Harlequins, Angelica and Ragwort Honey.

Mid-July brought clouds and rain.

In an effort to start catching-up, I’ve shoved photos from at least three different walks into this post.

A mature Roe Deer buck in the fields close to home.

Wildflowers in Clarke’s Lot.

Lady’s Bedstraw.

If you click on the photo and zoom in to enlarge on flickr, you will see that, unbeknown to me when I took the photo, two of the flower heads are home to ladybird larvae, of which more later in this post.

Fox and Cubs.

Tutsan berries.

Mullein.

Feverfew.

Hoverfly on Marsh Thistles.

Guelder Rose Berries.

A Carpet Moth – possibly Wood Carpet.

Hogweed busy with Soldier Beetles.

Meadow Sweet.

Broad-leaved Helleborine?

I was very chuffed to spot this rather small, straggly Helleborine – at least, that’s what I think it is – by the path into Eaves Wood from the Jubilee Wood car-park, because although I know of a spot where Broad-leaved Helleborines grow every year, by the track into Trowbarrow Quarry, I’ve never seen one growing in Eaves Wood before.

Common Blue-sowthistle.

Common Blue-sowthistle leaf.

Dewberry.

Dewberries are fantastic, smaller, juicier and generally earlier than blackberries, every walk at this time offered an opportunity at some point to sample a few.

Broad-leaved Helleborine.

These are some of the afore-mentioned Helleborines, not quite in flower at this point, in fact I missed them this summer altogether.

Lady’s-slipper Orchid leaves.

I missed the Lady’s-slipper Orchids too. Some leaves appeared belatedly, after the rains returned, long after they would usually have flowered. I don’t know whether they did eventually flower or not.

Dark-red Helleborine?

And I kept checking on the few suspected Dark Red Helleborines I’d found at Gait Barrows, but they seemed reluctant to flower too.

The pink gills of a fresh Field Mushroom.

As well as the Dewberries, I continued to enjoy the odd savoury mushroom snack.

Broad-leaved Helleborine by Hawes Water.

Wild Angelica with ladybirds.

Wild Angelica.

Wild Angelica.

Yellow Brain Fungus.

Dryad’s Saddle.

A slime mould?

I thought that this might be Yellow Slime Mold, otherwise know as Scrambled Egg Slime or, rather unpleasantly, Dog Vomit Slime, but I’m not really sure.

White-lipped Snail.

Comma butterfly.

Red Campion.

False Goat’s Beard? A garden escapee.

Inkcaps.

Harebells.

A profusion of Ragwort at Myer’s Allotment.

Honey-bee on Ragwort.

Spying this Honey-bee on Ragwort flowers, I was wondering whether honey containing pollen from a highly poisonous plant might, in turn, be toxic. Then I began to wonder about the many insects, especially bees, which were feeding on the Ragwort: are they, like the Cinnabar Caterpillars, impervious to the alkaloids in the Ragwort.

It seemed perhaps not; although there were many apparently healthy insects on the flowers, now that I started to look, I could also many more which had sunk down between the blooms. Some were evidently dead…

A Ragwort victim?

Whilst others were still moving, but only slowly and in an apparently drugged, drowsy way.

A drowsy hoverfly.

If the Ragwort is dangerous to insects it seems surprising that they haven’t evolved an instinct to stay away from it.

Mullein.

Yellow Rattle.

Leighton Moss from Myer’s Allotment.

Gatekeeper.

Mixed wildflowers at Myer’s Allotment.

Bindweed.

A Harlequin ladybird emerging from its pupae.

The leaves of single sapling by the roadside were home to several Harlequin Ladybirds in various stages of their lifecycle. Unfortunately, the leaves were swaying in a fairly heavy breeze, so I struggled to get sharp images.

Discarded pupae?

Another emerging Harlequin.

Harlequin larvae.

Fascinating to see, but the Harlequin is an invasive species from Asia, so worrying for the health of our native ladybirds.

Rosebay Willowherb.

Greater Plantain.

Burdock.

Hogweed.

Small Skipper.

Red Admiral.

Melilot.

Bee on Melilot.

Fat Man on a Bike

Or: A Promise Fulfilled

B on his bike. Not the fat man.

The actual Easter Weekend was at the end of our fortnight off. The Surfnslide crew were scheduled to join us and, in the run up to the weekend, although we were all, as ever, excited about the impending visit, the Dangerous Brothers in particular had just about reached fever-pitch.

At Trowbarrow Quarry.

Rather rashly, when we had last seen him, Andy had promised that on his next visit he would bring his bike and accompany the boys to their favourite local mountain biking venue.

Andy on his bike. Not the fat man.

For weeks before Easter they had been pestering me to remind him of his promise. And now that he had finally arrived they couldn’t wait to get out on their trusty steeds. So, on Good Friday, we all agreed to head for Trowbarrow Quarry.

Little S.

Our two-family party spilt into a cycling group and walking-to-watch-the-cyclists-fall-off brigade. Somewhat to everybody’s surprise, especially my own, I decided to join the ranks of the cyclists, which meant something of a delay whilst the entire party lent a hand to replace both of my bikes inner tubes. (You’d be right to conclude that my bike doesn’t leave the garage very often.)

Once we’d set-off, it was to discover that TBH’s bike wasn’t in a good state of repair either: one of the wheels was out of true and wobbled prodigiously as she rode. I waited a while and lost the others as TBH decided to turn back for home. When I eventually got going again, for some reason I didn’t take the first turn, along Moss Lane, but went the long way around beside Leighton Moss. It wasn’t much of cycle, but by the time I arrived I was already jelly-legged.

At the Quarry, the boys were showing Andy, the honorary Dangerous Brother, all of the steep banks which they enjoy riding down, and also the various mounds and edges they like to jump off.

Little S on his bike. Not the fat man.

They all looked much too steep to me.

I decided to try out my camera’s sports setting instead of attempting any feats of derring-do.

I did have a couple of freewheels down this, less intimidating, slope…

A on my bike. Not the fat man.

The net result of my change of heart was another puncture for my bike. Andy very kindly cycled back to our house for his car so that he could collect me and my long-suffering bike.

The ‘Fat Man on a Bike’ was, of course, me. But also the late Tom Vernon who wrote a book of that name after radio and television series about his cycling exploits. I can’t really recall anything about Vernon, apart from the title of his book. In my mind, he seems to have become muddled with Richard Ballantine, who wrote ‘Richards Bicycle Book’…

…a book which I thoroughly enjoyed when I was in my teens and very much bicycle obsessed. B is similarly bike fixated now. Of course, things have changed in the intervening years. I joined the Cycle Touring Club and fancied a set of Carradice panniers (handmade in Nelson, Lancashire since 1932), B hangs out in local quarries with his mates and has just acquired a dropper seatpost (whatever one of those is). We didn’t have mountain bikes, although I did enjoy off-road cycling, or rough-stuff as we used to call it. I even briefly kept a diary of my cycling exploits, a sort of forerunner to this blog, with carefully hand-drawn maps of the routes.

Finally, a bit of nature to round off the post…

In one corner of the quarry, we spotted a couple of what I think are slime moulds, probably the False Puffball, Enteridium lycoperdon, which is apparently common in Britain in the spring. According to this article, slime moulds, once thought to be fungi, are now classed as amoeba. They are certainly very strange.

Enteridium lycoperdon is found across Europe, but also in Mexico, where, in the state of Veracruz, it is known as Caca de Lune or Moon’s Excrement.

If this is False Puffball, then it is in its plasmodial stage, preparing to spore. The plasmodial stage is mobile, which I find very disconcerting – it looks like some sort of fungi, but it can move around. How very odd.

My extremely limited knowledge of slime moulds is a perfect example of one advantage of blogging – if it weren’t for a question I posted years ago, I wouldn’t even know they existed.

Tramp

A bit of a wander from the end of January. Before I left the house I’d been watching a large flock of Curlews in the field behind the house. Here’s a portion of them…

Snowdrops.

Pepper Pot.

Slime mould?

Goldcrest.

Jelly Ear fungus.

Stinking Hellebore.

I’m not sure that Stinking Hellebore is really a local wildflower – it likes alkaline soils so grows well here, but not in may places, so is probably a garden escapee. It’s apparently best seen on the chalk hills of Hampshire.

Jackdaws.

Snowdrops.

More Hellebores, this time from our garden. 

And the title? Well, it all came from mishearing….

‘The Champ’ by The Mohawks on Radio 6. My mistake is not too surprising, since this is a cover of ‘Tramp’, first recorded by Lowell Fulsom and cowritten by Fulsom and Jimmy McCracklin (who recorded the album ‘High on the Blues’, a favourite of mine) and most famously performed as a duet by Otis Redding and Carla Thomas. The song has had quite an eventful history, with lots of versions recorded, some of which have also been heavily sampled. Salt and Pepa recorded a reworking of the tune, but when the b-side started to get more airtime that was released separately as a single. And the b-side was…Push It, their big hit.

Anyway, enough pop trivia for now. I really like The Mohawks cover, but for me nothing will ever top the moment in the Thomas/Redding version when Otis’s voice soars into the line ‘I’m a lover’.

Do-Re-Mi

Don’t worry, I shan’t be bursting into any Rodgers and Hammerstein numbers.

Last Friday, (I’m only a week behind – Callooh! Callay!) whilst TBH took the kids swimming, I headed back to Gaitbarrow. On my previous visit, I’d read signs asking visitors to keep-off certain sensitive areas important for breeding pearl bordered fritillaries and duke of burgundy butterflies. So, I thought – since I’ve never knowingly seen either species, this is my chance. But, like the otters, bitterns, bearded tits and ospreys at Leighton Moss, which never seem to appear when I visit, the butterflies once again eluded me. Not to worry: there’s always plenty to see at Gaitbarrow.

 

The lady’s-slipper orchids, for instance, are now blooming.

Well, not all of them….

 

…but plenty to keep me and my camera occupied for a while.

 

Where ever I came across an open glade, I paused hopefully, waiting for masses of butterflies to appear. Nothing. But I did spot this moth…

 

I think that it’s a brown silver-line, but I’m not completely confident.

Nearby, I spotted an incongruous burst of colour amongst a patch of moss…

 

…I suspect that this is another slime mould, although, once again, I may be wrong.

Like the carnage of broken garden snail shells the boys and I found a while ago by Haweswater, this seems to be another anvil where numerous snail shells have been smashed, but this time the smaller banded snail…

 

…bits of shell were scattered over quite a wide area.

 

When I emerged from the wooded area into open fields, I did begin to see butterflies: peacocks, brimstones and whites, possibly female orange-tips.

Down by Haweswater the bird’s-eye primroses were flowering..

 

…and I finally managed to catch-up with one of those butterflies…

 

In the field at the end of the lake, I spotted a roe deer doe…

 

It was here that last year I saw a doe with a fawn. This doe may have a fawn secreted about the field somewhere – B tells me that he saw two roe deer fawns this week curled up together in a garden in the village. I often see roe deer on my evening wanders: like me they are crepuscular creatures.

 

As I got close to being back at the car, it seemed that almost every prominent tree had a song thrush busking from its topmost branches.

Several times on the walk I’d thought I’d heard the high-pitched begging of nestlings, but couldn’t find any nests. This time however, after some patient searching, I spotted a marsh tit poised on a branch with a sizeable insect in it’s beak. I backed off and waited and, sure enough, the bird dropped to a hollow in the trunk of a low tree,.

It was quite dingy under the tree here, and sadly none of my photographs were very sharp.

But in this last one, you can make out two yawning beaks facing the exhausted parent.

 

When I approached the tree for a closer look, the chicks greeted me at first as if I were bringing them food, but then hunkered down low into the hollow making themselves as inconspicuous as possible.

Whilst I watched the adult bird(s) going to and from the nest, this creature flew into my face and then fell to the floor. It’s a longhorn beetle, Rhagium bisfasciatum. Apparently longhorn beetles often fly at around dusk – another crepuscular creature.

 

Blackbird

Slime Mould

We’ve been having big sky weather – the forecast has been showing a black cloud with blue tears dropping from it and a spiky yellow sun poking out from behind – this has translated as large rolling clouds, white from a distance but black beneath, heavy showers, sometimes of hail, but also bright sunny spells. Proper April weather in fact.

This afternoon I proffered a late afternoon invitation for a walk and A accepted. She suggested the Pepper Pot and I asked if she minded if we dropped down on the Arnside Knott side afterwards…

 

…which gave us another chance to take a look at the…

 

…green hellebore.

 

We also found a wonderful patch starred with wood anemones…

 

But the real star of the show was the blob I spotted on a birch log on my last visit.

This is what it looked like then…

 

…pure white, smooth, shiny and slightly uncanny.

 

I wondered whether it might be fungi, but couldn’t find anything like it in any of my mushroom field guides. Phil suggested that it might be a slime mould, Enteridium lycoperdon, and naturally he’s quite right.

Here’s how it looked today.

A gentle touch sent small puffs of brown spores floating in the breeze.

Slime mould’s were once considered to be fungi, but they are far more weird and wonderful than that. They move. Like amoeba. Then they enter a sporangial phase, as above.

Further reading: (yes, yes, I pilfered this idea from Alen. Steal from the best, that’s my motto)

Here’s a link to four fascinating posts of Phil’s about various slime moulds. Well worth a read.

http://cabinetofcuriosities-greenfingers.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Slime%20mould

This is the wikipedia entry on this particular type:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteridium_lycoperdon

And here is an excellent article from the Grauniad online, about experiments involving slime moulds and their apparent ability to solve problems without the aid of a nervous system.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/sep/08/slime-mould-physarum