The Cocker Line

 A few weeks back, I took you on a local walk which I referred to as The Circle Line, alluding to the London Underground. Continuing this theme, were off on the Cocker Line today, following the river out of town and into the farmlands to the south.

Even in the town, as we walk along Rubbybanks Road there is plenty of life on the river. I've often seen wagtails and dippers along here and today there's a grey heron perched on an overhanging branch on the Kirkbank.

Leaving Rubbybanks, we'll circle up onto the Greenway (once the old Cockermouth to Penrith railway line which we visited at Keswick-Threlkeld), cross the river, dive through some woodland and emerge into the fields. Along the banks, as you can see, the Speedwell, Wood Anemone and Saxifrage are coming into flower.

As we continue to follow the river bank, small rills flow down from the hills on the far side, and fungi, too tantalisingly distant to identify, adorn the fallen branches.

The dandelions are out too, providing food for various small flies. These are very difficult to put a name to. All true flies are in the order Diptera and most of them are in the suborder Brachycera. These are the flies that look like flies, so to speak, as opposed to mosquitoes, midges and crane flies that are in other suborders. Within the Brachycera are Calyptrate flies (which include the familiar house flies as well as the dung flies, flesh flies and blow flies) and the superfamily Syrphoidea which encompasses the big-headed, hover and drone flies such as that Eristalis down there. There are well over a hundred different fly families, and if you want to see how they all relate to each other here's a mind-boggling diagram.

There's a farmhouse here with a track called Simonscales which will take us back into town, or we could carry on all the way to the village of Low Lorton, some miles away. However, we have an appointment to meet some friends, that we haven't seen since before Christmas, in a pub garden in town. Low Lorton will have to wait for another day, but meanwhile we have some Muscovy Ducks on the opposite bank (where all birds live). Despite their name these ducks have no more relationship with Moscow than turkeys have with Turkey. They are native to Mexico, Central and South America.

I can never look at a duck without feeling hungry (see Crispy Duck in Steve's Wild Kitchen). I wonder if they do food in this pub? Let's go and find out.

Steve's Books

The Quick Guide to Creepy-Crawlies All you need to know to identify any type of insect, spider, worm or snail very simply and find out more about it. Yvonne: This was a gift for a family so that the children can understand what they see on days out. The second was for me. Logical and easy to use. If you know anyone who likes nature you can be confident that gifting this book will give years of pleasure.
The Eggs of Saramova A science fiction novella for those who don't like science fiction. A fast-paced thriller that is, literally, out of this world (and it starts right here in Crete). Too new for reviews yet!	£7.50 Paperback edition
Not Just For Twisted Women by Steve Daniels  A light-hearted look at life through the eyes of the fairer sex. Janet: If you are short on time but enjoy reading and are maybe not into long extended novels then Not Just For... Twisted Women provides readers with concise stories that stand alone and most certainly entertain with their ultimate twists. Loved it. Helen: A very good read! Well written and entertaining! Margaret: Each quick tale gives a glimpse into a character's life and has an often humorous twist at the end. I would love to read more. Yvonne: These days many people find it hard to find the time to read a novel, so this book of short stories is ideal to dip into. It is also makes a good gift.	£4.99 Paperback edition

See sample pages of all my books and latest blogs, and keep abreast of latest publications here: http://author.to/SteveDaniels

Crete Nature Catch-up
Series 1 - Welcome to Lasithi	Series 2 - The Rhythm Of Life	Series 3 - A Journey Begins
Series 4 - The Milonas Valley	Series 5 - This Is Ferma	Series 6 - Upland Villages
Series 7 - The Forty saints	Series 8 - Sunday Strolls	Series 9 -Stormy Weather

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LINKS:

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

Agios Stefanos – The First Flower

Last week we were at Pefki, the village of the pines where, somewhat surprisingly, there weren't many pine trees to be seen. There is however quite a magnificent pine forest a little to the west, just past the village of Agios Stefanos which brings us round full circle on our upland village tour of east Crete. Agios Stefanos, or Saint Stephen would have been my personal saint, had I been born here in Crete but I must confess that I had to look him up because apart from the fact that Good King Wenceslas had a predilection for musing out of his bedroom window on said saint's feast day I knew nothing about him. Turns out he was a clever fellow who managed to prove, by theological argument, that Jesus upheld the precepts of Judaism better than the Jewish elders did. Clever, but not wise, seeing as he was on trial for blasphemy by those same Jewish elders at the time. They sentenced him to be stoned to death. Incidentally this gave us two important precepts which still hold true today: one, never conduct your own defense and two, nobody like a smart-ass.

But I digress. Apart from exploring the pine wood itself I noticed a beautiful glade when I passed by the other day, absolutely carpeted with wood sorrel, windflowers, and other small anemones which looks a delightful place to start. Here we are and I see that the honey bees are queueing up for nectar. We've talked about pollination before of course but while we're surrounded by pine trees and looking at flowers it makes you wonder how we got from one to the other. If you look at the centre of the windflower (just move the bees out of the way a second) you can see the female organ, the carpel, surrounded by the male organs, the stamens. Pine trees have carpels and stamens too but the key point is that they are separate. There are female cones that you see all the time and male cones that appear (here in Crete) in the spring (see Evolution: Top to Bottom for pictures). Somewhere between 130 and 160 million years ago a particularly enterprising pine flicked a genetic switch, combined the male and female parts into one structure and the world of flowering plants was born. Since then flowers have done a lot of experimenting with some going back to having separate male and female flowers on one plant, some producing different male and female plants and various shades of sexuality in between.

So that's the flowering plants but where did the pine trees come from? We've got a little shady gully feeding the glade and I think that the answer may lie up there. Come and meet the ancestors. In here amongst the shady rocks we have a few ferns. These first appear in the fossil record some 360 million years ago which is a heck of a long time just sitting about being a fern. Ferns reproduce by means of spores which you can see on the underside of the leaves, male and female, which require external moisture to get together. The breakthrough came with wrapping the spores in a protective coating and providing them with internal moisture and this was the origin of the seed. How long this mutation had been going on in various individuals is anybody's guess because as long as ferns had a moist environment seeds weren't needed. But around 300 million years ago when the Earth's land masses were having one of their little huddles called Pangaea there were a lot of arid bits where spores couldn't germinate but seeds could and the seed plants came into their own.

Where did ferns come from? Come and meet the bryophytes; mosses like these, along with similar looking hornworts and liverworts. The most obvious difference between these and the ferns is their size. Mosses are perfect little plants but their size is restricted because they lack the internal vessels needed to transport water. This was another little genetic tweak that proved useful some 440 million years ago due to falling levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Plants need CO₂ to photosynthesise but when you let it in, you let water out and there's the nub of the problem. When CO₂ levels are low you have to keep your pores open longer. You either grow low and close to the water or you develop a way of moving the water. The bryophytes that solved the problem developed into the ferns.

Now if we had some water in this gully we might have found some Chara as we did in the Dew Ponds of Katharo. Chara is a green algae and it is from these that the early bryophytes evolved. Some of the green algae went on to become bryophytes, some stayed as green algae and others went a completely different route and set up a symbiotic relationship with fungi creating a whole new group of organisms called lichens such as this sunburst lichen, Xanthoria parietina, which is a combination of a fungus and a green algae called Trebouxia.

So with that little round-up of how algae became bryophytes, became ferns, became pines, became flowers, we end our tour of the upland villages of East Crete. From here, if you own a rugged vehicle you can continue along the rough road back to Stavrochori or return to Agios Stefanos and turn right in the village to get back to the coast road at Makry Gialos. 

The Extra Bit

Personally I think we'll opt for the latter option and pop into Dasakis, a lovely little taverna (now open all year) at the entrance to Butterfly Gorge. We can spend a pleasant hour chatting around the wood stove whilst admiring a pair of Muscovy Ducks in the car park.

Next week we'll be starting a whole new walking tour in the hills above Koutsounari. This is new territory for me so we'll be exploring it together and who knows what we'll find up there.

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)

After the Rain

Red sky in the morning

Red sky in the morning: shepherd’s warning so the old saying goes. A bit of a late warning here in Crete as the rain has already been – torrents of it. Although I’m often bemoaning the lack of rain in this part of the island my records show that we are getting wetter. The problem is that the dry summers are now lingering into late autumn and the rains, which are getting heavier, are being squeezed into the winter months.Boots on then and we'll have a splash about in the puddles.

Mallow-leaved Storksbill

From a naturalist’s point of view the onset of the rains is like the opening of a whole new world as the earth reawakens after a long period of aestivation. Now here’s a flower that I don’t usually see until next month, it’s a Mallow-leaved Storksbill. They are part of a family called Geraniaceae which includes Storksbills (Erodium), Cranesbills (Geranium) and those garden plants that we’ve all been calling geraniums for years which are in fact Pelargoniums (Pelargonium). To add to the confusion in the USA Pelargoniums are called Storksbills. Personally I blame that fellow Linnaeus who lumped them altogether in the first place as Geraniums.

Dung Beetle

And along with the flowers come the insects like this beautiful Dor or Dung Beetle.  This is one of the Scarab group of beetles which you can tell by those specially modified clubbed antennae. As you can see he is a very robust beetle with powerful front legs which he uses for collecting dung. This he rolls into a ball (often much bigger than himself) and drags backwards into a hole in the ground which is a nursery. The dung ball provides food and warmth for the larvae when they hatch. He's looking a bit tatty for a photograph so we'll just clean him up with a bit of puddle water and some soft tissue. "OK little fellow, I'm not going to hurt you". Oh, he didn't like that one bit, he's complaining more loudly than I used to on a bath night during my school days. Listen, you can hear him telling us what he thinks in no uncertain terms. click here

Green garden Snail defending itself

And of course we all know that rain brings out the snails. We’ve already looked at the Garden Snail (Red Autumn) and the Mediterranean Coastal Snail (Dawn By The Riverside) but this one is a Green Garden Snail (although he looks rather brown in this early morning sun). There is, however, an olive green sheen to his shell which we can see if we move him back into the shade. As you can see he’s not happy about being trundled about from place to place for photographic purposes any more than the beetle. He’s exuding froth as a defence mechanism which supposedly smells of garlic but my nose isn’t sensitive enough, can you smell it? Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about snail slime – it’s used in cosmetics. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Seasonal puddles attract birds like this Muscovy Duck

The other good thing about heavy rain is that it collects in seasonal puddles of varying depths and sizes and that attracts the birds so let’s go and find who’s discovered the latest watering holes. Would you believe a Muscovy Duck? The originals of these are native to South America up to Mexico but they’ve been domesticated for many years and there are feral populations all over the place. I often see them out at Bramiana in the winter but this is the first one I’ve seen here. If, like me, you’ve decided on Barbary Duck to celebrate the upcoming festivities then this is what you will be eating. Muscovy Duck in common parlance, Cairina moschata forma domestica in scientific circles and Barbary Duck to chefs and gourmets.  Talking of upcoming festivities, the Winter Solstice is coming up (December 22^nd this year) so however you celebrate this time of year I wish you a good one and until next week – happy hunting.

Footnote:

There simply wasn’t room to include everything this week so there are more pictures of flowers, bugs, harvestmen and more in Naturalists (the facebook page that accompanies this blog).

Toenote:

You can also now follow me on Twitter Steve Daniels @cretenaturalist

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LINKS:

With special thanks this week to all at the  Coleoptera Group on Facebook for their help with identifying the exact species of Dung Beetle.

Naturalists (the facebook page that accompanies this blog)

Flowers of Crete;

BIRDS OF CRETE

Crete Birding

Greek Butterflies and Moths

Aquaworld Aquarium

Visit Greece (National Government Tourist Office)