That Good Friday Feeling

Easter at work is usually a busy time but the earliness of the break and the cold conditions have reduced the influx of grockles. It normally marks the start of visitor related issues on the sites but it wasn’t too bad yesterday, so I had time to take a picture of the wood anenomes among other things.

Part of my job is collection of injured or stranded animals from time to time, often because the RSPCA are very busy locally. Sometimes it is dead animals and sometimes what is left is more maggots than animal but of course is another potential skull source! Anyway, I got called out to pick up a young dead fox. This is a pretty annual job at this time of year.

I think that the young get pushed out of the territory by the mother fox to fend for themselves and occasionally they are unable to find sufficient food or get hit by cars. It is always a shame to see young animals die but I suppose is a form of natural population control. It was in nice condition too.

Another seasonal spring sign that I look out for is the emergence of a particular solitary (mining) bee, Andrena clarkella, which feeds on willow pollen. I was particularly concerned this year because in the autumn some mountain bikers unintentionally dug out half of the nest to build a ramp. At this time of year the bees are fully developed in individual cells, waiting to emerge in the spring. Those that hadn’t been squashed by the digging or bike wheels were wandering around aimlessly with no chance of survival. At the time I felt like I had failed them. We managed to speak to the bikers and show them the dead bees and they stopped building (for about a month). 

Fortunately the colony, with each bee to an individual burrow, is quite widespread and there were still at least 100 active burrows yesterday and bees going about their business; mainly digging burrows. There is a cuckoo species which particularly parisitises A. clarkella but my knowledge is not great enough to be 100% sure what they look like.

You can see that the front legs are adapted for digging and the female is much hairier for pollen collection. They are fascinating to watch and another herald of spring. Lets hope that climate change doesn’t put them out of sync with their food supply.