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.








autumn beeches

I always think beeches are the most beautiful trees in woods. Here in the South East they romp across the chalk downs, scattering dappled shade and a carpet of beech mast. Autumn is a good time to see them, as the dying season turns their canopies from green to bronze.

Our ancestors planted beeches along ancient boundary banks. Their roots entwine along the bank, so you wonder where one tree stops and another begins. It's as if they've formed an unbroken line to keep enemies out of the wood. The pair above, seem to have lost their neighbours but are holding fast to each other like "best friends forever".

What I love about beeches is the sinuousness of their trunks: how they twist and turn, almost dancing towards the light. Somehow they are more light on their feet, more feminine than the oak. That and the beech's fractal foliage, a vivid lime green in spring contrasting perfectly with the bluebells at their feet, then burnished bronze in autumn against a stark blue sky.

Oaks are the kings and queens of the landscape, in woods and pasture. But beeches are their liveliest courtiers, dancing through the seasons.