on the bird in Julie’s photo.

10May15 Julie’s response:
“In reply to Ian’s interesting and welcome contribution  I would just add that the reason I thought it might be a hybrid between Canadas and domestic geese is that historically those two hang around together in mixed flocks in the park and have done for many years. I thought that this might be the result of so much hanging around together!! He/she seems to be a slimline version of the domestic white geese (the ribbed affect on the neck is also a domestic goose attribute) with some dark feathers thrown in. I should have checked my terminology re the use of the word ‘melanistic’ which I was a bit worried about at the time, but when you think about it this goose could also be a very slim melanistic domestic goose or a albinistic canada goose!! Haha!!”