Getting to know and love pine martens

Over the last two weeks, I have had the enormous and exciting pleasure of getting to know a British native species that I have never met before. having been an enthusiastic and active naturalist for the last 40+ years, there are not many British mammal species that I do not have some experience with: but pine martens are not widespread and are pretty elusive over much of their range.

We know that we were, in all likelihood, going to see this species up close, but I wanted to stay within the Code of Conduct for nature photography. This meant that the animals needed to be baited with things that they were used to, but would do no harm. Personally, I'm convinced that any type of peanut butter is destructive of mind, body and soul. This is the usual attractant for this species, but I was reluctant to handle the stuff let alone feed it to unsuspecting wildlife. So we used raisins and whole peanuts: not perfect but we also hid the food amongst natural elements like logs, stones and moss so that some natural foraging behaviour was encouraged.

At first, we used the trail camera and to our great delight, two well grown cubs (identified by their fluffy coats and small heads) arrived and scrambled all over the feeding table.

Pine marten cubs search for goodies - infra-red image.

As time went on, the adults became bolder and we saw more of them. They chased the chaffinches around the bird feeders we had placed in some silver birch trees and pranced about on the rocks above their den. Long-legged and lithe, the pine marten seems to be moving on uncontrollable springs, bouncing across open space and leaping up into trees or onto the summit of prominent rocks.

Adult pine marten investigates the baited feeding table just after dusk. Loch and West Highlands in the background.

Once we had got the animals a bit more used to coming to the feeding table when it was lit with a gentle tungsten light, I could set up the Canon 5D Mk3 and Canon 300mm f2.8 to record their presence. The image below shows that even a comparatively small animals is of great interest to the West Highland midge!

Pine marten with a cloud of midges around it.

Pine martens are a fantastic photographic subject. I managed to get a couple of pleasing images, but I'm definitely hooked; they are a lot of fun and really challenging.

The nocturnal and crepuscular pine martens occupied the evenings, but each morning was devoted to otters. A different set up and in a different location: but that's for the next blog!

The Canon 5D III, 300mm f2.8 with x2 converter and an excellent otter location:  heavenly!

Ardnamurchan: first few days

My long-awaited trip to the Ardnamurchan Peninsula has finally come. At the weekend, we drove up from Wessex to Glenborodale on the banks of Loch Sunart. On our first day, while doing a recce in the canoe, we came across a female otter foraging in the loch. It was oblivious of us until we had drifted in to just a few metres of her. Pine martens, porpoises and red deer have provided us with some close encounters. Tomorrow, we will be completing a recce of some sites on Mull before getting down to some hard-core waiting and watching in the next few days. Here's a picture of one of the locations that is close to an occupied holt and a favourite foraging site for the local female.

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The birds and the bees: keeping wildlife gardening simple

Bees and wasps are having a hard time of it. Changes in the way we use and manage land, changes to our houses and gardens, have all meant less food and fewer nesting sites for all types of bees and wasps. This is bad news for people. Bees are vital for pollination of the plants we rely upon and aspire to grow. Wasps are hugely important for pest control. Most wasps are not the yellow-jacketed, stingy, bad-tempered banes of every picnic; most of them are solitary, small and parasitic. They target all sorts of other invertebrates as hosts for their eggs and food for their larvae. But there are some simple things that we can all do in our gardens and allotments. Easy things that benefit bees, wasps and birds too.

Knowing what we can do for bumble bees depends upon understanding a little bit about their lives. Bumble bee queens hide away during the winter in the soil. Hibernating, sheltered from frost and rain, she lives out the cold dark months on her own. She emerges when the soil starts to warm up and the first thing she has to do is feed. The winter flowering Viburnam and wild snowdrops are good sources of nectar and pollen for these early queens. If you have a hedgerow, then putting some blackthorn into it will also help provide early flowers. Daffodils are usually useless as they have been bred for looks rather than scent, so they have little nectar and pollen that the bees can get at. These early flowering shrubs and plants are also vital sources of food for beetles that are emerging from hibernation or have just transformed into their adult form.

The bumble bee queen’s first job is to establish her nest. She stores nectar in tiny wax pots that she makes and lays eggs alongside them. She lies over the eggs and makes sure that they stay warm and well-ventilated by shivering her body. When the first workers hatch out they need to gather large amounts of pollen and nectar. In my garden, the best source at this time of year are the sallow trees (pussy willows) beside the stream. On a sunny spring morning they are alive with bees, flies and beetles. Every evening they attract moths by the hundreds. In the lawn, I have established some bugle in the wet patches, crocus on the banks and marsh marigold beside the stream. I have also planted native bluebells under the beech hedge, but I have removed the Spanish bluebells because they hybridise with our native bluebells producing an inferior hybrid. These wild plants are better for insects than many horticultural varieties and will look after themselves.

As spring turns into summer, the bumble bee nest grows. More worker bees are produced which in turn need more food to sustain them. I have planted a lot of geraniums in areas where they can spread. Their long flowering period make them great for bees. Borage and comfrey are good as well, The comfrey does well in the shade of the horse chestnut tree. With the help of a kind friend who works in a garden centre, I have established a large herb bed. There will be lots of thyme, marjoram and mint when the bees return next year. I added some Verbena as well. In areas where I have cleared away scrub and invasive plants over the winter, I sowed the seeds of annual corn field plants. Corncockle, field poppies and corn marigold are all great for insects.

Corn cockle, with a thick legged flower beetle and a couple of flea beetles.

In high summer, bees and bumble bees are bringing their nests into full ‘production’. They start to produce eggs that will turn into fertile females (new queens) and males. This takes lots and lots of energy and protein. So our gardens have got to be up to the job of providing it and this is the time when you will see the most insect activity. Now you need to concentrate on how you garden, as there is no time left to grow extra plants. One of the best things to do is not cut your lawn. I have left about two thirds of the grassy area uncut until the end of July. Self-heal sprang up and more will come into the area next year, particularly if I can establish the parasitic plant yellow rattle that will weaken the grasses, creating gaps for wild flowers. I have also left the lawn uncut for a fortnight at a time. This allows the white clover to flower. Bumble bees in particular, love clover and the lawn was busy with small furry bodies hopping from one flower to the next, a happy drone permeating the air as I swung in the hammock.

You should also take advantage of the opportunities presented by your weeds. I decided to leave some sow thistles to grow big and branched. When they set seed, the goldfinches spent each morning feeding on the downy heads. Watching them was the perfect peaceful accompaniment to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. After they died down, I noticed that some woolly thistles were rising up. These are better for bumble bees. They seem to love sitting fatly on the fluffy flower heads, six legs and head buried in the flowers, buzzing softly. When it sets seed, the woolly thistle will attract the goldfinches back. Another great common weed is burdock. Bees love the purple flowers, as do flies and butterflies. Goldfinches and linnets love to perch on the big branching stems all winter, picking away at the seed heads.

Woolly thistle - superb weed much loved by pollinators and seed eaters.

I also left the ragwort to grow up and flower. This is a much-maligned flower that is one of the best for late summer insects. Ragwort-hate comes from the fact that if the stems and leaves are gathered in with the hay, and that hay is then fed to horses, it does them great harm causing irreversible liver damage. However, in your garden it will not be able to harm any horses; so let it flower and then, if you don’t want it to spread, cut it down before it sets seed. I leave mine because the land around me is sheep-grazed and they will eat it in the winter.

An Hemipteran bug (probably Blepharidopterus ungulates or another member of the family Miridae) enjoying the ragwort flowers.

A very small bee gathers pollen from the ragwort flowers.

I have saved the best until last. This is the easy bit. Imagine a flower that is so abundant it grows in almost every habitat in the UK. It flowers from early spring until the autumn. It is a native species and is loved by almost all the invertebrates that look for pollen and nectar. You don’t have to imagine it – it’s a dandelion. I leave dandelions in my lawn to flower wherever I can; I leave them to grow up in the vegetable patch and under the trees. They are so plentiful that you can weed them out of the areas where you don’t want them, confident that they will appear where they can be kept. If you allow them to set seed, the famous dandelion clock will be a wonderful food resource for seed-eating birds like goldfinches.

This is a picture of four overflies (Episyrphus balteatus) on a dandelion head in my veg patch. But there were another four flies queuing up, hovering around, waiting to get on the flower head.

This is a picture of Great Cheverell Down, part of the Salisbury Plain Training Area. There must be a million dandelions flowering there during April. It is no coincidence that Salisbury Plain has the highest diversity of bumble bees in the country. So if you can’t do anything else for wildlife, leave a few dandelions to flower.