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: Local Knowledge
Grass starts growing again at about 10°C (50°F) and you can track the movement of that isotherm across Europe from the Mediterranean to the Arctic, a green wave travelling north at about fifty kilometres a day, bringing with it a new season of light, warmth and growth – and a feeling of renewal. Surfing that green wave are our migrant birds, and none bears a greater freight of these associations than the swallow and the swift, arriving here from southern Africa, respectively in mid-April and in early May. I eagerly look out for them at their due dates every year, usually returning faithfully to exactly the same place at the same time. And I get a fizzing shot of adrenaline when I first see and hear them back again. I’m not alone. These two species have been among our traditional spring and summer markers for centuries, welcomed back each year with relief, as the poet Ted Hughes put it, ‘that the globe’s still working’.
A swallow, photo: Laurie Forsyth.
Swallows and swifts were the favourite birds of the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White, who inspired a new tradition in nature writing in Britain. White was an obscure country curate who lived all his life in the same house in the equally obscure village of Selborne in Hampshire (population about the same as Hollesley). But his account of the daily changes to nature in his village through the seasons, The Natural History of Selborne (1789), became one of the most widely-read books in the English language, still in print today in multiple editions. Its attraction was precisely its parochial focus, stressing the richness of the local, the particular and the familiar – or at least what you thought was familiar until you really looked at it. He urged the importance of deepening one’s knowledge instead of just extending it: ‘Men that only undertake one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with.’ Not in favour of eco-tourism, then!
White was an amateur in its literal sense and he touched a chord with thousands of ordinary people. He also attracted the admiration of such different figures as Charles Darwin, John Constable, William Wordsworth, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, all of whom remark on the book’sapparently artless simplicity and charm. White had effectively invented a new literary genre and so became the patron saint of today’s many nature diarists. He also kept a daily journal and one of his most striking diary entries is an ecstatic two-word exclamation on 13 April 1768, greeting the first returning swallow to Selborne by its then scientific name:
‘Hirundo domestica !!!‘ (his exclamation marks).
Jeremy Mynott April 2025
Nature Note: the Colour of Spring
I’ve just been watching the first butterfly of spring, a lovely yellow brimstone gliding across a sheltered spot in the garden. These are the floatiest of butterflies, like a large leaf pirouetting in a breeze, and their rich buttery hue seems to accentuate their spring freshness. It’s even been suggested that their colour gave ‘butterflies’ their name. Anyway, the sight made me start wondering about possible connections between spring and the colour yellow. We think of spring as the season of greening, but maybe spring makes some of its most important announcements in yellow. After all, a lot of our early spring flowers are yellow, too. The year starts with aconites, gleaming like little golden lanterns through the winter’s undergrowth. We then pretty soon have a succession of primroses, celandines, daffodils, dandelions, coltsfoot and cowslips – all different shades of yellow. Why would that be? One theory is that their bright yellow colour attracts the early pollinators like bees, so these plants get a head start in the work of fertilisation. Nice idea – simple, striking and plausible. It’s the sort of pop scientific knowledge we all like to parade. But hang on, does the logic work? Aren’t there a lot of early flowers that are not yellow – snowdrops, many crocuses, scilla, wood anemone, and so on? And equally, there are lots of yellow flowers that come later – sunflowers, chrysanthemum, corn marigold, tansy, ragwort, mullein and a whole tribe of humble vetches, trefoils, stonecrops and saxifrages. Moreover, gorse displays at least some of its sweet-smelling yellow flowers all the year round – hence the wise saying that when the gorse flowers kissing is in fashion. And anyway, don’t most insects have quite different perceptions of colour from ours, relying much more on the ultra-violet band in the wavelength, so they wouldn’t necessarily see the yellows we see?
Aconite, photo: Jenny Desoutter
Collapse of hypothesis? Not entirely, but it demonstrates that these things are quite complicated. Another thought might be that several of these early yellow flowers like the celandine and buttercup are also very shiny, so maybe they are more reflective of such sunlight as there is early in the year and therefore more attractive to insects for that reason? By contrast, some of the later flowering plants like ragwort have a much duller, matt finish.
Could there be an unlikely clue to the puzzle from taxi-cab design? It’s said that when John Hertz founded his Yellow Cab Company in Chicago in 1907 he chose that colour because it made his taxis easier to spot at a distance and his customers found it attractive. And now yellow cabs are everywhere in the world. Nature knows best.
Jeremy Mynott March 2025
Nature Note: Nature Literacy
I was sent this alarming chart, which revealed just how little many children know about the natural world around them. Not just children, though. In one survey a few years back involving first-year undergraduates studying Biology at Oxford (Biology and Oxford, mark you) it emerged that only 55% of them could correctly name five British bird species, while only 12% could name five British butterfly species (and 47% could name none at all). Anyway, I’m sure the country folk round here who read Village Voices can do better than that, so here’s a more exercising seasonal quiz as a wildlife workout for the New Year. All these species have been recorded at Shingle Street. No checking on your devices, though – answers below.
Just name what kind of creatures the following are:
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.
Black Mulberry. Photo: Jeremy Mynott
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: In Praise of Ivy
Autumn is the most ambiguous season. You know where you are with winter’s bare and chilly landscapes, spring bright with blossom and bird song, and summer’s rich abundance. Autumn seems a more in-between season, harder to define exactly, but it has its own subtler qualities. Think of the slanting light on the fields, the wistful autumn song of the robin, swallows lingering on the wires before departure and the rusty hues of the falling leaves. If you’re feeling at all elegiac, autumn looks back with nostalgia and forward with apprehension. November in particular is no one’s favourite month, as Thomas Hood described in what must be the gloomiest poem in the English language:
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member – No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds – November
He should have got out more, though. Far enough, at any rate, to look at an ivy-covered wall on a sunny autumn day, as I’ve just been doing. It was literally humming with insect life, all attracted by the nectar and pollen in the ivy’s late flowerings. There were red admiral butterflies, sucking up the reserves of energy they’ll need for hibernation, some honey bees and a small cloud of busy hoverflies – which included the eponymous ‘ivy hoverflies’ and, judging from their vivid orange and black banding, also a few of the delightfully named ‘marmalade hoverflies’. Ivy provisions a multitude of bird species through the winter, too – blackbirds, dunnocks and thrushes, which rely on its nutritious black berries when other food sources have been exhausted. It provides cover for tiny spiders, for the overwintering eggs and pupae of many moths and butterflies, and a safe retreat for small mammals and for nesting robins and wrens. So, it’s at once a larder, a fortress and a home to a host of wildlife.
No wonder, then, that ivy has entered human culture, too, as a symbol of evergreen life. The ancient Greeks and Romans crowned the winners of poetry and athletic conquests with wreaths of ivy. They also regarded it as an antidote to drunkenness, perhaps because their grape-vines would often become smothered by ivy. Bacchus, the Roman god of intoxication, was usually depicted wearing a wreath of ivy and that connection continued in the medieval custom of having an ivy-topped pole outside ale houses. Ivy featured in traditional health cures and it also became a symbol of the elite Ivy League of US universities, which planted ivy to commemorate each new term. And finally, ivy and holly are a central part of our Christmas rituals, with the entwined ivy representing the female principle that binds everything together.
Jeremy Mynott 3 October 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.
A slow worm. Photo: Laurie Forsyth
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.
Photo: Jenny Desoutter
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.’
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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.
A long-tailed tit’s nest.
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!
