Gallimaufry is a great word. A colleague at an antiquarian bookshop was very fond of it and various other synonyms for miscellany. It’s a French stew. Olla podrida is a Spanish stew (pot pourri is the direct French equivalent), also used by the book cataloguer to my mystification at the time, salmagundi and macédoine are mixed salads. Most of the synonyms I have found are to do with food: smorgasbord, hotchpoch or hodgepodge. Anyway, this post is one.
Badger sett survey April 2025
To my slight embarrassment, having lived here for 25 years, there turns out to be a wildlife haven, soon to become an official nature reserve, just over ten minutes’ drive away. This was the setting for the survey on Sunday where we found the setts already recorded and one which wasn’t (I found that one, but it wasn’t hard – I just followed the very obvious run). They are quite spread out, I think because the badgers have a large, safe space and they make the most of it because they can. It must be very busy at night – there are lots of foxholes too. I would love to give the location but badger baiters and killers mean that it would be unwise to do so. Thames Water owns the site and has a sewage works there (there was a protest a year or so ago), but that’s been good news for wildlife because “no development is allowed within 400m of the extraction points” – “water is pumped up from the porous chalk deep below the valley floor.” It’s possible to walk along a disused railway line, to roam the fields and to see a marshy area where pools of water glittered in the sunshine.
I’ve made a mental note to go back when this Yellow Iris will be in flower.
This Hawthorn seemed perfect:
It’s only flowering on one side so far which perhaps means that is the south-facing side.
What is it about teasels? They make such good photographs.
Others on the survey with far better skills than mine heard Blackcaps (as did the Merlin app) but I am absolutely sure that I saw one, a male, very fleetingly, as it darted across the path in front of us, a first for me.
From: Meyer (Henry Leonard). Illustrations of British Birds, c.1835-1844.
The grey underside and of course black cap were clear to see.
Do birds enjoy singing?
Following the British Trust for Ornithology’s online bird song course and reading Seán Ronayne’s wonderful Nature Boy; a journey of birdsong and belonging, Hachette Books, 2024 (Nature Boy – Animal Wild) and watching his documentary Birdsong, I have been trying to learn and improve. I am being painfully slow and find it pretty difficult, although it may be that I recognise more birds than I think I do. One of the BTO’s trainers advised that we might aim to learn perhaps two new birdsongs a month. I felt a sense of relief. Of course you don’t have to nor could you learn it all at once. That seems a manageable thing to aim for. Amongst the garden birds I can now distinguish Great Tits, Robins and Blackbirds and Wrens, none of which I could have done a few weeks ago. As also recommended by the BTO, I found myself in a reverie the other evening, lost in listening to the beauty of the dusk chorus, a Blackbird in particular. There is a great deal of anthropomorphism in this (not at all necessarily a bad thing) but it sounded to me that the songs became less exuberant as the night drew in, and that the Blackbird was ending with an almost witty series of notes. “There’s a tune for you” perhaps. We know that birds exhibit dialects and that males sing territorially and to attract a mate (I have plenty of energy and am in good health), and there are alarm calls (sometimes specific to the threat) but beyond that we simply don’t really know what they are communicating. Wrens sing incredibly fast and very loudly for their size, with more notes than the human ear can really follow. Apparently if you slow it down it sounds like whale song. Who knows what wealth of information is being conveyed?
Do they actually enjoy singing though? It is rather like the age-old and ultimately unanswerable question as to whether they enjoy flying. Personally I don’t doubt that they like to fly. Singing comes at an energy cost, from dawn to dusk. Do they take pleasure in it, is it at least sometimes joyous? On the basis of faith rather than science but given that as a species we have always tended to wildly underestimate our fellow inhabitants of the planet, I very much doubt that it is a purely mechanical, reflexive response to circumstances. I cannot believe that a Skylark does not take pleasure from his song. Or, to put it another way, I find it impossible to believe that he doesn’t. May 4th is Dawn Chorus Day.
Why are Mallards so successful?
Another strange question which came to me from nowhere other than seeing only these ducks and no others on my canal trips. It seems to be because they are extremely adaptable to different environments, including those where they live close to or amongst us in urban areas, and they have a long breeding season and large clutches of eggs and are happy to renest when necessary.
Long-lived Oystercatchers
Having seen these beautiful birds in Alderney (see previous posts), I am astonished to learn from the RSPB that two have been recorded, one at over 40 years of age and one at 43. Their average life expectancy is just twelve years although many have been recorded as living to twenty or thirty. The 43-year-old is probably actually 46 since age is measured from the time of ringing, when the bird is thought to have been three years old already.
UK’s oldest known Oystercatchers discovered on England’s east coast wetlands
“Jim Scott, RSPB Estate Operations Manager for Titchwell Marsh and Snettisham explains: “The Wash is the single most important coastal wetland in the UK for migrating and over-wintering wading birds, ducks and geese supporting up to 400,000 waterbirds each year. Up to 26,000 of these are Oystercatchers, making The Wash a site of international importance for this species, as it is for many others.
“The records of these two birds illustrate just how important it is to protect England’s East Coast Wetlands. Like so many wading birds that repeatedly spend the autumn and winter here, Oystercatchers rely on The Wash mudflats for food as they are jam-packed with invertebrates such as ragworms, snails and shellfish. So, in some ways it’s not really a surprise that these two record-breaking Oystercatchers choose to spend every winter here.”
Fat royal hands
Well, I did say that this was gallimaufry, a mishmash. Again, I am not sure where this came from, but I happened to notice that our king has extremely fat hands, which reminded me of the palaver about his brother Andrew’s hand in the picture where he has his arm around Virginia Giuffre, who has just, terribly sadly, taken her own life. I am not generally one to mock people’s physical appearance and wondered if Charles might be suffering from a medical condition, or, given my current train of thought about the aristocracy being some sort of subspecies of the human race, if it might be a matter of genetics. Either way, when I googled the issue, I laughed out loud when I read this comment: “Finger muscles highly developed sorting through the wealth filched from the colonies.”
Coyotes
I realised that until enlightened by something I was watching recently, I had no idea what coyotes actually looked like. They are stunning, like small wolves. They are also known as American Jackals and Prairie Wolves. Actual wolves predate them and sometimes interbreed with them. Humans are of course the greatest threat. There seems to be a huge amount to learn about them. Uncommonly, humans have been attacked, but only twice fatally. They do prey upon livestock and pets, so justifying -not – US government agents killing by shooting, trapping and poisoning some 90,000 every year. Hunting for sport is pretty much unregulated and they have been exploited for their fur from around 1860 and even their meat. A list of animals which we have chosen to demonise throughout human history would be exhausting and terribly demoralising.
The Enfield Oak
A nationally significant ancient oak, listed on the Woodland Trust’s inventory of ancient trees, estimated to be around 500 years old and with a girth of twenty feet has been cut down on what seem to be entirely spurious health and safety grounds in Whitewebbs Park, Enfield, north London, by Toby Carvery. The remains are now subject to legal protection, a Tree Preservation Order, way too late, but it seems no crime has been committed, except perhaps that of extreme arrogance. It really shouldn’t be possible to own a tree. As one local said, this fabulous oak belonged to Enfield and to our national natural heritage. There has been much outrage, as with the famous Sycamore Gap tree in Northumberland, chopped down in 2023. Legal proceedings against the two men accused of that are now under way. The case of the oak may move forward in the form of a civil prosecution, which could in theory cost Toby Carvery, who are not even the landowners (the land belongs to Enfield Council), £1m and there are calls for the law to be clarified, tightened and enforced. An oak can support over 2,000 other species. The Whitewebbs Oak, according to inspections, had at least 50 more years to live and possibly several hundred.
Colossal Squid
A living Colossal Squid has been filmed for the first time ever. This was a small one, but they can grow to up to 43 feet and be the heaviest invertebrate on Earth. The species was first identified in 1925 – two arms were found in the stomach of a sperm whale near the Shetland Islands. It is entirely plausible that the Colossal Squid has been the source of legendary or mythical sea monsters: the Kraken and Scylla perhaps. As the article in The Times says, it as though the creatures were designed by a committee who, disagreeing about what to include, threw everything into the mix: “a mantle for locomotion, a pair of gills, a beak, eight arms … with hooks, two tentacles with a club divided into ‘wrist’, ‘hand’ and ‘fingers’, suction cups with teeth, a head, two fins and a prehensile penis up to three feet long.” They can be aged by counting growth rings, like a tree. “Their eyes glow in the dark and grow to almost a foot in diameter: the biggest eyes of any creature known to exist”. They eat “deep-sea fish, and occasionally each other.” How wonderful that such a large species has hidden in the realms of myth for so long.
Extraterrestrial life?
I subscribe to the view that there is more likely to be life in the universe other than on our planet than not, but it does seem odd that we haven’t heard anything. If there is other life, perhaps it is too different from us to communicate with us. It’s a big topic. But it’s intriguing that scientists have now discovered (with 99.7% certainty) that a waterworld planet 124 light years from earth , K2-18b, has in its atmosphere either dimethyl sulphide or dimethyl disulphide, or both. Only living organisms produce them here. Astrophysicist Dr Nikku Madhusudhan has said that a hydrogen-rich world “with an ocean that is teeming with life is the scenario that best fits the data we have.” There is scepticism of course and no certainty, but it’s an exciting thought.
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Here’s this year’s first Slow Worm, the legless lizard.
And incidentally, this extremely thorny specimen in the garden is Berberis darwinii or Darwin’s Barberry it turns out. It was named in Darwin’s honour after he first recorded it in 1835. The leaves, berries and flowers are rather spectacular. I am delighted to have a plant named in this way.
And the ever reliable broom is in bloom.
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