Into The Valley

Into The Valley

In last week's Almanack I introduced you to Borage, one of the hairy guys in the family Boraginaceae. The name derives fro the Latin for hairy or woolly and their stems and leaves are covered in the stuff. This particular one is Cynoglossum creticum or Blue Hound's Tongue which is native to the Mediterranean basin and not just Crete as its scientific name suggests and the leaves do indeed look a bit like hound's tongue. Some of the chemicals in this are not particularly good for us or our livestock but caterpillars of some butterflies use it to harvest and store chemical defence weaponry whereas some female moths find it an alluring addition to their pheromonal perfume. One man's meat is another man's poison as the saying goes.

Look Mum, I can see the sea! We've now come around the far side of Agioi Saranta, or the Forty Saints and we're going to head down towards that deep ravine before cutting back around the hill. The air down here is absolutely redolent with a sweet, almost blancmange like smell which is being produced by the tiny red flowers of these mastic bushes. The lumpy bits in among the leaves and flowers are the nurseries of the little Woolly Aphid, Aploneura lentisci, which we met and put under the microscope last year in the Milonas valley (see A Recipe For Life).

This is getting to be quite an olfactory outing as the musky scent of Greek sage is now beginning to pervade our nostrils. These orange and black bees are enjoying it too. Most of us are familiar with Honey Bees and Bumble Bees and we met a Mining Bee when we were up on The Orchid Hills but this one is a Leaf-cutter Bee, Megachile sicula, which gets its common name from its habit of neatly cutting up leaves or petals with which to build its nest. Like the Mining Bee, it is a solitary bee rather than a social insect and the female builds her nest alone.

Here's a wayside plant with a bit of history as well as a pleasant aroma. It's called Yellow Mignonette, Reseda lutea, and like its close relative, Dyer's Weld, its roots have been used to produce a yellow dye for about three thousand years. Small flowers attract small pollinators and here we have yet another, somewhat diminutive , bee of the Halictidae family. These are social bees (technically euscocial but we won't go into that now) with a queen, workers and drones and so on that build a communal nest, usually in the ground and they are generally know as Sweat Bees as they are attracted to our perspiration. Hope you remembered the deodorant this morning because although their stings are very minor if you find yourself walking through a cloud of them the cumulative effect can be most irritating. Fortunately there only seem to be a few about this morning.

That's enough bee-haviour for the moment as I can hear the sonorous cronks of Huginn and Muninn behind us so let's look back and see what they are up to. They would appear to be courting; flying around in tandem, almost wing to wing at times. Ravens start courting at a young age but it may take two or three years before they settle down to nest building after which they will stay together for life. Sort of like a long engagement before getting married and settling down. We'll continue to keep an eye on them while we're up here and see if we can spot them carrying nesting material this year. Meanwhile we have a choice of down into the depths on our right or up to our left. We'll leave the depths for another expedition and continue our circumnavigation of Agioi Saranta next time.

The Extra Bit

Sorry the blogs are a bit erratic at present but life is playing silly bugs at the moment. Hope to publish next week. Meanwhile the novel “The Magic of Nature/The Nature of Magic” has had a sniff of interest from a publisher in the UK. Nothing definite yet but if you'd like me to drop you a line when the deal is done just email me at steves.summer.book@gmail.com and type “yes please”.

Photographic Bit

Many of you have asked me what photographic equipment I use so for details of aperture settings, shutter speeds etc. my pictures will be on Flickr within a few days and that has all the geeky stuff.Pictures were edited with FastStone Image Viewer and combined with Microsoft Paint.

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LINKS:

Share your nature thoughts, photos and comments on Naturalists (the facebook page that accompanies this blog)

Explore the region with the #CreteNature interactive Hiking and Nature Map

Cretan Flora

Flowers of Crete;

BIRDS OF CRETE

Crete Birding

Greek Butterflies and Moths

Aquaworld Aquarium

Visit Greece (National Government Tourist Office)

Bumbling Through the Bog

Vervain, Verbena officiaonalis

On our way down to the beach last week I noticed an interesting small patch of ground to the left of the steps, about half way down, which looks ripe for a little investigation. I thought we’d spend an hour or so probing about there before lunch and then go snorkelling. It’s pretty boggy here so I expect there is a spring bubbling up from the cliff face nearby. Not a lot in flower at the moment but this one has a name you’ll probably recognise, Vervain or possibly Verbena from its scientific name Verbena officiaonalis. It’s been used in medicine since time immemorial as a sort of cure-all, even being used to staunch Christ’s wounds when he was pulled down from the cross. Even though we know that it contains compounds likely to have pharmaceutical properties there seem to have been no human studies regarding its actual efficacy which I find somewhat surprising.

How to identify Sedges, Rushes and Grasses

You’ll have to watch your step here, it really is rather wet. The trick is to use the clumps of reeds as stepping stones. I’ve flipped a few rocks but disappointingly no reptiles or amphibians have emerged as yet. Reed incidentally is rather a fuzzy term for tall, grassy plants found in wetlands and they all look superficially similar. To work out whether the plant you are looking at is actually a rush (Junaceae family), a sedge (Cyperaceae) or a grass (Poaceae) there is a rhyme about the stems of these plants that may well bring back memories of student days for the older botanists among you: Sedges have edges, Rushes are round, Grasses are hollow and have nodes to the ground. Simple but effective: now we can all sound like professional wetland botanists.

Leaf-cutter Bee, Megachile sp.

I do believe that there’s a blackberry bush in flower over there, let’s take a closer look. The petals are almost exactly the same hue as the vervain. Have you noticed that certain flower colours predominate at certain times of the year? I see that it’s being visited by a Leaf-cutter bee, so called because they neatly snip off a portion of plant leaf and use it to line their nests. They make a burrow in the ground or find a suitable cavity, line the bottom with leaf snippets, lay a single egg, provision it with pollen (which they carry in sacs under their abdomens rather than on their hind legs like most bees), put a cap on it and then repeat the process until they have a nursery of little cells throughout the burrow. The larvae hatch, eat the food, moult a few times, pupate and then emerge as adults.

Hooded Crow, Corvus cornix

Talking of eating food I think that it’s time to revert to the terrace for lunch and a bit more bird watching. Last week we were looking at the flocking behaviour of feral pigeons but today I thought we’d take a closer look at the Hooded Crows. Like all of the corvid family they are highly intelligent birds and it seems to me that they get bored easily and, if they have nothing better to do, they play. A couple of days ago I saw one trying to fly in formation with the pigeons like Concorde among the Red Arrows (the pigeons didn’t take a blind bit of notice). Today I see that they’re playing aerobatics: launching themselves from the telegraph wire, catching the updraft from the cliffs, allowing themselves to be blown gently backwards and attempting to land on the telegraph pole whilst in reverse as it were. Whether they are actually playing depends upon your definition of play of course but flight play, such as this, is one of seven documented play types observed in crows. ^[1] An excellent lunch as usual so I suggest a short rest for digestion purposes and then we’ll continue our undersea explorations.

Ornate Wrasse, Thalassoma pavo

Now this is a common colourful fish that you’ll see a lot of as we snorkel about. These are Ornate Wrasse and you may be forgiven for thinking that they are two different fish as the male is much bigger and has one blue band and the smaller female has five blue bands and a black saddle. Not only are they beautiful, inquisitive and friendly (start flipping rocks underwater and they’ll be your friend for life, following you around to see what tit-bits you disturb) but, like many fish, they develop in a curious way. When the eggs hatch after spawning they are all female, not a male to be seen. Like their mothers before them they grow to maturity, produce eggs and spawn and then, having fulfilled their female function they change sex and become males ready to fertilise the spawn of other females. So they get to see both sides of life as it were. Let’s all split up and see what else we can find. There are some sea caves along the cliff line that usually throw up something interesting.

Happy hunting.

See all the pictures including insets in detail on Flickr

[1] Corvid Research- Do crows play and why?

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