Village Voices Nature Notes

Nature Notes is a series of articles written by Jeremy Mynott and published monthly in Village Voices, the local magazine for Shingle Street and nearby villages.

Nature Note: Mulberry Mysteries

We visited the Thomas Gainsborough House in Sudbury the other day. As well as the gallery it has a lovely old garden, once an orchard, with three fruiting trees of great character: a quince, a medlar and, best of all, a magnificent black mulberry whose mighty limbs have been bent down under the weight of years and now rest their elbows on the ground around the main trunk. This mulberry is over 400 years old, so would already have been well established in the 1730s when the future artist Thomas Gainsborough played in the garden as a child. It was one of many thousands imported into Britain by James the First in 1607 to try and establish a silk industry in this country to match that in China.

As everyone knows, silk comes from the silk moth whose caterpillars (silkworms) feed on mulberry leaves and then spin a wondrous cocoon of silken thread to surround the pupa before it finally metamorphoses into the adult moth, Bombyx mori. This raw silk has such special properties of lustre and softness that it became highly prized as a luxury fabric. Hence the ancient craft of sericulture – silk manufacture from domesticated silkworms – that had been practised in China for several thousand years but whose techniques remained a closely guarded secret until, the story goes, Christian monks smuggled some silkworms out of China in a hollow stick around AD550 and presented them to the Roman Emperor Justinian in Constantinople. An early intellectual property theft! The ‘Silk Roads’ from China later became a major trade route to the West, exporting huge quantities of silk and other natural products. No wonder King James wanted some of the action. But he made one big mistake. The trees he imported were all black mulberries (Morus nigra), but any naturalist could have told him that silkworms only feed on the white mulberry (Morus alba), a quite different species, native to China. Well, at least the black ones produced nice jam.

As it happens, Sudbury did later become – and still is – a major centre for silk production in England, though all the silk has to be imported. The black mulberry itself entered English culture in a quite different way, through the nursery rhyme ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’ in which children are encouraged to get themselves up, washed, dressed and ready for school ‘on a cold and frosty morning’. The lyrics have dubious origins, but maybe here too there’s a mistake a naturalist could have picked up. Could the composer actually have meant a ‘blackberry bush’? Both brambles and mulberries have juicy black fruit, but mulberries only grow on trees not bushes. Hmm.

Black Mulberry. Photo: Gainsborough House

Jeremy Mynott
5 November 2024

Nature Note: Martha’s month

Here’s a little quiz question. Which famous Martha died in September 1914? One clue: she was called Martha after George Washington’s wife. Here’s another: fifty years before her death there were 10 billion others like her. Final clue: she was the last of her kind. Answer: Martha was the last ever Passenger Pigeon, once the most numerous bird on earth, and she died at 12 noon on 1 September 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo, Ohio. It’s the best-recorded extinction in history, and perhaps the most extraordinary. Up to the mid-nineteenth century huge flocks of these birds darkened the skies of America. We hear of one in 1813 so vast that it spread from horizon to horizon and took three days to pass over. Yet in a few decades the bird was no more. What could have happened?

The main cause was simple in fact. The immigrants from Europe had poured into America and spread west, dispossessing the native Indians, clearing the land and destroying the forests as they went. The pigeons were wholly dependent on these forests for food and nesting sites. They were also easy to hunt and their flesh was both a staple diet for the settlers and a valuable export, so they were slaughtered on an industrial scale. In the killing season extra trains were put on to convey thousands of barrels of pigeon bodies east to cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.

Martha the Passenger Pigeon. Photo courtesy The Smithsonian.

The name ‘passenger pigeon’ isn’t a macabre reference to these train journeys, but probably derives from the French pigeon de passage or some equivalent Indian name. This was a permanently mobile species, moving on restlessly until they literally ran out of forest. It should really have been called the ‘wandering pigeon’ or ‘peregrine pigeon’.

This isn’t the only extinction of a charismatic bird, of course. Think of the great auk, last recorded in Britain in St Kilda in 1840 and killed by fishermen who were terrified by its unearthly shrieking and clubbed it to death, thinking it a witch. Or the dodo, which has entered our language as the very symbol of extinction, ‘dead as a dodo’. That was a sort of giant pigeon, too, in fact. The last of them died in 1662 in Mauritius – a fat, clumsy and trusting bird which was butchered by sailors grateful for an easy meal.

It couldn’t happen again, could it? But when did you last see or hear the British cousin of the passenger pigeon, the turtle dove? That used to be the soundtrack of summer with its gentle purring song. They were common here once, but I didn’t hear one anywhere this year, or last …

Jeremy Mynott
3 September 2024

Nature Note: Slowly does it …

Dinosaurs are wildly popular, especially with children. Think of all those films, books, cartoons and soft toys. Is it because they belong to a world long past, full of extraordinary creatures we shall never see again? At any rate, the attraction doesn’t seem to extend to their modern-day descendants in the same family – crocodiles, snakes, lizards and iguanas. ‘Ugh, reptiles – slithery, dangerous creatures, more horror film material than Disney!’ Well, that’s partly right since they are indeed slithery – the word ‘reptile’ means ‘creeping thing’ but in Britain, at least, only one of them (the adder) is at all poisonous, while the others are entirely benign and all of them are interesting.

We have six species of reptiles in this country – so there’s a quiz question, can you name all six? They comprise three snakes, two lizards and one other that looks somewhat like a snake but is actually a legless lizard – a slow worm. You can tell a slow worm from a snake since it has eyelids and can blink. It also has a much smoother skin, in which the scales are not overlapping and don’t feel rough to the touch. Finally, slow worms have no separate ‘neck’ so do indeed look like a very long worm.

There have always been popular misconceptions about slow worms. Shakespeare usually gets his wildlife references right but in Macbeth he has the witches casting a ‘blind worm’s sting’ into their toxic brew, a double error since they are neither blind nor do they sting. They do have one unusual anatomical feature, however, which accounts for their scientific name fragilis. They have various natural enemies like hedgehogs, badgers, magpies and domestic cats and have evolved a trick whereby if the would-be predator grabs them by the tail they can detach these and leave their captors grasping just this bony appendage – still wriggling independently. If they survive all these hazards, slow worms can live to a great age – over 50 years has been recorded. They also enjoy an impressive sex life, in which a couple can be entwined together mating in leisurely fashion for some ten hours at a stretch, so to speak.

Slow worms used to be quite common round here, and were welcome garden visitors, feeding on slugs and snails and living unobtrusively in damp corners and under compost heaps, but their numbers have declined sharply in recent years. Help may be at hand, however. A local developer needs to relocate some from a building site before he can get permission to proceed and we’ve made a bid for them. So there could be some coming your way, slowly of course.

Jeremy Mynott
6th August 2024

Nature Note: Survival Scales

July is usually a quiet time for birds but it’s often the best month of the year to see butterflies, emerging to drink in nectar from the summer flowers. This year, however, we’ve had such disturbed weather with these heavy rains and squally winds that many things have been knocked out of kilter. Knocked out of the sky, too, in the case of butterflies, many of which are just venturing out for the first time in all their fragile beauty. Imagine how vulnerable they are if caught in a downpour, with huge raindrops exploding on and around them like shells. In fact, they dive for cover in a shower, just as we do. They usually hide under nature’s own umbrellas, clinging to the underside of leaves and using the clever waterproofing on their scales, like the overlapping tiles on a roof, to shed stray droplets from those delicate wings.

These scales are one of the distinguishing features of the larger grouping of both moths and butterflies called Lepidoptera, literally ‘winged with scales’. The thousands of scales on a butterfly’s wing are a wonderful piece of micro-engineering. They act as tiny reflectors, which bounce the light off to create those shining colours, and they are also subtly ridged to serve as gutters, funnelling moisture away to keep the insect dry.

Butterflies have other ingenious survival tricks, too, and they need them. Suffolk has suffered terrible losses in its butterfly populations over the last century. The famous Suffolk entomologist, Claude Morley, writing in the 1920s, lamented even then that all we would soon see were ‘the plebs of the highways and hedges’, by which he meant the commoner kinds of whites, browns and blues. Since then many of these have gone from the county too, but one ‘pleb’ which is still just about surviving on Suffolk heathlands is Plebejus argus (‘small pleb with many eyes’), the silver-studded blue. This species has evolved a very clever alliance with ants. By day, the young caterpillars are shepherded to ant’s nests for protection from predators like birds, emerging at night to feed on the heathers. In return, the ants feast on the sugary secretions suppplied from glands on the caterpillars’ bodies. ‘Win-win’ – a happy symbiosis.

Silver-studded blue. Photo: Jeremy Mynott.

The silver-studded blue is so named from the brilliant pinheads of iridescent scales on the underside of its wings. I went to watch some of these little beauties recently on Hollesley Heath, fluttering about in a sunny spell. The spectacle lasted just an hour. The clouds closed in and the rains came again. But as the great Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore noted, ‘The butterfly counts not in months but moments, and has time enough’.

Jeremy Mynott
8 July 2024

Village Voices Nature Note: Hedgelands

‘Greenery’ – what a lovely word that is. One of the great delights of an English spring is to see the hedges greening up day by day, from the first fresh buds in March through to the gorgeous extravagance of leaves and blossom in May. The hedgerows are transformed in this annual miracle from the bare skeletons of winter to a burgeoning renewal in what the countryman-poet John Clare happily called, ‘the green life of change’.

We have something like 250,000 miles of hedgerows in Britain – about the distance to the moon – and they are one of our most important wildlife habitats. These ‘edgelands’ were originally established to mark boundaries and contain stock, so they consisted predominantly of the thornier trees and bushes – especially hawthorn and blackthorn. But over time ancient hedges will be joined by a rich variety of other natives like field maple, dog rose, crab apple, dogwood, hazel, spindle and buckthorn, and the hedge sides will meanwhile become cladded with a thick covering of ivy, brambles, honeysuckle and trailing plants. As the great American writer and naturalist Thoreau remarked, ‘It is only necessary that man should start a fence and Nature will carry it on and complete it.’

Such a hedge is a haven for wildlife – a larder, a highway, a fortress and a nursery. Hedges support up to 80% of our woodland birds and half of our mammals. Some 1,000 plant species and over 1,500 insect and invertebrate species have been recorded in our hedgerows. Butterflies and moths depend on them for food and shelter; wild flowers flourish along their edges; countryside birds like linnets, yellowhammers and whitethroats use them as song posts and nesting sites; shy creatures like dormice find safe homes deep inside them; bats use them as navigational aids; and glow worms may illuminate them. Lots of species even take their names from them: hedgehogs, hedge sparrows, hedge garlic, hedge parsley, hedge rustics (moths), woodland hedgehogs (mushrooms) … We benefit too, of course. Hedges provide windbreaks, barriers to soil erosion and flood-defences. They also sequester huge amounts of carbon. If you want to help counter climate-change you will get much better and quicker results from planting a new hedge than a tree. Then there is all the ‘food for free’ in the salads, berries, fruits and nuts that human foragers have gathered over the centuries and still do.

This great natural resource has sadly been much reduced and damaged over recent decades, however, as many hedges have been replaced by barbed wire fences, while those that remain are regularly flailed to pieces. Cheaper in the short-term maybe, but not everything that really counts is so easily countable.

Jeremy Mynott
5 May 2024

Village Voices Nature Note: Master-builders

Who are the world’s greatest architects? You might nominate the builders of such iconic ancient structures as the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Taj Mahal and the Parthenon, or perhaps modern celebrity-architects like Le Corbusier, Norman Foster and Frank Gehry conjuring up their breath-taking confections of steel and glass. All extraordinary feats of engineering and imagination on a massive scale.

I’d nominate a bird, though. Quite a common one, and very small –weighing just ten grams (about the weight of two sheets of A4) and only 14cm long (of which more than half is its tail). There’s the clue: a long-tailed tit. You can often see loose parties of them in winter flitting through the hedges and trees to work the vegetation for tiny insects and spiders, all the while keeping contact with their family flock through soft, conversational zupp calls and little trills. They are becoming common garden birds too, clustering round the bird-feeder like a fluffy feathered jacket. Their nests are usually very well concealed, deep in blackthorn or hawthorn hedges to protect them from predators, but if you ever come across one it is a thing of great beauty. They construct them from the finest materials – mosses, lichens and feathers (some 1,500 of them in a single nest), all bound together and secured by filigree strands of spiders’ silk. Just imagine sewing with thread from a spider’s web – and using only your mouth. The nest is designed in the form of a perfect oval-shaped dome, with a small entrance hole near the top. It has to satisfy the most stringent building regulations: well insulated enough to maintain a constant temperature for the eggs and young; porous enough to keep the air fresh; capacious and strong enough to hold the female brooding a clutch up to twelve eggs for a fortnight; and then flexible enough to later accommodate the bare, struggling nestlings as they take about another fortnight to grow and fledge. All this done from instinct and at high speed, with no construction manuals, consultants, specialist assistance or tools.

No wonder some of the old country names for the long-tailed tit reflect this remarkable architecture: bum-barrel, bush oven, hedge jug, pudding bag and jack-in-a-bottle. What is even more amazing is that the nest is only occupied for a single season and when the autumn and winter storms come it will be shredded and destroyed. It’s a work of exquisite natural art designed to fulfil its function just once and then to be replaced and newly constructed again the next year. Its only permanence comes from this annual re-creation from the template in the bird’s brain. Surely the winner!

Jeremy Mynott
2 April 2024

Village Voices Nature Note: Save It And They Will Come

There’s a 1989 film called ‘Field of Dreams’ in which an Iowa farmer (Kevin Costner) converts one of his corn fields into a baseball stadium to relive memories of his childhood sporting heroes. ‘Build it and they will come’, he hopes, and so they do. There is a conservation equivalent to this in the ambitions of bodies like the RSPB, which acquire tracts of former farmland in the hope that our threatened wildlife will return to populate it. ‘Save it and they will come’ is their corresponding motto. In 1948, the RSPB bought Havergate Island (the only island in Suffolk) to protect the first nesting avocets to have returned to Britain since the mid-nineteenth century. That too was a huge act of faith, but the avocets flourished and the site went on to attract a huge range of other wildlife including, most recently and excitingly, a colony of nesting spoonbills. It was a similar story at RSPB Lakenheath, where since 1995 they have transformed the former carrot fields into a major wetland reserve which now has breeding bitterns, marsh harriers and cranes.

These are both spectacular success stories, but we can all do our bit on a much smaller scale. The residents of Shingle Street have just embarked on a modest community venture of this kind. We have acquired an adjacent field, which was poor-quality grazing land, and are planning to turn part of it into a wetland. Shingle Marshes, as we are calling it, is already home to skylarks, snipe and brown hares, but we plan to restore some ancient lagoons and channels to create new habitats for visiting waders and wildfowl – curlew, godwit, lapwing, teal and wigeon, maybe even a breeding avocet of our own one day. We will also encourage a spread of fringing reeds for nesting warblers, reed buntings and (in my dreams) bittern, as well as water voles, harvest mice, dragonflies and rare aquatic invertebrates like the starlet sea-anemone. The overall aim would be to protect what is already there and to restore the biodiversity of local species we have sadly lost over the years.

There is, however, also a second important conservation motto. We must not only ‘Save it so they will come’, but then ‘Leave well alone’ if they do. The whole field is readily visible from the road and sea-walls, but we shall need to protect it from any closer access by people and their dogs lest we end up destroying what we have just created. In the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:

O let them be left, wildness and wet.
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet

Jeremy Mynott
February 2024

Village Voices Nature Note: Common Knowledge

It was once all so simple. For centuries people had a pretty good idea of what weather to expect each month and this knowledge was distilled into innumerable country sayings and poetic images. We had mad March hares, April showers, May flies, flaming June and in September we moved gently into the ’season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. Climate change has undermined some of those familiar associations, however, with unseasonal floods, storms and rising temperatures. It has disrupted the related life-cycles of wildlife, too. Daffodils still ‘come before the swallow dares’, as Shakespeare put it, but they are now as likely to start flowering in February as in March; while the swallows will later struggle to find enough flying insects to catch.

It isn’t all change, though. There is another huge factor, as well as the average temperatures, controlling these seasonal cycles. That’s light. Sunrise and sunset times will remain the same on 1 March 2024 as they were on 1 March in Shakespeare’s day (give or take a minute or two, for tiny variations in the earth’s orbit) and many natural phenomena like bird song are governed by those triggers. The dawn chorus of birds is one of nature’s great wonders. From February onwards you can hear it slowly building, both in volume and variety, as one by one the different species join the swelling orchestra of mingled voices.

The first species to form the choir in February usually include the robin, wren, great tit and dunnock, supported by great spotted woodpeckers in the percussion section. But my favourite of these pioneering heralds of spring is the song thrush, ‘the throstle with his note so true’ (Shakespeare again). There is a clarity, boldness and confidence in its evangelistic mode of address – usually delivered from some prominent pulpit on a house top or tree – which immediately lifts the spirits and reassures you that, yes, the magic of another spring will soon return.

Part of its musical effect comes from the bird’s repetitions on a theme, as Robert Browning noted in his famous poem ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’:

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you think he could never recapture
The first fine careless rapture.

And just as the song thrush leads the dawn chorus, so it is often the last bird singing in the corresponding dusk chorus, which is the more muted but equally moving evening performance. In his ‘Darkling Thrush’ Thomas Hardy recalls one that even in midwinter ‘flung his soul upon the growing gloom … in Joy unlimited’, as if it nursed ‘some blessed hope, whereof he knew/ And I was unaware’.

That was the hope of another spring, surely.

Jeremy Mynott
29 January 2024

Village Voices Nature Note: Books Can Change Lives

The great eighteenth-century man of letters, Samuel Johnson (‘Dr Johnson’) always made the same New Year’s resolutions:

Apply myself to study
Rise early
Go to church
Drink less
Oppose laziness
Put my books in order

I generally attempt the last one at least, but I then get absorbed in reading my old favourites as soon as I pick them up to re-arrange them. My first real book was a bird guide, Edmund Sandars Bird Book for the Pocket, which I think my parents acquired as a ‘damaged copy’ from the local library. It certainly became damaged quite quickly, as I engaged with it in every way that a five-year old can – smeared, scratched, torn, licked, crumpled, scribbled on and lugged around as my constant companion, indoors and out (especially out). It was my bedtime reading of choice and I made my mother recite it to me endlessly, intoning the potted descriptions of plumage, behaviour and distribution until we both had them off pretty much word perfect. There was not much narrative flow in this, however, so my mother often fell asleep before I did …

Edmund Sandars *Bird Book for the Pocket*, photo by Jeremy Mynott

I still remember snatches of the text:

Green woodpecker. Manners: has a strong pungent smell, energetic, watchful for enemies when boring, dodges behind trunk. Long, barbed, protrusible, sticky tongue. Never climbs downwards. Sometimes takes two or three backward hops.

I probably misunderstood this nice use of ‘manners’ (habits), and of course I had no idea what the thrilling word ‘protrusible’ meant. Nor have I ever seen a green woodpecker hop backwards. No matter, how could one fail to be enchanted by a world that had such creatures in it. This was a true guide – not a mere book of instruction but my way into the natural world of wonders all around me that I was learning to discover and describe for myself.

I still have my Sandars, just about held together by decades of glue, sticky tape and devotion. Books can do this to you. Jane Eyre, in Charlotte Bronte’s novel, would at the age of ten retreat behind a curtain in the drawing-room to read her favourite bird book, Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds. She became absorbed in his wonderful woodcuts and illustrations, which fired her child’s imagination: ‘Every picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting … With Bewick on my knee I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption.’ A lovely last line.

Buy a child a bird book.

Jeremy Mynott
5 January 2024

Village Voices Nature Note: the Vikings have Landed

The call is unmistakeable. A harsh, grating chak-a-chack chack as a stocky, long-tailed thrush, or more likely a small flock of them, rises up from a field or from the hedges where they have been feasting on the autumn bounty of hips and haws. Fieldfares. We often associate birds with particular seasons and times of year – the first cuckoo of spring, the skylark pouring out his heart in high summer, and the swallows gathering on the wires in early autumn. For me, the fieldfare’s chattering call – like a piece of rusty agricultural equipment – is the sure sign that winter is really upon us. Their arrival in East Anglia often coincides with the first influxes of cold air from Scandinavia, and it’s hard not to think of them as Viking invaders, come to plunder our rich native berry stocks. They usually arrive in company with other ‘winter thrushes’ like redwings and continental blackbirds and song thrushes, but the fieldfares are the largest and most dominant of these. They are a slightly paradoxical combination of shyness and boldness. They are easily alarmed by any human approach and before you can get close they tend to rise up in a loud clacking flock, flashing their silvery-white underwings. They’ll then perch warily high up in a tree, where they all face in exactly the same direction rather than distributing themselves in a random pattern, as most other birds do, before suddenly taking flight again with a further volley of alarm calls. Maybe this nervy anxiety is some sort of biological folk-memory from Victorian times when roasted fieldfare was a highly regarded amuse bouche for gourmet dinners and the birds were hunted and shot in large numbers.

By contrast with this apparent timidity, fieldfares are fierce in seeing off much larger birds like crows and birds of prey, which they buzz and dive-bomb in formation. On the ground, they also bully smaller birds competing for the same food supplies. In really hard weather they’ll come into orchards and even into our gardens to gorge on the fallen apples and you can watch them driving off blackbirds in a flurry of aggressive short-range assaults. When you see fieldfares close-up like this they are very handsome birds, with a grey head and rump, a reddish-brown back and a prominent arrow-head pattern of markings running down the chest. Chaucer called them ‘the frosty fieldfares’, which neatly connects both their time of arrival and their physical appearance. That description also catches something of their robust defiance of wintry weather. It’s their time of year and they know how to handle it.

Jeremy Mynott
3 December 2023