Welcome to the Wildlife Hotel

This is it, the Wildlife Hotel. It wasn't designed as such but is an abandoned project that has been this way since before I arrived in 2004. Gradually the native plants have taken over the gardens and the wildlife has moved in. Before we nose around though I'd just like to draw your attention to these poppies down here. To me, poppies used to be those red things that you wore on Remembrance Day or the mauve things in the middle east that provided the world, for better or for worse, with opium. I was quite surprised to learn that there were nearly eight hundred species dotted around the world with nine here on Crete alone including the familiar red and mauve ones. This particular one is widespread but not very common on the island and is called the Red horned-poppy. Presumably on account of that massive, rampant seed pod.

The other flower that is prevalent in this region is the endemic Cretan ebony. This is acting like a magnet to the honey bees and I see that some enterprising individual has placed a couple of hives on the approach way. Don't worry, they won't bother you. You may think that you look and smell pretty but you can't hold a candle to the Cretan ebony. Just look at the air traffic control that's going on down there at the hive – the bees take off and fly out bottom right and approach and land from the top left.

The air may be a-buzz with bees but there's not much in the way of bird life up here today. I can hear Blackbird, Sardinian Warbler, Chaffinch and Sparrow but ten years ago I used to see Buntings, Flycatchers and Linnets up here quite regularly. A sad illustration of the decline in European songbirds unfortunately. Populations of the Spotted Flycatcher that I photographed on the balcony back in 2006, for instance, have dropped by a staggering 89% in recent decades.

Let's rest in the sun and admire the view for a while. There's some nice grass to sit on or a flat rock if you'd prefer. As you can see, I've bagged the one surviving sun lounger. Looks like I'm going to have to share it though. This curious little insect is one of the hoppers. There are four main groups: plant, leaf, frog and tree hoppers. I think that this one is a leafhopper but they're all very similar until you study them in detail. They all belong to the same order, the hemiptera or true bugs, and are most closely related to the cicadas which keep us entertained throughout the summer. Unlike the cicadas however they do not announce themselves to the world in the same deafening manner.

The little hoppers are lovely but I like an insect that you can pick up and make friends with; like this magnificent grasshopper. Isn't he a beauty? I've just picked him up from among those wild oats down there and he's taking being handled gently with equanimity. That's right, you sit up there on my shoulder – pirates have parrots, why shouldn't I have a grasshopper?

That just about wraps it up for this week so it just leaves my new friend and I to lead you back to where we started and next week we'll investigate the top track above the village.

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LINKS:

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

See detailed pictures on Flickr

Read more about the flora and flora of the island in The Nature of Crete (Flipboard Magazine)

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)

Taking It Easy

What a lovely day for wandering along the beach and taking it easy after our exertions down the valley. I see that we have another of those Bee flies that we were discussing a few weeks back (see The Sweet Smell of Rain) investigating the sand. Quite an absorbing pastime and there are hobbyists who collect sand, studying its composition from places around the world. The bit that the bee fly is studying for instance contains dark grains, pure white grains and at least fifty shades of grey in between. The colours are determined by the mineral content and the shape depends upon whether it has been washed down from the hills or transported by wind and waves. Ours is angular suggesting that it has come down the valley like us and the colouration is typical of quartz and chert with that odd orange bit by his abdomen probably coming from one of the iron bearing rocks that we observed in How To Get Blood Out Of A Stone.

Let's walk along the back of the beach and see what else we can find. Those bunches of strap like leaves will throw up fragrant blooms of white Sea Daffodils in the summer but we have one common beach plant blossoming here and now and that's Sea Rocket. The seed pods have a very high concentration of erucic acid which is an omega 9 fatty acid and has a bit of a story behind it. You may be familiar with great yellow fields of rape, from which we get rapeseed oil. Rape and sea rocket are closely related and both contain high levels of this acid. We cultivate rapeseed oil for biofuel, animal feed and edible oil but the high levels of erucic acid became a cause of concern after laboratory tests in the 1970s showed that if you stuffed rats full of the stuff then it had a toxic effect on the heart. To be honest, if you pig out exclusively on anything it will probably do you harm – even water can poison you in high enough doses. Enter two bright sparks from the University of Manitoba in Canada who bred rapeseed low in erucic acid and called it Canola oil. Nowadays we just genetically modify the plant of course and canola is widely marketed as the healthy cooking oil. I'll let you make your own mind up on that one.

Here's a pretty little lady, she's a Long tailed Blue. Not as showy as the male who has a lot more blue on his upper wings but it pays not to be too conspicuous when you're sitting there egg laying. This maybe what she has in mind now. Her caterpillars feed on a wide range of leguminous plants in the Fabaceae family such as this Cretan Ebony which is just coming into flower. Shall we take a wander down to the sea and clamber along those interesting looking rocks over there?

That seems like a nice place to stop and watch the marine world go by. Not much in the way of fish today... the odd shore crab scuttling about... but there's some seaweed down there which may be harbouring some microscopic life. Let's have a look. Ah, our old friends the diatoms, the very basis of the food web. These are marine diatoms and different to those that we found under the dripping stalactite in A Recipe For Life.

Those wedge shaped ones often cluster together, narrow ends facing inwards, so that they make a complete circle like a flower head. I expect that we disturbed them when we rudely hauled them out of the sea and plonked them on a microscope slide. I think we'll rinse the slide and put them back. You know, it's almost warm enough to join them in there. Maybe in a couple of weeks. When the sea's had a chance to warm up a bit.

The Extra Bit

If you'd like to become an arenophile and collect sand as a hobby there's a society just for you: http://sandcollectors.org/become-a-collector/

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LINKS:

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

See detailed pictures on Flickr

Read more about the flora and flora of the island in The Nature of Crete (Flipboard Magazine)

Cretan Flora

Flowers of Crete;

BIRDS OF CRETE

Crete Birding

Greek Butterflies and Moths

Aquaworld Aquarium

Visit Greece (National Government Tourist Office)

Beachcombin’

Ferma Bay

After last week’s somewhat strenuous hike through the Kritsa Gorge I promised you something a little more relaxing this week. I thought I’d bring you down here to Ferma Bay and we’d spend an hour or two wandering along the sands beachcombin’. An activity so laid back it’s too much of an effort to pronounce the end of the word.

Nest holes at Ferma Bay

So let us start at the western end with the early morning sun gently warming the rocks and reflecting off the cool, crystal clear water. And we start with a bit of a puzzle. If you look up above your head you will see a few holes in the rock with what appears to be nesting material hanging out of them. Who made them? There is no way an animal could run up and down the vertical walls so it must be a bird of some sort. From what I can see the nest appears to be too well constructed for one of the pigeons that inhabit these cliffs. Their idea of nest building is to throw a few sticks on a ledge, drop a couple of white eggs on top and hope they don’t roll off. Various martins use holes in rocks of course but they always fortify them with spittle and mud and there’s no evidence of that. No, my prime suspect is the White Wagtail, that ubiquitous beach bum that we met last year on the Road To Nowhere, but I’m open to alternative ideas.

A Fossilised Scallop and an Egyptian Grasshopper adorn the walls

If we look deeper inside this little recess you can see how the various sediments have been laid down as neatly as a loaf of sliced bread. Here, jutting out of the wall is a fossilized Scallop that’s been laying there, just like that, for tens of millions of years and further up, an Egyptian Grasshopper warming his muscles for the day ahead. These are our largest grasshoppers locally, as long and fat as your index finger. Their prime delight in life seems to be to give tourists a severe case of the jitters by flying into tavernas, low above their heads with a great whirring of wings, and land with a thud on the central umbrella pole. I’ve seen whole tables vacated in microseconds by an experienced grasshopper with a wicked sense of humour. Being vegetarian, they’re completely harmless of course, but can make serious inroads into your Greek salad.

A Mirid Bug on Cretan Ebony

We’ll leave the rocks now and stroll along the sands. We’ve spent a lot of time this year up in the Milonas valley and this is where it comes down to the sea. Many of the plants you’ll recognize from our previous excursions but these little shrubby patches of purple we’ve only mentioned in passing. This is Cretan Ebony, an endemic that you’ll only find on Crete. It is a chasmophyte, a plant that specializes in growing on cliffs, but as you can see it has extended its territory somewhat. To me, these flowers are the heralds of warm weather and wall-to-wall sunshine and they’re a great favourite with the local insect population. Nestling in the leaves of this one for instance we have a little Mirid Bug, with the almost unpronounceable name of Deraeocoris schach, busy extracting the sap from the stems.  He doesn’t seem to be particularly inclined to have his photograph taken so I’ll just pop him in the insect box a moment so we can have a better look at him. He's in full adult colouration having been through his various instars and is now ready to participate in the great mating game of life.

The architectural beauty of a Sponge

Now here’s an animal that will be familiar to almost everyone, it’s a sponge. Most natural bath sponges come from the Mediterranean and their skeletons consist of a fibrous, elastic collagen protein called spongin which, when looked at under the microscope, has an architectural beauty surpassing that of  any cathedral. They also have a far more ancient lineage dating back hundreds of millions of years. Sponges are very simple animals, having no internal organs as such, and most species absorb nutrients either directly from the seawater itself or from bacteria. So, here we have a dead animal that lived on bacteria – an interesting thought next time you’re in the bath with one.

A Mediterranean Yellow-legged Gull surveys the bay

So here we are at the east end of the bay where a series of rocks form a sort of lagoon, perfect for snorkelling and rock pooling, which we’ll investigate further in the coming weeks. Meanwhile out on the rocks is a Mediterranean Yellow-legged Gull, blissfully unaware of the fact that he and his relatives have thrown the ornithological world into heated debate over recent decades. Apart from having yellow, rather than pink, legs he’s virtually indistinguishable from the European Herring Gull of more northerly latitudes – in fact there are over two dozen gull species in the genus Larus to which this one belongs and sorting out who is related to whom is proving a major headache. The latest DNA research shows that he is more closely related to the Great Black-backed Gull and the Armenian Gull than any of the Herring Gulls of which he was treated as a subspecies as recently as the 1990s. Not that he’s in the least concerned of course, he’s just enjoying the sunshine and looking for lunch. Now doesn’t that seem like a good idea?

Until next week – happy hunting.

NEW! See all the pictures including insets in detail on Flickr

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LINKS:

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)