Polly and the Nightjar

Forgive me for NOT being a 'negative nelly' about the BBC for a moment, but I used the extra hour given unto us by the clocks falling back (as the mnemonic says - though I keep getting confused between falling back and falling forwards, springing back and springing forwards) to listen to Radio 4 between 6 and 7 o'clock and was transfixed by the delights of Something Understood and The Living World.

Something Understood was about our need for art, but playwright Polly Stenham used it chiefly to explain what writing plays means to her - and doing so in highly-charged, poetic language. She got so metaphorical at times that I sometimes lost the sense of what she was actually saying, but her enthusiasm and general meaning was plain - and touching. I was persuaded.

Anyhow, her use of language, even when I didn't understand it, was something out of the ordinary, and none the worse for that - and much the same could be said for some of her musical choices. I've never heard Florence and the Machine before, and was rather taken by them. They even sang a version of Addicted to Love.

The Living World went out into the woods of Somerset on a hot, midge-ridden summer's night to see and hear nightjars. Chris Sperring (and his unseen producer Ellie Sans) accompanied two nightjar experts there - Ian Parsons and Andy Harris. The results were informative and fascinating. 

Despite the midge, I wouldn't have minded being there too - especially to hear that astonishing call of theirs (the nightjars, that is) which I'd describe as being like a 1960s sci-fi computer buzz, oscillating between two notes, then tumbling down step-wise to the accompanying of rhythmic claps as the bird's wings beat and take to the air.

A tip for anyone tempting to go and listen to nightjars: Cup your hands around your ears to amplify its call. 

Nightjars arrive late (early May) and leave early (late September). They come for food - moths. They migrate, taking much the same path as swifts and cuckoos, down over the Med and over the Sahara to central and southern Africa. 

In a pleasingly upbeat bit of news, we learned that nightjars are doing well. Numbers are up. They are widespread too, so most of us should be able to experience them (at dawn or dusk) somewhere near to where we live. 

If I'd have known I could have used that extra hour to watch nightjars instead - except that they're probably all in Africa now, so there wouldn't have been much point.  

Life's a piece of shit/When you look at it...

Some things in life are bad

They can really make you mad

Other things just make you swear and curse

When you're chewing on life's gristle

Don't grumble, give a whistle

And this'll help things turn out for the best...

And...

The guests on this morning's Broadcasting House press review focused on the brighter side of life, which, given all the depressing news there's been in the past couple of weeks or so, is pretty understandable. An entertaining romp through the Sunday papers ensued (more about which later). 

I'm guessing that some of you might just be feeling the same way too, so this post will laugh and smile and dance and sing, for as the song says...

When you're feeling in the dumps
Don't be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle
- that's the thing.
And...

The Broadcaster Formerly Known as "Mark Tully in Dehli" presented a Something Understood on the theme of 'Translation' this morning. 

To the strains of John Coltrane, we heard a list Iowa State University's Department of Linguistics and Language which shows how easy it is to make mistakes, even in simple translations. Well, it made me laugh:

In a Copenhagen airline ticket office: We take your bags and send them in all directions.

In a Rhodes tailor's shop: Order your summer's suit because if there's a big rush we will execute customers in strict rotation.

In a Bucharest hotel lobby: The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret you will be unbearable.

In a Zurich hotel: Because of the impropriety of entertaining guests of the opposite sex in the bedroom it is suggested that the lobby be used for this purpose.

In a Paris hotel lift: Please leave your values at the front desk.

Detour sign in Kyushu, Japan: Stop. Drive sideways.

In an advertisement by a Hong Kong dentist: Teeth extracted by the latest methodists. 

On the menu of a Swiss restaurant: Our wines leave you nothing to hope for.

On the menu of a Polish hotel: Salad of firm's own make. Limpid red beet soup. Cheesy dumplings in the form of a finger. Roasted duck let loose. Beef rashers beaten up in the country people's fashion. 

Mark Tully also read out part of the preface to the King James Bible, something so lovely that it needs passing on for those of you do not know it:

Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water...

Talking of which....

This week's I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue came from Worthing. Jack Dee introduced us to the place: 

Famous as a retirement destination for gentlefolk, Worthing has a population of just over 105,000 people. Or just under, if you're listening to the repeat.

This part of Sussex is famous for producing some of England's finest white wines. We were treated to a tasting earlier at a local branch of Lidl and tried a 2011 Chardonnay which had a fine nose. Just like the pork pie that came with it.

Oddly enough, that repeat of ISIHAC from Worthing (population, just under 105,000) was followed by an edition of the Food Programme on the subject of English wine - one of the smaller triumphs of English business in recent years, becoming ever more renowned for its quality and growing in quantity, despite the occasional bad harvest. (I'm sure I read James Delingpole somewhere putting it all down to global warming, but I could be wrong about that). 

We learned that homegrown wines account for less than 1% of sales here. In my household it's 0% of all wine purchases at the moment, though in my childhood we did make potato wine - illicit stills of the heady stuff stinking out our basement. Thank God Al Capone wasn't around in Morecambe at the time! (He apparently hated potato wine).  

The growth of the English wine industry is cheering news, and it's news I feel close too as there's even a small vineyard near Morecambe (yes, really). 

If Eric Morecambe had still been around I'd have asked him to wangle me a bottle of their finest sauv blanc. I suppose I could ask Gail from Coronation Street instead. (Yes, she's from Morecambe too. All the greats come from Morecambe).

One thing we don't have in Morecambe (AFAIAA) is pygmy boa constrictors (subject of today's The Living World), a cousin of the anaconda (to which they are proportionally identical) native to - and specific to - the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. No house mouse could eat an anaconda - it's eyes would be truly bigger than its stomach if it tried - but a house mouse can, apparently, eat a pygmy boa constrictor. The p.b.c. (as I like to call it) is about 25cm long, "not more than half a little finger" according to presenter Tom Heap (though, from the looks of it, you'd have to have an abnormally long little finger!). What do they eat? Electrons? No, they eat things like new-born froglets, reef geckos and freshly-hatched lizards. Its main meal, however, is the Caicos Island round-toed gecko, whose Latin name, written down (according to local naturalist Bryan Naqqi Manco), is actually about twice as long as the lizard itself. 

Now back to ISIHAC, and some new dictionary definitions that tickled my fancy:

alter ego - a priest who's full of himself (Barry Cryer)
permits - cat-skin gloves (Graeme Garden)
tamper - what you take on a Yorkshire picnic (Barry Cryer)
shoddy - Big Ears' unkempt friend (Graeme Garden)
stifle - a home for a pig designed along the lines of a Paris landmark (Harry Hill)
gladiator - an unrepentant cannibal (Barry Cryer)
transcendental - to receive false teeth through the post from a drag act (Harry Hill)

Returning to Broadcasting House, and remembering why I don't actually hate the BBC (at least most of the time), Paddy O'Connell was in the New Forest and gave us one of those radio moments that radio listeners tend to treasure, however absurdly. The report was about some parliamentary-related fluff about the frivolous use of mobile phones, but Paddy was suddenly seized by a moment of beauty in the New Forest. 

To the entrancing accompaniment of many untalked-over recordings of the natural sounds he was hearing (running water, hoofs, ponies neighing), Paddy said (on location):

Four wild ponies are approaching the stream. The hoofs are crunching on the pebbles of this small stream, which is the colour of stewed tea. Four chestnut ponies, one, two, making their way through the stream. There's the third. They're all on the gravel now. The foal has a flash of white on his nose. It has one more to cross. Ears up, it's looking. Here we go. And there's a log across the stream and I'm going to try and cross it...scaring away two tiny fish...

He fell in. 

"The hoofs are crunching on the pebbles of this small stream, which is the colour of stewed tea." Now, that's good, isn't it? (Any passing English teachers, what would you grade that?)

BH also featured a profile of Vladimir Putin (featuring Ben Judah, European Stability Initiative; Sir Roderic Lyne, Chatham House; Lord Browne, former head of BP; and Angus Roxburgh, former PR advisor to the Russian government). It wasn't a particularly sympathetic portrait (to put it mildly), but we learned certain fascinating things about Bad Vlad (if true): 

• He always has cottage cheese for breakfast. 
• He once brought his dog, Connie, into a meeting with Angela Merkel, knowing that Frau Merkel is scared of dogs in order to intimidate her.
• He rarely uses computers and the internet, preferring paper. (Safer).
• Russian ministers have to wait for three to four hours to see him. No one dares to contradict him. 
• His daughters are a state secret, living far from Moscow, probably abroad. 
• He never forgets a slight, such as that by former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who (because of his height) used to call him 'LiliPutin'. (It didn't end well for Georgia).
• When he stood next to much taller foreign leaders (like Tony Blair), he'd have the lecterns put far apart to avoid comparison.
• He's isolated, trapped.

As Mr Putin never forgets a slight (according to this profile), a polonium-tipped umbrella might well be wending its way to Broadcasting House as we speak. 

The paper review featured booted-out Radio 5 Live presenter Shelagh Fogarty, booted-out Tory MP Giles Brandreth and unbooted-out Artistic Director of the Petworth Arts Festival Stewart Collins. 

We heard about apps relaying WW1 poet Wilfred Owen's verses (the most famous being written in hospital whilst suffering from shell-shock), which prompted Giles to read some other poetry, concerning the 4/5 of couples apparently seeking financial contributions to their weddings:

Do come to our wedding bash.
Show your love in cheques and cash.

Just use the bank details at the end of this ditty,
And you can still contribute to our kitchen kitty.

Giles, in the event of the death of a pet poet, wrote his own verse - "the shortest poem in the history of world literature":

O,
Wet
Pet.

Stewart rejoindered with a short family grace before meals:

Heavenly Pa,
Ta.

Now, that's my kind of paper review!

Finally, before I down a late-evening salad full of rocket (freshly supplied by Hamas), some suggestions for titles of films like to prove popular with an audience of dog-lovers from the cast of ISIHAC:

Tales of King Arthur and his knights in 'Winalot' (Graeme Garden)
Hawaii Fi-Do (Barry Cryer)
When Harry Sniffed Sally (Tim Brooke-Taylor)
The Postman Always Tastes Nice (Barry Cryer)
Five Easy Faeces (Tim Brooke-Taylor)
Arselick and Old Lace (Barry Cryer)
Bring Me the Lead of Alfredo Garcia (Barry Cryer Graeme Garden)

Altogether now...

 

The Bee that Lived in a Snail Shell

Talking of bees...

This morning's The Living World reported on the tiny bullet-shaped Osmia bicolor, a sort of mason bee which seeks out empty snail shells for a nest. 

This was another delightful programme from Trai Anfield.

Trai was walking around the chalk downlands of Dorset with naturalist John Walters. And not just any old chalk downland. 

No, they were investigating the hillside directly above the the Cerne Abbas giant [the famous chalk figure that depicts the Palestinian Authority president in a decidedly frisky mood].

The scene sounded lovely. They were investigating a very steep, south-raising slope full of yellow cowslips and vibrant purple orchids, with a horny chalk giant below them and bees buzzing above them. 

John put out some empty snail shells on the slope last year, and awaited developments. The bees nested in them.

So why do Osmia bicolor bees nest in empty snail shells? 

Well, other mason bees love crevices and snail shells, especially on chalk downlands, are the closest things to a crevice that a bee can find. Plus there are plenty of them around.

Males hide in the shells if the weather gets too cold, but they don't stay for long as they are very short lived. The longer-lived females nest in them. 

Osmia bicolor are solitary bees. Even if they nest quite close, they only interact for mating purposes and that closeness is out of necessity rather than choice.

The females lay their egg in the snail shell then start camouflaging it, giving it a green, speckled appearance. They do that after mating. 

They select a nest site [snail shell], build a little nest, collect pollen to feed their soon-to-be larvae (using the special hair of the underside of their abdomen for extra efficiency), then lay one egg and surround it with mashed-up leaves, then collects rubble, soil and more mashed-up leaves to pack the remaining spaces, tightly seal it, turn he shell over so that the entrance is pointing downwards and then make an elaborate 5-6 cm long tent of grass ["a little wigwam of grass stems"] to hide the shell. It only takes a hour or so to do.

Trai described the result as "a work of art" that "just blends in beautifully".

Unlike many other insects,  Osmia bicolor lays a mere 10-15 eggs in its lifetime. They may lay a handful each year, each in a separate snail shell. They have a high survival rate. 

This represents a rather typical pattern in reproduction - you either spend a lot of time and effort to keep a few offspring safe and sound, or you produce so many that losing a few doesn't matter much. 

John said that there's been little study of them, little written about them. There aren't any identification guides for solitary bees yet.

Still, there's The Living World - and this blog!

Where adders and wild haggis live side by side

Brickbats down, bouquets out: I thought this morning's The Living World was wonderful. 

It dealt with the unexpected topic of adders living along the shoreline of Loch Lomond, and did so by having an enthusiastic presenter, Trai Anfield, guided around by a very engaging expert, Chris McInerny.

There was no background music. There wasn't even a mention of climate change. Bliss.

As they say in all enthusiastic radio reviews, 'I was enthralled', and I learned a lot. 

(I'm resisting all urges to write a pun-based joke about 'slippery adders', 'bonnie banks' and the Royal Bank of Scotland's dodgy finances here.)

Besides Britain's venomous viper (and, no, I won't be making any cheap cracks about Yasmin Alibhai-Brown either), there are also slow-worms and Common Lizards living around Loch Lomond's shores.

I can't say I spotted any of them when I was there last year though. I saw lots of midges, and the Loch Ness Monster. (She told me that she's been living in the area for several decades now; which is why no one can find her in Loch Ness. She shares a house with Lord Lucan, Shergar, Elvis and Gordon Brown.)

There's a pleasant write-up about the making of the programme on Trai's own blog, entitled 'Adders, Adrenalin & Unblinking Red Eyes'. 

Voles

Alan has posted some interesting material at Biased BBC this morning, including a piece on how Al-Jazeera praised the restraint of the Israeli military (not something you're ever likely to hear from Jeremy Bowen) and an extract from an essay by left-wing former BBC reporter Nick Jones on the problems facing the corporation. (He reckons its problems ultimately stem from "the free-for-all of the Thatcher era and then the bonus culture of the Blair years").

Here at Is the BBC biased? though, we've got something about voles for you. Yes, voles. 

There was an interesting The Living World this morning on the subject of voles. Yes, voles.

Presenter Chris Sperring went with Dr Fiona Mathews, Senior Lecturer in Mammalian Biology at Exeter University, to track down some voles in the Mendip Hills, Somerset. (I can think of worse ways to pass a few hours.)

We learned that there are five types of vole found in the UK - field voles, water voles, bank voles, Orkney voles and Guernsey voles.

They can be recognised by differences in size, colour, length of tail, size of ears, what they smell like, and by what they eat. (Field voles, for example, are grass specialists. Bank voles, in contrast, also eat shrubs, fruit and invertebrates.)

There's an estimated population of 75 million field voles in the UK, living out their very short lives.

Other factoids are that voles produce urine which is visible in ultra-violet light, presumably as a way of signalling to each other (scent-marking). Unfortunately, some of their (many) predators can see it too. 

Also (as that apparent scent-marking suggests) voles are territorial, especially the females during periods of lactation. Males are rather more free-and-easy apparently, and the females aren't so fussed about them intruding.

That said, voles tend to stay close to where they were born, maybe dispersing a 100m away at most. They can breed within five weeks of being born.

As for the 'vole cycle', some UK vole populations go through multi-annual cycles (with numbers fluctuating up to tenfold on a three to four year cycle), others are just seasonal, having their fling in the spring or late summer and then passing on. It's "one of nature's mysteries" why each population does as it does, according to Dr Fiona.

Those of you who sit in dread during BBC natural history programmes awaiting the inevitable moment when climate change is mentioned will not be surprised though to hear that climate change did indeed come up, with the recent floods being unambiguously attributed to it.

"So we see climate change having a major effect", asserted Chris at this point.

Dr Fiona was asked to give a message. She wants farmers to keep undermanaged grassland at the edge of their fields, give it time to become tussocky grass, keep lifestock off it and don't cut it so often. That will allow voles to keep flourishing - unless Chris's scary predictions about the devastating impact of climate change on Britain's wildlife by the end of this century come true.

So there you have it. A post about voles.

Where do butterflies go in winter?

The second pre-Sunday Radio 4 programme I want to light sacred fires in praise of was The Living World - a programme which answered several questions that I've had fluttering around my head for many, many years now, all grouped around a central question: Where do British butterflies go in winter?

All credit to presenter Chris Sperring and Oxford University butterfly expert Richard Fox for settling the matter. 

It was slightly too late for me though. 

I found a red admiral in our bathroom a week or so ago. It was awake and flying around. Central heating and the relatively warm temperatures outside must have roused it from its dormancy. It had made the mistake of wintering somewhere in my house. I opened the window and guided it out, suspecting that this was a better course of action than leaving it bewildered indoors, possibly dying.

I now learn (from The Living World)  that I was right to help it to a better wintering place than my centrally-heated house. However, unless it finds its own way to a better resting place (and fingers crossed for the poor thing), I should have captured it (in a glass) and moved it into my garden shed allowing it to remain dormant until the spring comes. Britain's winter wildlife looks ravenously upon an active butterfly.

That said, also courtesy of The Living World, I now know that it looks just as ravenously on a dormant butterfly.

So, besides my house, where do British butterflies go in the winter?

Well, for starters, let's get that old myth out of the way via a joke:

My wife just said to me, "Did you know, butterflies only live for two days?" 

I said, "Darling, I think that's a myth."

She said, "No, it's definitely a butterfly."

As we all know, butterflies metamorphose through four forms - egg, caterpillar, pupa and adult insect - and we find wintering British butterflies in all four forms. It's all down to the species of British butterfly in connection. None hibernate, strictly-speaking.

Four British butterfly species remain in adult (butterfly) form throughout the winter and in warm weather go into action - the peacock, the small tortoiseshell, the comma and the brimstone. In the past couple of decades, quite a few red admirals (who used to migrate to Britain in the spring whilst wintering on the continent) have starting over-wintering in the UK (including mine).

Now some of you may not like this but The Living World hinted (ever so discreetly and briefly) that this might be down to climate change. (What kind of climate change - natural or man-made - they shrewdly refrained from saying).

The stars of the show were peacock butterflies. 

I do like peacock butterflies. We had a near invasion of them a few years back. Beautiful creatures.

Peacocks are brilliantly 'designed' by natural selection to fend off predators. They rapidly open their wings to expose those startling owl-like 'eyes', thus sending some predators scuttling off in terror. They also emit a hissing sound (through wing action) and emit ultrasonic clicks which, apparently, scare the bejesus out of nocturnal predators. They still suffer massive predation, but more than enough survive to mean the species is in no danger.

Incidentally, I also learned from this programme that mice are active hunters of butterflies, biting off the inedible wings and chomping only on the main body of the flying beast. Did you know that?

The BBC Natural History Unit, which produced this programme, has evolved over many years. By a vigorous flapping of its brilliantly-coloured, technologically-exquisite wings, it helps disarm predatory attacks from BBC critics. Its mega-fauna, such as the silverback gorilla (Davidus attenboroughis), act as camouflage for its less popular species, such as wasps (Vespula newsroomis) and dung beetles (Phanaeus radiofouricus comedianis).