Margins

How many stop to admire the tracery of white borders during the cow parsley days at the beginning of June?  This plant easily beats later umbellifers for delicacy and beauty of form yet I see few people stop to give it a second thought. Perhaps they've mentally placed it as that weed coming after dandelion alongside dock and nettle.

The margins of Hathersage Road are full of it just now with added white interest provided by hawthorn. Not unexpected that motorists don't stop. Perhaps they should. What better reason for causing a traffic jam than something beautiful and natural?

Artistry and Assertiveness

There are debunkers around in every sphere of life and usually plenty for them to debunk. Then there are those who debunk the debunkers. In the question of birdsong I associate with the latter. There have been some very sentimental things written about birdsong, often beautifully and lyrically expressed with the accent on extreme romanticism. Some of it tips over into anthropomorphism to a near derisory extent.

No surprise then that a reaction against this set in leading to certain observers dismissing the expressive qualities some claimed to detect in birdsong as so much mushy nonsense. To the new thinking bird song was all about territory and aggression and that was an end of it.

The alternative view comes more from seeing the way that artistic expression reflects essential qualities in human behaviour and the competitive elements that have always been implicit in our music literature and visual arts. Once anyone proclaims himself, as a poet or musician does, assertiveness and creativity go together.

There is something in the creative process that is saying the artist has belief in his own ability to outdo others. This is not far from the assertiveness and competitiveness of two blackbirds singing from neighbouring rooftops.


In this case the warblers were close to the main road so maybe competing with other noise in addition to normal rivalry. They were still deafening.

Songs of Spring

Spring birdsong for some of us is hardly less than an addiction. We can't get enough. And once the summer reaches its peak and the song dies down we're in a limbo time until the following April.

The pictures in this video are worthless. The only reason for including it is the sound. This is the secondary woodland above the stream, not loved by conservationists but much loved by summer visiting songbirds and residents too.
A morning with no sunshine can be one of the best for hearing the amazing chorus. For so much energy to be transformed into a kind of wild art form is just a moving experience for those lucky enough to hear it.

Logic

A pipit in a tree must be a tree pipit just as a pipit in a meadow must be a meadow pipit. This logic suggests a meadow buttercup is also in the meadow and a creeping buttercup is on its hands and knees.

By the same token anyone seeing a butterfly on a tortoiseshell can be pretty sure it's a tortoiseshell butterfly.....?

The pipits do look almost identical, at least to those who don't have one in each hand and a guide book on the table. The 'parachute flight' of the tree pipit would be a pretty good desciption of what this fellow was going in for.

Cuckoo Stalking

A good year for cuckoos and this is excellent cuckoo territory. To them the wilder the better. Not just several males with noticeably varying calls but the bubbling call of the female heard several times.

Following the call and trying to get closer reminds of the rule well known to everyone wanting to take a photograph: wildlife always appears just when you've put the camera away and zipped up the case.

I'm also reminded of the early meeting of the RAG when they were trying to tell us that Blacka being in 'unfavourable condition' had such a bad effect on the birds - 'not a single grouse nested on the moor last year' said the BTO man. Interesting that, I said, has there been no other species that's been doing well? Well, wrens I suppose, he reluctantly replied. No mention of all the exuberant summer visiting song birds, cuckoos etc. I'm sure that if he came back now he would claim that the management of the land in the last ten years has improved things immensely. God knows how. Poisonning trees and installing barbed wire? It's a local speciality: make up your mind first - then look round for something to back it up.

Hard Done By

Nobody is quite so hard done by as the hard-done-by-farmer. If it's not the supermarkets driving down the prices, or the forms to fill in for subsidies or the cost of fuel, or floods or droughts it's the public, particularly the urban public, who want to walk across their land.
A caricature I know, but with a grain of truth.

So let's offer some sympathy on hearing that their incomes will suffer as the value of the Euro goes down. Farm subsidies are paid in Euros.
Best, though, not to mention that farm incomes went up by 25% in 2011!!

Beech, Oak and Birch

Ten days ago beech had already transformed those parts of the woods where it dominates, creating translucent ceilings in the morning sun.

 

At the same time oak had only begun to stir.

It has now emboldened after the warmth of late May.

Oak ceilings are quite different.

Elsewhere on Blacka the area around Lenny Hill is particularly rich in young oaks

and, should they be allowed to make progress, it will be interesting to see how they develop. Some of the more established of the oaks have a spreading character presumably because they colonised earlier than the others with no neighbouring competition. Will the next generations be straighter, accelerating towards the light where several of similar age are nearby?

That's certainly happened with a vengeance at some places in the case of birch

while other parts show a more random character. Some unnecessary felling of older trees further out from the edge of the crowded clusters has exposed the stark edges here and not improved the view. So much for minimal intervention.