Gardening for Wildlife

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Do you garden for wildlife? If so, what type of wildlife are you aiming to attract? Let me take a guess…

If you’re like most wildlife gardeners, you’ll be feeding the birds and hedgehogs and providing the birds with food, water, nest boxes and roosting pockets, and perhaps growing things like Teasels and Pyracantha for the seeds and berries. You’ll be growing pollinator-friendly flowers and putting up bee houses, and looking for the little round cut-outs on your rose leaves made by leaf-cutter bees. Hedgehogs will benefit from des res hibernation houses, holes cut into fences for access, and from being fed. You’ll be delighted to see foxes on your patio, and you’ll perhaps be throwing them scraps of food, or even whole raw chicken wings. A dedicated wildlife guardian might even feed them jam sandwiches laced with mange treatments. All this is a huge step in the right direction, but here’s the question: do you also leave greenfly alone, and allow slugs & snails to go about their business without poisoning them?

Maybe you’re more like me. I garden for invertebrates and positively welcome the arrival of aphids in the spring, because I know that without aphids, a whole host of miniature life might well starve or fail to find a way to raise their next generation and Blue Tits could struggle to raise their broods.

If you’re like me, you’ll know that invertebrates, from microscopic soil creatures to slugs and snails are, in partnership with native plants, pretty much the builders, keepers and recyclers of all the earth’s ecosystems. Without them, there’d be no soil, no crops, and no higher animals at all, so it’s very worrying that we are losing our insect biomass hand over fist right now. Climate change? That’s only partly to blame.

The problem feels so vast that we feel helpless, and yet we can all of us do something to help. Small actions do very much add up to big gains here because so many invertebrates really don’t need huge amounts of territory.

Take a look at the average garden. Firstly, the chances are that there’ll be a lawn, and that lawn will be pretty well manicured to present a nice, flat, green appearance, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, as long as we don’t use chemicals to keep it that way, and as long as it’s balanced with other features, because some invertebrates and wildflowers positively thrive in very short grass: ground-nesting bees, for instance, and Self-Heal.

Secondly, an increasing number of gardens have large, paved areas and nothing much else, or they have artificial grass instead of a lawn, and without soft landscaping in the form of living plants, these gardens have nothing much to offer our wildlife. To our small scurrying, creeping, crawling friends, they are barren and inhospitable, and what’s more, they are often regularly dosed with toxic chemicals to keep weeds, ants and algae away.

And thirdly, an awful lot of gardens have no trees. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of trees to our native wildlife. They provide leaves as food for caterpillars and leaf-miners and leaf beetles, and when the leaves drop they provide the raw material from which humus will be made by earthworms and other dead-leaf-eaters, and they are a ‘duvet’ for overwintering invertebrates. Trees provide nectar for pollinators, bark and crevices for invertebrates, shade, shelter and nesting opportunities for so many different animals. Some provide more than others, of course: fruit trees provide food for pollinators, fruit eaters and detrivores, and – for instance – did you know that an Oak tree supports more wildlife than any other tree? An astonishing 500 different species of animals, butterflies, moths, insects and other invertebrates use oak trees to feed, breed and roost, and some of the specialist species rely solely on the Oak to survive. Other trees might have less impressive lists, but they all support invertebrates which birds and other animals come to feed on and space to rest and nest, and it’s important to note that if you have a bird feeder, birds will be much happier to use it if they have a tree to hide in while they check that the coast is clear before coming to feed. Most modern garden could not accommodate an Oak, but even a small tree like a fruit tree or a Rowan is honestly very useful – and these days it’s well worth thinking about the fact that they can reduce the ambient temperature in their shade area by several degrees.

As trees age, they become more and more useful, and when they get so old that bits start falling off, or the whole tree ends up on the ground, they continue to be useful – nay, essential – to some species as the decomposers arrive and eat their way through the dead wood. Forms of life from the tiniest springtail to sizeable fungi* and the larger animals all arrive to eat them and to use the dead wood to shelter under, or as a larder (woodpeckers, for instance, love a fallen tree).

A good way to understand the interconnectedness of our ecosystems is to take one example and follow it through. The dead wood lies on the ground, gets damp, and is soon populated by springtails (one of our smallest visible creatures). Those springtails eat the rotting wood, and are in turn eaten by, for example, a predatory beetle. The beetle (if he’s unlucky) is eaten by a mouse, and the mouse is caught and swallowed by an owl. The owl dies, falls to the ground, and is found and eaten by a Carrion Crow, which in turn dies and is eaten by a whole truckload of animals from fly maggots, slugs, mice, and Red-Tailed Kites, to the odd very hungry fox. The droppings from all of these things fertilise the soil to provide nourishment for trees, which die, fall, and provide food and shelter for, guess what? The springtails. And this is just one example. Imagine all the different strands! I could have followed a slug, which will certainly have mites, and might be eaten by a hedgehog, which probably has ticks which are eaten by birds or predatory insects … you see where I’m going with this. And as you will know, all of this delicate balance is affected by temperature, by rainfall, by lack of food, by pesticides & weedkillers, by over-fishing, by agriculture, by … yes, and by our management of gardens.

To close this blog I will leave you with a statistic: if you add all of the gardens of the UK together, they collectively cover more ground than all of our nature reserves put together.

Oh yes. We can make a significant difference.

* Oh, fungi … that is a huge, and hugely important story all by itself. And it’s one on which so many things depend, including us.

The Year of the Fly – The Bee-fly

Jay2 Comments

One of the things I look for in spring is the Dark-Edged Bee-fly, Bombylius major, appearing in my garden.  These are strange-looking insects, which look a bit like cute and fluffy brown bees with a huge long sting, flying backwards.  In fact, the ‘sting’ is the proboscis (tongue) of the animal and is permanently out in a rigid, forward facing position.  They cannot sting, nor can they bite you.

Depending on whereabouts in the UK you are, you might see the Dark Edged Bee-fly, or you might be lucky and see Bombylius discolor, the Dotted Bee-fly.  If you are extraordinarily lucky, you might find one of the other nine species of Bee-fly to be found here, some of which are rather rare.

Whichever one you come across, however, they are not just a pretty face, but have a dark side to their lifestyle.  I’ve said that they can’t sting or bite, haven’t I?  So go ahead and try to capture one in your cupped hands if you want to – they are completely harmless1.  But good luck with that, because though they might look slow and bumbly hovering in front of that flower or a few inches above your lawn, they are in fact remarkably zippy little things.  Now you see it, now you don’t!

This one is Hemipenthes velutina, which is widespread on the western dunes of Jersey, but unknown anywhere else on the British mainland.

Adult Bee-flies are nectar-feeders and very useful pollinators.  So, the dark side to these little fluff-balls?  Well, when you see Bombylius major hovering over the surface of your lawn, they are probably females looking for the burrows of solitary bees.  When they find one, they rather cleverly2 flick their eggs into the entrance of the tunnel in mid-flight, and the Bee-fly larvae, when they hatch, proceed to eat the bee larvae they find there.

Not all Bee-flies are parasitoids3 of ground-nesting bees, and – apart from the Bombyliids – they’re not all cute and fluffy, either.  The smallest one, Phthiria pulicaria (seen here feeding on Dandelion nectar) has larvae that prey on micro-moth caterpillars, and the rest are larger, flatter, less fluffy flies, with a rather shorter proboscis.  Most are parasitoids of sand wasps, one is a parasitoid of mason bees, three target moth caterpillars, and one is a hyper-parasitoid, because it preys on ichneumon wasp larvae4 which are already developing inside caterpillars.

So there you have it.  This month’s Year Of The Fly post, in plenty of time for you to do a little swotting5 in time for the spring insect awakening.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek into the world of flies.  Should you wish to know more, you could do worse than join the Dipterists Forum, where you will be welcomed with open arms!

1 Or you could use a net!

2 And extremely accurately

3 A parasitoid is an animal which lives at the expense of its host (ie, it eats it), eventually killing it.  Some are extremely cleverly evolved, eating the non-essential parts first so that the host lives longer and stays fresh.

4 Ichneumon wasps are parasitoids, so anything which eats them in situ, as it were, is a hyper-parasitoid.

5 Yes, that’s  ‘swotting’, not ‘swatting’.  Don’t get carried away!

The Year of the Fly – Not just the stripey ones

Jay1 Comment

It might seem strange to you, but for me, finding and photographing hoverflies in my garden was a fascinating little hobby, and it led me to develop a deep interest in flies.  I already had a general interest in nature, and a particular interest in insects, but once I started really looking at hoverflies and trying to identify them so that I could label my photos correctly, I was hooked.

If you take the trouble to look, you’ll see quite a few flies visiting flowers. If you look more closely, you’ll find that many of the ‘bees’ that you are seeing are not bees at all, but merely flies which look like bees. These flies are usually hoverflies and totally harmless. How do you tell the difference? Well, the easiest way to tell a bee from a fly is the shape of their heads and eyes and the fact that flies (usually) have little short stubby antennae instead of the long, waving antennae of the bees.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the the striped hoverflies which sit and look pretty on the more open garden flowers, or hover like little mini helicopters above and around their food source.  But hoverflies are not all stripey – some are black, some are brown, some are patterned and some are not – and their size ranges from a few millimetres to twenty or more.  They are common flower visitors, but that’s not the only place you’ll find them. For instance, members of the Helophilus genus of the family Syrphidae2 do visit flowers, but they also hang around water margins, so you’ll often see them around garden ponds, especially if there is some nice wet mud around the edge. These fairly large flies are banded and patterned with various shades of orange, yellow, and brown so dark that it’s almost black, and they look as if they’re wearing little football jerseys! I spent quite a while this summer sitting by my newly dug turf-edged pond, watching three female Helophilus pendulus stake out their territory, indulging in what looked like aerial battles to mark out their air-space and chasing other females away from a particularly well-sited pond plant.

They were joined one day by an Eristalis pertinax female (one of the bee-mimic hoverflies) also looking for some very wet mud, because both Helophilus and Eristalis species lay their eggs in or near water. The larvae eat their way through the organic debris they find there, staying completely submerged and getting their air by means of a long telescopic breathing tube which extends from their rear. The breathing tubes end in an arrangement of fine hooks which cling onto the surface tension of the mud or water to keep the airway open while the larvae – known as rat-tailed maggots – munch away below the surface. Some genera of hoverfly have larvae (without rat-tails) that live in ants’ nests, wasps’ nests or bees’ nests. Others live on stems and leaves, under bark, in rotting compost, in drifts of dead, wet leaves, in sap runs, in hollow thistle stems, in rotting wood or in water-filled rot-holes. This is one very good reason why you should try not to be too tidy a gardener – you could be ‘tidying away’ next summer’s crop of hoverflies!

Many hoverflies are so small that you probably don’t notice them at all. The tribe Bacchini, for instance, includes many species which – to the naked eye – all look small and black as they fly silently around your lobelia, forget-me-nots and dandelions. Known to the dipterist as LBJs3, they are the curse of the amateur because they are so difficult to identify without microscopic examination. In the case of one Platycheirus species, it comes down to the shape and length of one bristle on the foreleg of the male, and in another, whether a small depression on a front leg has a ‘lightning’ shaped mark in it or not.  For other Bacchines you might have to examine the genitalia – and no, I have not so far done this.

There are wasp mimic hoverflies and bee mimic hoverflies and some which look like other types of fly. Some are shiney and some are dull, some are metallic while others are furry. Hoverflies are interesting and very, very varied, and there are hundreds of different species of them in the UK and I can’t possible mention them all.   You see, though I do love them (and I’m learning) I am no kind of an expert.

However, I can’t leave you without mentioning the big hornet mimics. Volucella inanis and Volucella zonaria really are often mistaken for hornets but they are just flies, have no sting and cannot bite. They are beautiful velvety yellow, brown/black/red beauties which are incredibly photogenic.   Originally considered a migrant species, there are now areas in the south of the UK where they do breed, though they sometimes don’t survive our winters.  These Volucella species have now been found as far north as Cumbria, and are among those hoverflies which mimic bees or wasps for self-protection, because they use their camouflage to enter wasps’ nests to lay their eggs.

To sum up, hoverflies are very beneficial insects and we need to encourage them.

Why? Because although there are some which will damage our plants (the Narcissus Fly, Meredon equestris, for example), most are pretty good at helping farmers and gardeners.  They deal with rotting material for us, they eat a huge amount of insect pests, and what’s more, they are seriously good at pollinating crops and flowers.

Some pollinate various wild flowers which bees simply don’t visit, and there are some plants which have evolved to attract hoverflies for pollination – the orchid species Epipactis veratrifolia, produces a pheromone which is indistinguishable from the alarm pheromone of aphids, which attracts hoverflies, and the plant gets itself pollinated!

If you want to help hoverflies, you can do one or more of the following: make a garden pond and a compost heap, leave some long grass and other undisturbed areas, leave some dead leaves lying on the ground over winter,  allow some rot-holes and a bit of dead wood to remain on your trees, and plant plenty of pollen- and nectar-rich flowers, trees and/or shrubs.  If you feel particularly enthusiastic, you could join the Buzz Club’s Hoverfly Lagoon Project.

Oh yes.  And whatever else you do, DON’T use insecticides in your garden!

1 – A dipterist is someone who studies flies, because the order of insects we study is called Diptera.

2 – Syrphidae is the diptera family which covers hoverflies.

3 – LBJ = Little Black Job

Well, did you?

Jay4 Comments

New Year’s resolutions. Did you make any? No, I didn’t, either. But what I did do was gather the equipment needed for two and have it in my mind to do a third. You might think that this is copping out, or somehow less effective than sitting down on New Year’s Eve and formally deciding what to resolve, or getting up on New Year’s Day, sitting on the side of the bed and making a momentous decision, but it isn’t.

See, what happens to most people is that they dream big when it comes to resolutions, and they have a mindset that says once you slip off track, that’s it. No point in carrying on, Oh well, never mind, better luck next year, bring on the cupcakes. However, if you break your goals down a little bit and make them manageable and not so arduous, you have a much better chance of sticking to them – especially if you accept that you are going to fall short of a perfect record sooner or later, and deal with it by simply picking yourself up when you can, and taking another run at it.

One of my most successful New Year’s resolutions wasn’t actually begun until February when I felt ready, and that was giving up sugar1. I knew that if I tried it on New Year’s Day, with the remaining Christmas goodies sitting around taunting me, I’d fail spectacularly, so I waited. Did I fall off the wagon? Sure. I ate dessert about five or six times that first year, I ate lots of dried fruit to compensate for the lack of sugar, and I allowed myself a certain amount of chocolate – dark chocolate, with a cocoa content of more than seventy percent – but basically, I did cut out all added sugar, and by the end of the year, I called it a success. It was a success because I had succeeded more than I had failed, and it was a success because after a matter of weeks I no longer craved sugar, and by the end of the year, I was not enjoying it much when I did eat some. It was also a success because I was more than ready for year two and I’m now embarking on year three, but by now it’s part of my lifestyle, not a resolution. I still eat dried fruit when I fancy something sweet, and the odd square of very dark chocolate or a sugar-free biscuit, but if I want a dessert now, I ask for fresh fruit. Most restaurants are happy to supply me with a plate of highly expensive but beautifully arranged melon, and some are able to come up with a pretty good fruit salad.

So what about this year? I have two goals. One is to keep a journal, which I used to do but stopped when my life hit a depressing phase and writing it up was a bit much. However, keeping a journal is a great way to keep track of what you’re doing with your life, writing a bit of family history, counting your blessings etc. You can use it to record food, if you need to work out what is causing you problems or if you want to track your nutrition generally. You can use it to track your exercise, your creativity, your learning … In fact you can use it for all kinds of things2.

The other is keep up a moderate amount of exercise. We already have a treadmill and an iJoyRide3, but depending on which bit of me hurts most on any given day, I need to vary my options. We don’t currently have a dog, which would make us get out more, so we have decided to buy ourselves a recumbent exercise bike, and it’s ordered. It’s not here yet, but that doesn’t worry me because .. well, see paragraph two. Before it arrives, I need to start on resolution number three, which is to de-clutter.

Now, de-cluttering is my bête noire. I am hopeless at de-cluttering. It makes me anxious to toss things out, even though I really hate my clutter. There is far too much of it in my house and I want it gone because then I’ll feel less anxious about it4 and it will be easier to clean my house and have guests to stay, etc. Thing is, it is absolutely no use at all me deciding that all my clutter will be gone by the end of the year, or that I will do such-and-such an amount every day or every week. No, the only way I will be able to manage this one is to resolve to do it when I can, but to record it in my journal when I do. The way this works is that not being able to write down ‘I cleared one shelf/one box of junk or whatever today’ when I’m writing up my journal in the evening will induce a mild sense of guilt and put a very gentle pressure on me to do it, if only to be able to write about it later. Because there is no set amount to do or a time to do it, I will not suffer the hopeless ‘fallen off the wagon’ guilt which can make it seem futile to try again. I’ll just do it as and when. See?

Well. I’m pretty sure I can do the journal – after all, I’ve done that one before – and the exercise bike is very do-able, because there are times I’ll be able to get on and pedal, however slowly, when I can’t face the treadmill and I won’t have to go outside in the biting cold to do it. The de-cluttering? Well, I like my theory on that one.

Don’t hold your breath.

1 Try it. It’s probably the single best thing you can do for your health (if you are a fairly normal person and not a drug addict or something), and you will be stunned to see what foods sugar is added to when you start to read labels. Frozen chips, ham, savoury crackers, soups, cooking sauces … the list is endless.

2 And it gives your children something most enlightening to read after you’re gone

3 Look it up. It’s most entertaining.

4 Though possibly quite anxious about what I might have thrown out that I will desperately want next week or that I might have thrown out by accident

Year of the Fly

JayLeave a comment

I bet you didn’t know that 2019 has been designated The Year of the Fly, did you? It’s true. And now I expect you want to know why. Why have a year of the fly? Flies are nasty, dirty little nuisances and you can think of a lot of better things to have a year dedicated to, am I right?

Well, I have news for you. Many, many species of fly are neither nasty nor dirty and on the contrary are very useful to us. They dispose of excrement and dead bodies, they pollinate our crops and our flowers, they keep down the numbers of insect pests like aphids, they keep our soil healthy, and not least, they provide food for our garden birds and other animals.

Flies can also be both colourful and clean1. There are a huge variety of flies, around 7,000 species2 right here in the UK, ranging from the tiniest of fungus gnats to the smacking great hornet-mimic hoverflies. Bee-flies are particularly cute and fluffy, and many hoverflies and soldierflies are strikingly beautiful, but all flies are miniature marvels of nature, perfectly adapted to their lifestyles. Even Bluebottles, Greenbottles and other blowflies are amazing little things, seen in close-up. You would be surprised if I tried to describe the detail, so I shall have to just show you – and when I do, you will also be amazed at how intricate they are, and how delicate.

So there are pollinating flies, parasitic flies, blood-sucking flies, flies which feed on decaying organic matter, flies which dispose of dead things, and flies which feed on other insects. Some species have larvae which feed on one thing (e.g. other insects) and adults which feed on something entirely different (e.g. nectar). Some adult flies don’t feed at all, but simply live very short lives until the fat reserves they built up as larvae run out. By the way, we may be used to thinking of flies as the adult flying insects which we are all so familiar with, but for the majority, the larval stage is the longest and it could be argued, the most important. The function of many adult flies is simply to mate and die, although some will overwinter and live to fly another spring and summer. None of them can chew. All of them are liquid feeders, though some have developed some fairly vicious cutting or piercing equipment for getting at the liquid that they need.

In recent years, I’ve become very interested in flies in general, and hoverflies in particular, and this year – The Year of the Fly – I’m going to try to give you a good number of posts here on The Sparking Synapse to show you why they are so fascinating, and to share some information with you which I bet most of you did not know. Since I am a hoverfly person, I’ll start with an overview of that genus, the Syrphidae, and before I start I’d better tell you that most flies do not have a common name, but don’t worry. Some of them do, and anyway, there won’t be a test at the end of the year!

1 – Well, as clean as anything which lives outdoors and has no truck with modern plumbing

2 – You’ll see different estimates of the number of species in the UK, depending on where you look, but my figure comes from the UK special interest group The Dipterists Forum

What makes fireworks so special?

Jay1 Comment

I’m writing this on 7th November, just after Bonfire Night – or Guy Fawkes Night as we used to call it when we were young. Nowadays, of course, it’s considered politically incorrect to celebrate the torture and death of a man who allegedly1 plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, so we don’t make effigies of poor old Guy and burn them on our bonfires these days. I think even the bonfires are dying out, if you’ll excuse the pun.

But hey, fireworks are great fun, aren’t they? They light up the skies with rockets exploding like blossoming chrysanthemums, stars and streaks of colour shooting skywards, trails of pink and violet tinted smoke. There are gleefully loud bangs, crackles, snaps and pops, with children and adults alike gazing at the skies in wonder, wreathed in huge smiles2. Everyone loves fireworks.

But those bangs and whines and whizzes are growing ever louder. You practically need ear-defenders now to stand and watch a public display, and even indoors, streets away from fireworks being set off in someone else’s garden, it’s enough to make you jump … and your cat disappear under the sofa and your dog wet himself, wedge himself into the tightest dark space he can find, and pant half his available body fluids onto the electrical bar down there. It’s no exaggeration to say that every year, a handful of dogs die of heart attacks during a firework session, some injure themselves running into household furniture, and others bolt, escaping from gardens and getting lost. Some of those who bolt end up running into roads and dying, or getting seriously injured.

This week I have read, in the UK media, of several dogs killed on the road after running off terrified by daytime fireworks, and many more running off terrified but being recovered safely. I’ve read about two dead horses and many galloping around terrified in their fields or rearing, rolling-eyed, in their stables. There have been around fifteen or twenty missing cats reported on our local ‘lost pets’ Facebook group, and dead birds and rabbits found in gardens.  There has been one case of a farmer finding three of his cows in a water-filled ditch (one dead), where they had fallen, running in panic from fireworks set off at the gate of their field.   And, disturbingly, fireworks thrown at a blind woman with her guide dog, a firework placed in a homeless man’s jacket pocket, two incidents of fireworks being thrown into crowded buses, causing terror and injury, and one pushed through a house letterbox. These are just the ones I’ve read – I’m sure there have been many more. Increasingly, emergency service workers seem to become targets of firework misuse, and increasingly, those who dare to voice a complaint are verbally abused – this week I read of a woman who has sheep in her field and dogs in her house having very large fireworks aimed deliberately at her house after asking a group of young men to take their unofficial display away from the public land next to her property3. She says that the fireworks looked like display quality fireworks, which should never have been available to the general public and should never have been set off near livestock or residential areas, and yet they were. Her sheep and dogs were beyond terrified, and she was frightened herself, and had to stay up all night with her traumatised dogs. The police were called, but – as if often the case – arrived too late.

No doubt those concerned in these incidents thought they were most amusing. Those concerned did not, and neither do I.

There are, every year, several impassioned petitions out there requesting a limitation on the noise level of fireworks, the time frame in which you can buy them, and/or their availability to the public. To my personal knowledge, three have gained well over the 100,000 signatures required for a debate in parliament – and they have had (or will have) their debates. The answer is always the same: “We believe current legislation is sufficient” and “We believe that most people use fireworks responsibly”.

What I would like to ask is this:

Why are fireworks such a special case?

We now have knives and scissors sold in impenetrable packaging because of stabbing incidents. We have limitations on gun ownership because of shooting incidents. We have limits on how many/how much you can buy of  pain-killers, decongestants, and certain garden chemicals because addicts can make crack cocaine, or terrorists can make bombs with those things. We have over-packaging of nearly all our food and drink in the shops due to one or two cases where criminals have tampered with them and added poisons. We have to practically strip and have our personal belongings x-rayed at airports, and we can’t take even a bottle of babyfood or medicine through security without special conditions being met because of terrorist attacks – good grief, they tried to take my husband’s walking stick away from him to put through the scanner last time we flew!

And yet anyone who is over eighteen can walk into a shop and buy prepackaged explosive devices, some of them alarmingly large. Does this make ANY kind of sense to you? It isn’t as if they are harmless, is it? Apart from the incidents mentioned above, numerous people arrive at UK hospitals for weeks around 5th November with firework-related injuries, many of them life-changing, and many of those hurt are children. According to an article in The Guardian, the number of people admitted to A&E has more than double since 2010, and the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive an Aesthetic Surgeons is calling for graphic representations of firework injuries to be added to firework packaging4.

It is impossible to police the current regulations with our depleted police forces, so why not admit that firework use is beyond control at the moment and limit them at the source? Let’s keep them for public displays only. Let’s go back to the days when you knew exactly when you should expect fireworks – because at the moment, it’s not just 5th November and New Year’s Eve5, plus Diwali and Chinese New Year, it’s weddings & parties, Christmas lights switch-ons, concerts, various other celebrations (or even no celebration at all) which can literally be any day of the year. It might not be legal to stockpile fireworks, but judging by what I hear from the comfort of my living room, people do it, and they do it quite regularly. And of course, you can always apply for a licence for any old public celebration you like, and if you qualify, you can buy even bigger, louder, brighter fireworks.

We cannot know the true extent of the damage and terror fireworks cause.  It’s an offence under the Animal Welfare Act of 2006 to cause suffering to an animal, but nobody counts terrorised pets, or terrorised or dead wildlife or failure-to-breed in either wildlife or farm stock.   Nobody counts terrorised and bewildered dementia patients, autistic people, or those with PTSD, either.  Can you imagine coming back traumatised from a war zone and having to deal with fireworks that sound like mortars exploding?

And worst of all, as far as I know, nobody keeps a central register of incidents involving fireworks in the UK as a whole, although a small but dedicated group on Facebook is doing their best to create one.  So what the heck is it going to take to get the legislation changed?

 

If you want the latest petitions:

NEW 2018 petition
https://www.change.org/p/office-for-product-safety-and-standards-review-firework-rules-to-protect-animals-from-injury-and-distress

Government petition
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/231147

RSPCA quick and easy email to Government. –https://www.rspca.org.uk/getinvolved/campaign/fireworks?

1. And who was probably only the gang’s scapegoat anyway

2. Except the youngest and the nervous ones who are rightfully terrified, but are often told by their parents not to be silly because ‘it’s fun’.

3. I am 100% sure that there have been many more, these are just the ones I’ve heard about.

4. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/05/plastic-surgeons-call-for-cigarette-style-warnings-on-fireworks

5. And when was it, exactly, that New Year’s Eve became a firework night, too? It never was, not in my youth.

Balloons – not so much fun after all

Jay8 Comments

There is a disturbing new trend afoot: people are now using helium-filled balloon releases to celebrate or commemorate lost loved ones.

Did you watch Blue Planet 2? It was marvellous, wasn’t it? David Attenborough took us on a tour of the world’s oceans and introduced us to the multitude of life to be found there. He also introduced us to the problems that so many forms of sea life are having with pollution – pollution caused by mankind. And womankind. In other words, us.

This pollution takes many forms, from raw sewage discharged from various countries directly into the sea, factory & processing plant effluent, microbeads from cosmetics and the plastics industry, to rafts of floating plastic garbage – including many balloons.

Plastic, and other artificial materials like ribbon, are directly responsible for the torment and agonising deaths of thousands upon thousands, of sea creatures1. Whales, dolphins, and sharks have been found dead from starvation, their stomachs filled with indigestible plastic bags. Seems that a floating plastic bag looks remarkably like a jellyfish to a marine mammal or large predatory fish, and they eat them, dozens of them.  What is a balloon when it’s deflated? That’s right; a plastic – or latex – bag. These bags can’t pass along out from the stomach, and when the stomach is full of plastic, the animal can’t eat. Birds are routinely found strangled with twine or ribbon, and others are found with their legs shackled by plastic, or with their beaks stuck in it, or they drown, having got their wings entangled while diving for fish. Same goes for turtles and terrapins. Do a search on YouTube and you’ll find many examples, if you’ve the stomach for it. And what do released balloons have attached to them? Yep, a long string.

Plastic pollution is just about everywhere in our oceans. To illustrate just how far floating plastic can travel, in 1992 a container load of 28,000 plastic ducks was lost in the Pacific. They are still washing up on shores around the world today – from Alaska to Newfoundland, to the UK, Africa, South America, Australia, and they’ve even been found in the Antarctic ice. Now, not only do balloon releasers expect their balloons to travel a long way, they actually hope they will 2!

We are all becoming very conscious of the need to be more aware about our use and disposal of single-use plastics, are we not? I’m pretty sure you’d all agree with that. But now we come back to that disturbing new trend, because for some reason, these same people have a blind spot when it comes to balloons. Is it because they are pretty, or because they are fun? Probably. People really don’t like their fun curtailed, do they?

So, PLEASE do not add to the general plastic waste problem by releasing balloons into the air. Not to celebrate an important day, not as a memorial to someone, nor anything else. Please. For the love of the deity of your choice, Stop and think. Do you really want to mark your special day, or commemorate a loved one by bringing suffering and death to innocent creatures? I know I don’t. And yet that’s exactly what balloons do, especially the most common, plastic type. Especially those pretty, shiny helium-filled Mylar balloons you can buy for birthday and wedding celebrations, and so many of those end up on the world’s beaches and in the world’s oceans. Even latex balloons with cotton strings have their problems, despite being made of natural, biodegradable materials. The balloons still have strings which are capable of garotting a bird or seal pup, and they still take a long time to degrade. Meanwhile, a half-deflated balloon of any description eaten by a hungry sea creature can asphyxiate that poor creature, or starve it to death. If you want to hear it from a park ranger, go here.

And, by the way, it seems the earth’s helium is a finite resource too, and we’re running low3. This is a problem because it is essential for medical scanners like MRI machines, and for many other scientific applications.

Are you re-thinking that birthday balloon? Yep, me too.

Top image from Pixabay, the rest by kind permission of Balloons Blow.

1 – Nobody keeps track of the numbers, but considering that the largest balloon release on record was 1.4 million balloons in one go, and that 1,359 balloons were collected from British beaches in 2011 by the Marine Conservation Society, I think a guess of ‘many thousands’ is not unrealistic. The number of balloons collected had risen threefold since the previous count, by the way, so it’s also safe to assume it’s still rising.

2 – And then, no doubt, go on holiday to a far-flung, exotic location and expect to find it pristine and litter-free.

3 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/why-the-world-is-running-out-of-helium-2059357.html

Who are these people?

Jay5 Comments

There are some people in the world who don’t seem to care too much about others. I’m not talking about criminals1, although sometimes their actions are not exactly within the law, but people who simply go about their day doing whatever makes life easiest for themselves with scant regard for anyone else. When their actions inconvenience you, hurt you, or cost the rest of us money, it can feel as if they are holding up a big middle finger to the world, which is why OH calls them the ‘Fuck You’ contingent. That car up there is parked in the clearly marked ‘Zig-zag’ zone of a primary school – a zone which is designed to keep young children safe. What’s more, those red and white triangles on the fence? That’s ‘Do Not Park Here!’ bunting. And yet … there they are.

Fuck Yous are the people who jostle you in a doorway as they hurry through following their own agenda, or cut you up when driving as they find their own way around a multi-laned roundabout, disregarding the lane markings. These are the people who spit on the pavement, or leave their chewing gum, broken glass, dropped food or dog’s excrement there for you to tread in. Perhaps you’ll go back to your car after shopping and find that one of them has angled their car across the parking space next to you, leaving you no room to open your car door. Maybe you’ll set out to walk to the shop and find that a Fuck You has put their bin out for collection, right in the middle of the footpath. Or come home to find that there is a Fuck You car parked across your driveway and you can’t get in.

Well, okay, most of the time their selfishness is nothing more than a minor annoyance, so we shrug it off.

But it seems to me that an awful lot of those people don’t really think. And what they don’t think is this: who pays? For example, when filth is left on the pavement, the natural consequence is the arrival of nature’s clean-up gang: rats, flies, bacteria, and in town centres, the pigeons, which then have to be controlled by the town council because they create mess and disease opportunities of their own. All this has to be cleaned up, and who foots the bill? Everyone who pays tax does. That’s you and me2. If an accident is caused by poor lane discipline, or by someone running into a bin in the dark, there’ll be an insurance claim and maybe a visit to the hospital. Everyone’s insurance premiums go up in direct proportion to the number of accident claims, and your taxes pay for the NHS, so who pays? Everyone who pays tax does. You, and me. If you don’t pay tax, trust me, you’ll be paying in other ways because the Government’s resources are finite and when the money is tight, benefits and pensions suffer, and a lot of non-essential services suffer too.

I’m sure you’re all sitting there nodding and thinking of Fuck You examples of your own, but do you know which particular type of Fuck You annoys me the most? The ones who decide halfway round the supermarket that they don’t want that bit of meat or jug of milk which they have in their basket, and they just leave it on the nearest convenient shelf, or even at the end of the checkout itself. Last week, I picked up an abandoned piece of rib roast and handed it to a member of staff. What you may or may not know is that any chilled goods found outside the chillers can’t then be sold, or even given to the soup kitchen or any other charity, but must be destroyed. Considering that I find something abandoned every second or third shopping trip, this must be happening on a daily basis in every supermarket in the country, and the amount of food waste this causes is simpy appalling.

And you know what? All that food which has to be thrown away eats into the supermarket’s profits, and that puts the price up for everyone – not just those who pay tax. But I guess to the Fuck Yous, that is just Someone Else’s Problem.

So who are they? Who are the people who feel – even in adulthood – that they are the centre of the universe and that the things they do, drop, or abandon are Someone Else’s Problem3? What kind of upbringing did they have? I have never met anyone who would admit to taking something from the chiller and leaving it on a random, unchilled, shelf, nor have I met anyone who boasts about parking in disabled bays, spitting in the High Street or knocking old ladies aside as they push their way through crowds. I know I’m far from perfect, but I could no more do those things than fly.

1 Although criminals are the ultimate Fuck You, aren’t they? They don’t care about you when they steal your identity, your car, or your confidence.

2 And indeed, the Fuck Yous themselves, who then complain about the cost of the tax.

3 Douglas Adams coined the phrase ‘Someone Else’s Problem’ (or ‘SEP’) in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the theory being that if you see something your brain can’t cope with it simply doesn’t see it, and therefore you can leave, say, an intergalactic spaceship parked in the middle of a city and people will simply walk round it and not even notice it’s there. Fuck Yous seem to feel that the results of their actions are pretty much SEPs.

Four women

Jay4 Comments

In my lifetime, there have been three older women who have been very important to me. One was my mother, of course. The second was a family friend, Billie, who was almost exactly the same age as my mother, and the third was a neighbour, Maureen, who was younger than Mum, but still much older than me.

Mum, pictured at the top on her ninety-first birthday, was always there for us. She smothered me a bit at times, since I was the youngest and the only girl, and there were an awful lot of things I wasn’t allowed to do, and many restrictions placed on me that were not placed on my brothers. As I grew older, and jeans, rock music and boys came into my life, we clashed quite often, but she was a good mother and she was always there, baking, sewing, and knitting for us, patching us up when we were hurt and caring for us when we were ill. She had the kindest heart imaginable, even if she wasn’t always able to empathise with me terribly well. I never fell out with her – she was hard to fall out with – but equally, I never actually told her how much she meant to me,.

Billie was a very dear person with a cracking sense of humour, an infectious giggle and a very individual outlook on life – that’s her with my mother on the beach at Hove, laughing at the camera and wearing very short shorts. We didn’t see her all that often because we lived in London and she lived on the south coast, but when she did visit she would light up the room with her huge personality. She would do anything for those she loved, and I can remember my brother and I staying with her for a seaside holiday when we were very young. When her husband Ambrose developed dementia 1, she cared for him devotedly and nearly went out of her mind doing so, because he wouldn’t let her out of his sight, let alone out of the house. When he died, she coped magnificently right up until the time his cat died, upon which she fell to pieces.

This is Maureen, the slender lady on the left in the lilac jacket.

When I was about twelve years old, we moved into a rural bungalow and acquired new neighbours; Maureen, her husband, their toddler, and a lovely cream coloured labrador called Cleo. I loved dogs and had never had one of my own, so very soon I was chatting over the fence and offering to take Cleo for walks. She was a very easy dog, because she had been trained to walk at heel without collar or lead and if she was told to wait, wait she jolly well would until she was released 2. I was just thirteen years old when I got to know Maureen, and she really was a second mother to me through my difficult teenage years. I would go and sit with her when I felt misunderstood, lonely, bad tempered, stifled, emotional, or at a loose end, and she would get on with her chores and chat and listen, and make me cups of coffee, and I always felt better when I left. I’d play with her young daughter, too, making paper dolls, drawing, colouring and so on. Sometimes I’d take both daughter and dog for walks, and sometimes I’d babysit. And then I grew up, got married, moved away, and saw them only briefly when visiting my parents, and gradually we lost that closeness and saw each other only occasionally.

I write in the past tense because all of those wonderful ladies are now gone. In fact, for the past couple of years, friends, contemporaries and relatives have been dropping like flies in a room full of DEET, and this kind of thing makes you think 3.

I was thinking a lot this morning, as one of our elderly neighbours lies in bed in a care home having suffered a stroke. This gentleman has been suffering from dementia for a number of years, during which time I’ve become quite close to his wife, the lovely G. We started by offering to take G into town with us when we were going to have time to wander around because we know she loves to window shop, and because anyone who cares for a family member with dementia is going to need some time out now and again. I’ve also spent time with them in their home, just chatting and laughing together, and G and I have become quite close which is really rather wonderful. She is, perhaps, a tiny little bit of a mother figure for me, since I have lost my own, but more than that, I value her as a friend. G keeps thanking me, and telling me how grateful she is to me for visiting and for taking her out, and another thing I was thinking this morning is that perhaps I should be thanking her.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, because now G is the fourth woman in my life who has become quite important to me. Recently, she thought I’d fallen over on my way home from her house 4 and she came hurrying out, quite pale with fear. She hugged me tightly and told me that she thought she was going to lose me. And so this thought stayed with me and fermented and became today’s post for International Women’s Day.

You see, I now know that I am important to my new friend, but how often to we actually tell people that they are important to us? Did I tell my mother? I don’t remember ever doing so, and now it’s too late. Oh, I knew my mother well enough to know that she would just say ‘Oh, don’t be silly – you’re my daughter! I know without you having to tell me!’ I remember hinting at it in a letter to Billie, which I sent her after Ambrose’s cat died, and she responded by telling me I was a dear girl, and we never spoke of it again. I do remember telling Maureen. On one of our rare visits, we sat and drank tea, and I apologised for all the times I’d gone round as a teenager and left her with the mess to clear up after playing with her daughter (and later, her son). She laughed and said yes, I’d done that quite often, but that she’d enjoyed having me occupy the children for her while she got on with things. It was then that I told her that she’d been my second mother and I think it pleased her. I’m particularly glad that I did so, because it wasn’t long after that that I heard that she’d died.

As we get older and we start to lose people – family, friends and neighbours – we often end up with regrets. We may feel that we neglected someone, that we had unfinished business with another, that there was perhaps a rift with someone which we wished we’d healed … or simply that we never told a person dear to us how special they were to us. I ask you now to think about those in your own lives, and consider whether there is anything you’d like to say to anyone, now, before they are beyond your reach. It’s easy to say ‘Oh, maybe I’ll go and see Great-Aunt Sally next month. I’m too busy right now’, and you think you have time … and then one day, you just don’t.

1 He was a true gentleman, and did so in a very gentlemanly way. I can remember him wandering into the kitchen where B and I were talking, and he’d say ‘B, have I had my tea yet?’, and she’d say ‘Yes, go and sit down and read your paper’, and he’d say ‘Oh, have I? Alright … ‘ and wander gently away. She would then say to me ‘I’ll get it for him in a minute’ and finish her cigarette before doing so.

2 I had first-hand evidence of this when I took her out one day, told her to sit and stay while I went into the butcher’s shop … then forgot she was with me and walked nearly all the way home without her. When I realised what I’d done, I ran all the way back to the butcher and there she was, still sitting outside the shop, having watched me walk away without her and disappear.

3 And the first thing it makes me think is that I don’t want DEET anywhere near me, thank you very much.

4 They have an alarm system in their very long driveway which alerts them to approaching – and leaving – visitors. I’d left her, walked home, met OH with a fence guy who wanted to inspect some fence damage we had, and all three of us walked down G’s driveway, but only part of the way. Enough to trigger the alarm though, and make them think that a small army was on it’s way … or that I’d fallen over and was being helped up, possibly by a team of paramedics.

Farming matters

Jay1 Comment

My country, by which I mean England, has a nice mixture of terrain. Quite a lot of it is lowland and green, but there are areas of mountains and lakes, bog and moor, and so on. For a long time, we pretty much had the means to support ourselves, making most of what we needed, fishing the seas, and farming the land and adding to our diets, knowledge and culture with what could be brought across the channel by boat1. And then we got silly and started chopping down our vast forests to provide wood for warships, and we wanted exotic things like spices and silks, chocolate and bananas and pineapples and so on, and we began to import and export and go to war over resources in far-flung lands, claiming that stuff belonged to us because we got there first, and our armies are bigger than yours. Well, that’s obviously an over-simplification and misses out various bits of history and it’s all water under the bridge, but the fact is that we’ve somehow lost the ability (and/or the desire) to support ourselves and we are no longer content to travel slowly using horses and carriages and some things are going seriously downhill.

Farming, in the UK, accounts for around 70% of our land use. England, this green and pleasant land of ours, has traditionally been a country of small farms and mixed landscapes dotted with hedges and drystone walls2. Now, though, our farming practices, changing over time to suit perceived needs, are threatening the delicate balance of nature. Farms have got bigger. We have lost huge percentages of almost every sort of wildlife, both flora and fauna, and we have catastrophic flooding. Since the introduction of factory farming3, animals have largely disappeared from most of England’s landscape to be replaced with monoculture arable farming.

This next bit will no doubt upset a lot of people, but bear with me. It’s just my opinion, but I do have environmentalists on my side, and considering that we are facing a very uncertain future what with global warming and all, I think we need to stop thinking about profit and more about sustainability and repairing the damage that we are doing to the planet we live on.

Monoculture arable farming – you know, that thing they do with gigantic fields full of a single crop, ripping out hedges and trees to make it easier for combine-harvesting behemoths – is not sustainable. It requires unconscionable amounts of pesticides, destroys ecosystems, and has a lot to do with the increase in flooding in certain areas. The soil in far too many of these fields is all but dead, there is no wildlife habitat to speak of, and the food that is produced is, not to put too fine a point on it, contaminated.

Building on greenfield sites – that thing that they do where developers place ‘options’ on land that doesn’t even belong to them and put in outline planning applications, so that they can go to a farmer and offer him hundreds of thousands of pounds to sell them a field to build hundreds or thousands of houses on – is not sustainable. We are losing farmland at an unacceptable rate, which not only reduces the area on which we can grow our food, but it further increases the loss of wildlife. Not only that, but much of our fauna, not unsurprisingly, often requires exactly the same type of landscape as we do. There are bog and moor and mountain specialists, but a huge amount of our wildlife likes to live where we like to live; in more equable conditions and where the food and water and shelter options are more varied. So the arguments that ‘only 10.6% of our land is used for housing, you know’ are rather specious.

More to the point, perhaps, is that both of these things have an extremely negative effect on the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere. Trees are probably the most efficient thing we have for locking carbon into the environment, with hedging also doing very well indeed, thank you very much. And yet we are told to use less of this, more of that, on a personal level, while the big boys and girls continue to play their wasteful games.

There is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Michael Gove – who, as I remember, nobody liked very much prior to the election4 – has been making some encouraging noises. He seems to have all the right priorities and is promising some very good things. Of course, we will have to wait and see whether all this is actually put into practice or if it will fall by the wayside of political expediency, but the future is beginning to look a little brighter. Then there are people like Lynne and Stephen Briggs, whose innovative measures on a farm in Cambridgeshire look most exciting indeed. They are bucking the trend and dividing their huge fields into strips – almost like the old mediaeval ridge & furrow system, only … well, not really. Their 21 metre-wide strips are divided by trees, running north-east to south-west across the fields to maximise sunlight coverage. Their trees are apple, but they can be fruit or nut, giving high-value cash crops, or something like hazel, which produces large quantities of usable wood when coppiced. Profit from agroforestry (as it is known), can increase productivity by 40-50%, because the crops grow and are harvested at different times, and it’s three-dimensional farming, for heaven’s sake, making far better use of the space. What’s more, the trees bring nutrients up from the depths with their extensive root systems, parking them in the leaves, which then fall and rot, and cycle the good stuff up into the topsoil.

Another wonderful thing about this is that it would return our green and pleasant land to that lovely patchwork of crops mixed with trees and hedges of different shades of green and brown, and the autumn would have proper colour again instead of vast areas of dispiriting stubble and stinking stalks of oilseed rape. Add the proposed Northern Forest project which has now been approved, and if it weren’t for HS2 about to cause the destruction of huge swathes of irreplaceable virgin forest on its way up north I’d be a very happy bunny indeed.

1 There was – of course – poverty and inequality, but we haven’t exactly solved those now, have we?

2 Mm .. yeah, OK. This is fairly recent historically, because in the middle ages England was covered with vast tracts of virgin woodland and later grew into a feudal system consisting of a landlord whose land consisted of a large house and parkland, and a little autocracy of small farms and smallholdings. This began to change, partly due to changing laws, depressions and so on, and we started to import more goods, then there were two World Wars which basically left us with a system pretty similar to the one we have today. Historians will pick this explanation to tiny pieces in two minutes flat, but that’s basically the gist of it.

3 An abomination if ever there was one, and the single most devastating blow for animal welfare in my lifetime.

4 Possibly because of the way he shafted Boris Johnson.