nature

My chance encounter with a family of stoats

I have been walking my various dogs around the fields to the south of the village for the past twenty-five years, and until two weeks ago had not encountered a weasel or stoat. My first sighting occurred as I was being dragged by my dog, a former racing greyhound, towards a field of oilseed rape. I saw enough of his ‘prey’ as it made its getaway, to observe its black tail, which I was later able to confirm meant that it was a stoat, rather than a weasel. Or, as I found on the Internet, ‘Weasels are w’easily recognisable and Stoats are stoatily different!’

Then last Friday, whilst walking my dog alongside the cemetery I stopped to talk to the grave digger who was having a well earned cup of tea. Whilst in conversation with him my dog started to dance up and down and pull on his lead. When I turned to look what was causing his agitation, I saw a stoat scuttling past us. The grave digger commented that it was a good job I had my dog on a lead otherwise it would have had the stoat.

When I had managed to calm my dog down I noticed on the path a very small bundle. A closer inspection revealed it to be a baby stoat about two inches long, which did not as yet have its eyes open. The mother stoat must have been transferring it from one den to another and dropped it in her fright. The grave digger said to leave it on the path and the mother would return for it.

On our second walk of the day along the same route, I noticed the baby stoat was no longer on the path. As the grave digger was still in the cemetery I waved to him and he came over to talk to me. He told me that five minutes after I had left, the stoat returned and picked up her baby and went on her way.

I feel privileged to have witnessed this occurrence. Avril Mellor

Beautiful Bee Borders

The double Bee Borders at the Botanic Garden have been created with some of the flowers bees love best and are also a honeypot for visitors since what makes a flower attractive to bees also makes them excellent garden plants - lots of brightlycoloured flowers on sturdy plants, in this case massed in an exhilarating ‘cottage garden’ style.

Bees visit flowers for food: nectar provides sugars for energy whilst pollen provides proteins essential for growth. Many good bee plants have large, tubular flowers symmetrical along the vertical axis (as we are!). The lower petal is often lipped to provide a landing platform for the visiting bee and can be decorated with lines or spots, called nectar guides, which show the way to the nectar. Foxgloves are a good example of this, and are used extensively along with snapdragons and our native Viper’s Bugloss.

Bees, and especially honey bees, are in major decline worldwide due to a complex range of factors thought to include climate change, pests and diseases, colony collapse disorder, and a decline in wildflowers due to intensive agricultural practices. And yet, honey bees are vital to our food chain as pollinators of crops accounting for about one third of our diet. Gardeners can play an important role in shoring up the bee population by including some of these beautiful flowers in their own planting schemes and borders to provide a rich food source, helping to keep bees healthy. Visit us soon for inspiration – most of the plants in the Bee Borders are readily available from garden centres and many are straightforward to raise from seed. Find the Bee Border plantlist on the website at www.botanic.cam.ac.uk

Juliet Day, Development Officer, Cambridge University Botanic Garden The Botanic Garden is open 10am – 6pm through the summer months, and a onehour highlights tour leaves Brookside Gate every Saturday at 11am. In June, July and August, the Garden stays open late on the first and third Wednesdays. Call 01223 336265 or visit www.botanic.cam.ac.uk for further information, including this week’s Plant Picks from the Head of Horticulture.