Island 2000 Trust Blog

Spring is most definitely sprung and buds are bursting all over the place. No exception is the beautiful Wild Service Tree Sorbus torminalis; a rather rare species in the UK and pretty much confined to ancient woodlands and old hedgerows. There’s quite a bit of it scattered along the north of the Island on the clay but very little on the greensand or the chalk, which makes it allthe more surprising that the largest specimen (and one of the largest recorded in the country) grows on a little greensand bank near a chalk down!

Here is a picture taken yesterday of its leaves just beginning to emerge.

Yet more finds from the amazing Alverstone Dig continue to emerge. We have just been given a small collection of flint lithics (bits of stone to you and I) struck from hand tools in the dim and distant past. These are now a part of the Alverstone Archive with island 2000 and will be a very useful addition to the material to be studied by experts from around the country over the next 18 months as they try to unravel this extraordinary story.

Now that the autumn leaves are all but gone these striking growths have become very obvious in birch trees around the Island. They can look a lot like birds’ nests and a large birch can support over 100 of them. But they are in truth the result of a fungal infection.  The fungus is called Taphrina betulina (sounds like a Russian ballerina) and does a clever thing - it stimulates the tree to produce a mass of new growth (twigs and leaves) from the point of infection and then proceeds to feed on that larder. Surprisingly this  does little harm to the tree and strictly speaking this makes Witches’ Broom a gall, defined as an abnormal growth prompted by parasitic attack. The colloquial name for the gall originates in the belief that they were a sure sign of a witch having passed over.  Bearing in mind just how many of these things there are out there the Island sky must be fairly buzzing with commuting witches; now was that a crow flapping raggedly overhead just now or……..?

Don’t forget to come along to the fabulous WoodWarming expo at Newport Football Club tomorrow and saturday. There’ll be everything you need to know about switching to wood fuel: boilers, stoves, chips and pellets and all the other bits and pieces. There will be experts and suppliers from the Island and the mainland ready to answer all of your questions.  See you there!

A nice and compact little seaweed quite common around the Island though it’s more of a  west coast thing really. These ones…

…are attached to the Norris castle seawall along the East Cowes esplanade. It’s an aromatic seaweed and is dried and used as a spice in some parts of Scotland.

The  team have been doing a wonderful job at Robin Hill throughout August running Really Wild Fridays. One of the events on offer is a minibeast hunt followed by a look at all the fab things collected under a microscope (actually a USB plug-in through a laptop and then projected onto a big screen for all to see - very effective). The bugs are caught using sweep nest and then safely collected up in pooters ( pots with straws in and out for sucking up insects - just make sure you use the right straw). In the close quarters and confines of the pooter pot however all manner of carnage can ensue which of course only makes the spectacle the more fascinating! Here you can see a voracious Damsel Bug about to puncture a  spider with its wicked-looking rostrum: a stabbing, hollow beak for sucking out insides. Yummy.

We’re working on a restoration plan for a splendid roadside verge site at Arreton that’s become rather overgrown. It still has an excellent flora though and one of its many specialities is the lovely Blue Fleabane, not at all a common plant on the Island.

We’ve been looking at some barns out in west Wight  and it seems they’ve been the roost of choice for at least one Little Owl. The pellets you can see in the picture show the characteristic black shiny beetle wing cases - Little Owls are master beetle catchers.

You might remember a few weeks ago we were off to try out Simon’s hairtubes to see if we could find evidence of Dormice at a site. Well, one of the tubes turned up a few strands (and all the peanut butter bait was gone) so something must have crawled through. Here’s a microscope image (not great as it’s taken by pressing the digital camera into the eyepiece and trying not to wobble). It does seem to show typical Dormouse hair structure - closed oval cells (the dark blobs). It’s not exactly conclusive, but interesting.

Here you can see us baiting the Dormouse hair-tubes with crunchy peanut butter and taping them up in likely spots - places where there is plenty of tangled cover with fruit, nut and berry-bearing species and honeysuckle in particular. We’ll be back in a week to check for little hairs and naked mice.