Food from the Park: June

Flaming June? Not for most of the month, it wasn't, in Stirling at least. But we still managed to eat from the Park again in June. And, in wild food terms, it might seem a logical conclusion that the availability of edible species would continue to increase in June as it does in the run of months from March to May. But our experience is that while some new options for a wild food diet do indeed appear, other options become less palatable. Nettles, ground elder, common hogweed and cleavers in the Park, which provided the bulk of vegetable mass for meals in the previous months, have all grown up and become tough, coarse and/or incredibly fibrous. Hawthorn leaves, so soft and nutty-tasting when they first appeared, and lovely in salads in that state, have also toughened up and dropped off our menu. By June, the leaves of wild garlic were also beginning to die back.

But, fortunately for the wild food gastronaut, there are new kids on the block in June. From mid-June in Stirling, the creamy-white, fragrant umbrellas of flowers, or umbals, of the elder can be found in profusion on elder bushes all around the edge of the Park (see below). As I've written previously, the elder is an important source of ingredients for wild food - in winter, we picked the jelly ear or Jew's ear fungus from dead elder trees. In autumn, I have no doubt that we'll find ways to incorporate elder berries into a meal. And in summer, well, best of all is elder blossom. Every summer, we make a big batch of elderflower cordial. We drink it usually with sparkling water but sometimes just with tap water, and often with ice cubes, frozen raspberries and the blue flowers of borage from the garden thrown in. It's a bit special.

We started making this year's cordial about in early June and we finished the last bottle of last year's stock three weeks later, so 12 litres must be about right, since we don't stint on its use during the year! We use the recipe in the book "Sensational Preserves" by Hilaire Walden, which includes the addition of citric acid to prevent fermentation. Actually, we made about 14 litres last year but two bottles fermented, probably as we didn't have quite enough citric acid left for the recipe by the end of the season - so 12 litres survived.

Elderflowers - raw material for one of summer's true wild food delights!

 Here's a picture of our final elderflower cordial "product" for 2011, labelled up as a bit of fun.

Our 2011 elderflower cordial collection

The other special wild food that appeared in June was wild raspberries, which are usually abundant in our Park and which few people bother to collect. We usually harvest about 6 kg of these over the several-week long season and these are mostly frozen for use through the year, in porridge and in puddings (and, once, to make a framboise liqueur).

Wild raspberries in King's Park.

 Our raspberry season usually begins with us simply eating the first ripe berries off the bush for a couple of weeks in early-mid June when we are out walking the dog, until there are enough ripe berries to make it worthwhile doing some organised picking. The 6 kg total usually arrives in about half-to-one kg batches, which is what we can pick in about 30 minutes with both of us picking. That's generally because 30 minutes is about the limit of my patience with the nettles and bramble thorns that interweave the Park's raspberry patches. Unless we are planning to cook them down for something, in which case, they can be frozen in a lump, we normally freeze them laid out in a single layer on baking trays in the freezer and then bag up the already-frozen berries.

The 2011 raspberry season began worryingly slowly and it looked like last winter's extremely extended and severe cold spell had killed off the majority of the raspberry canes (wild raspberries produce the current year's fruit on the previous year's new growth). That had indeed happened and there were large areas normally dense with raspberry canes which were almost devoid this year, but the remaining survivors seemed to have benefitted hugely from the very warm dry spell of weather in April, resulting in a great pollination and a huge crop on the remaining bushes. We picked steadily through late June and all of July such that, with the final picking session in our raspberry season, we managed to bring our total to just over 6 kg again this year (by the very end of July, when I wrote this catch-up note).

Incidentally, we also managed to include some Salicornia or glasswort in our diet in June, a salt marsh pioneer plant that has been eaten in Britain for thousands of years. Highly nutritious but if eaten too regularly, it might wear away your teeth due to its high silicon content (it is called glasswort after all!). I seem to recall reading that people from some prehistoric coastal populations in Britain were found, by archaeologists examining their remains from graves, to have wear patterns on their teeth consistent with a high consumption of glasswort.  We didn't pick this ourselves - O bought it from the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar shop. It must have been harvested wild (no one grows it commercially here - or anywhere?), and probably locally to Loch Fyne.

[Addendum, 4th August: Excitingly (admittedly I don't get out much), I was on a bus in Portobello yesterday and saw Salicornia for sale in the window of a traditional fishmonger's - the one with the window constantly washed by a curtain of running water; if you are local, you may know it. Maybe it is becoming more popular. I'd love to know where they source it from].

 We ate it (the green stuff above) as an accompaniment to a breakfast of smoked salmon scrambled eggs, made with Loch Fyne smoked salmon and eggs from our Stirling friend Judy's chickens. Slightly salty and you have to pull the edible vegetable portion off with your teeth and leave the central slightly woody stalk. A slightly odd breakfast item but pretty tasty nevertheless.

Wild food from the park – January



Stirling King's Park in Winter - not the obvious place
to start looking for a square meal perhaps?


Regular readers of this blog will be aware that wild food is an important part of my ongoing interest in the nature of Scotland (and elsewhere). The adventurous O and I have, for several years, explored the opportunities for picking, harvesting, cooking (where appropriate) and eating wild food (mostly fruit, nuts, roots, leaves, seaweed and fungi), both locally and on our travels around Scotland. During 2009, we successfully completed a wee project, to try to find wild food to eat from our local park (the King’s Park in Stirling) in each month of 2009. That was before I began this blog so we have decided to repeat our efforts during 2011. All that is required to satisfy our project’s objectives is that, each month, we include in a meal food or drink collected or made from ingredients collected from our local park. The meal can include anything else that’s necessary and doesn’t have to be exclusively based on wild food from the park (we’re not fanatics!).

We might also include wild food collected and preserved in earlier months but that can’t count towards that month’s contribution (otherwise, we could just drink homemade elderflower cordial every month). We reserve the right to eat the same thing in more than one month (season’s rarely last a single month!) but we will aim to use it in a different way each time. The park has woodland, grassland, walls, trees, shrubs, etc so there are lots of opportunities to find wild food. When we tried this project in 2009, the winter months were always likely to be the most challenging but, as you’ll see below, an unusual wild food that we learned to eat recently has helped us start the 2011 attempt with something a little special.


One caveat – please don’t take my posts as evidence that something you’ve found is edible and safe to eat. We have spent a long time learning how to identify edible and poisonous plants, fungi etc. We absolutely don’t eat any wild collected food of which we aren’t absolutely sure of the identity and you shouldn’t either. Please take advice, go on courses and guided wild food walks, consult with specialists (especially for mushrooms and other fungi) but DON’T eat anything you can’t identify as safe (and don’t try to identify things to eat based on my blog).


So, to January and wild food from the park. If you’ve been reading my posts for a wee while, you might remember that I mentioned back in the summer (July) that we had found some Jew’s Ear fungus colonies growing on dead elder branches in a quiet corner of the park. You can read about that here, where you’ll see I wrote that, no doubt, we’d be eating them soon enough. The Jew’s Ear fungus or jelly ear fungus (Latin name: Auricularia auricula-juda ) does indeed look like a gelatinous ear and is dependent on a certain part of the life cycle of the elder tree (Latin name: Sambucus nigra), growing on dead and decaying elder branches. And we’ve found that there is much more of that in the park than we had initially realised:

 

Furthermore, as a source of wild food in winter, Jew’s ear fungus is something of a star. Not only does it produce fruiting bodies (i.e. the visible fungus) in winter when most fungi do not do so but, in our park, it continued to grow and produce new “ears” right through the very coldest weather this winter, when the temperature was well below zero for weeks on end and everything in the park was frozen solid. Even then, the fungus survives being frozen solid, can be harvested frozen, and can then be kept in the fridge for days without breaking down. A kind of wonder food it seems, as it can even be dried, then reconstituted by soaking in water. One of our fungi gurus, Dick Peebles of Fresh Direct Foods advises me that a related species is, in fact, sold in dried form in the Far East then reconstituted for cooking with. So, we picked quite a large bag of Jew’s Ear Fungus in early January.

We decided to have a go at making Jew’s Ear Fungus ravioli and so O made a pasta dough with Scottish-milled strong white bread flour and rolled it out through her pasta gadget.

The ravioli filling was made by lightly frying finely chopped Jew’s Ear fungus, shallots, parsley, garlic and chopped smoked Argyll mussels (from our local Farmer’s Market), along with some leftover boiled blue potatoes to give the filling some bulk:





After seasoning, the ravioli were assembled:

Ravioli production line

then boiled gently for a few minutes

before serving with drizzled olive oil, a grating of Parmesan, ground black pepper and finely chopped parsley. A wildly tasty and satisfactory start to our 2011 “Wild food in the Park” experiment!

Signs of the times: Autumn #6

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

“The gentle sun cobwebs brightly

his black cap, his crimson breastplate”

Norman MacCaig (From: “Bullfinch on guard in a hawthorn tree”, December 1980)

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

This charming picture shows some of Autumn’s bounty of fruit being enjoyed by one of Britain’s most attractive birds (in my humble opinion). Here, as a car that looks like a psychedelic purple Hillman Minx disappears over the brow of a dip in the road, a pair of bullfinches are feeding on the berries of a road-side elder bush. In the bottom left of the picture, the golden autumnal leaves of a dwarf maple are growing under a heavily fruiting rowan or mountain ash tree, with its clumps of bright red berries.

The Scots gaelic name for the bullfinch is corcan-coille, which I think means “forest finch”, but it has managed to adapt to a wide range of the habitats that humans have carved out of the original forests of Britain. The BTO advises that the bullfinch is most commonly found in scrub habitats but also commonly in deciduous woods, pasture lands, villages and coniferous woods. Although a delightful bird to look at, the bullfinch has a bad reputation with gardeners since its diet, as an adult, is based on soft fruits, and the buds and new shoots of fruit trees and bushes, something g mentioned in the text accompanying this picture. In terms of the fate of bullfinches in Britain, the BTO reports that the UK’s Bullfinch population “entered a long period of decline in the mid 1970s, following a period of relative stability. The decline was initially very steep, and more so in farmland than in wooded habitats, but has been shallower since the early 1980s.”

(From: British Trust for Ornithology)

Although the exact causes are not clear, it is possible that “agricultural intensification and a reduction in the structural and floristic diversity of woodland are suspected to have played a part through losses of food resources and nesting cover”. There is also a suggestion that predation by sparrowhawks may limit the colonisation of certain habitats by bullfinches. Recent figures show a slight upturn although, in Scotland, this has been more marked, with an estimated 30% increase in population between 2003 and 2008. This reflects my own, admittedly anecdotal, experience, that bullfinches are much more common in the Stirling area than when I first moved here over 20 years ago. I certainly see many more pairs in our garden and in nearby parkland woods than I used to, perhaps a response to efforts to improve marginal habitats on farmland through the so-called agri-environment schemes – and perhaps an effect of more gardeners deliberately planting fruit-bearing bushes and trees to benefit fruit-eating (frugivorous) birds. Whatever the reason, it is, to my mind, a welcome return.


Incidentally, one of the nature writers whose work I most admire, Ray Collier, has written a little article about bullfinches in the Highlands. Ray, retired after a career spent working for the government’s nature conservation organisations, is one of the contributing writers for the Guardian newspaper’ s daily “Nature Diary”. He writes beautifully in those articles, little vignettes of the natural history of the Highlands and his daily experiences and encounters, often while walking his dog. I commend his Guardian articles to you - his bullfinch text can be read here, where you can also access his other writing - under the April 2010 heading.


Both the rowan and the elder in full fruit are very powerful images of the bounty of Autumn, the energy of the Sun captured in fruity form, a highly attractive source of energy for birds building their fat stores for the winter ahead. I’ve already written about both the rowan or mountain ash) here and the elder here, so I won’t add more now, other than to say that we have managed to find ways to use both kinds of fruit in our wild food experiments – rowan berries going into rowan jelly for when we have wild Scottish venison (which a local butcher buys in from the Cairngorms National Park red deer culls), and elder variously into hedgerow jams, a somewhat failed cordial (WITH VINEGAR – IT WASN’T GOOD) and into a black berry (as opposed to purely blackberry, if you see what I mean?) fruit coulis(brambles, blackcurrants, elder) to go on ice cream. We’ve also have elderberry clumps dipped in batter and deep fried (tempura elderberries!) – deep-fried fruit? Well, this is Scotland, you know!


As for the so-called dwarf maple in the picture, with its golden Autumnal leaves, I’m afraid it is not something I can track down – it might simply represent a typical maple species that has grown in a dwarf form as a result of continued pruning/ cutting. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything more about it!

Signs of the times: Summer #7

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

 

"Many a long hard-working day

Life brings us! and many an hour of play;

But they never come now together.

Playing at work, and working in play,

As they came to us children among the hay,

In the breath of the warm June weather.

Oft with our little rakes at play,

Making believe at making hay,

With grave and steadfast endeavour;

Caught by an arm, and out of sight

Hurled and hidden, and buried light

In laughter and hay for ever."

Dora Greenwell, Haymaking (1865)

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Summer Picture 7

I’m a bit excited. I accept that, as sources of excitement go, this is pretty tame but this picture, Summer picture 7, is the one selected to represent all of Summer’s glory as the cover picture for the book “What to Look for in Summer”. And I contend that it would be difficult to argue with swallows, roses, elderflowers, butterflies and hay-making as iconic images of a British summer scene. For the farmer in the picture, on his little tractor, is indeed making hay while the sun shines, as high Summer flourishes all around him.

Swallows were featured in an earlier post, when their arrival was noted in Spring picture 12, so I’ll say no more here except to note that, as they are very busy hawking flies in midsummer, they are probably feeding young, perhaps by now a second brood, the first having flown the nest already. The Meadow Brown butterflies in the foreground (Latin name: Maniola jurtina) are identified in my copy of the State of the Butterflies of Britaina dn Ireland report (produced by a partnership led by Butterfly Conservation) as the most abundant butterfly species in Britain (i.e. the most individuals recorded in surveys), as well as the second most widely distributed (in terms of the number of 10 kilometre squares where the species is recorded), after the Green-veined White butterfly (watch out for your cabbages, missus!).  Since the Summer book was first published (my copy says 1960, exactly 50 years ago this year), the Meadow Brown has been doing well. A generalist species of grassland habitats including downland, heathland, coastal dunes and undercliffs, hay meadows, roadside verges, hedgerows, woodland rides and clearings, waste ground, parks, gardens, and cemeteries, its population is estimated to have increased by 28% between 1976 and 2004 (although there was a slight decrease of -5% in the final few years of that period).

Of the wild plants featured in this picture, the accompanying text says: “The wild, briar rose and elder are the flowers that most distinctly speak of June and midsummer.” The fact is that, as you’ll notice, we are in July and midsummer is nearly three weeks behind us – a typical condition of this series is me struggling to keep up with the timetable of the books, consoling myself only with the fact that the timing of natural events in a Scottish summer is likely to be lagging behind those down south by at least a couple of weeks. As such, even last week, I could look out of my window and see numerous elder bushes in the park, resplendent with their umbrellas of creamy white flowers. And yet,only this weekend, the lovely O and I struggled to find the few remaining accessible flower heads on those elder bushes, to make a final batch of elderflower cordial.

The elder (Sambucus nigra) is indeed an important food plant in the British countryside, which I talked about in Spring here, and promised to talk about in more detail once it appeared in flower in this current Summer picture. The black shiny elder berries that occur later in the year in great bunches like miniature grapes have long been a mainstay of the home-made wine manufactories of rural Britain. But it is the flowers that O and I relish and cherish – in particular, we make litres and litres of fragrantly-scented elderflower cordial every June and July, aiming to produce enough to see us through the long, cold winter with regular tastes of summer sunlight captured in golden liquid form. We’ve managed to produce about 15 litres this year. We use a recipe which includes the use of citric acid powder to prevent any fermentation.

Last year, for the first time, we also made elderflower champagne, which IS, obviously, allowed to ferment. I confess that, although we made about 6 litres, we haven’t tried it yet, even though it is supposed to be drinkable after a week! Now I’m a bit scared, both of the gas pressure in the 2 litre plastic bottles, and the potential alcohol content. But, versatile wild crop that it is, the elder’s flowers can also be eaten, both raw and dipped in batter and deep fried as tempura (which is just a posh way of a Scottish man justifying yet another opportunity dip a piece of perfectly innocent food in batter and deep fry the hell out of it! Deep-fried Mars Bar, anyone? No thanks!). I have to say, elderflower tempura was pleasantly, surprisingly, tasty! The raw flowers are also OK, but I do find the texture a bit odd. Incidentally, the elder is also home to the edible fungus known colloquially as “jew’s ear”, a bit of unfortunate anti-Semitic nomenclature, if ever I heard one. This weekend, we found a neglected corner of King’s Park in Stirling where a few old elder trees are covered in growths of this fungus, some of which, inevitably, we are going to end up eating! I’ll let you know how it goes...

The New Atlas of the Flora of Britain and Ireland indicates that, since 1962 when the original Atlas came out, the overall distribution of elder hasn't changed, but that it is impossible to tell introduced populations from natural ones, as it is both widely planted by people and also spread widely as seeds in bird droppings.

The wild rose dominating the bottom left corner of the picture is the dog rose, Rosa canina, although that Latin name hides a more complicated story, where a number of related groups of wild roses are brigaded under the rosy collective of a Rosa canina “aggregate”. There are also a number of hybrids of Rosa canina and other rose species and, indeed, other, completely separate wild rose species, all also referred to as “dog roses”! No-one said it had to be easy... Anyway, Rosa canina is the commonest and most widespread of these. The New Plant Atlas , while pointing out its complicated family relationships, suggests that its distribution is probably stable over the period since the publication of the 1962 Atlas. Maybe more in Autumn on rose hips and their contribution to our wild food larder...

The final element of the picture worthy of comment is the hay-making process in the background, not least to point out how the general process remains basically the same 50 years later, even although the machinery has changed, particularly the tractor. Grow grass, cut it when the weather is dry, let it dry out a bit in rows on the ground where it was cut, then gather it up to store it. Now, hay is baled; back when this picture was painted, it was a slightly different storage method, as you wil see in the next Summer picture.

A final sartorial point to note – the farmer on his tractor is wearing a pair of red dungarees – surely all farmers now wear blue ones! In fact, the boiler suit has probably largely replaced dungarees as the favoured protection for the hard working agriculture operative! And I am not sure if the flatcap, which seems to be ubiquitous on all agricultural employees featured in these four Ladybird books, has survived through to today as an obligatory piece of farmer’s protective clothing (although, obviously, still much loved by rural huntin’, shootin’ toff-types!).

Signs of the times: Spring #7

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

"April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.” Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe

This post needs to be briefer than the last couple in the series, to allow me to catch up a little! Spring is rolling on in the Ladybird book, and picture 8 brings us to the end of March (I know it is April here-and-now, but I am falling behind a bit – but it was still March less than a week ago!)

Picture 8 presents a scene of springtime nature idyll with, as centrepiece, a bank of primroses in flower, along with the emergence of ladybirds, the opening of the buds on the elder, bringing forth its leaves, a chiffchaff (the olive green bird) newly arrived from its wintering grounds, and a large female oil-beetle.


The primrose (Latin name: Primula vulgaris) is a native plant, usually perennial (evergreen) and found across all of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Indeed, the primrose is one of the earliest Spring flowers in much of Europe (the name “primrose” coming from Old French primerose or medieval Latin prima rosa, meaning first "rose"). Where conditions are right for it, as seems to be the case in this picture, it can carpet the ground in woodlands, along hedgerows and on more shaded (North facing) grassy banks. Interestingly, its seeds are usually dispersed by ants. Richard Mabey’s “Flora Britannica” dedicates four pages to the story and folklore of this popular Spring flower, stating: “its pure yellow flowers and tufted habit – arranged naturally into the form of a posy – have made it a universal token of spring, and especially of Easter.” Very appropriate, as I write this on Easter Monday 2010! The customs and traditions associated with this welcome harbinger of Spring are fascinating but too numerous to repeat here, so I recommend Richard Mabey’s account if you want to know more. The New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora reports that populations of primrose have not fluctuated markedly during the last Century in most parts of Britain and Ireland. In a Scottish Natural Heritage report from 2006 (“Natural Heritage Trends of Scotland: phenological indicators of climate change”), the results of flowering records are reviewed for Scotland - a long-term record for primroses on the Isle of Skye suggests that the first flowering date is becoming earlier by an average of a day a year, presumably as a result of a warming Spring climate.


How appropriate, too, for ladybirds to appear in this Ladybird book-focused series. Surely Britain’s favourite insects and certainly its favourite beetle, ladybirds are also beneficial to gardeners, as their larvae are voracious predators on aphids. There are 46 members of the beetle family Coccinellidae native to Britain, of which 26 species could be recognised as “proper” ladybirds. Britain’s ladybirds, however, be in trouble. I couldn’t find any readily available information on the trends in ladybird numbers or distribution since 1959-1961, but there is one recently identified major threat. According to Buglife, the Invertebrate Conservation Trust: “Familiar British ladybirds are facing their biggest danger since the last ice age. A new invader from southeast Asia, the Harlequin ladybird is threatening to displace the resident species that for generations have helped us to control aphid populations.” This undesirable, which was first introduced into Britain in 2004, has now reached Scotland, being recorded near Loch Tummel in October 2007.


A friend of mine, Craig Macadam, Buglife’s Conservation Officer for Scotland, has also said: “This ladybird can have a devastating effect on our native ladybirds. It’s not fussy about what it eats. Once it has run out of aphids it will feed on other ladybird eggs and larvae and even butterfly and moth eggs and caterpillars. Harlequin ladybirds are often found hibernating in large numbers in buildings during autumn and winter. There are cases where tens of thousands of ladybirds have been found in people’s homes.”

Harlequin ladybirds

A survey of Harlequin ladybirds is underway – you can find out more about participating here. You can read more about the concern over Harlequin ladybirds, including the problems they raise for humans too, at this site.

The elder (Latin name: Sambucus nigra) is a very widespread woody shrub verging on being a tree, native to all of Britan and Ireland, except for the very north of Scotland and the Northern Isles (Orkney and Shetland). According to the New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora, its current range is similar to that shown in the 1962 Atlas. It is also one of the earliest woody plants in Britain to come into leaf, hence its featuring in this picture with its new leaves. Although I will say more about elder when it re-appears in flower in the Summer book, it is worth noting here that, as one of the earliest leafing species, a study by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology showed that earlier flowering of elder can be expected as a result of climate change, by up to 4 days for every degree of average temperature rise in February and March. So the time of leaf appearance in Spring may affect the time of flowering in Summer.

The only bird in this picture is the diminutive olive-coloured chiffchaff (Latin name: Phylloscopus collybita), a warbler species almost identical to the willow warbler, both species that come to Britain to nest but spend their winters in a zone from North Africa to India. One of my posher bird books (Birds of the Western Palearctic: Concise edition) indicates that this species has only spread into Scotland since the 1950s, where its summer population continues to increase. So I assume there are now more chiffchaffs visiting Scotland than when the Ladybird Spring book was published! In 1988-91, Britain was estimated to have 640,000 breeding territories, while the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) reported that this had increased to 807,000 territories in 2000, and between 1967 and 2007, its average egg-laying date is now 14 days earlier. The population trend is a healthy one, as shown by the BTO:

(From: British Trust for Ornithology)

Right on schedule for my blog, I heard my first chiffchaff of the year two days ago and saw the first one yesterday, both in the local King’s Park in Stirling. I had a wee moment with the bird yesterday, as I copied its simple two-note call and it zoomed down to a low bush near me to try and identify the intruder in its territory, calling back madly. It then followed me back along the edge of the wood as I walked home, mimicking it. When I was clearly at the edge of its patch, it headed back again. Incidentally, in English, it takes its name from its call, a two-note song sounding like “chiff chaff” ... or if you are Dutch, “tjiftjaf”, or German “zilpzalp” – the German is the closest to the real sound, in my view.

The only other feature of this picture is a female oil beetle emerging from its winter hiding place. I confess to knowing nothing about these and the only easily accessible general information was on the Buglife website here. Three species, including the Violet oil beetle (Latin name: Meloe violaceus), are listed on the UK’s Biodiversity Action Plan due to a perceived decline in recent decades. There are few recent records, although any proper assessment is limited due to a lack of data. The beetle’s larvae are parasitic on solitary ground-nesting bees. This species is therefore reliant on healthy populations of its hosts, and many bee species are in decline. Species with highly specialised life-cycles are more vulnerable than those with a more generalist nature, especially when reliant on other species which, in turn, may be threatened or declining.

Apologies, but I failed to make this one briefer, as intended – there is just so much to say!