I have in my hands a wonderful book. It was a treasured possession of long-time Shingle Street resident, Tricia Hazell, whose life and memory we recently celebrated. The book is rather battered and weather-beaten (like the rest of us), but has been honoured by years of constant and loving use. Over twenty years use, in fact, as I can deduce from the spidery annotations in Tricia’s hand over lots of the pages. It’s her moth book, a field guide with her dated records of the many moth species that visited her secluded garden at the southernmost end of Shingle Street.
Tricia’s moth book. Photo Jeremy Mynott
Tricia would often invite over local moth expert Nick Mason and myself to set up an overnight moth-trap and then early next morning inspect the host of bejewelled beauties that had taken refuge there, before releasing them safely into her garden again. Sometimes we’d invite over a larger group of residents to share the experience and the event would take on the character of a moth-séance, with an attentive circle of devotees gasping reverentially at each new winged spirit summoned up and announced by Nick as our moth-medium. Thinking of them as spirits isn’t a bad analogy, in fact. In the ancient world moths were thought of as ‘souls’, which were released from one’s body at the moment of death to flutter away and disappear into thin air. They continue to be magical creatures of the night, whose presence amongst us feels like an epiphany.
Moth séance at Shingle Street. Photo Jeremy Mynott.Small elephant hawkmoth. Photo: Jeremy Mynott.
One thing that impressed me about Tricia was that she wasn’t, like some naturalists, just interested in identifying the moths and keeping a tally of them. She asked other sorts of questions, too. Whenever we extracted a new specimen from the box she would carefully note the date we’d seen it, but then insist that we pause so that she could discover in her field guide what specific habitats it was found in, what food plants it preferred, and what time of year it would typically emerge. For example, we’d learn that the gorgeous Small Elephant Hawkmoth we’d just caught could be expected ‘between May and July’, was ‘largely coastal’, had a particular liking for ‘heathlands and shingle beaches’, and was attracted to ‘viper’s bugloss, valerian and honeysuckle’. ‘Well, that all fits perfectly’, she’d conclude cheerfully. Although she’d be amazed to hear me say it, Tricia was an ecologist. The word ecology literally means the study of wildlife in its ‘home surroundings’ – that is, in its relationships with the whole web of life on which it depends. And the mark of a good ecologist is not how much you know but in asking the right questions.
Jeremy Mynott 30.3.23
Village Voices Nature Note: a Confusion of Seasons
The exciting thing about this time of year is that one keeps seeing the ‘first’ of various things for the year: the first butterfly (usually a floppy yellow brimstone butterfly gliding along a hedge), the first chiffchaff (freshly in from Africa), the first frog spawn (in your garden pond – you should have one if you don’t already), the first bumblebees, the first shoots of green on the hawthorn, the first cowslips in the banks, and so on. I still feel a jolt of adrenaline when each of these appears again, a reassurance, as the poet Ted Hughes put it, ‘that the world’s still working’. More than just a reassurance, though. It’s a joyful sense that the dark days of winter are soon to be replaced by light, warmth and growth. A feeling of abundance and renewal. Who wouldn’t feel the emotional sap rising at such a time?
Brimstone butterfly
But it’s getting more complicated, like the rest of life. This ‘spring’ we had the first sticky buds on the chestnuts in January, and the first aconites out in December; there’s been a chiffchaff flitting around all winter; and I’ve just seen my first brimstone, like a floating piece of detached sunlight. Isn’t this good news? It can’t be bad to enjoy the pleasures of spring a month or two earlier, can it? But suppose we are losing the familiar distinctions between the seasons altogether? These are deeply ingrained in our history and culture, and give us our bearings in the natural world. I wouldn’t want a bland, uniform climate in which the cycles of growth and rebirth had been flattened out, even if it was a bit more comfortable.
We’ve got used to this kind of thing in our eating habits, of course. You can now eat fresh raspberries all the year round. And you can buy exotic fruits like avocados at any supermarket or corner store. I don’t suppose I had ever eaten an avocado until I was 30, and if you had asked me as a boy what the word ‘Avocado’ meant I might have guessed at some sort of Church prayer or Mexican board game; but at this rate we may one day see avocados growing in our own back-gardens.
Perpetual spring would actually mean no spring at all. No autumn either, perhaps the loveliest of seasons with its bitter-sweet associations. It was once all so simple in Genesis. ‘While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.’ But if you read it carefully, that was both a promise and a warning.
Jeremy Mynott 8 February 2023
Village Voices Nature Note: Songs of Love
It was Chaucer who gave St Valentine’s Day its romantic associations. In his poem, The Parliament of Fowles, he imagines all the birds coming together on February the 14th to declare their passions and choose their mates. Florists and card manufacturers have been grateful ever since. But hang on, why mid-February? Wouldn’t you expect the mating season to begin in Spring? Well, like all the best-loved British traditions the history is rather murky. Chaucer actually wrote his poem to celebrate a royal wedding on 3 May 1381 between Richard II and Anne of Bohemia and he borrowed the name of a minor Italian saint called Valentine whose feast was by chance celebrated on that day. It was only much later that all the lovey-dovey stuff was cheerfully transferred to the February date, which was itself originally an ancient Roman fertility festival that happened to coincide on the calendar with the death of a quite different saint also called Valentine.
Song Thrush. Photo by Elizabeth Dack.
Never mind, there is truth even in literal error. The birds really have started to sing in the early mornings now and for just the reasons Chaucer supposed. Two of the easiest songs to recognise in the February dawn chorus are those of the great tit and song thrush, each of which relies on repeating a few basic phrases loudly and often. The main great tit song is a ringing double note, which is usually represented as teacher-teacher, though they do also have a large repertoire of different calls (up to 80 variants have been separately counted). The song thrush, on the other hand, tends to sing in longer phrases like did-he-do-it, did-he-do-it; too-true, too-true. Or as another poet, Robert Browning, puts it:
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over Lest you should think he could never recapture The first fine careless rapture!
Bird songs are in fact getting both earlier and louder, for reasons Chaucer could never have foreseen over 600 years ago. Earlier, because of climate change, which has advanced the breeding season by some weeks for many birds. And louder, for the sad reason that traffic and other urban noise has now reached levels where courting great tits, for example, have to turn up the volume to press their suit if they live in towns rather than in the countryside. Moreover, some birds with softer and less penetrating voices are now quite unable to hold territories and nest successfully by motorways, even though there are suitable nesting-sites in all those bushes on the verges, because they simply cannot make themselves heard to prospective mates. Now that really is a fable for our time.
Jeremy Mynott 4 January 2023
No birds!
11 Jan 2023
Walked to East Lane from SS and was shocked to see how few birds there were on the fields and the marsh. No lapwings or golden plover at all and very few wildfowl or waders, apart from a goldeneye on one of the pools. Not sure if Avian flu is a factor, or maybe they just haven't migrated here for the winter from Northern Europe because of climate change? Dire, anyway.
Jeremy Mynott
Winter birds
09 Jan 2023
Sometimes absences are more striking than presences. Very few winter visitors here, possibly because climate change makes it unnecessary. At any rate no redwings or fieldfares on the hawthorns, still berried, on the Twin Banks. No lapwing and just one curlew. There was one winner from climate change, though, a Cetti's warbler calling, which stays here all the years now.
Jeremy Mynott
Village Voices Nature Note: a Good Start to the Year
What better way to start the New Year than a walk along the coastal path at Shingle Street. You might start something else new. You might start a hare. Since parts of the beach grassed over in the recent years we’ve been blessed with regular visits from these lovely loping creatures. They were always common in the fields at the back but you can often now put one up near the front of the houses and watch it streaking away in a trademark mazy run, zigzagging to confuse any potential pursuer. You can forget about any pursuit yourself, though. The scientific name of the hare is Lepus, which comes from the Latin Levipes meaning ‘light-footed’. And so they are. They have a top speed of about 50 mph and can jump ten feet in one bound. Unlike rabbits, they live their whole lives above ground, usually on open fields, so they depend on their rapid acceleration to escape natural predators like foxes and stoats. They also have eyes set so far back in their heads that they have almost 360-degree vision and can spot trouble a long way off. They’re about twice the size of rabbits and have those distinctive long ears, black at the tips and pink velvet inside.
What with climate change you may soon be seeing mad March hares dashing about in January, and you might even catch sight of a couple of them ‘boxing’. This isn’t, as you might suppose, an all-male event, but is more likely a female fending off an amorous male. They’ve long had a reputation for lechery. In classical times the hare was sacred to Aphrodite, goddess of erotic love, and the Roman author Pliny tells us that eating a hare could enhance your sexual attractiveness for nine days. Only nine days? Well, it’s another kind of start, I suppose. Anyway, there is some truth in the old folklore because hares are certainly very fertile. They have up to four litters a year and the females can even get pregnant again while they are still pregnant the first time around. But there’s a reason for that, too. The young leverets are born fully furred and with open eyes, but they are still very exposed and vulnerable at first and to avoid advertising their exact whereabouts the mother (the ‘jill’) only visits them once a day to feed them milk, usually in the evening. They remain easy prey, however, and there’s a very high mortality rate.
We used to be enjoined to ‘go to work on an egg’. I think ‘start a hare to start the year’ is as good a slogan.
Jeremy Mynott 25 November 2022
Crimson Speckled
23 Oct 2022
Nick Mason was the finder of a spectacular moth in Shingle St, a Crimson Speckled, a very rare immigrant from the Mediterranean with the most beautiful markings.
I encouraged him to run a moth trap in my garden while I was away but had no idea he'd come up with something like this! Well, if freudenfreude is the opposite of schadenfreude, good on you, mate.
Jeremy
Village Voices Nature Note: Web Sights
When you see a spider do you go Oh, Ugh or Aaaaaaaaarh? Wherever you are on that ladder of reaction, let me try and talk you down to a rung where you might just say Hi oreven Wow! Fear of spiders (arachnophobia) is quite common. It could be a primitive instinct evolved when our distant ancestors lived in caves in Africa and might have trodden on seriously poisonous spiders. Or maybe we learn it as children from nursery rhymes like the one about Little Miss Muffet, who was put her off her curds and whey by an abseiling spider. But relax. None of the common spiders in the UK are dangerous to humans. Certainly not those big house spiders that can appear overnight in the bath or dash across the living room floor at an impressive top speed of half a metre a second; nor the Daddy Longlegs that get into odd corners of rooms and twizzle rapidly in their untidy webs; nor all those tiny spiders that balloon around on invisible filiaments of silk – on the contrary, these are the ‘money spiders’ that are supposed to bring you good luck.
Orb Web Spider. Photo: Laurie Forsyth
Most of the UK’s 650 species of spider – bet you didn’t realise there were so many – live outside anyway. Among the wonders of autumn are those soft , misty mornings when you go out into the garden and see a perfect spider’s web outlined with beads of dew. The architecture of these silvery webs is breath-takingly beautiful. The spider first puts in the spokes to establish the structure and tether it securely to its moorings, then adds the complex spiral strands with a special sticky kind of silk that will trap unwary insects. The spider herself has anti-stick feet – all eight of them – to navigate the web. As a construction material the silk has extraordinary properties. It’s five times stronger than steel, weight for weight, but so light in density that a strand of spider’s silk stretched right round the earth would still only weigh the same as a bag of sugar. You can make bullet-proof vests from spider’s silk. It has medical uses, too, as a gentle anti-septic for binding wounds. Miss Muffet may in real life have been the daughter of the famous sixteenth-century naturalist, Dr Thomas Muffet, who discovered this property. Shakespeare knew about it anyway. In his Midsummer Night’s Dream he refers to the curative powers of one of Titania’s attendant fairies called Cobweb (‘Cob’ is the old name for spider). And we honour spiders, at least metaphorically, by naming one of the most important modern inventions after their magical creations – the World Wide Web.
Jeremy Mynott 7 October 022
Village Voices Nature Notes: Moth Matters
I’ve had some big game in the garden at night recently – two elephants, three tigers and a leopard for starters. Also a menagerie of smaller creatures, including: a fox, puss, kitten, mouse, some tabbies, several hummingbirds and peacocks, lots of pugs and even a shark, though I’m still hoping for my first lobster and goat. No, this isn’t some radical Shingle Street rewilding exercise; these are just a few of the weird and wonderful names of the moths that grace our gardens every night and lurk unseen in them by day. Mention moths and most people immediately think of clothes moths. These are the moths referred to in the Bible, where we are advised not to lay up our treasures on earth ‘where moth and rust doth corrupt’. But there are only two kinds of clothes moths in the UK – really tiny ones, and in any case it’s their larvae (caterpillars) that cause the problem. You might be amazed just how many other kinds of moths there are out there – some 2,500 kinds in the UK as a whole. And with the expert help of Nick Mason, our local moth-er (don’t forget the hyphen), I’ve found a remarkable tally of over 350 different species just in my own back garden. Most moth species were first identified and named by naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and they bequeathed to us this wonderful lexicon of names, not just the animal ones mentioned above but a whole treasure-house of footmen, quakers, wainscots, rustics, lutestrings, carpets, fanfoots, tussocks, darts and daggers. There are also some wittily intriguing ones like the Uncertain, the Suspected and the Confused. How splendid to know that we have living amongst us a Setaceous Hebrew Character, a Pebble Prominent and the lovely Merveille du Jour.
Peppered moth. Photo: Jeremy Mynott
Moths matter. They’re an index of the health of our environment. Readers of my generation will remember the ‘moth snowstorms’ we used to get years ago on our car windscreens. Not anymore. Despite the captivating diversity I mention above, moth abundance has declined dramatically in recent years. Disastrously too, since moths are a key part of the larger eco-system: they pollinate plants, and their caterpillars are a crucial food-source for birds, just as the adults themselves are for bats and for birds like our heathland nightjars. Hence the elaborate camouflages they adopt – as in the featured Peppered Moth blending perfectly with the blotches on my paving.
Moths are also beautiful when you see them close-up. Take a look at the ones on the Shingle Street website under Gallery.
Heretical to say it, but they make the gaudier butterflies look almost vulgar.
Jeremy Mynott August 2022
snout
31 Aug 2022
Last moth trapping of August was a bit meagre after a blustery night with showers, but we did catch a lot of Snouts, an ugly name for another subtly marked moth (and you can see why it is called that from its elongated palps).
