Week 11: Misty Morning & Willow Patterns

Yesterday’s forecast: bright with sunny spells all day. Perfect, I thought. I’ll get out around Boxmoor and visit the Oak. I am still frustratingly below par so venturing out requires a degree of psyching myself up and a little forward planning. Of course, the day dawned, complete with a thick blanket of fog. A more sensible individual would have postponed her jaunt into the gloom until the sun had burned its way through the moisture. Not me. Like an oil tanker, my course was set and there was no turning back. So, off I went into the mist...

The backdrop to the Dellfield oak (below) was the murky trees of Barnfield. The leaf buds are due to open this month so I shall keep a close eye on them.

Walking along Two Waters Road, it’s easy to spot a variety of willows on the adjacent moor, with one particular tree rising up from the river and overhanging the footpath. Its fresh leaves were still carrying the raindrops from the night before.

Through Two Waters Moor (west) and all the daisies were still fast asleep, their heads closed up to the dark, dank morning. I hadn’t realised this, but the name daisy is thought to be derived from a corruption of “Day’s Eye”. The flower retracts all its petals at night and opens them up again in the morning.

 

Over the weekend, I had noticed a rather lovely pattern in the dead stump of one of the willows, growing by the river, on Bulbourne Meadow.  I returned to this spot and, not long into my photo session, the Kingfisher came to join me. He announced his arrival and perched on one of the low hanging willow branches, just centimetres off the ground, right on the river bank. Less than 8 metres from me, at ankle height, he looked around and then flew a short distance up river, where he hovered like a humming bird before diving to catch a fish. The whole encounter was over within a couple of minutes but was utterly delightful. I shall now always associate the willow pattern with the Kingfisher’s company.

In the past few days, the Chiffchaffs have been joined by singing Blackcaps. I heard at least 2 birds on the moor yesterday. The Grey Wagtails were around too, over on Station Moor, and the floods on Snoxall’s Moor don’t look to be subsiding yet. I had hoped to find a migrant wader, waiting for the fog to clear before carrying on its journey, but no luck. There weren't even any gulls to look through!

Finally, as I was walking back through Station Moor, the Little Egret was fishing in the company of 5 rowdy Woodpigeons, all bathing in the shallows. Unfortunately, by this point, I'd run out of steam but decided that if the light improved, and I had the energy, I'd return in the afternoon to get some video footage of the Little Egret. Needless to say, the sun came out and raw enthusiasm fuelled the video below (it’s a shame it couldn’t also provide a steady platform to stand the tripod on. You’ll have to forgive the occasional wobble in the footage - keeping everything level and steady on rough, boggy grass is harder than I thought!). Interestingly, it isn't the same Little Egret that I photographed last month. That bird had two wonderful, long breeding plumes emanating from its nape. Yesterday's bird only possessed a short plume at the back of its head.

It turned out to be the day of the willow. By the afternoon, the Little Egret had moved to Bulbroune Meadow and was below the tree of my reflection obsession. The Kingfisher couldn't help but put in a cameo appearance or two...

Week 8, Part 2: Patterns in Nature

The Daisies are out in bloom now, their yellow centres arranged beautifully in Fermat’s spirals. This gives me the perfect opportunity to return to the idea of patterns in nature. Unfortunately, my brain is somewhat hampered this week and, so, this isn’t going to be quite the post I had intended. I won't go into Fractals, for example, but you can google those if you're curious (today's Oak photograph goes some way to illustrate a fractal in nature, sort of). However, I hope a glimpse will provide food for thought or spark some interest.

More than half a lifetime ago, I submitted an A-level Fine Art dissertation entitled “Mathematics and Art...?”. Ever since, the division between science, art and nature has, for me, been arbitrary at best. As far as I’m concerned, there is beauty in mathematics just as there is precision in art, and nature encompasses both. There is no better way to experience this than to take a look at one of the fields of mathematics which is expressed in the beautiful patterns of nature.

If you don't want to read the technical bit, feel free to skip to the video at the end. No words, just beautiful illustrations set to music.

In 1202, a chap known as Fibonacci proposed a sequence of numbers whereby successive integers are the sum of the preceding two integers i.e.

0,  1,  1,  2,  3,  5,  8,  13,  21,  34,  55,  89,  144 and so on to infinity.

The result of dividing the current integer in the sequence by its previous integer tends towards the value 1.61803399 (e.g. 89 / 55 = 1.618). This became known as the Golden Ratio, best illustrated in the Golden Rectangle, where the ratio of length of the long side to the short side is the golden ratio ((a +b)/a) = 1.618.

The golden rectangle is composed of a square and rectangle. Each rectangle can be subdivided into another square and rectangle with the same proportions, ad infinitum.

Incredibly, this simple series of numbers and its ratio can be expressed in the most wonderful and beautiful ways both in mathematics and in nature (the above illustration includes the golden spiral, which can been seen in the structure of Nautilus shells. And, the Fermat's spiral, in the daisy head, also derives from Fibonacci's numbers. In botany, there are phyllotactic spirals. And so it goes on). Hopefully, the following short video from Youtube will capture your imagination. If you have the time, it's worth viewing….full screen, with the sound switched on.

(A beautiful short film on the Fibonacci sequence in Nature – ‘Nature by Numbers’)

Week 5/A: Oaks, Galls and Snowdrops

Having made this blog public last week, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the almost immediate and terrifying mild sense of stage fright, and the utterly irrational fear that everything in nature would cease to be “there” for me to explore! It came as a relief, although not a surprise, that Nature was still there today.

A mid-week visit this time. The two main aims of today were to photograph the Oak at Dellfield and the Snowdrops I’d seen growing on Bulbourne Moor (across the road from B&Q). I started with the Oak, stepping out of the car to the sound of a lusty Dunnock and a male Chaffinch belting out his song. Both birds obviously getting a head start on Spring-time pursuits.

I opted for a silhouette of the Oak, with the blue sky loosely reflecting the shape of the canopy.

It occurred to me that I'd not included a close-up of the clustered buds of an Oak. So, I headed up to Preston Hill where I knew there were two mature Oaks with low-growing branches. I’ll try to follow these over the coming weeks, as the leaf buds open up.

The hedgerow along the path down to the pond was alive with Blue Tits and Great Tits. They were likely searching for food or potential nesting material, or simply keeping an eye on territory. A Green Woodpecker was calling, but I couldn’t see it, and a Buzzard was making its rounds overhead.

As I walked towards the woods, I came upon a solitary, young Oak. It still had last year’s leaves hanging precariously from it - very surprising given the strength of recent gales.

Growing out of a leaf bud was an Oak Marble Gall, about 2cm in diameter. I could pretend I knew what it was when I found it but, no, curiosity, resulting in a bit of research (rather than the proverbial cat-killing, thankfully!?!) was the answer.

It is in fact the home of the larvae of a gall wasp, or gallfly, so called because of its ability to stimulate these tissue swellings or galls on plants. They are a large group of wasps in the family Cynipinae (order Hymenoptera), whose eggs, once deposited, cleverly create their own home and food source. Each species of gall wasp produces a distinctive gall, with a particular form and in a specific location. The Oak Marble Gall is, not surprisingly, always found on Oaks and always in a leaf bud, and is created by the gall wasp Andricus kollari. It contains a high concentration of tannic acid and for centuries was an ingredient in the manufacture of iron gall ink, used for writing and dying clothes (just in case you needed a random fact to pull out at dinner parties!)

This young Oak tree wasn’t only hosting the Andricus kollari. There were signs of an additional infestation, this time on the dead leaves.

These are Silk Button Galls, created by the gall wasp species Neuroterus numismalis. They are always found on the underside of Oak leaves. Each gall contains one wasp lava and they should begin to emerge from now onwards.

On my way back to the car, I took the opportunity to photograph the flower buds of the Elm tree, showing the progress made in 3 weeks.

Next stop was Bulbourne Moor to photograph the Snowdrops.

As I walked through Two Waters Moor (west), I was amazed to come across Common Daisies (Bellis perennis) in the grass. However, having done a little reading, I discovered that it’s not unusual for this species to produce a few flowers in mild winters. An interesting fact gleaned from Wikipedia:

“Although the 'flower' may appear to consist of a yellow centre with white petals, this is not the case. Each individual "petal" is itself an individual flower, called asterales. In the centre there are also many tiny yellow flowers. The different colours and styles of flower work together in order to attract insects. This type of flower is known as a composite flower.”

Out onto Bulbourne Meadow some flooding still remains and I spied a female Great Spotted Woodpecker, picking bark off a tree trunk, perhaps looking for insects. Unfortunately, a pair of Magpies chased her off before I could get within photographic range.



Finally I came to the Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis). Spring is most definitely taking hold.