Frog City

Frog City on the Basingstoke Canal

Guest post by Simon Hughes   

Walking a ten-mile stretch of the Basingstoke Canal on an unseasonably mild day, bird life on and around the  water was abundant, including a kingfisher. A brimstone fluttered upwards and violets, primroses and celandine were making their first appearance.  For a long while, there was a fisherman every fifteen yards or so but they seemed to only be catching tiddlers. In any case, the murkiness of the canal combined with the bright sky reflections made it difficult to see any life in the canal. 

That was until I passed the last fisherman, when out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a few bubbles rising through the reedy vegetation at the side of the canal. Closer inspection revealed the bubbles were a couple of frogs bobbing up and down. Even closer inspection revealed that it wasn't a couple of frogs but many dozens in the vegetation. I had discovered Frog City. Perhaps the vegetation offered a prop for resting in the sun that was easy to escape from should a predator, or nosy human, hove too close.

Moving along the bank, I saw more and more frogs sunning themselves and occasionally popping up or down. Eventually, I came to a single huge conglomeration of frogspawn, clearly of different maturities since the "black dots" were of different size. There were more frogs amongst the spawn than anywhere else. And while I was watching, one jumped on top of another. I'm not sure it was a happy pairing since the jumped upon flailed its legs violently . But all that did was to encourage more frogs to leap on the pair. I felt obliged to leave them to their business. That day, apart from Frog City, I saw nothing else moving in the canal.

Snakes alive

Most people walking across the Common never see the snakes basking a few metres from their feet. For the snakes, and for many of the people, this is probably a good thing. But for a few of us who admire their sinuous beauty, these few weeks in March are a long-awaited spring spectacle.

Adders lie in little coils at the foot of scrub islands in the meadow, half hidden among the moss, dead grass and leaves. They often curl up together for warmth, in what look to human eyes like affectionate entwinings. From a distance you'd guess they were heaps of dog poo (which suddenly disappear from view unless you approach on tiptoes).

Grass snakes are much more elusive, a truly shy creature and lighting-fast when they shoot under cover. I hear them much more often than I see them. But yesterday I spotted a rather torpid one waiting to absorb some heat from fleeting sunbursts on a cold afternoon. Look closely at the photograph and you'll see that it's lying on top of an adder. I've seen these two species basking close together before, but never actually touching. Clearly, neither sees the other as a threat.

Fire trees

On a bitterly cold day, in brilliant sunshine, I walked among the fire trees on Ashtead Common. Twelve years ago fire raged through the Common for three days, destroying hundreds of veteran oaks. Flames took hold in a deep layer of dry bracken, defying efforts to extinguish them.

Some remnants of the burnt oaks remain as silent witnesses to the destruction. These monoliths, scorched and bleached amputees, create a bizarre landscape. In summer they watch over a herd of chocolate-brown Sussex cattle. In autumn bracken rollers crush the scrub at their feet, removing tinder for any future flame.

Look inside these hulks and you will find the remains of wasp and hornet nests, beetle burrows and deep hollows which once sheltered bats and birds. In this dead wood, you can read the history of the trees and the life of the Common.

In the winter landscape the fire trees stand proud against the sky, dominating the high pasture and casting deep shadows. They are like the grand old men of the Common, watching over it and offering a poignant warning against the destructive power of fire. There is something both beautiful and terrible about them. 

Blue sky thinking

Sky-blue sky over the Common today as I stood dazzled by the sun reflecting off the Great Pond. A heron stood statue-like on the shore, then flew over the water like some prehistoric beast. Further on I spotted an unlikely buttefly fluttering through the bare twigs of a tree. I may be going mad but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a leaf - probably a red admiral woken briefly from hibernation. Overhead a flock of long-tailed tits called my attention with their metallic tweets.

madagascar dreaming

Snuggled up under the duvet on a dark December morning, I'm dreaming of a white sandy beach, basking in tropical sunshine and lapped by the warm Indian Ocean.

beach lemurs?

Lemurs dance across the sand where the forest fringes the beach, sometimes pausing for a moment to cast a glance at the strange hairless creatures lying in the sun. They huddle together for safety, then spring back into the trees and disappear into the dappled foliage.




I wander down to the water's edge and wade out through the surf, jumping through the waves. As I swim across the bay, giants appear on the horizon, hurling themselves out of the brine to crash back down in spectacular back flops, sending clouds of spray into the air.
As twilight falls, I walk up the beach towards the path. A pair of saucer-like eyes shine at me from a low hanging branch. The tiniest of primates, a mouse lemur, has come to peer at me with intense curiosity.

Madagascar may be six thousand miles away but it's never far away in my dreams...

It's all the more vivid for having lived it (well, make allowances for a little poetic licence) with the UK/Madagascar ngo, Azafady. You can go too and volunteer your help with conservation or human development. Have a look at azafady.org!

Bitten

 

The unloveable Blandford Fly

I'm a self-confessed bug hugger and a trustee of a national charity dedicated to conserving invertebrates but this little critter is not one of my favourites. Even though it has a real ale named after it.

Last week I visited my allotment. Something prompted me to gently scratch the back of my hand and immediately a tiny pool of purple blood formed on the skin. Puzzling. Surely, I hadn't scratched hard enough to pierce a vein?

In the night, I woke up scratching a hot and swollen hand, the site of the "injury" no longer visible. By the following afternoon, my left wrist looked as if it had sprouted a giant puffball and my partner urged a visit to the doctor. My GP was puzzled too. It's always slightly alarming when a doctor looks worried.

Later, I pondered the possible cause, sitting with my hand propped up on a pile of cushions, knocking back penicillin and anti-histamine and feeling rather drowsy. The skin was starting to blister. Then I remembered reading something on Facebook: earlier that week conservation volunteers had been bitten by the Blandford or Black fly while working just a few miles away at the Sutton Ecology Centre.

Diving onto Google confirmed that all my symptoms matched. The Blandford Fly, named after an epidemic of bites in Dorset in the 1970s, is a tiny insect, just two or three millimetres long and lays its eggs in running water. One of its relatives spreads river blindness in Africa, but thankfully - at least - our resident species, Simulium posticatum, is not known to carry disease.

Blandford Fly ale is brewed by Badger with a not-so-secret ingredient (an enzyme found in ginger), said to reduce the effects of a bite. I'm hoping someone will track down a bottle for me as a Christmas present. Then again, I'm hoping I'll never need it again...

Nuts to dormice



Stuck for something to do this autumn? Why not spend a couple of hours scrabbling around on the forest floor, searching for chewed nuts? Not just any forest floor - you need to be under the canopy of a mature hazel coppice - and the nut you seek is a hollow hazelnut with a perfectly round signature hole. 

 This hazelnut is the holy grail of dormouse conservation. You'd be amazed how much you can tell from the marks on its shell.

Squirrels insert a sharp incisor and crack the nut apart. Woodmice like to hoard their nuts in secret stashes for the lean times in winter. Like bank voles, they leave distinctive bite marks on the shell. But the golden hazelnut hidden under leaf litter bears an almost perfectly round hole on its side with a smooth inner rim and tooth marks at a 45 degree angle to the hole.

a dormouse nut



Why so much fuss about a discarded, chewed nut? It's the only way to find out if dormice are living in the wood, without going to a lot of trouble and expense. These sleepiest of British mice are nocturnal and they scuttle around in the tree canopy. You are extremely unlikely to see one in the wild or find its nest. If you do find the remains of its dinner, you feel justified in putting up wooden nest boxes which at least some of the population will probably use.

Only then will you come face to face with the cutest critter in the woods and be able to weigh it, sex it and find out how many offspring it has.

 A few days ago we found seven dormouse nuts among hundreds of squirrelled shells on the floor of a hazel copse in Surrey, suggesting there is a viable population in the wood. On hands and knees, we sifted through damp leaf litter, disturbing spiders and woodlice and revealing buried fungi. Foxes must have wondered who had scraped so many patches of earth clean when they emerged into the wood that night. 



torpid dormouse

 Very soon now, the hazel dormouse will be curling up in a ball of leaves for its long winter sleep. It doesn't depend on hazel nuts to survive, so long as it has plenty of food from April to October: nectar, bugs, fruits and nuts. But it does need a connected habitat of woods and hedges and hazel coppice seems to suit it very well.