Hooray, Hooray, the First of May

So Runs The First Part Of An Old American Celebratory Greeting

You have to be careful how you use it; the second line of the couplet is: Outdoor sex begins today!

I knew of a lady who used to say the whole couplet whenever she answered her telephone on May Day. Since it was in the days of old black Bakelite telephones, with no Caller Identification, she must have startled quite a few commercial callers!

But that is what May has always represented. It is the time when animals and birds are getting on with producing the next generations of their various species, and what is more natural than that humans should pick up on this.

Here we come gathering nuts in May

Oh, no, you don’t! Not unless you are living south of the Equator, and even then it would be a bit late. What you would be gathering is “Knots of May”, or bunches of hawthorn flowers (although since 1752, when Britain reformed its calendar, and everything slipped by 11 days, hawthorn has tended to flower in late May or June). This floral expedition of course could be quite innocent, but the system of ladies to “Go Maying”, ostensibly to pick flowers in the woods, was often a cover for more robust activities. Talking about flowers in the woods, it seems that bluebell woods are as scarce in France as they are sadly becoming in England. There are lovely woods full of daffodils - tiny wild daffodils - but I had never encountered any bluebell woods. However, our beloved Editor is familiar with a beautiful wood near her home that is filled with bluebells, so perhaps my assumptions have been wrong. There seem to be plenty of grape hyacinths by the roadsides, but I hadn't seen a bluebell. I must look around more carefully.

All the birds of the air … … should by now be raising families. I saw my first Hoopoe of the year, and the first House Martins, before the end of March, so they have had plenty of time to get their acts together. Remember, the adults are running themselves ragged trying to push enough food down their little ones’ throats to keep them alive, and the poor adults can do with a bit of help, so please keep your bird-feeder tables stocked for them.

ByMikeGeorge

Mike George is our regular contributor on wildlife and the countryside in France. He is a geologist and naturalist, living in the Jurassic area of the Charente with anything so large, not even to spit it out! Ensure your feeders can only deliver small samples of food, especially fragments of larger nuts.

Later on, the adults may well bring the fledglings to share food at the feedingstation. This can be a wonderful thing to see, especially if the woodpeckers bring their young. Watch out for cats, though; young woodpeckers have a tendency to wait their turn near ground-level, which makes them easy targets for cats.

Larks in the clear air

The bird rises, singing constantly, from ground level up to as high as 1000 feet, where they hang, far from motionless

But please remember to ensure that they cannot take a large piece of food back to the babies. A whole peanut shoved into a hapless chick’s mouth can easily mean death, as it hasn’t the equipment to deal

May is a good time to listen for skylarks. Go out on a sunny day into a rural area with cultivated fields and listen. You will find it hard to spot the larks but you will hear their high-pitched chirruping song coming from high above you. These are the males, and they are trying to impress their females. The bird rises, singing constantly, from ground level up to as high as 1000 feet, where they hang, far from motionless, but not moving any distance. They sing uninterruptedly for up to an hour. It is a display of endurance and fitness to show what strong fathers they would make.

The song of the lark has inspired some fine music and poetry over the centuries.

Ralph Vaughan-Williams’ Lark Ascending,

in its original form of duet for piano and violin, or in its later orchestral incarnation, is stunning; actually to hear a real lark can seem something of an anticlimax! Still, it is one of the sounds of early summer that should be sought out and savoured. Sadly, it is one of the joys of summer that is lost as one’s hearing deteriorates with age, so do take the opportunity to listen while you can.

Pond-watching

During May the tadpoles that hatch from the frog- and toad-spawn that was laid in February should be pretty active by now. Frog tadpoles are black with brown or golden speckles; toad tadpoles are black. Fully aquatic and taking all their air through gills from the water in which they must live, they gradually fill out and start sprouting limbs: hind-limbs first, then fore-limbs. Gradually they will reabsorb their gills and begin to gain the ability to breathe air directly, so necessary for their adult existence. While it is true that an adult frog can stay underwater and remain able to absorb oxygen, it is a very inefficient process. It can just keep a frog alive if there is no high oxygen demand, but it is sad to observe that, during the February mating frenzy, some female frogs can drown underwater if they cannot reach the surface.

About now, dragonflies and damselflies start to appear on ponds and rivers. These charming creatures are a triumph of evolutionary specialisation as far as hunting and food-capturing goes, but the compromises that they have had to develop to enable species propagation are astounding. Rearranging the positioning of genitalia to facilitate mating on the wing has in some cases been extreme. The need then to lay their eggs in plant-tissue underwater has led to even more extreme developments. The female of one damselfly species has even been found to be able to submerge herself and perform an extended laying process whilst breathing air trapped in the hairs around her body.

Incidentally, though some folks find a good-sized dragonfly can be a disconcertingly large insect to find flying around their head, the insect’s eyesight and sense of position are so welldeveloped that there is virtually no chance of an accidental impact. Think, though, how one might have reacted to some of the earliest manifestations of the dragonfly clan. Meganeura monyii, a dragonfly found preserved in coal-measure strata from the Carboniferous era, which therefore lived some 330 million years ago, had a wingspan up to 30 inches (about 75 cm).

Enjoy your early summer. Soon it will be June, and things really kick off!

THERE ARE MANY INCONSISTENCIES IN THE SCIENCE OF NATURAL HISTORY. ONE OF THE CHIEF PROBLEMS IS THE WAY WE IDENTIFY THE THINGS WE ARE TALKING ABOUT.

You would think that this would be the first thing to get settled before we could even begin, but it wasn’t so.

The trouble is that the whole thing started from the outside inwards. When they wanted to discuss something they had seen, people with no scientific background (which was, basically, everybody) had to make up a name for the flower/butterfly/small furry rodent/large ravening carnivore they were talking about, and be agreed on that fragment of nature to which the name referred, before they could start discussing it. The name they ended up with in any given situation would depend on the knowledge and imagination of the speakers, their language, history and probably their belief systems.

Even the people in the next valley probably had a totally different name for whatever-it-was

Redbreast (English), Roodborst (Dutch), Rotkehichen (German), Rödhake (Swedish) are all reasonably interchangeable – at least you know some red component is involved (Robin is a nickname originally tacked alliteratively onto Redbreast, probably just for fun, that has now actually become the bird’s name in English). Even an American Robin is a different bird from our European friend. Mostly, however, the name applied only in that small neck of the woods – even the people in the next valley probably had a totally different name for whatever-it-was.

ByMikeGeorge

Mike George is our regular contributor on wildlife and the countryside in France. He is a geologist and naturalist, living in the Jurassic area of the Charente

Sometimes this might mean that the name could be usable all over the place, especially if you were naming it for some outstanding physical characteristic. Thus

Over the centuries, by agreement, many of these names became more widespread, until we get to the stage when we can say, “It’s called the Red Admiral in English, the Vulcain in France, Atalanta in Dutch, Admiral in German, Rod Amiral in Swedish,” etc. In point of fact, the English name is itself an alteration, having originally been, “Red Admirable”. This problem was solved, at least for the scientists among us, by a Swedish botanist, biologist and doctor named Carl von Linné 1707-1778 (he liked to use the Latin equivalent of his name, Carolus Linnaeus, because it sounded more learned!). He took a fledgling idea, that names should be systematised and worldwide, and made it the formal system that it is today. He is known as the “Father of taxonomy.” In his system all creatures were grouped first into a Kingdom (plant or animal – now also fungi), then into a Phylum depending upon a major characteristic, then into a Class, then an Order, then a Family, then a Genus, then a Species, each criterion being narrower. There may be intervening groupings also, but these are the chief ones. For example, the Large White butterfly, scourge of your cabbages, is an animal (Family), with jointed legs (Arthropod – Phylum). It has six legs and three body divisions (Insect – Class), large, leaf-shaped wings (Lepidoptera –Order), Club-ended antennae (Rhopalocera or Butterfly – Superfamily), large, flamboyant wings and flight (Papillionidae – Family) then its main form puts it in the Genus Papilio, and its detailed form and mating restrictions put it in the Species brassicae.

All living things, plant, animal – and fungus – can, with a bit of jiggling and experience, be fitted into this system. The important bits, for most of us, are the last two designations, genus and species. Everything is given a generic name and a species epithet, which defines it worldwide. It may seem meaningless, being based often on a combination of Greek or Roman mythology and the name of someone you’ve never heard of, but it refers to just one species, and if you use it, your interlocutor, no matter what language he or she speaks, can know to what piece of life’s jigsaw you are referring. Even better, there are fixed rules for using this system. The generic name, which is like a family name, is always given a capital initial letter, while the species epithet, which is the equivalent of a forename, has a lowercase first letter. Moreover, if written they should be in italic script.

This non-capitalisation holds even where the species epithet is derived from a person’s name. Thus Diplodocus carnegii, although named after Andrew Carnegi the philanthropist, takes a lower-case letter. You can name your animal after anybody you like. Some pop-fan named a trilobite Agerina boygeorgei after his favourite pop-star. The ultimate is Anophthalmus hitleri , a small (5mm long) blind cave beetle that a German entomologist named in honour of the Chancellor of Germany in 1937. The Führer was apparently delighted. In fact, the only person you can’t name a species after is yourself!

There are a few weird rules. I said just now that this “binomial” was unique to one being. In fact, you can have the same genus name for a plant and for an animal, e.g. Pieris is the generic name of the White butterflies and the Ericaceae shrub. Also, you can have the specific and the generic name the same for an animal (e.g. Bison bison, the North American Bison, or Gorilla gorilla, the Western Lowland Gorilla), but never for a plant.

Once a species has been described and all the protocols have been followed, the name stays forever after linked to that species, specifically to the actual specimen described, which is designated the holotype specimen. One of the main things that the great museums do is guard holotype specimens very carefully. The name can only be changed if it is proved that the same organism has been correctly described under a different name by an earlier researcher (the earliest name has precedence). Thus we are stuck with Anophthalmus hitleri, as the name is genuine and all the criteria have been fulfilled.

However, when I am writing for you, my faithful and well-loved readers, I tend to mention the Linnaean names, but I refer to the animals in the language you will understand and by the names which you are likely to know. However, there are complications even with this.

The people who write on gardening and horticultural matters frequently use the common names of plants without any capital letter, e.g. “It’s time to plant your zinnias and thin out your delphiniums.”

Editors like this; it cuts down on capital letters, which can look intimidating if there are too many on a page. However, when those of us who write about animals take up our pens, it is a different matter.

Ornithologists and zoologists tend to write the common names of their subjects with a strict attention to capital letters. Every word on the name should begin with a capital letter, unless it is linked to another word by a hyphen. Thus: Golden Eagle, Lesser Spotted Eagle, White-tailed Eagle. This fills the page with angry-looking capital letters. However, it is the correct thing to do. Where you can cut down is when you are referring to the creatures in a more generic way. Thus, you would not write that your house was overrun with Mice, but with mice. You would not describe your garden as full of Woodpeckers, but of woodpeckers. However, one must be careful of using this approach. If I wrote that, “Florence Nightingale kept a little owl in her pocket” or, “Florence Nightingale kept a Little Owl in her pocket”, I am saying two completely different things. In the first case, she could have been playing host to a Scops Owl, a Pygmy Owl, a Little Owl, or any one of several other owls of restricted size, or even a small stuffed toy owl. In the second case I am telling you that her pocket-pet was Athena noctua, a Little Owl. Scientific papers, of course, are teeming with capital letters, italic script, and other intimidating symbols, and they are hard to read. In a magazine for general distribution, we scientists and specialists try to be less frightening, but we still need to say what we have to say as accurately as possible. So please be patient with us!