It would be interesting to compare for example the sightings of kingfishers in 2009 to those in 2008. Kingfishers need access to water to feed and if this is frozen for a prolonged period then they may die.

Kingfishers are not a climate change species in UK, so could be used as a standard to compare the other species against. If their numbers go down then it may be a cold enough winter to cause widespread ecological effects rather than just the normal year-to-year variation in weather.

I would expect several of the insect species that have been rapidly spreading in Britain to have their numbers checked in 2009 and even reduced. Some, though, may be much less affected than the kingfishers if they have an overwintering strategy that can withstand the cold.

Kingfishers have no choice they are here year round, and have to constantly catch food in water to survive. Many invertebrates, however, overwinter as cold resistant eggs or pupae, well insulated in the soil; or perhaps they live in our centrally heated houses. This wintering method is used by creatures such as the spindly spider.

In fact, a number of other species of spiders have taken up residence in our homes in recent years including relatives of the black widow which can have an unpleasant bite.

Photo of relative of black widow in flats in Milton Keynes - might have an unpleasant bite so I left it well alone and did not check.
[image by Mike Dodd © copyright Mike Dodd]

Another effect, of the snow particularly, was to break branches on evergreen trees. I have recently been looking at a 'lost' arboretum where about 60 species of oaks from around the world were planted.

Most of the species are deciduous and they were unaffected by the snow but the evergreen species from warmer Mediterranean climates such as cork oak had many of the main branches smashed down and split. Different evergreen species from northern forests, such as fir trees, have downward pointing branches and needle-like leaves that easily shed snow; the branches also tend to be very flexible and spring back once the load is gone.

One species that I thought might be checked somewhat is the water fern Azolla filiculoides which is an invasive species from North America. It forms a symbiotic relationship with the blue-green alga Anabaena azollae, which fixes atmospheric nitrogen enabling it to rapidly cover water bodies and cause a considerable nuisance.

It generally turns red and grows poorly in winter so I thought the low temperatures may kill it this year but no during fieldwork last week we saw it still smothering one of our boggy woods. However there is now a 2milimetre-long weevil that seems to be eating the plant and acting as a biological control - so its days of smothering ponds may be numbered.

About the author

Doctor Mike Dodd is a research fellow in ecology at the Open University. He is also a keen naturalist: "Nearly all biologists nowadays only study one organism or even just a few molecules, but I have a plea that people should be aware of their whole environment."

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The 1300 sample locations have to be surveyed over a short period when all the plants are up and flowering but before they are cut at the end of June. Besides the meadows that we have been recording annually for many years there were several ‘new’ floodplain areas that had not been looked at for 10 years and which proved to be a bit of a challenge. We wanted to record exactly the same 1x1 metre square areas (quadrats) that had been surveyed in the past so that we could see if there had been a change in species composition especially after the severe flooding and lack of hay cut that happened in 2007. The quadrats we record are not marked by anything – the areas are run over by hay cutting equipment and later grazed by animals so we can’t put in above ground sticks and filling each field full of buried metal to mark all 200 squares is not really desirable either. So how do we find them each year and how to rediscover the ones from 10 years ago?

Until this year we had been using theodolite type surveying equipment to accurately measure angles and distances from fixed points, these can position the quadrats to within a few mm if the fixed objects are still present and visible and we can find the ‘origin’ position of the survey. It’s a big ‘if’ when you consider that the origin position is usually a buried dipwell somewhere in the middle of thousands of square metres of waist high grass and that the landscape often changes quite considerably in 10 years. Fences are replaced, trees grow up and obscure reference points, the 10cmx10cm metal lids of the dipwells may be taken away so the metal detector might be of no help in finding them.

We are moving over to a gps based system, its not as accurate as the old system but can usually position the quadrats to within 5cm of where they should be which is fine and is usually significantly quicker as you don’t have to hunt for the fixed points and there is no delicate equipment to carefully set up on a heavy tripod. The gps also gives the locations in latitude/longitude or ordinance survey grid so researchers will be able to go back to those exact positions in future. There is still a bit of a downside to the new system, it may be lighter, quicker and can be one person operated but it does rely on the mobile phone system to get real time differential corrections of the gps signal – this is how it achieves a much better accuracy than a normal hand held gps. Some of our sites have rather poor and intermittent gprs mobile phone coverage which can be very frustrating as the accuracy can go from a couple of cm to a couple of metres and back again as you are walking along so we may even set up our own temporary base stations and use a radio link instead of using the mobile phone for these sites.

What are the results of all this effort by the botanical surveyors and of the chemical analysis of soil and hay, well you will have to wait until at least the autumn for all the data to be typed in and analysed. Just by eye some of the sites looked rather different to normal but this may have been more to do with the lack of a hay cut rather than the water from summer flood itself.

Botanical surveyors setting off to set up quadrats in a flooded meadow beside the Thames in 2008.
[image by Mike Dodd © copyright Mike Dodd]

Normally the meadows are dry at this time of year so it was interesting trying to identify species of grass under 30cm of river water at this site. The red box contains the ‘total station’ theodolite for comparison with gps at setting out quadrat locations.

About the author

Doctor Mike Dodd is a research fellow in ecology at the Open University. He is also a keen naturalist: "Nearly all biologists nowadays only study one organism or even just a few molecules, but I have a plea that people should be aware of their whole environment."

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A large family tree showing the position of all plant families has been produced and beyond this many of the plant families have been broken down into smaller and smaller branches some even showing exactly how each species is related to each other. The orchids are one of the largest plant families containing many thousands of species so it’s a huge task to fill in all the branches of their family tree – imagine there were 19,000 relatives in your family and you had to make a family tree showing how they were all related to each other. At the moment many of the higher level branches have been slotted in showing where groups of species fit and within a few of these groups the smaller branches and twigs down to species level have been done.

One of the most interesting things for me was to see that these marvellous DNA techniques actually failed to tell the difference between some of our most distinctive orchids which are easy to tell apart just by looking at them. For example, take a look The examples below are all orchids of the genus Ophrys, they look similar but we can see they are different and the insects that pollinate them can probably tell they are different too. However the usual DNA techniques have difficulty distinguishing the species. One theory to explain the finding is that this group are rapidly evolving and so there has not been enough time for the small mutations to build up that the DNA techniques use to tell the species apart.

Ophrys lutea and Ophrys tenthredinifera,
[photographed by Juan Sanchez and made available under Creative Commons licence]

About the author

Doctor Mike Dodd is a research fellow in ecology at the Open University. He is also a keen naturalist: "Nearly all biologists nowadays only study one organism or even just a few molecules, but I have a plea that people should be aware of their whole environment."

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Unfortunately the first close-up photo showed a new species of hairy ladybird where the dusty bits of left over tea had coated the creature. So I had to wash the ladys, they tucked their legs in while under a gently running tap, then set them down on the leaf hoping they would clean the last bits of tea off themselves. They were all quietly sitting on the leaf so I went next door to change the camera flash setup and of course as soon as I left the room they saw their chance and scarpered. 

Harlequin ladybirds.
[image © copyright Mark Dodd]

I did eventually manage to round up all except one and get some shots before letting them go, still looking for the remaining one in the kitchen, not mentioned to my wife that they can actually bite humans if they are short of food.

Harlequin ladybirds are a new species to Britain and they are rapidly spreading north and west. This spread is shown on maps at The Harlequin Ladybird Survey where you can enter your own records of the ladybirds to help researchers monitor the situation. There is concern that this introduced ‘alien’ is causing harm to our native species. One interesting and confusing aspect of harlequins is that they come in a wide variety of colour forms, some of our natives also have different forms but the harlequins are rather extreme, as shown in the photo, would you think that those two insects are the same species even though they look so different?

[Image: Harlequin Ladybirds. © copyright Mark Dodd]

About the author

Doctor Mike Dodd is a research fellow in ecology at the Open University. He is also a keen naturalist: "Nearly all biologists nowadays only study one organism or even just a few molecules, but I have a plea that people should be aware of their whole environment."

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In Britain I suspect this alternative would not work for a whole range of reasons but in Russia it works on a huge scale, the people I spoke to did not know any families without these plots. The trains out of the city on Friday evening are packed with people carrying baskets to collect the fresh food they have grown on their plots. But nearly all of them have also built some kind of ‘summer house’ on their plot so they can stay overnight or as long as they want during the summer. In winter its usually too cold to stay and there is nothing to do on the plot.

Summer houses are usually rather basic but functional, providing somewhere to sleep and eat and are often built out of wood by the plot owners themselves with some help from their friends. They are certainly not the ostentatious huge Dachas that the new rich Russians are building.

Preserving Aronia berries.
[photo © copyright Mike Dodd]

An item frequently found on the plot is a small stove where pans of water are boiled to preserve fruit and vegetables for the winter. All the households I stayed in had a large store of produce from their plot(or their mother’s plot), it did not matter whether it was a city centre flat in Moscow or St Petersburg or a house in the countryside there was always that store of food that would last all year. As a tourist visiting Moscow and seeing the lines of Range Rovers outside posh restaurants this may seem strange but the vast majority of Russians are both rather poor and value the traditional healthy home produced food.

This year in Britain (well Milton Keynes at least) has been meagre for tree fruit after last year’s very heavy harvest. This often happens and is more pronounced in some varieties than others. However this was quite the opposite in the Moscow area with all the apple trees breaking their branches with the weight of fruit. We were living on fruit compote as this was the easiest way to deal with large numbers of apples quickly. One thing I did notice was that there were only one or two varieties of apples wherever we went. It seems that the severe cold winters mean that special very hardy rootstocks and hardy grafted on cultivars have to be used. There are a considerable range of these available but just like in Britain nowadays only one or two cultivars are widely grown except by keen gardeners or specialist orchards.

One regret from the recent trip was the lack of wild mushrooms. It should have been the peak of the season and my daughter had collected several kilograms just a few days previously which we were eating. But the hot 30^oC+ temperature, very patchy rain and sandy soils meant that the ground was too dry for fruiting bodies to develop. The one edible species I did find, hedgehog mushroom,turned out to cause a lot of suspicion among locals since it is not one they traditionally eat and has spines rather than gills under the cap. I am always amazed at how traditional knowledge gets passed down as to which species can be eaten and which are poisonous. When my daughter was collecting it was with her grandmother who pointed out the good edible types. I wonder what percentage of the UK population would go out and collect and eat wild mushrooms without any help from identification books or experts. 

On the evening two hour journey back to the city past many small villages of summer houses we watched more and more people pack into the train with baskets full of produce and even some with bags full of wild mushrooms. Obviously their patch of forest had benefited from thunderstorms earlier in the week. It was coming to the end of the season in late August and many of the plots were more or less bare waiting for the severe cold to come and kill pests and weeds. It seemed strange that the season was about to change so suddenly whereas back in Britian we have a long drawn out late summer, autumn and even the winter can have warm days, unfortunately ideal for all those nasty pests and weeds to survive on our allotments.

About the author

Doctor Mike Dodd is a research fellow in ecology at the Open University. He is also a keen naturalist: "Nearly all biologists nowadays only study one organism or even just a few molecules, but I have a plea that people should be aware of their whole environment."

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The Parks Trust are planning to move some of the best habitat to another site close by that has very similar conditions. The history of moving plants or bits of habitat by consultants or other organisations is not good, schemes very frequently fail and/or are not monitored correctly resulting in the failures not being reported.  Translocation should be seen as the very last resort if there is no other way to save the species.  However, the Parks Trust here generally have a good record of habitat management and are one of the few organisations that might be able to get this kind of thing to work properly.

I was particularly interested in this little episode as I was almost cast as the villain of the piece for finding the orchids which might stop the bikers from using the land, the bike club had been kicked off their previous home of many years by developers and have nowhere else to go.  It did remind me that one of the species of orchids on the site is in a rather similar situation, it declined rapidly as Britain’s species rich meadows were destroyed during the 20th century but some plants were able to switch to living on old industrial sites so long as they had high ph soil.  Unfortunately now these industrial brownfield sites are the chief target for development so the plants are being thrown out of that home too.

About the author

Doctor Mike Dodd is a research fellow in ecology at the Open University. He is also a keen naturalist: "Nearly all biologists nowadays only study one organism or even just a few molecules, but I have a plea that people should be aware of their whole environment."

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So what’s this alien looking creature on the right? It's Common Dodder (Cuscuta epithymum) a parasitic plant that grabs hold of its victim, attaches to the stems and ‘eats’ them. It's usually found on heathland growing on heathers and gorse and is not particularly common. However at this particular location, just beside Dungeness nuclear power station, it was absolutely everywhere, carpeting the ground with its red and yellow thread-like stems and parasitizing a wide range of species especially Nottingham catchfly (Silene nutans). I’ve been visiting the site for 20 years and never noticed it anything like as extensive as this.

The weather was warm and sunny but with a dense sea fog right on the coast so you could not see the power station, seemed there was a looming giant just hidden in cloud. I started wondering if this was the time to reassess nuclear power as a green energy source. Ever since the 1970s I have campaigned against nuclear power so to think about reassessing it now seems rather strange especially since the technology does not seem to have moved on significantly. There are still large arguments against nuclear such as cost, terrorist threats, no way of disposing of the waste to name a few. In the 70s these things were all cloaked in secrecy and the costs were not believable since there was still a hang over from needing the waste to make nuclear bombs so the government would go ahead with the power stations whatever but now this is less of an issue so perhaps there is a chance for a more reasoned debate and a public enquiry to get everything out into the open. 

Of course, at Dungeness there are a couple of extra little issues such as the power station being built on a shingle bank that is being moved by the sea in any big storms so there needs to be cranes on standby to rebuild the defences at short notice or the power station could be washed out to sea. The second issue at the moment is airport expansion very close by, How long before a plane crashes into the power station accidentally or by terrorist. But again these are simply risk factors that could go into the enquiry and be compared to other major items of infrastructure.

The big problem with all of this is that a public enquiry is likely to take years and things could well change along the way, so what about a new way of doing things via a web enquiry, some way of stacking up the ‘for’ and ‘against’ and the neutral evidence. Perhaps a small team would regularly look at the evidence coming in to prioritise it so that after say a year an inspector and a small group of independent people could pull it all together and make a report. 'Totally naïve, it would never work,' I hear you cry, but it might and it would certainly save a huge amount of time and money (especially on legal bills) and could even come up with more representative decisions than the current system. 

[Photograph showing common dodder © copyright Mike Dodd]

About the author

Doctor Mike Dodd is a research fellow in ecology at the Open University. He is also a keen naturalist: "Nearly all biologists nowadays only study one organism or even just a few molecules, but I have a plea that people should be aware of their whole environment."

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Ever seen a hairy snail? Last evening I was out with the local natural history group on a scrubby ex industrial site dodging the showers when I came across one of the little beasties. Well tiny might be a better description as they are about the size of a small fingernail, I only noticed it as I was on the ground lining up another, much larger, brown lipped snail for a photo.

Snails are the next big thing at least for a bunch of evolutionary biologists who are putting together a website to be launched in a couple of months. The general public will be able to enter their records of different striping patterns and colours of brown lipped snails (the common stripy ones you get in gardens). Thousands of records of this type of snail going back 100 years have been collected and they now want to see if the numbers of different forms of this snail have changed, perhaps as the result of the decline in the numbers of their predators such as the song thrush.

One of the people in the natural history group spotted the dark brown form of the snail which I was delighted to see as they are supposed to be rare in this part of the country (Milton Keynes), they are commoner in Ireland. I explained this and she was very proud to have found it, but then lots of other people started finding them too and were joking that we had been transported to Ireland without realising. 

I have now told the experts about the site and we will have to look at it more carefully, perhaps it is just the particular mix of bushy habitats that have developed at the site which favour the brown form. Or, more interestingly, perhaps there has been a general country wide change in the frequencies of the different types since the last big surveys which were done quite a few years ago.

About the author

Doctor Mike Dodd is a research fellow in ecology at the Open University. He is also a keen naturalist: "Nearly all biologists nowadays only study one organism or even just a few molecules, but I have a plea that people should be aware of their whole environment."

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