Time for the six-monthly inspection of the Plumpton elm, which we are nurturing as part of the Great British Elm Experiment. It's been a tough six months for the elm - it hasn't grown an inch, let alone a millimetre, in this dry summer - the leaves are showing clear signs of drought-related distress. But it was playing host to a truly stupendous caterpillar - almost indistinguishable from the leaves. It proved to be the larva of the Pale Tussock Moth (Calliteara pudibunda) - not specific to elms but it had still made a good meal of ours.
Violet helleborines Epipactis purpurata are in flower now. This photo was taken today in a wood in the parish (but doesn't really do it justice). This orchid flowers much later than most other orchid species and likes deep shade so it can be difficult to see. But it is worth looking out for. The species is restricted to south and south-east England and we have some good populations in the woods of Plumpton. JH On 28 July, at the base of an oak tree on the edge of a wood bordering Little Inholmes Farm, Tony Hutson saw and later identified this fungus as Inonotus dryadeus. It is about 30 cm wide, lumpy and exuding amber drops from tubes in the upper surface. It is also known as oak bracket, weeping polypore or weeping conk. It is said to be quite widespread but rare. It is, unsurpisingly, inedible but who was cr. (Jacqui Hutson)
On Markstakes Common, not far from Plumpton, I found a rare moss this summer: the Strict Haircap, (Polytrichum strictum). It is only the second record of this moss in Sussex for about 30 years. The first was in March on the Ashdown Forest, where I saw it while with a group of fellow moss lovers on a recording trip. Having seen it once then I obviously had the search image lodged in my brain – otherwise I am not sure I would have noticed it among the other similar-looking mosses that carpeted the ground in the glade where I was on my hands and knees weeding out birch seedlings. It was a very surprising place to find it – a new glade we cleared of birch and bracken about four years ago and is now regenerating with heather and a mix of other lovely heathland species. But it is a very different place from the very wet bog where I saw it on Ashdown Forest. The record has been verified and is now on the national database. I know that not many people get as excited as I do about mosses and liverworts but thought you would like to know about this discovery given that it is so near our village and probably the result of the conservation work we are doing on the Common. Despite etxensive searches we have found only the one little patch. If anyone is interested in joining in our Monday morning tasks then please contact us. We do a variety of things: making new glades to enhance the Common for butterflies etc; maintaining them by hand weeding or scything; carrying out surveys Plumpton resident Frances Barter sent us these photos of the bluetits who successfully raised five chicks in a nest box fitted with a webcam.
Mick Newman, our friendly station master, saw a hoopoe this morning. It flew in from the racecourse and landed on one of the disused London-bound platforms so he had a good view of it. Hoopoe are scarce spring passage migrants in Sussex and have bred here very
We've had the first report of a cuckoo in Plumpton this year - heard on Monday 22 April, towards Streat, by Sally Huband!
For the second year running contractors disregarded the management plan we have with Southern Railway for the wildflower areas at the station. It states that no cutting should be done after February and before the late summer/early autumn to allow wild flowers to bloom and set seed. The first primroses and cowslips were in flower by 20th March but on the 29th the contractors cut them down.
Why this should happen again is a mystery at the moment –last year Southern apologised and provided us with some cowslip seeds, so why let it happen again? We await their response. Cowslips and primroses both provide nectar for long-tongued bumblebees, bee flies and other insects and this is particularly important when few other flowers are in bloom. Both have a rather sophisticated mechanism to ensure cross-pollination and successful seed set. There are two forms of flower– pin-eyed, in which the female stigma is at the mouth of the petal tube and the male anthers lower down the tube – and thrum-eyed, which has the reverse arrangement. When an insect pushes its long tongue to the bottom of the petal tube of a pin-eyed flower to find nectar, it picks up pollen from the stamens at just the right place on its tongue to transfer the pollen to the stigma of a thrum-eyed flower. And when the insect visits a thrum-eyed flower pollen sticks on the right place on its tongue to pollinate a pin-eyed flower. Sadly, this year, any early insects visiting the station will find no flowers to feed on. Cowslips are even more important now that the species have largely disappeared from most meadows. They were once probably as common as buttercups are now, as suggested by their widespread use to make wine, to strew in front of brides and to decorate churches on Cowslip Sunday. They declined catastrophically between the 1950s and 1980s due to changes in farming practice – ploughing and reseeding old meadows, and applying artificial fertiliser. Jacqui Hutson I was entranced watching Charlie Hamilton James’s remake of Percy Smith’s 1908 film The Acrobatic Fly, televised on BBC 4, Edwardian Insects on Film on Tuesday 19 November. The programme also showed other films made by Percy Smith whose amazing technical ability and dedication to filming natural history was ground-breaking and was the start of time-lapse photography. Do watch it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01rd376/
Flies are not everyone’s favourite animals, probably because most people immediately think of troublesome bluebottles and blowflies. But of the 7000 known species in the UK only some are pests and disease vectors. Most are beneficial, being important predators of other pests, as pollinators and as food for other animals. The larval forms of many species are involved in the decay of organic matter and therefore play a vital role in the recycling of nutrients in the soil. W. H. Hudson, in his book, Nature in Downland, published in 1900 by Longmans, Green & Co, observed that flies have wildly eccentric behaviour and wrote ‘if they grew to the size of ducks and geese we would spend our whole time watching their amazing, meaningless antics; nothing else would be talked about or even thought about in the world and we would become strictly nocturnal in order to get out of their way or else we should go mad.’ |