Snakes Alive!

 

A little over two and a half years ago, in October 2020, I took you down to look at the Dunescape of Drigg. We were, as you may recall, looking for Tiger beetles and Adders. There was plenty to look at, but unfortunately not those two creatures. Anyhow, I thought we'd go back there at the weekend, and see if we have any better luck in the warmer weather.

You may also recall that I had a new found friend with me on that trip. The fact that she is with me once again, this time in a campervan, speaks volumes. The dunes are a marvellous place for bird watching, and we are joined by Stonechats, Meadow Pipits and Goldfinches on every available perch. A pair of Linnets are also wandering about and, first thing in the morning, a Skylark comes down to take a dust bath.

Behind the dunes, where small streams run, we are accompanied by Common Blue and Wall Brown butterflies, as well as the diminutive Small Heaths, which are only about half the size of the other two. We also have four new flowers to add to our May collection: with Bloody Crane's Bill, Burnet Rose (which is a bit of a dune specialist), Yellow Iris, and Marsh Marigold. This makes 64 species for the year so far, if anyone's counting.

There are still no Tiger Beetles about, but we do have another little fellow that is associated with sand dunes. This  is a Marram Weevil. The antennae coming out of his snout like that, shows that he's a weevil of some kind. The snout is also short and broad, which means that he's one of the 14,000 or so broad nosed weevils, and we found him near Marram grass, so he's in the correct habitat for a Marram Weevil.

Adders, on the other hand, we do have. There are two things along this coast that frighten the beejabers out of people; Adders and Sellafield. Both are pretty overrated in terms of danger to the public. Adders bite about 100 people a year, but the last fatal bite was almost fifty years ago. They are not aggressive, but like most of us, they don't like being downtrodden. Sellafield hasn't bitten anybody since 1957, when it was Windscale Nuclear Power Station. A radioactive leak is believed to have been responsible for a couple of hundred fatal cancers. Nowadays, it primarily stores low to medium radioactive waste.

We'll walk back along the beach and see what the tide has washed up. A somewhat ferocious looking jellyfish for a start. Although the Dustbin-lid Jelly is one of the largest jellyfish to drift around UK shores, it's a bit of a gentle giant. Don't get me wrong, it will sting you, even when dead, but there are much smaller jellyfish with much worse stings. Also, they're big enough to see and avoid in the water, and they don't have metres of stinging tentacles trailing behind them.

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Mugwort - The Smokers' Alternative - Silloth West Beach

 

We're off to Silloth West Beach today, in search of a somewhat drab looking plant called Mugwort. Drab it may be, but it is the first of the nine sacred herbs listed in the 10^th century herbal, the Lacnunga. You can stuff your pillow with it for sweet dreams, beer was brewed with it before hops as a medicine, or you can put it in your bath water for an invigorating soak. Personally, I'm going to put it in my pipe and smoke it. I started smoking many years ago when fags were cheap and apparently good for you (according to the adverts). Nowadays, they are ridiculously expensive and, so we are led to believe, can kill you at twenty paces. Mugwort, so I am told by other pipe smokers, can gradually wean one off nicotine by gradually increasing the ratio of mugwort to tobacco in your pipe or roll-up. Worth a go. I'll let you know.

Now that I've collected a bag of young leaves with which to experiment, let's go and see if we can find any Northern Dune Tiger Beetles. In a word, no, but we'll find one some day. We do have a couple of other beetles though. This first one is a Darkling Beetle. There are over 500 species of these, but this one, Phylan gibbus, is a bit of a dune specialist. The other, beautifully shiny metallic green one, is a European Gazelle Beetle, Nebria revilcollis. Lovely over here in Europe, where it belongs, but it has taken to voyaging the Atlantic and is now invading North America.

Behind the dunes, we have a magnificent stand of gorse and small trees which the birds are absolutely loving. There's a resplendent male Chaffinch, singing from a high branch; a Starling foraging for insects and other arthropods around the roots; a camera shy Linnet; and a Song Thrush competing with the Chaffinch for volume, and winning by quite a few decibels.

A tiny flash of blue has just caught my eye in that heather and moss down there. Let's dive in and see if we can find the owner. It's a lady Wolf Spider, carrying her brood in a sac (Wolf Spiders are the only spiders that do this). I'll just see if I can tempt her to come to my hand so that we can see her better. Here she is, sweet little thing. When the spiderlings hatch, they will run up her legs, presumably using those convenient spines, and settle on her back for several weeks, until they are able to fend for themselves. I'll put her back and let her go about her business.

As I am writing this, Jeremy Vine is hosting yet another programme about Covid. I don't know about you, but I think that too much coverage of a subject can create public apathy, even resentment and eventually become counter-productive. I've noticed this with with other things such as antisemitism, racial equality and gay pride. Highlighting issues is one thing; shoving it in people's faces all the time is quite another. Unfortunately, I can see the same thing happening with climate change. If you want to get a message across – do it with a smile, like these guys!

Steve

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Dune

The dunes at Long Beach, Crete

Dune was a famous science fiction novel written by Frank Herbert in 1965. It is set on a desert world which is home to an endemic and valuable spice and is essentially a story of the usual human shortcomings of greed, control and power. I thought I’d take you to visit some of our local dunes this week. Plenty of greed, control and power but neither a rare spice nor human in sight.  Like most coastal dunes these are wind formed with the lighter sand particles being blown to the back of the beach along with the lighter sea shells and dry seaweed. 

Albardin

Very often, the first plants to colonise a dune are tough grasses with deep roots which can reach down to the water table and these help to bind the sand together and add nitrogen to what will become a complex ecosystem as we shall see. I don’t claim to be an expert on grasses (or anything else for that matter) but this one I think is Albardin or False Esparto Grass which has been used since antiquity for making rope, baskets, shoes and paper.

From this beginning the slightly enriched dune allows more plants to make a home and if we do a quick count I can see at least a dozen plants including thyme, thistles, plantains (including one I haven’t seen before) and even small juniper bushes. If we get down on our hands and knees we should find a rich variety of insect life scurrying around in the sand. Here look, a beetle making his way through the campions, and there a grasshopper chewing on a leaf and that flash of yellow that has just gone by was a Clouded Yellow Butterfly. Three different orders of insects: Coleoptera (Beetles); Orthoptera (Grasshoppers and Crickets); Lepidoptera (Butterflies and Moths) in as many minutes, to say nothing of the stunning variety of flies (Diptera).

Mammoth Wasp

Oh, and a fifth order: Hymenoptera (Bees, wasps and Ants). Just take a look at this lady feeding on the thistle head. She’s a Mammoth Wasp, the largest wasp in Europe (and, so I’ve been told, she has a sting to match her size). Just observe quietly from a distance and she’ll ignore you. She is one of the ‘beetle parasitic wasps’ and when she’s ready to lay she’ll dig out the larvae of European Rhinoceros Beetles, paralyse them with her sting and then lay a single egg in each larva. When her egg hatches it will consume the larva from the inside. Not nice but I like them.

Gecko

So much for insects eating other insects, I wonder if we can find anything bigger? You’ve guessed it – I’ve spotted a log and for those of you who’ve been following the blog throughout the year you know I can’t resist log turning. Oh beautiful, please allow me to introduce to one of my favourite little animals on the island – the gecko. Geckos are a type of lizard with really adhesive toe pads that allow them to skim up and down walls and even across the ceiling like a curling stone on ice. I love having them around the house as they feast on the small biting insects that get in despite the mosquito netting (how the geckos get into the house is a trick known only to them but I suspect that they flatten themselves down and squeeze under the door). He was obviously happy under his log, re-growing his tail by the looks of things, so we’ll put him back.

Crested lark

That was a great finale to our dune walk but as we wander back in search of a bit of lunch let’s take a look to the skies. We’ve been accompanied all morning by swallows swooping and diving around and taking advantage of the airborne insect fauna but I’ve also heard a couple of larks about. We crossed a flat, open bit of ground on the way here which is the favourite habitat of Crested Larks so we’ll see if we can find some. There’s one pottering about over there. Smashing little birds aren’t they and the Mohican hair style would be the envy of any punk rocker. They’re common residents here on Crete and I see them most months of the year, usually down near the coast.

There have been a lot of plants and insects this week and I’ll try to add some more pictures to the Naturalists facebook page later in the week and if you want to add your own dune pictures and experiences, feel free. Until next week – happy hunting.

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