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.
Hello everyone and sorry we’ve been a bit slow in greeting the New Year but here we are again. Things are of course pretty tough economically the world over just now and it’s no different for us. The next 3 months will be pretty tough but we’ll be as busy as ever delivering projects as we restructure ourselves to better fit more straightened times.
We’re just about to begin some major wetland works in the Alverstone Marshes SSSI to continue to manage the exciting progress of drier parts of the site from nettle bed to reed bed. We’ll also be finishing off the winter’s work at Bohemia Bog by scraping off old slumped soil from what might be a good bit of the original bog just beneath. Even now in the dead of winter there are bits of that amazing bog flora visible. Here you can see the red of sundews showing through. Of course 2009 is the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and there will be celebrations and events the world over. Interestingly Darwin worked on a study of insectivorous plants including sundews (there is a story that some of his samples may even have come from the Island but it seems more likely that he used the New Forest) and we’ll be marking this with special walks at Bohemia later in the year.
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……..?
This banana is 135 Million Yrs old - it’s a new line in high-fibre organics from M&S.
Actually it’s not. It’s a trace fossil - that’s fossilized evidence of something living having been around but not actually any part of the creature. In this case it’s probably a fragment of the burrow made by a gastropod rummaging in the lagoonal mud of the cretaceous IOW. It comes from the fabulous ‘cracker beds’ - a belt of crumbly grey muds halfway between Shepherd’s Chine and Whale Chine famous for its lobster fossils. These are really rare but you can easily find shells and sea urchins amongst the debris at the base of the cliff and along the beach.
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.
Here are some nice pictures of a female Slow Worm we found while surveying a site in the south of the island. You can tell it’s a female by the quite marked narrowing of the abdomen and also by the ‘neck’ formed by a slight narrowing behind the head. Mr. Slow is in the background.
Here’s a better shot of the Yarrow Broomrape with AlarmGnome temporarily disabled. It really is a very beautiful thing, much more so than many of the broomrapes which tend to look dead even when they’re alive. The reason for is that they have no chlorophyll and so aren’t green at all. They don’t need to make food in the usual photosynthetic
way because they are in fact obligate parasites living off the food and water in neighbouring plants by tapping into their roots. Many broomrapes are very specific and are named after their hosts. Yarrow Broomrape parasitizes yarrow - a very familiar plant which makes it all the stranger that this broomrape is so rare.
One of the island’s rarest flowers is in safe hands. The rather beautiful Yarrow Broomrape (the purple flower in the picture) has acquired ‘AlarmGnome’ technology thanks to a grant from the SBPF (Spurious Botanical Projects Fund). If anyone should approach the plants AlarmGnome issues a first warning: ” Step Away from the Flowers”. If this doesn’t ward them off and they get still closer risking harm to the Broomrape, then AlarmGnome gives a second warning of “Back Off Now, or Suffer”. If this still doesn’t deter the deranged intruder then AlarmGnome becomes AttackGnome and you really don’t want to know what happens next.
Suffice to say, it’s not pretty.
No, you weren’t and yes, it did. And to make sure we had photographic proof of the miracle of the morning of Sunday April 6th we created this little reminder from the white stuff itself:
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