Work Day On The Marshes

Last Sunday I took part in my first volunteer work day for the Friends of Tottenham Marshes – clearing an area of scrub to make space for beehives. I barely knew a soul, so it was a confusing day of forgetting peoples names, not knowing where to sit for lunch and generally being the one constantly having to play catch-up. To add to the confusion it was a shared work day with Lea Bridge Conservation Volunteers, who seemed to completely outnumber the Tottenham lot and who I constantly mistook for them. The confusion didn’t matter one bit though as LBCV were a friendly bunch and I think I’ll be joining in with some of their work days in the future.

The area of wooded scrub we were working in was chest deep in nettles and brambles which we mainly cut down using tools with the satisfying name of slashers. The work was sweaty, stingy and thorny but with about a dozen of us working it wasn’t so bad. The picture above shows the area I was working in – wish I’d taken a “before” picture as you can’t really tell from this how much vegetation we shifted. Blackcaps sang all around us as we worked, and not long after we started someone found a nest with two blue eggs in it. It was a blackbird nest, possibly already deserted as it is so late in the year – the eggs were cold. We left it and it’s tree untouched though, just in case.

The day was hot and sunny and I was glad to be working under the shade of Hawthorn and Elder scrub. Out in the bright sunshine a small work party dug over and prepared a flower bed outside the meeting rooms, and there in the fresh turned soil was a tiny newt.

After a leisurely lunch by the banks of the river we went back to the clearing and worked with pitchforks to pile up the vegetation we had cut back. Those tall compost piles will provide a wonderful invertebrate habitat, quickly rotting down to take up less and less space, until it is time to put in the bee hives. We’d got most of the work done before lunch so there was a chance to lean on our tools and look around, a few of us discussing wildlife on the marshes and identifying trees and shrubs in the clearing. Many were laden with fruit, like this bird cherry.

The bank I had been working on was smothered with cascades of fat, sweet sunwarmed brambles which I had spent the morning eating greedily before cutting the thorny branches back. Before calling it a day we combed the remaining bramble thickets and were rewarded with a tasty wild grown treat.

Post Industrial Sky

In honour of  Skywatch Friday, this week I’m going to celebrate the huge and beautiful skies over Tottenham Marshes. This is one of the few places in my neighbourhood where you can gulp down a view of vast and uninterrupted sunset – or perfect blue,  or racing cloud. But those skies are also wonderful viewed through a fabulous collaborative latticework of human and natural making.

I suspect I may be unusual in my love of the pylons, gasometers and other industrial paraphernalia that frame the marshes on every side but their sculptural forms are wonderful against a vivid summer sky, and if they are good enough perching places for Little Owls, then who am I to argue? On a hot early summers day the brilliant rust red of the gasometer, the pinkish orange of these Water Dock seeds and the vivid green of vigorous new grass just pop and sizzle against the sky. I defy you to find brighter colours anywhere – and how lovely! There are no colour clashes in nature and yet this beauty is haphazard, undesigned, random. On a stormy day like today  rain laden clouds glower over emerald and lemon fields, shafts of sunlight rippling across the grasses and sedges, making their colours ripple and dance. In a built up city like this where you can often see no further than the next street and the sky is almost completely closed to you, this flat, open expanse can make your senses reel.

As I began to write this a police helicopter was and is still clattering overhead, reminding me of a strange sky related incident that happened to me on Tottenham Marshes. I was cycling home late across the marshes one summer night, the knockout smell of haymeadow tickling my nostrils, the hot damp air singing with crickets. A police helicopter passed overhead – we paid no attention to it, they are common enough hereabouts. But with a dramatic flash the long yellow grass lit up like daylight around us  – we’d been picked up in the helicopters spotlight! We couldn’t quite believe that it was actually following us and tried a sudden change of direction to relieve our paranoia – and the spotlight, after a moment of swinging wildly from side to side found us again and stuck to us, the helicopter swooping much closer in. I briefly considered stopping and waving at them but we felt unsure how they would react, so weird as it seems we just carried on, pretending not to have noticed the dazzling spotlight, apocalyptic noise and flying police who were in hot pursuit, plainly convinced that we’d been up to something terrible. The marshes looked incredibly dramatic lit up in the crisscrossing spotlight as it flickered over pylons, lighting gantries, tall vegetation and gasometers, throwing huge, lurid terrifying shadows.  The sky was a light polluted, deep velvety almost-orange hue and the whole place looked like a scene from War of the Worlds. So what happened? Well, after hovering over us for a good five minutes it seems the cops realised that it was all a case of mistaken identity, the ‘copter did an abrupt 180 and sped off towards the industrial estate, which the real miscreants no doubt escaped from half an hour before.

For more beautiful and fascinating images of the sky around the world, visit Skywatch Friday!

The elusive Bee Orchid shows itself

It’s high time I continued the story begun in last week’s post Here Be Dragons. Did I find any Bee Orchids? I hadn’t meant to tease but yes, yes I did! As you can see from the pictures here, I saw some beauties.

To recap… after bumping into wildlife photographer David Cottridge beside the pond on Tottenham Marshes, he offered to show me where the rumoured  Ophrys apiphera, or Bee Orchid, was flowering. I had been there once before on a fruitless search so I was thrilled to bits that this time I would not be disappointed! I was led to a small area of open meadow which had obviously been mown at some point; the grass was shorter and the undergrowth sparser in general – perfect Orchid habitat. How had I not spotted this admittedly modest clearing before? And there they were. I didn’t spot the first one; not knowing quite what to expect David had to point it out to me.

The flowers are a little bit smaller than I’d imagined, about the size of a thumbnail. It doesn’t matter that I have a field guide, somehow the measurements never sink in when I read them and taking the name of the plant literally, I’d been on the lookout for something perhaps the size of a large bumblebee. There is a fairly good reason why I made this error though, and it has to do with this plant’s fascinating and bizarre method of reproduction.

The Bee Orchid is a shameless mimic, and what it mimics as you might guess is bees. It imitates female bees of a particular species right down to the scent it gives off, which to a male bee is as convincing and seductive as his intended mate would be. The Bee Orchid’s flower also looks, to a bee at least, very much like a prospective female. Sadly the Bee Orchid which is native to the UK mostly flaunts it’s flowers and scent in vain; it is thought that the original bee which it was trying to seduce is extinct, but I’ve read that bees of a different species will occasionally be mistaken. But why is the plant bothering to do this in the first place?

Take a look at the above picture. The bloom on the left has what looks like a little yellow ball hanging from it’s hood, in fact there are two of these and they are called pollinia. Pollinia are dense packages of pollen, and to set seed the orchid needs some way of transmitting their pollinia to other plants. So imagine – the excited bee lands on the flower and attempts to mate with it, at which point

“a curved column that houses both male and female plant organs descends from the top of the orchid and glues a pair of pollinia to his head. If the next orchid he visits has already dispatched it’s pollinia, then the column will pick up the one he carries and the orchid is fertilised” (pg 126, The Private Life Of Plants, David Attenborough)

This little plant is luring the hapless bee on a false promise of sexual bliss in order to have it’s own reproductive needs met. Or it would be, if  any bees were answering it’s scented call. UK bee orchids, bereft of their original pollinator are luckily able to pollinate themselves so it’s a good job I hadn’t sat down in the grass expecting to see this drama enacted, because I’d have been there still.

Back to the little clearing, and David and I were tiptoeing about in the grass trying to find the perfect angle for a picture. There were several flower spikes and each spike had flowers slightly different from the others – it seems they are vary variable. David pointed out the one pictured above as being particularly striking. The area the orchids were flowering in has been mown for the last couple of years as a traditional hay meadow by Friends Of Tottenham Marshes in an attempt to encourage wildflowers; apparently these orchids had shown their heads the very first year this was done.

As above, so below.

A male Broad Bodied Chaser dragonfly perches above the sky’s reflection on Tottenham Marsh Pond. You can read more about how I came across this beautiful insect in the previous post, Here Be Dragons.

For more beautiful and fascinating images of the sky around the world, visit Skywatch Friday!

Here be dragons!

Yesterday was fine and sunny, so I thought I’d try my luck dragonfly hunting on Coppermill Lane. I had a tiny hope that I’d find the beautiful Libellula Depressa, or Broad Bodied Chaser I had seen there not so long ago; whether I did or not I couldn’t  fail to enjoy myself on a glorious midsummer day like this.

Under the little bridges behind Springfield Marina this Mute Swan has been incubating her eggs for what seems an age. It looks nice and cool there doesn’t it? But when the sun swings westward the shade vanishes and she’s left exposed in the harsh sun; then she is forced to keep her eggs cool under her downy body.  I’ve seen her gaping dejectedly in the punishing heat, struggling to reach the water for a drink without getting up from the nest. She drove a coot off that nesting spot earlier in the spring, and I wonder if, in her small and pugnacious brain, there is ever the vaguest sense of regret.

Further along Coppermill Lane I realised I wasn’t going to see any dragonflies or damselflies. Council gardeners had been at work with strimmers and mowers and cut back the long vegetation fringing the edges of the tracks and the towpath for miles and miles. The water was spattered with shredded grass and the longer vegetation which served as territorial perches for the dragonflies had been destroyed.  I guessed the insects had dispersed into the marshes while the cutting was being done, and after a brief scout around revealed nothing I sadly got back on my bike and resolved to go up to Tottenham Marshes in search of bee orchids. I remembered the new pond and decided to enter the marshes via the pond track. That was the best thing I did all day! Nearing the water I saw a man with a camera around his neck who was clearly watching something. I asked him what he’d seen, and he pointed to this…

A male Broad Bodied Chaser, perched like an improbably beautiful mechanical toy on a stick poked into the pond mud. The photographer had placed the stick there in the hope of attracting a dragonfly and within moments this beauty had claimed the tailor made perch. I couldn’t have been more thrilled and started gabbling about how this was the only dragonfly I could recognise for sure and that I’d tried and failed to photograph one a couple of weeks before. At last, success! As I snapped away I noticed just how well…serious a camera my new friend had, and had to comment. Turns out that I’d bumped into David Cottridge, an award winning wildlife photographer who encouraged me to take my time and get the shot just right as I stood at the waters edge with my undistinguished point ‘n’ shoot. We discussed the various quirks of cheap cameras and the fabulousness of state of the art ones, and I picked up so many hints about the wonderful things to be found on the marshes, the best parts of the river and marshes in which to see dragonflies and damselflies (I didn’t realise that the River Lee which runs through the marshes is the best place in the UK for dragonflies!) and just kept on looking at that gorgeous powder blue insect.

While discussing the wildlife of the marshes it was only a matter of time before the subject of Bee Orchids came up. As I was talking to a man who knows Tottenham Marshes like the back of his hand I shouldn’t have been surprised when he casually offered to show me where they were, so I excitedly grabbed my bike and he shouldered a rucksack crammed with field guides, and off we went.

PS:- David, if by any chance you ever actually read this, thanks again for sharing your knowledge. I am sure I must have appeared slightly bonkers. I was so thrilled to find exactly what I had set out to see that day, and to have bumped into just the person who could help me was extraordinary good luck. No wonder my snake/tree identification skills, rudimentary at best, went right out of the window

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