Mistletoe

The mistletoe bough, in the olden time,
Was honoured in many a sacred rhyme
By bards and by singers of high degree,
When cut from its place on the old oak tree
By white-robed Druid with golden knife
For they thought it a magical Tree of Life:
And many a promise and holy vow 
There was solemnly sworn on the mistletoe bough….
                                               Steeleye Span 2004

Opposite the Reserve

Three large trees close by the Reserve have clumps of mistletoe in their canopies. Winter is a good time to see it, when the trees’ leaves have fallen, and the evergreen, near-spherical sprays are most obvious; at other times the hemi-parasitic growth may be hidden.

 

On the towpath towards Dudbridge

Apple trees are a favourite host for the plant, as are lime and poplar, so there would probably have been much more to see when there were orchards hereabouts at Hilly Orchard and on the QEII field. (Have a look at the copy of the 1880s Ordinance Survey map under Hilly Orchard bridge). Less common hosts include ash, blackthorn, hawthorn, Rowan, sycamore and willow.  

 

By Hilly Orchard bridge

There are separate male and female plants. The seeds, in the waxy, white berries of the female (seen from early autumn to late spring), are coated in a tacky gum, viscin, so any birds feeding on the berries get their beaks coated. The birds then wipe them off on a tree branch, the gum hardening and holding the seed secure. Any seeds eaten also get deposited, hence the name mistletoe, literally ‘dung-twig’. Once germinated the roots penetrate the bark, taking water and nutrients from their host.

 

Male mistletoe

Female mistletoe

Thrushes in particular feast on the winter berries, notably mistle thrush and fieldfares and redwings, and visiting blackcaps too. There are also some insect specialists like the mistletoe marble moth and the mistletoe weevil.

 

Further information and images

 

The Smithsonian Magazine: the Biology of Mistletoe 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/biology-mistletoe-180976601/

 

The Wildlife Trusts: Mistletoe

https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/wildflowers/mistletoe

 

 

Willows

O! the happy willow tree,

With the river by it sighing

And the swallow by it flying…

William Morris, Willow and the Red Cliff, c. 1853

All are native to the UK bar the Weeping willow (Salix babylonica, and its variants), introduced from China in the 18^th C. Most prefer moist or boggy ground, and a wonderful Weeping willow grows gracefully on the opposite side of the canal, while there at least two other species of willow in the reserve.

Growing by the pond is a Corkscrew willow (Salix tortuosa, also referred to as Claw or Wiggerly), which is eye-catching in late autumn and winter as the yellow-orange, twisted branches become unmasked at leaf-fall.

December

Next to this, straight multi-stemmed and branched willows (possibly Osier basket willows, Salix viminalis), which will grow the taller.

All these willows have long, lance-shaped leaves, slightly curly for the Corkscrew willow (unlike Goat willow, Salix caprea, the typical pussy willow, which has long, oval leaves). After the leaves unfurl in spring, catkins appear, long yellow male catkins and, on a separate tree, short green female ones, which will go on to produce fluffy seeds that get carried by the wind.

Our native willows include White willow, Salix alba, a large non-weeping willow often seen by the side of rivers and streams, the source of cricket bats, and the basket willows which were already being used for weaving 10,000 years ago.

 

Links to further information and images

Tree Guide UK - willows

Woodland Trust - willows

Beds, Cambs and Northants Wildlife Trust - a key to lowland willows and osiers

Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust - common osier

Golden Shield Lichen

Lichens are composite organisms of fungi and algae; the former provides the structural home (and the scientific classification, here Xanthoria parietina), while the latter produces essential nutrients for both, by photosynthesis. In this case the associated photosynthetic symbionts are Trebouxia green algae.

Near the pond, all year round on the elder branches, you can see this common, leaf-like lichen, which will grow up to 8cm across with 1-4mm lobes; it is aptly named Golden Shield as you can see from the images above.  Other names include Common Orange, Sunburst, and Yellow Scale. The yellow pigment, parietin, is produced as a UV screen, so in shady spots the lichen is greener. 

Unlike the majority of lichens, propagation is not vegetative, rather tiny arthropods aid the dispersal. The faecal pellets of oribatid mites, which feed on Golden Shield, contain both the ascospores and algal cells, and so new colonies can spread. The tree snail, Balea perversa, also shelters in and feeds on Golden Shield.

 

Links to further information and images

 

Natural History Museum- A guide to lichens on twigs

 

Daniel Greenwood - Golden shield lichen

 

 

 

Purple Loosestrife

The beautiful cerise-purple spikes, mentioned in the poem by Robert Byron below, have been in flower since June, and the plant will still give pleasure in the autumn when the willow-like leaves turn russet.

Purple loosestrife takes your cares away, as its name suggests. And it provides nectar for lots of long-tongued insects like red-tailed bumblebees, brimstone butterflies, and hawk-moths and hoverflies.

While an invasive weed in America, where it found its way a few hundred years ago, perhaps caught in wool bales, here some very specific insects stop it getting rampant. The leaves are eaten by the larvae of the loosestrife beetle, the roots munched by the loosestrife root weevil, and the flowers eaten by the larvae of the loosestrife flower weevil.

Links to further information and images

Bug Woman – Wednesday Weed – Purple Loosestrife

The Wildlife Trusts – Purple Loosestrife

All These I Learnt

by Robert Byron

 

If I have a son, he shall salute the lords and ladies who unfurl green hoods to the March rains, and shall know them afterwards by their scarlet fruit.

He shall know the celandine, and the frigid, sightless flowers of the woods, spurge and spurge laurel, dogs’ mercury, wood- sorrel and queer four-leaved herb-paris fit to trim a bonnet with its purple dot.

He shall see the marshes gold with flags and kingcups and find shepherd’s purse on a slag-heap.

He shall know the tree-flowers, scented lime-tassels, blood- pink larch-tufts, white strands of the Spanish chestnut and tattered oak- plumes.

He shall know orchids, mauve-winged bees and claret-coloured flies climbing up from mottled leaves.

He shall see June red and white with ragged robin and cow parsley and the two campions.

He shall tell a dandelion from sow thistle or goat’s beard. He shall know the field flowers, lady’s bedstraw and lady’s slipper, purple mallow, blue chicory and the cranesbills – dusky, bloody, and blue as heaven.

In the cool summer wind he shall listen to the rattle of harebells against the whistle of a distant train, shall watch clover blush and scabious nod, pinch the ample veitches, and savour the virgin turf.

He shall know grasses, timothy and wag -wanton, and dust his finger- tips in Yorkshire fog.

By the river he shall know pink willow-herb and purple pikes of loosestrife, and the sweetshop smell of water- mint where the rat dives silently from its hole.

He shall know the velvet leaves and yellow spike of the old dowager, mullein, recognise the whole company of thistles, and greet the relatives of the nettle, wound-wort and hore- hound, yellow rattle, betony, bugle and archangel. In autumn, he shall know the hedge lanterns, hips and haws and bryony.

At Christmas he shall climb an old apple-tree for mistletoe, and know whom to kiss and how.

He shall know the butterflies that suck the brambles, common whites and marbled white, orange- tip, brimstone, and the carnivorous clouded yellows.

He shall watch fritillaries, pearl-bordered and silver-washed, flit like fireballs across the sunlit rides. He shall see that family of capitalists, peacock, painted lady, red admiral and the tortoiseshells, uncurl their trunks to suck blood from bruised plums, while the purple emperor and white admiral glut themselves on the bowels of a rabbit.

He shall know the jagged comma, printed with a white c, the manx-tailed iridescent hair-streaks, and the skippers demure as charwomen on Monday morning.

He shall run to the glint of silver on a chalk-hill blue – glint of a breeze on water beneath an open sky – and shall follow the brown explorers, meadow brown, brown argus, speckled wood and ringlet.

He shall see death and revolution in the burnet moth, black and red, crawling from a house of yellow talc tied half-way up a tall grass.

He shall know more rational moths, who like the night, the gaudy tigers, cream-spot and scarlet, and the red and yellow underwings.

He shall hear the humming-bird hawk moth arrive like an air- raid on the garden at dusk, and know the other hawks, pink sleek-bodied elephant, poplar, lime, and death’s head.

He shall count the pinions of the plume moths, and find the large emerald waiting in the rain-dewed grass.

All these I learnt when I was a child and each recalls a place or occasion that might otherwise be lost.

They were my own discoveries.

They taught me to look at the world with my own eyes and with attention.

They gave me a first content with the universe.

Town-dwellers lack this intimate content, but my son shall have it!

Shimmering webs

On a moist and misty autumnal morning, you are bound to notice myriads of dew-laden webs, particularly as they sparkle in the rays from the rising sun.

Spiders from different families weave different sorts. Some webs are simple sheets, some tangled masses,

while others are beautifully complex, two-dimensional radiating structures. The first two types are true cobwebs (from ‘coppe’, the old English name for a spider), while the last (a typical cartoon web) is just a ‘spider’s web’ 

Our garden spider (Araneus diadematus), or cross spider, is an orb-weaver, the female spinning amazing webs of the third type at night. Every few days she will make a new web in a couple of hours, as the previous one looses its stickiness, but will recycle the old one by eating it. Her web needs about 20m of silk for a span of around 40cm and will weigh less than a thousandth of a gram.

At this time of year she is fat and full of eggs (another name is pumpkin spider), and will wait patiently at the centre of her web or at the edge (while holding on to a signal thread) until she feels the vibration of a stuck fly or other insect, which she will then wrap up for a tasty snack later. She will lay her eggs (500 or so) in a yellow silk sac, her spiderlings emerging next Spring, but staying together in a golden ball until their first moult, and only reaching maturity to continue the cycle the following year.

Links to further information and images

Buglife: garden cross spider

Natural History Museum: spider webs

 

 

 

Cinnabar moth and caterpillar

The adult moth is beautiful, slate-black with two red spots and two rosy stripes on each fore-wing, and with black bordered hind-wings that are also rosy red. It is named after the red mineral Cinnabar, which was once used as an artists’ pigment.

From May to July you might see the moths in the Reserve or along the Canal around the grasses and ragwort, perhaps during a sunny day, though they mostly fly at night.

A female will lay a few hundred eggs on the underside of the lower leaves of ragwort, in groups of around 50; on hatching in July the larvae are yellow and cluster for protection, but, as they feed and move up the plant to the flowers, they accumulate the plant’s bitter alkaloids, which stops the birds eating them. (If the plant is stripped, younger larvae may starve, or be eaten by their siblings).

At the same time the caterpillars’ colour changes into the typical fancy, golden-orange and black hoops, and long hairs grow. In the late summer of August, the mature caterpillars drop to the ground, and then spin a cocoon ready to overwinter in the soil. Next spring the adult moths will emerge to begin the cycle again.
 
 
Links to further information and images
 
Buglife
Natural History Museum

Ragwort

Drone fly on ragwort

Ragwort thou humble flower with tattered leaves

I love to see thee come and litter gold...

Thy waste of shining blossoms richly shields

The sun tanned sward in splendid hues that burn

So bright and glaring that the very light

Of the rich sunshine doth to paleness turn

And seems but very shadows in thy sight.

John Clare 1831

As you step through the gate of the nature reserve or walk along the towpath from June to November, amongst the grasses you will see large, flat-topped clusters of golden-yellow, daisy-like flowers; these sit atop long stalks carrying raggedy leaves (hence the name). Each plant is a biennial, meaning that it will flower in the second year (perhaps producing over 2000 flowers over the season) and then usually die.

By Hilly Orchard bridge

In the UK it is in the top ten of plants which show the best benefit to wildlife feeding on nectar (the bugs in return help pollinate the flowers). Around 35 insects, including seven moths and seven beetles, just rely on ragwort for their food. Various butterflies, hoverflies, moths, and solitary bees and wasps love it too; for hundreds of them, like the cinnabar moth, ragwort nectar and pollen is a really important larval food. Then there are parasites for some of these insects, and birds eat the seeds, so you can appreciate the plant’s amazing value to nature.

Hoverfly

Soldier beetles

Speckled wood butterfly

If you look out for the cinnabar moth caterpillars, wearing black and golden-orange striped pyjamas, you will see what a voracious appetite they have, sometimes stripping all the leaves. This can encourage the plant to grow a new basal rosette, and then it will last for longer, behaving more like a perennial. Animals, horses included, avoid eating the growing plant as the leaves contain bitter-tasting, alkaloid toxins, but the cinnabar moth caterpillar has evolved a way of storing the toxin, even retaining it after pupation. Birds then know to avoid the warning bright colours of the caterpillar and the moth if they don’t want a yucky meal.

 
Links to further information and images 
 
Greg’s Wildlife - Ragwort
Ragwort Facts

 
 

Ringlet Butterfly

There are three common, medium-sized brown butterflies in the UK: Gatekeeper, Meadow Brown and Ringlet. From June to the end of August you are likely to see all three fluttering by the QEII nature reserve, though they have slightly different preferred habitats, with the Meadow Brown in grassy areas, Gatekeepers along the hedgerow and Ringlets near the trees.

You might even see a young Ringlet on a cloudy day as its dark brown velvety wings readily absorb warmth from the sunlight, though the wing colour of the older butterflies fades. They feed on the nectar of the pink blackberry flowers and the yellow ragwort, so keep an eye out along the brambles and near the stage.

With a life-cycle of just one year, in the summer the female drops her pale yellow eggs amongst the coarse grasses. The larvae hatch a few weeks later, then hide during the day, waiting until night-time to feed on the grass. After overwintering, the larvae pupate in the spring, before a new adult emerges two weeks later from the chrysalis.

Links to further information and images

First Nature

UK Butterflies

The Woodland Trust

Water Horsetail

The Equisetum genus, which includes water horsetail(1), is a relict of spore producing ancestors that grew in the Carboniferous period (300 million years ago). These ancient plants formed much of the world’s coal deposits; some grew up to 30m tall(2).

You can see this carbonised fossil, from nearby,
at the Museum in the Park, Stroud

Like those by the QEII pond and along the Stroudwater Navigation, the fossilised specimen looks like a bottle brush, though new spring shoots are naked, and look quite similar to asparagus.

Once around 10 cm high, they develop needle-like green branches, which are arranged in whorls at nodes up the stem. The purple-toothed sheaths, above each node, are the non-photosynthetic leaves.

While by late spring only non-fertile shoots emerge, in early spring the first  stems are tipped with a cone, the strobilus, which ripens to release millions of green spores. Each spore has four short legs which may help gliding in the air, and, intriguingly, once on the ground, allow it to walk and jump as the humidity levels change(3), to aid its dispersal.

The segments between the nodes gradually decrease in length up a stem in a regular way, which is said to have inspired the 17th century Scottish mathematician John Napier to invent logarithms(4).

 

Early morning dew on the plant forms as almost spherical droplets. Various plants, such as grasses, elicit this same superhydrophobic effect(5).

Horsetails have evolved a unique way of achieving this, producing a micro-bobbly surface by incorporating silica balls under a waxy coating.

.

magnified branch

magnified stem

If you rub a branch it feels like very fine sandpaper, and traditionally a wodge of the plant was used to polish metal, such as pewter, and wood, which gave rise to the folk name ‘scouring rush’.

Links

1 The Wildlife Trusts (Beds, Cams, Northants): a revised key to the horsetails

2 In defense of plants: Ancient Equisetum

3 The walk and Jump of Equisetum spores

4 Maths is fun: introduction to logarithms 

5 Maths Inside: Nature’s Raincoats