Signs of the times: Autumn #12

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.

“That day was their first use

in the whole time since

his father’s death, eleven years

before; the mute swan

and the whooper, avocet

and teal, tufted duck and lapwing,

the pochard and redshank;

pushed the eyepieces closer

and apart, that occluded,

needed to be refocused;

shoveller duck and egret,

marsh harrier, bunting.”

Ian Pople, “His Father’s Binoculars”

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Autumn Picture 12
We have a busy waterside scene here, with a flock of the tiny duck, teal, “dibbling in the mud” in the foreground on a lake shore, with some shoveler ducks hunkered down between them and a roosting flock of lapwings or peewits. A single goldeneye drake (described in the book’s text as a “she” – wrong! Female goldeneyes are brown and white) is swimming close to shore in the top left, near some swimming black-headed gulls. A heron stands on one leg, overlooking the scene.


We’ve looked at a couple of these species previously, the heron in some detail here, and the peewit similarly here! Of the others in the picture, one that I was fascinated by as a child was definitely the shoveler duck (Latin name: Anas clypeata), one of our more unusual looking bird species. As my old AA Book of British Birds says: “The enormous heavy bill that gives the shoveler its name is specially adapted for feeding on the surface of lakes and ponds”. Paddling through the shallows, it dabbles in the water or thin mud, sieving out small plants and animals, hence its membership of the group of duck species known as “dabbling ducks”.

I am not a regular bird-watcher these days (other than daily naked-eye ornithology every day when dog walking), although I was a bit obsessed as a child, and haven’t seen a shoveler for years, and it is not a numerous species in Britain, especially in Scotland; but I remember vividly the first one I saw, at Aberlady Bay Nature Reserve. I must have been eight or nine years old and I was thrilled! The British Trust for Ornithology doesn’t maintain an entry for this duck in the Species Trends information that has been my main source of up-to-date information on the status and long-term success of bird species for this series of seasonal posts (come on BTO guys, what's a blogger supposed to do?). Its BirdFacts information does, however, give its status in the UK as a migrant breeding bird, and a passage/ winter visitor. It is unable to provide a population trend, although a summer population of 1000 to 1500 pairs is cited, along with a winter population of some 15,000 individuals. In “The Birds of the Western Palearctic”, it is suggested that, although there might have been some contraction of the range in Britain, there might actually be a slowly increasing British population.


The little flock of teal (Anas crecca) in the foreground represent a typical group of this, Britain’s smallest native duck, and another dabbling duck species. The teal is also one of the most aerobatic of our duck species, small flocks performing dramatic and rapid manoeuvres in flight outwith the breeding season. The explosive, near-vertical rising of a group of disturbed teal also leads to the collective name for the species, namely “a spring of teal”. In clay pigeon shooting (which I’ve never tried), I believe that there is a challenging dispersal of vertically-fired clay pigeons called “rising teal”, supposed to simulate this behaviour. Teal typically inhabit small pools, ponds, lagoons, slow-flowing rivers an streams, and complexes of wetland habitats. They prefer habitats where there is some form of dense vegetation cover, and they will sometimes nest away from water in gorse or bracken. The male teal is a strikingly beautiful bird, with a vivid metallic green eye patch on a chestnut coloured head, and both male and female bids have a green patch on the upper wing. In this Autumn picture, however, the birds are in “partial plumage” having moulted after their breeding season, and so they look a little more plain than normal.


Again, the BTO doesn’t maintain a Bird Trends page for this species on its website, so I must rely on other sources for information of the status and trend of the British teal population. “Birds of the Wester Palearctic” cites a marked contraction in the range of teal in Britain and Ireland, with a conservative estimate of a 20% decline in population over the 20 years preceding the book’s publication (1998), although no causes are suggested for this. A British breeding population of 1500-2600 pairs was estimated between 1988 and 1991, although huge numbers of teal pour into Britain in winter from mainland Europe and Iceland (the BTO quotes a winter population of 192,000 in the period 1994-1990!), to over winter here in our (usually!) milder winter conditions.


The other species of duck in the picture is a diving duck species, the goldeneye (Bucephala clangula), represented by a single male swimming, its white cheek clearly visible (it actually does have quite a bright golden eye but it is too far away to see this clearly. Practically all the goldeneye seen in Britain are here as winter visitors between September and April. While the summer population of (presumably) breeding birds here is around 200 pairs, the wintering population between 1994 and 1999 is around 25,000 individuals. Seen on lakes, lochs and rivers in winter, they are also seen on the coast when migrating. Here in Stirling, I see goldeneye every winter on the tidal river Forth, effectively the upper estuary of the Forth although it is largely freshwater moving up and down as it piles up against the rising tide further downstream. Generally, they are solitary males, easily identifiable from a long way off on account of the white eye patch and bright eye. They are tremendously good divers, and can travel quite a long way underwater.


The first reliable record of goldeneye breeding in Britain was in Inverness-shire in 1970 (BTO). Its status as a breeding species in Scotland has been enhanced by their colonisation of nestboxes for ducks installed as part of conservation programme in Strathspey. So, the summer population of this species has certainly increased in the 50 years since these books were published (partly as a result of human intervention), and “The Birds of the Western Palearctic” indicates that most populations in Europe are stable or increasing. A good point on which to end for now!

Signs of the times: Autumn #10

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.

"Wha saw the tattie howkers?

Wha saw them ga'an awa'?

Wha saw the tattie howkers,

Comin' ower the Barrow Raw?

Some o' them had bits an' stockins'

Some o' them had nane of aw

Some o' them had a wee bit whisky

Just to keep the cald awa.'"

Traditional Kilwinning song, to the tune of The 42nd

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Autumn Picture 10
This another picture that shows me how much some things have changed in 50 years. It shows a fairly manual harvesting process for a potato crop, with a little grey Massey Ferguson tractor with a rotary “spinner” which unearths the potatoes so that they can be lifted by hand by pickers with baskets (women in headscarves and, again, men in flat caps!), a back-breaking task. At the top of the picture, a larch tree is covered in golden cones. To the right, a hawthorn hedge has a vine of black bryony, with its bright red berries, entwined through it, and a flock of lapwings (peewits) is circling in the far distance.


I looked at hawthorn previously, here, and the larch tree here. Lapwings or peewits have also featured in a couple of posts previously, here, and in this picture we see them exhibiting their winter flocking behaviour, something I saw often when growing up in East Lothian. The long-term decline in the lapwing population has probably resulted in fewer people seeing this wonderful sight in the 50 years since these books were published.


The black bryony (Tamus communis) is a native vine species, found in southern and central England, and in most of Wales. The New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora says that is found: “mostly on neutral to calcareous, well-drained soils, particularly those overlying chalk and limestone, but also on clay. It can be luxuriant in hedgerows, woodland edges and along paths and in waste land”. It grows from a large tuber and the text in the book speculates on how good the tuber may be to eat! Richard Mabey, in Flora Britannica, however, points out that it is actually the only member of the yam family to grow in Britain, and is a poisonous irritant (so not a good candidate for our wild food project!). The New Atlas indicates that there has been no change in the overall distribution of black bryony since the previous Atlas was published in 1962.


The image of the potato harvesters reminds me of the itinerant Irish workers, in the early 1970’s, who came to our village in East Lothian each Autumn to work in the potato harvest. Backbreaking work indeed, not helped by the squalid little “bothy” they lived in on the edge of the village (On the Mair road) for the duration of the harvest, which sat empty for the rest of the year. It must have been damp and I am certain it didn’t have running water or plumbed toilets. On the farm we lived on, potato harvesters would occasionally come to the door asking us to fill a large water bottle. We used to collect leftover tatties from the fields too, once the harvest was over, something we’ve done more recently around Stirling (shame to let them rot on the ground...). Even in the 1970’s, however, the potato harvesting equipment employed around us was much more advanced than the relatively primitive mechanised digger shown here!

Signs of the times: Spring #19

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.

“We’ve been rambling all this night

And the best part of the day,

And now we’re returning back again

We’ve brought you a branch of May.”

Anonymous Hertfordshire May-Day folk song, reported in Flora Britannica

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Nearing the end of the pictures in the Spring book, with four to go, it already feels like Summer outside (occasionally...). Spring picture 21 is like a picture from a child’s fantasy of Spring, with a mare and her foal, blossom, chicks and orchids. In fact, the text of the book is charming: “The mare and her foal are in a lovely place on a lovely day, and have the best month of the year in which to stray at their own sweet will.” But horses aside, the wilder, natural elements of this picture are a lapwing and her chicks in a field where the bracken is growing up among the flowers of early purple orchids and lady’s smock. To complete the picture, a hawthorn tree in the hedge of the field is in full blossom and, in the background, the new, silvery, pale leaves of a whitebeam tree are opening.


I already covered the long-term problems of the lapwing or peewit (Vanellus vanellus) in a previous post in the series but with the beautiful lapwing chicks in the picture here, how could I not add a bit more? I just wanted to share the following picture, scanned in from my beloved old AA Book of Birds (from 1969), which is just possibly the cutest bird picture ever painted – not my dispassionate contribution to the assessment of the state of nature, but who cares? Everyone deserves to see and enjoy this en masse set of wading bird chicks! The lapwing chick is bottom left. If you double-click on the picture, you can take a closer look.

The bracken fronds starting to rise behind the mare first appear as little spiralling “fiddleheads” uncurling from the ground, but fairly quickly they will shoot up to form a dense green canopy. Bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) is a native species of fern found in the uplands, on moorland, in forests, generally on slightly more acidic soils. Many land managers regard bracken as a problem invasive species, which can invade and ruin good grazing land. In keeping with that attitude, the New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora identifies that its abundance increased markedly in the 20th century, “apparently in response to more intensive sheep grazing and more frequent burning of hill vegetation. In the 1970s, it was invading more than 10,000 hectares of agricultural land annually.” But, if you looked only at the records of bracken in Britain divided up by squares of sides of length 10 km in 1962, you wouldn’t see this, as it was recorded nearly everywhere even then. So what has happened is that its local distribution has increased in many areas. This shows the importance of understanding exactly what it is that records of nature are telling you. Looking at the trends in species in more than one way can reveal changes which would be masked by looking just at, for example, records as presence or absence in 10-km squares.


But bracken hasn’t always been a villain – it has a long an honourable history of use in rural Britain, as described by Richard Mabey in his “Flora Britannica”, including manuring and covering potato beds, for dressing leather, and as fuel and tinder. Chiefly, however, it was used as “a universal packing and padding stuff”, such as winter bedding for cattle, basket lining for fruit and fish, and padding for earthen ware and slate transport. Mabey also suggests that the decline its use as modern alternative materials became available, may have contributed to its spread. In 1990, it was estimated that bracken covered between 1.2 and 1.7% of Britain’s land area, and 15% of rough upland grazings, leading to more grazing of bracken by stock – this may be a problem as it is toxic to mammals and may be carcinogenic to humans if overeaten (the young shoots are commonly eaten in east Asia) and perhaps from over-inhalation of its spores. One to watch!


You will find fewer people complaining about the presence of native orchid species on their land, and we see the flowers of the early-purple orchid (Latin name: Orchis mascula). The New Atlas reports that this orchid, which grows on a variety of neutral and calcareous soils, is most common in “woodlands, coppices, and calcareous grassland”, as well as in hedgerows, scrub, roadsides and railway banks, on limestone pavements and moist cliff ledges. The fact that this species has, since 1962, declined particularly in central England and parts of Scotland, is largely due to felling of woodland or its replanting as conifer plantations, the intensification of grassland management and ploughing. Richard Mabey makes an interesting point – the variety of local names for this species (perhaps over 90) suggests that the early-purple orchid was once abundant and well-known. Mabey also adds that the habitats where it is found includes “precisely the kind of habitats that have suffered most from development and modern farming over the past 50 years [the precise window for this series of posts, as it happens], and where they have gone the orchid has usually vanished with them”. Maybe the early-purple orchid ought to become one of a number of flagship indicator species of the success or failure of our future efforts to prevent further declines in our native wildlife. Fin ally, the Latin name Orchis that is applied to many orchid species (such as this one) is the Latin word for “testicle”, due to the testicle-like pair of root-tubers from which orchids grow!


The other flower growing in the horse’s paddock is the cuckoo-flower, or lady’s smock (Cardamine pratensis), a perennial herb typically of wet grassy areas in woodland, wet meadows and fens, upland rush pasture and springs. I think it is the main food plant for the caterpillars of the beautiful Orange-tip fritillary butterfly. There has been no overall change in its distribution since 1962. According to the New Atlas, it is quite resistant to some herbicides and so has been able to survive in semi-improved pastures.


The hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) – where to start? Also known as the May-tree, it is the only British tree to be named after the month in which it flowers. It would be difficult to cover here all the important cultural aspect of this tree in British rural culture – Richard Mabey devotes six pages of Flora Britannica to this one species. A flavour of its influence can be taken from the following quote for Mabey: “Its blossoming marks the cusp between spring and summer... It was the ancestor of the May-pole, the source of May Day garlands and the decoration of Jacks-in-the-Green and Green Georges, and one of the models for the foliage which wreathes the faces of Green Men carved in churches and inns. Superstitions about the flowers – and especially about the dire consequences of bringing them inside the house – persist more widely than for any other species.”

Regarding its superstitious status, Mabey suggests that, among other possible causes, the red berries and thorns was taken, in earlier times, as an association with the Crucifixion of Christian tradition. On the wild food front, we eat the new young leaves in salads in Spring, which taste slightly nutty. The New Atlas indicates that its distribution is stable.  As it has been so widely planted as a hedging plant for centuries, however, the extent of its natural distribution is unclear, although in northern Scotland, its distribution is often confined to the vicinity of habitation where it is almost certainly an introduction.


Briefly, the whitebeam (Sorbus aria) which is coming into leaf in the rear right of the picture, is a small-to-medium sized tree, not native to Scotland (in fact, probably only native to southern England. The New Atlas reports its distribution as stable, although widely planted, including in Scotland, in parks, gardens and streets. The new leaves of this tree resemble the buds of magnolias before they open and, with fine downy white underside and shiny slightly silvery leaf-top, must be the whitest-looking leaves of any tree native to Britain. I’ve been greatly enjoying their emergence every morning this Spring along our local park and golf course footpaths. One unusual feature of the whitebeam is its tendency to form highly-local endemic species often confined, according to Flora Britannica, to single rocky gorges and found nowhere else in the world. At least 14 of these individual species are known in Britain. Special!

Signs of the times: Spring #9

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.

“Hail in the Spring, a start of new beginnings.

Creativity awe-inspiring gives a reason to be living.

Plant life showing life anew, a wonder to be found.

New born lambs playing in the fields, birds nesting all around

People enjoying the sun and the warmth, feeling good to be alive.

Spring gives a purpose to our lives, a touch of Paradise.”

Kay M. Sutton, Bring in the Spring

Copyright: Ladybird Books

I guess I have reached a mildly exciting stage of the Spring book with this picture, as it is the one used as the book’s cover. And, I suppose, in selecting the image for the cover, one that is reasonably iconic for the season would have been selected. And there probably isn’t a more iconic British Springtime image than newborn lambs playing “King of the Castle”! So this picture of a farmland scene also introduces blackthorn in blossom, small foxglove plants, and two birds of farmland habitats, the skylark (on fence post and in foreground) and the lapwing (or peewit).


In June 2007, an agricultural census in Scotland identified that there were 7,490,700 sheep in Scotland including 2,916,680 breeding ewes and 3,673,790 lambs. This was a 22% decline from the more than 9 million sheep being farmed in Scotland in 1997. The Scottish Agricultural College has said that “Sheep farming in harsh upland environments is economically marginal, heavily dependent on subsidies and can present environmental and animal welfare issues.” In recent years, sheep farming in Scotland has become much less profitable even that it was before and the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy is likely to result in changes (a decline?) in hill sheep numbers. It is hoped that this will lead to an increase in biodiversity.


In Scotland, sheep were inadvertently responsible for what has been described (Oliver Rackham, “The History of the Countryside”) as “the most outrageous example of the single-minded pursuit of agricultural profit”. From the late 18th Century onwards, sheep farming on moorland increased everywhere northward from South Wales. The Highland Clearances in Scotland were one notorious outcome. Between 1782 and 1854, there were many instances of unscrupulous landowners evicting their tenants “through violence, bloodshed and arson”. to make way for the then-more profitable, sheep farming. This process was not as profitable as first thought though, as the capacity of moorland for sheep grazing is not as high as was first thought. The history of sheep farming is, therefore, unarguably linked to the long, sad and inglorious story of rural depopulation in Scotland. Despite the compound human misery of the various periods of Clearances, it is also true, however, that without this despicable treatment of poor rural tenant farmers and crofters, there would have been no major diaspora of Scots to “the Americas”, Australia and New Zealand, and all the significant contributions that those Scottish emigrants made to the development of those nations. For more about the history of sheep farming in Scotland, the Scottish Agricultural College produced a report here, with a current outlook report on Scottish sheep farming here.


Moving to the natural features of the picture, there are two plant species, both of which are of considerable value to people. The blackthorn (Latin name: Prunus spinosa) is a deciduous shrub or small tree which grows across almost all of mainland Britain and Ireland. Blackthorn is valued as a hedging plant,for its hardwood branches as a source of “corkscrew” walking sticks (my Dad has made several) and, not least, as a source of its small black plums, or sloes, much lauded (not least in this house!) for their use in flavouring and colouring of sloe gin, prepared in the Autumn and usually ready to drink by Christmas. The New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora reported, in 2002, that the distribution of blackthorn in Britain is stable compared to the original Atlas published in 1962.


Foxgloves (Latin name: Digitalis purpurea) are shown in the picture as small rosettes beginning their second year of growth. Under normal wild conditions, foxgloves take two summers to grow from seed to flower. Very widely distributed in Britain and Ireland, though introduced in Orkney, foxgloves grow from these rosettes, a tall flowering spike with many tapered tubular pink or, quite frequently, white flowers. Foxgloves often grow in great profusion on disturbed or formerly burnt ground (e.g. railway bankings, cleared forestry plantations). The foxglove in full flower features in a quite striking picture in the Summer book, so I will discuss its usefulness to people when I write about that picture. The New Plant Atlas reports that, when compared with its 1962 distribution, the current distribution of the foxglove is stable, probably as a result of its prolific production of seeds and their persistence in the seed bank in the soil.


The story of the two bird species here is in stark contrast to the tale of the two relatively stable featured plant species. The text for the picture says: “From January until April, skylarks can be heard singing over meadowlands and downs”. Indeed, the skylark (Latin name: Alauda arvensis) and especially its soaring flight and song have a strong cultural resonance in Britain, providing the muse for, among other delights:


- Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “blithe spirit” (“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!”),


- William Wordsworth’s “To a skylark” (“Up with me! Up with me into the clouds! / For thy song, Lark, is strong”) 


- William Blake’s “A skylark wounded in the wing, / A cherubim does cease to sing.”


and the inspiration (and indeed the musical theme) for Vaughan Williams’ “Lark Ascending” (played beautifully here by the amazingly talented young Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti). But sadly, the tale of the skylark since the Ladybird series was published in 1959-61 has been one of pretty catastrophic decline, particularly in England, where the skylark breeding population declined by 60% between 1967 and 2007, according to figures provided by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), a parlous state that has led to its inclusion as a priority species in the UK’s Biodiversity Action Plan, and its listing on the UK’s red list of threatened species.

(From: British Trust for Ornithology) 

Skylark numbers have also fallen steeply across Europe since 1980. Considerable research effort by BTO and other researchers in the last decade suggests that the most likely cause of the decline is: “the change to autumn sowing of cereals [I discussed this in the post on the first picture in the book]: this practice restricts opportunities for late-season nesting attempts, because the crop is by then too tall, and may depress overwinter survival by reducing the area of stubbles”.

The BTO also points out, slightly ironically, that: “before the widespread introduction of farming, it was probably quite scarce and its fortunes since have followed farming practices”. In Scotland, there has been a small annual increase in the skylark population since 1995. Changes in agricultural practices can also help with the recovery of the skylark. For example, “leaving small, rectangular patches of bare ground ('Skylark plots') within autumn-sown cereals appears to provide many of the benefits of spring-sown cereals at very low cost to the farmer”.


The lapwing, or green plover (Latin name: Vanellus vanellus) is also known as the peewit in Scotland (from an earlier name, the peewee), which is onomatopoeic for the bird’s call. The BTO provides a wee tidbit about the lapwing/ peewit: “Ever since Chaucer wrote of the 'false lapwynge, ful of treacherye', the lapwing has had an association with deceit, perhaps because of its beautiful plumage and joyous display flights”. Sounds like jealousy to me. The peewit is one of the most strongly declining bird species in Europe, having decreased in all regions since 1980.


Despite an increasing population during the 1960s and 1970s, peewits “have declined continuously on lowland farmland since the mid 1980s, probably because changes in agricultural practice have led to their breeding productivity dropping below a sustainable level”. The decline is obvious in this BTO figure:

(From: British Trust for Ornithology)

The BTO reports that national surveys in England and Wales “showed a 49% population decline between 1987 and 1998”. Population declines of more than 50% over 15 years in Northern Ireland mirror similar declines throughout grasslands in Wales and southeast England. The Breeding Bird Survey suggests some increase in England since 1994, but a steep decline in Scotland (of 33% between 1995 and 2007). It is thought possible that the decline is resulting from an increase in grazing intensity in marginal uplands and increased predation by nocturnal mammals (88% of nest predation taking place at night by, e.g. hedgehogs, foxes), possibly associated with habitat changes. The peewit is one of the most strongly declining bird species in Europe and is now listed in the UK’s “Red list” and is the subject of an action plan under the UK’s Biodiversity Action Plan.