I’ve rather lost track of the weather this month. Two storms in two successive weekends and I am sent into a confusion. I counted the first storm as fairly significant but, by the time the second one came along, it seems I’d used up my capacity to be objective and so Ciara and Dennis have quite quickly armoured me against feeling miserable; it’s all so comfortably familiar now. I’ve started to experience an unreasonable lack of discomfort as I turn my face away from the hail stones and lean into the however-many-miles-per-hour gusts of wind that buffet me like old friends. As I walked through the western section of West Sedgemoor this week, as part of our monthly WeBS (Wetland Bird Survey) counts, I found myself laughing during a particularly spirited point in the morning’s weather. We work outdoors most of the time and that does mean that breaks in the rain and the wind, such as the sunshine that came out for us in the afternoon, are a positive luxury. Working at the top of Red Hill, with spectacular views over the moor, the sun felt possibly warmer than it was and we quickly forgot the punishment of the morning.
I’m a big fan of plants and spend a lot of time looking down at the ground but it does pay to look up sometimes too. There is of course a lot of willow around us at Greylake and West Sedgemoor. It lines many of the droves and we coppice it on a rotation to maintain its shrub and scrub like stature. This allows it to be excellent for caterpillars and other insects (when coppicing it, it’s a rare chance to witness an array of beetles and caterpillars and spiders) as well as useful cover for small birds as they cross through the moor, whilst not becoming too prominent a spot for corvid predators and their nests, nor risking splitting in high winds. I’ve recently spotted a couple of these willows with stems displaying an unusual growth habit called fasciation. Fasciation is the word used to describe a pattern of growth where something has interrupted the normal growing pattern in a local spot on a plant, such that the stem becomes flattened, often spreading out in a slight fan shape from this point, and there can be an overconcentration of new buds, as well as the growth starting to curl and twist. It can appear in many different kinds of plant, from flowering bulbs (I’ve seen it in an early purple orchid) to herbaceous perennials, to trees and shrubs. Very often, in herbaceous plants – those which die back each year, especially during the winter – it is not something that will repeat the following season. As to what causes it, it can be a number of things so here it may be a virus, a bacterium, a random (and local) genetic mutation or even mechanical damage from frost or animals. Something has happened at the growing tip and the future growth has broken the normal rules that willow stems play by. In both these willows, it’s just the one stem out of some 20 or 30 that is affected. The willows in this particular area are clearly not all the same species or hybrid type because there is a range of stem colours. The two affected are both green-stemmed willows and so I wondered if they might be clones, perhaps two sticks planted from the same parent plant many years ago, and so they’re both exhibiting their shared susceptibility to a particular pathogen. Whatever, it’s quite interesting to see.
Below: Fasciated willow.
Above: Fasciated early purple orchid, Orchis mascula.
Below: Fasciated willow, close up.
And lastly, here’s some great pictures found on our camera traps this week. One of the droves, which we drive up and down all throughout the summer, is currently a nice waterway for the mallards. One particular carrion crow (it must be the same individual, surely) has been most helpful, coming every day, for hour upon hour, to stake the area in front of one camera, presenting fish after fish to me as I sit surveying the footage at my computer desk, finding amphibians so we don’t have to. We got a great view of a smooth newt’s stomach: bright orange with black splodges. Plus lots of hare and little egret activity, one very grainy otter, and herons on the prowl at night. It’s fascinating.
Photographs either mine or of indeterminate intellectual property. Although they're not selfies, not even the crow's many, many photographs...
Fiona