Fishy wasp?

At Soldier's Seat on Brede High Heath (grid ref TQ780207) there is a sunlit patch of bare earth worn by all the people, their children and their dogs who rest a while there.

Yesterday I photographed this small solitary wasp scooting about just above the surface.

It is an ornate-tailed digger wasp, Cerceris rybyensis, an identity confirmed by my entomologist friend Steven Falk.

This species is predatory on the small mining bees that build their nests in this area of bare soil.  The wasp catches and stings the bees and buries them in a nest tunnel as food for its larvae.

If you get a chance sit on the seat on a warm sunny day and watch all the action.  It is a good illustration of the importance of bare ground as a habitat as most of the active species cannot complete their development in places where the vegetation forms even the thinnest layer.

'Ryby', incidentally, is the Polish word for 'fish', so the scientific name means 'of the fish'.  Seems a bit improbable, but I cannot find anywhere called 'Ryby', though it can be someone's name.  Perhaps someone can suggest a better reason for the specific name.

When it isn't raining

I have had two lovely sunny mornings in Brede High Woods this last week and, though it is wet underfoot, the wildlife responds very quickly to an hour or two of warmth.

Butterflies on the wing include many silver-washed fritillaries and today just one white admiral.  There are also meadow browns, ringlets, commas, red admirals, brimstones and large and small skippers.  I have not yet seen a gatekeeper though and they are usually one of the commonest butterflies at this time of year.

One apparent success story is the large number of six-spot burnet moths (Zygaena filipendulae) shown here on marsh thistle.

It disappeared from the woods for a few years, then started to return a couple of years ago and continues to increase in Holman Wood Field.

One of the plants now in full bloom in several places is musk mallow (Malva moschata), so named because the flowers are said to smell of musk and they do have quite a pleasant scent.

Not being sure of what proper musk smelt like anyway, I looked it up in Wikipedia and learnt that "No other natural substance has such a complex aroma associated with so many contradictory descriptions; however, it is usually described abstractly as animalic, earthy and woody or something akin to the odour of baby's skin"  The leaves of musk mallow are very finely divided, which distinguishes it from other mallows and, with the flowers, are edible and highly regarded by many wild food foragers.

Musk mallow is a native but, in the main car park, there are, as usual, some interesting aliens.  In the picture below there is, on the right, a typical plant of purple toadflax (Linaria purpurea) next to the much rarer pink form of this Mediterranean plant.  In the foreground there are also some silver leaves of  Lamiastrum galeobdolon subspecies argentatum, a cultivated form of the wild yellow archangel.

Recolonising plants

An area that until late 2008 was covered in a dense canopy of spruce with a ground layer of black, dead pine needles, has now the conifers have gone, a very varied vegetation of a markedly heathland nature.  All three Sussex species of heather grow there and there is purple moor grass, dodder and much else.

Here is some slender St. John's-wort, Hypericum pulchrum, in the bracken:

As well as these smaller acid soil plants there are many trees and shrubs coming from seed.

The picture above shows a host of birch seedlings, which we would rather not have, with a slightly larger alder buckthorn seedling in the centre.  Alder buckthorn, Frangula alnus, is scattered, but uncommon, in the High Woods and it is good to see in increasing naturally, especially as it is the only local food plant of the brimstone butterfly (one of which was on the wing here last week).

Small water bodies

This very wet summer has its compensations and there are many small water bodies in Brede High Woods at the moment that offer a specialised habitat to the various plants and animals that need them.

In the areas where the cattle graze there are plenty of water-filled hoof prints and there are some insects that use such a very ephemeral habitat.  The caddis fly Limnephilus sparsus, for example.  A widespread species, but with only one Sussex record so far (Chailey Common).

Plants that flourish in small scale aquatic environments include remote sedge, Carex remota, seen here at the edge of an iron-stained stream that would normally be dried up by now.

In the cart ruts there are pools rich in lesser spearwort and water-starwort (Callitriche), whose leaves can almost cover the surface as below.

Where the soil is very acid and boggy there are some good colonies of sphagnum moss much more associated in my mind with moorlands and uplands.

Something new to me was a strange red cloud I noticed on the muddy bottom of a small, clear puddle in one of the rides.  I thought at first it might be a leaf, or a dense cluster of water fleas, but closer inspection showed it to be a colony of tubifex worms, almost certainly Tubifex tubifex which, like us, use the red-pigmented haemoglobin to carry oxygen around their bodies.

Each 'cloud' is composed of hundreds of small worms, head down and writhing around together like the tentacles of a sea anemone.

These pools and puddles may be small, but there is much going on in them and, when they dry up, most of the residents have survival strategies to tide them over until the next deluge.

The flowering of the broom

Broom (Cytisus scoparius) has become a landscape feature in Brede High Woods following the opening up of more acid areas and is currently in full bloom.

It is a beautiful shrub that has featured much in poetry and folklore as described by Geoffrey Grigson in his 'Englishman's Flora'.  One ballad says:

There was a lady of the North country

Lay the bent to the bonny broom.

According to Grigson this means that twigs of broom were plaited with 'bent' or heath rush (Juncus squarrosus) to avert the evil eye and discourage the elfin lover.

In Brede High Woods heath rush grows along many of the rides that are bordered with broom, so it is easy to see how the two came together.  Yesterday I plaited two rush & broom amulets just in case the elfin lover is lurking about:

The top one is 2 rush, 1 broom and the lower 2 broom and 1 rush.  I will see which is the most efficacious.

As well as being beautiful and useful, broom attracts a great number of insects including, in the High Woods, the green hairstreak butterfly whose larvae feed on this and other plants.

Broom flowers are also sought after by bees.  As Thomas Hood said "the broom's betrothed to the bee."

A spring walk

Yesterday I led a walk from the new car park to Austford and Austford Farm then back to Holman Wood Field and up around Brede High Heath.

Though rather chilly, it was a fine sunny day crowned by a noisy thunderstorm of which we missed almost all the rain.

Highlights of the day were the sound of the cuckoo, the fact that there seemed to be plenty of heath dog violets, Viola canina, a rapidly declining species in there usual places, while in one of the streams we found a small brook lamprey, Lampetra planeri.  It did not look too healthy and was easy to lift briefly out of the water, but the fact that it was there at all indicates that the streams are in good condition.

Now is the time to look for these strange, primitive creatures as they swim upstream to find suitable spawning grounds, though they are often on the move at night.

Puffballs, ferns & littler things

The mild, and now damp, weather is extending the fungus season.

Today in Greenden Wood we found a fine clump of the stump puffball (Lycoperdon pyriforme) growing, believe it or not, on an old stump.  These fruit bodies are good to eat so long as they are still white inside, but we left them where they were.

A larger member of the same genus, the common puffball (Lycoperdon perlatum) was found in several places.  It is also good to eat and one source says it used to be used as a painkiller in dentistry, but I can find no further information on that.

On a rather smaller scale were some tiny black rat's dirt fungal fruiting bodies  (hysterothecia) growing on the wood of a honeysuckle twig.

The twig was lying on the ground and the tiny microfungi were confined to a small area where the bark had exposed the wood underneath.  They turned out to be Hysterobrevium mori, not previously recorded from East Sussex.

Identifying things like this is not easy.  In this case I was able to get close by looking at pictures in a book on microfungi.  However, since there were several rather similar species it was necessary to crush a few of them up to get the ascospores out then examine them under a high powered microscope.

Fiddly though this may be, it is always gratifying when one gets a good fit and a new name.  The specific name 'mori' means 'of the mulberry' as in the scientific name of the silkworm, Bombyx mori, whose caterpillars eat mulberry leaves.  Maybe this fungus was first found on mulberry wood, but I fancy the name is because the ascospores look rather like mulberries.

Greenden Wood retains its wonderful stands of hard fern (Blechnum spicant) where the chestnut coppice is dying back and letting in more light.  Below is a fine display of the spore bearing fronds.

I have not come across any special uses for this fern in the UK, but among the indigenous people of western Canada it has a reputation for curing internal cancers and giving relief to skin sores.  These people say that deer rub the antler stubs on these plants when their antlers break off.