Two Films : One Problem

Before we plunge into this week’s cri de coeur I would like to apologise for the recent emphasis on philosophical matters. I too miss happy little posts on courageous bees or curious cats or unexpected butterflies, but we must bide out time until spring and her more charming subjects appear. Consider these winter posts as fireside stories told to pass the time while winter rains itself outside.

This week we are going to pick over a couple of films recently released by climate change charities.

New Toy

I've been such a good girl this year the man in the red coat rewarded me with a new Ipad with a camera.

Luckily for us this means we can now have pictures and videos instantly up on our blog. You will know the moment anything happens in Garden65. This is going to be cutting edge journalism: breaking news, livefeeds, realtime commentary, the works. Shame nothing actually happens in the garden, but still, we must keep up with the times.

So here is a short clip of the wind in the park, and a hazy picture of some ducks. Both have been edited, themed and app-ed to the limit of my current expertise. And then uploaded on the actual Ipad. What a palaver.

Winter Gnats, or Christmas Angels?

Have you ever tried photographing gnats? Impossible!

The swarms of little flies dancing over your lawn at this time of year are the aptly named Winter Gnats (of the Trichoceridae family).

The swarms are made of male gnats stretching their wings, having some fun with the boys, before they pair up with a female and sneak away from the group to mate.

Luckily for me, as I stood around trying to photograph the little blighters, the males don't bite. It's the females who suck your blood, because they need the extra energy for egg laying.

The eggs are laid on decaying wood and the larvae feed on decaying matter - Ha! plenty of that in Garden65. It's worth noting (if you're at all interested in garden invertebrates) that the wiggly larvae in ponds are mosquito larvae.

Here's a short spooky film I've cobbled together:


The music is from John Dowland's 'Lachrimae', composed in 1604. I guess 'lachrimae' has something to do with tears (lachrymose).

And though the title doth promise teares, unfit guests in these ioyfull times, yet no doubt pleasant are the teares which Musicke weepes, neither are teares shed alwayes in sorrow, but sometime in ioy and gladnesse.

Happy Christmas Everyone   Jx 

That Cat, Alla Rustica

That Cat in a Vivaldi mood.

On another note ... I'm sorry about the dark logo at the top of the blog. Blogger is playing silly buggers and I don't know how to change it back.

Drinking Coffee - Again

  Dandelion coffee from Patrick Jones on Vimeo.

It's cold and wet out there. Let's hunker down round a fire and have a warming cup of coffee.

This meditative video (be patient and get to the end - the man with the lovely hands starts to talk) is on an Australian blog I follow called Permapoesis. I must admit I haven't got to grips with it yet, but get the impression it's by a man who mixes artistic and permaculture philosophies with an Aboriginal way of relating to the land.  He explains,

"Permapoesis is the portmanteau for permanent making, a term I've developed, incorporating permaculture principles and indigenous thinking, to define a practice of art that participates in what it represents; that is of its environment; that generates no waste"

None the wiser? No, me neither. However, I keep returning to his blog because I think its sensibilities echo the treasured experience of drinking coffee in my own garden. I struggle to articulate the peace felt in those few moments. It is not simply a matter of taking a break from the normal tasks of the day. It is more than that. There is a performative element to it - the right cup with the right amount of milk in it, two cushions placed on just the right end of the bench, perhaps a couple of lines written in the journal, an unspoken 'thank you' to the spirit of the garden when I go back indoors.

The dark and overlooked garden of a suburb of Manchester doesn't equate to the fierce light of an open Australian garden and yet both have the power to affect the people in them.

Having gone off on a flight of romantic fancy I feel I must bring us back to reality. There is no way I'm going to start drinking dandelion coffee, made with own hands or not. I remember my mum and dad drinking it in the 70s. Filthy stuff.

There Are No Cranesbills in Yorkshire

According to the charity Plantlife 10 species of wildflower have become extinct in Britain since the 1950s.

Land management changes since then are the cause. Industrial scale farming means there are fewer proper hedges and untouched field margins, and of course the increased use of herbicides plays a part. Since the war 97% of wild flower meadows have been lost, with a third of all plant species in Britain currently in danger of extinction.

Let’s repeat that statistic – a third of ALL plant species, not just the pretty flowers, but the ferns and mosses and lichens, grasses, shrubs and trees are ‘in danger of’ extinction.

And let’s face it, bar major changes in the economic, political or population spheres, that ‘in danger of’ means ‘will become’.

On the county scale the situation is stark. Middlesex has lost 76 species in the last 40 years, Warwickshire has lost 74 species since 1970. Even the subject of the last post, the wood cranesbill, has disappeared from Yorkshire.

Plantlife will publish a report next month. Not a light read I should think.

I’ve whacked up a little montage of the 10 lost plants.

Something that struck me while I did was that this impoverishment is not only in terms of biodiversity, but also language. In the last post I wondered how the cranesbill got its name. How did the Interrupted Brome or Summer Lady’s Tresses get theirs? Isn’t that interesting – it’s Summer Lady not Summer Ladies? Who was the summer lady?

It’s sad to think there will no longer be anything new in Britain in need of a name.



Information from Telegraph article

Image of Hawkweed from Kingsdowner blog , saxifrage from this Tumblr blog, other images from newspapers and wiki.

The Cat And I Have A Coffee

It was one of those hot sultry days in which you half expect alligators to crawl up out of the drains. The cat and I retreated to a cool corner of the garden by the pond. I drank coffee, ate brazils and journalled. The cat dozed intermittently but remained alert to the slightest sign that a frog might be out of its watery domain. She is a nervous animal; a born hunter. I had the privilege of sharing a moment of companionship with her, but in truth it was a matter of tolerance on her part, not friendship.

Here is a rather duff film of our morning together. The singer is Earth Kitt (see what I’ve done there?)

Flickr Slideshow of Ox-eye Daisies

This is an experiment in embedding a Flickr slideshow.

Let me know if it doesn't work for you (or does). It doesn't work on my Ipad.

A Ladybird Waves Contemptuously

A ladybird waves contemptuously at the incompetent camerawoman, who turns her ineptitude into a short comic film after raiding the CDs in her car to find a suitably cheery and copyright free tune.

Music is a Mozart Clarinet Concerto

Daisies Dancing In The Sun

Warning: nothing much happens - think of it as a short meditation.

Music is Hayden. Adagio from 2nd Movement of Symphony No. 24

Clematis Waving About

Clematis ... blackbird ... bee ..... car alarm = urban garden no. 65

Cat Predation Of Birds

Naughty cat, leave those endangered sparrows alone.

I'm going to get serious now...

As bird numbers have been falling, with the House Sparrow in particular danger, some have looked to predation by domestic cats as a possible cause. There have been a number of research projects that have looked into this. One concentrating on a single village did notice cats had an effect on sparrow numbers, but many other projects show cats are not necessarily a significant cause of bird decline.

A survey in 1997 of the number and type of creatures brought home by cats showed mammals were in more danger than birds.

For the purposes of the project it was assumed that what the family cat dumped on its owner’s bed related to the actual number it killed and perhaps ate outside (a recent study however suggests this is only 30% of the catch). 986 cats took part with 91% bringing something home. Not surprisingly older, fatter cats caught less than more spritely kittens.

Mammals i.e., mice and rabbits (I hope that doesn’t mean the neighbour’s pet rabbit), were the greater animals killed at 69%. Birds were only 24% of the total kills, with amphibians just 1%. [The figures for another survey conducted in 2005 had the numbers as 77%, 15% and 5% respectively]. As you can see birds are not the main prey for cats.

However if the figures are applied to the national population of cats of approximately 9 million then that would mean 27 million birds are killed in a similar period of time.

So what can be done to reduce this predation?

Not attracting birds to your garden in the first place would seem a good idea, but counter intuitively, the number of birds brought home in the study was less where households put food out for birds, though the number of species increased. It is speculated that the reasons for this are:

• A greater number of birds round a feeding area helps in ‘group vigilance’ 

• Extra food means birds do not need to forage on the ground 

Maybe putting a bell on kitty’s collar would warn of her coming? It seems not:

"It is possible to speculate that this may be because birds rely largely on visual cues in predator avoidance behaviour, or because the acoustic qualities of cat bells may not lend themselves to warning bird"

You would think feeding your cat up so she isn’t hungry would help, but even this has no effect on the hunting instinct.

"Most urban cats are well-fed, but this does not stop them hunting birds and small mammals. Cats' hunting instincts are largely unconnected to how hungry they are; a well-known experiment established this by putting cats in a box with a large quantity of tasty food, before putting a rat into the box with them. Invariably the cats would find the rat, kill it, carry it back to near their bowl of food, and then continue eating the food."

It seems cats will be cats and there is little to be done bar reducing their number. It has also been argued that cats and birds have evolved together for many thousands of years so birds would have developed strategies to outwit their natural predator.

It will come as no surprise that recent research points the finger at pollution as the main reason for bird population decline, not the domestic cat. A study on the reproductive success of house sparrows within the urban-suburban fringe of Leicestershire shows a more complex problem. It concludes that increased pollution from the greater number of cars is affecting insect numbers

"UK traffic volume has increased by 82% since 1980 (20% since 1990)"

Not only are the chemicals decreasing the availability of insects to eat, but are directly creating smaller birds that are more prone to die from cold or other causes.

"Nutritional stress is also the most plausible explanation for the recent reduction in average maximum brood size from an extensive sample of house sparrow nests from across Britain (Baillie et al., 2007)."

I’m going to include the researchers recommendations in full here (even though it makes this post everso long) because it seems important to me and it surely has implications for many other birds and animals in the urban environment.

"Management to promote invertebrate abundance in urban–suburban habitats is an obvious recommendation to draw from this study, although other unknown limiting factors might still constrain population recovery. House sparrow parents collect most invertebrate prey from deciduous woody vegetation, trees and grassland and make relatively little usage of evergreen or ornamental shrubs (Vincent, 2006). There is evidence of widespread recent losses of greenery from British cities as a consequence of development on green space, tree removal and the conversion of front gardens for parking (e.g. London Assembly, 2001, 2005, 2007). Management should therefore include the planting of native deciduous shrubs and trees especially those providing canopy cover above 2m (Smith et al., 2006). Allowing a diversity of grasses and forbs to set seed and remain in situ throughout the winter should promote the abundance of a range of foliar invertebrates including Dipterous flies, Lepidopteran larvae, spiders and Homopteran bugs (McNeill, 1973; Purvis & Curry, 1981; Morris, 2000). Given the uncertainty concerning the possible impacts of air pollution and/or vehicles on house sparrows, management to promote invertebrate abundance should initially be concentrated away from busy roads. Such advice needs to be targeted at the owners of private gardens and could be incorporated into local authority green space management plans."

It seems if we want to help birds it is not the cats we should limit but our own use of the car... and plant more trees. The eco-warriors are right!

References:

reproductive_success_of_house_sparrows_along_an_urban_gradient
Cat Predation
domestic_cats_and_wildlife

Blossom in Three Dimensions

I've made a short YouTube movie for you - a bit arty and wistful (with an Einaudi soundtrack no less).

If you were to measure the volume of air that is enclosed by the garden's boundaries then most of it at the moment is filled with little white dots like a Cornelia Parker installation.

The delicate airiness of the spectacle is contained by mundane brick and panel fencing.  Nature is trying to burst out of the confines of suburbia.  You go girl!

Cornelia Parker 'Edge of England'

For the purposes of copyright infringement I'd like to point out the music is by Ludovico Einaudi from the album Una Mattina. You can purchase this CD from all good retailers.

Turning Over Old Leaves

This was the first day of gardening in 2012. The unseasonable, and slightly worrying, warmth brought me out of hibernation.  So I pruned, and chopped and cleared while hoping my actions weren't killing off any still hibernating insect.  Luckily for those left behind any further disruption was brought to a halt when the green bin became full.  The volume of a recycling bin measured out my first visit to the garden.

Green Bin from Janet Walsh on Vimeo.

To be honest it is so early in the year that Nature is still asleep. I uncovered a worm, and saw a couple of blue tits, but the usual robin didn't appear and the skies were quiet.  My only companion was a bold fly:

Fly image from Sas & Marty Taylor on Flickr