Science & Nature

elizabethwatsonillustration.com

DRAWN TO THE LIGHT

OAK BEAUTY BISTON STRATARIA Gillian Nash

Gucio_55/Shutterstock

One of our early spring moths, the impressive Oak Beauty is on the wing from February to April. It is sometimes found resting on tree trunks by day and, with its thickset form and wingspan of up to 50mm, is the largest moth species you are likely to see caught in your car headlights or attracted to lit windows at this time of year. The mottled and speckled cryptic wing pattern provides excellent camouflage, strongly resembling the crags and crevices on the bark of well-chosen tree species. Although this pattern is similar for all individuals, the arrangement of brown, cream, fawn, white and rich chestnut shades can vary considerably, but always with the diagnostic broad black-edged bands across the wings. The more frequently seen male of the species has feathered antennae as depicted in the image above.

Despite being widespread and relatively common throughout most of England and Wales, particularly in more southern counties, the Oak Beauty is sadly one of our declining species – numbers having significantly fallen since the 1970s. It is however still often recorded in Sherborne and surrounding areas, occurring around its preferred habitat of mature woodland in rural and suburban situations. It may also be found in urban parks and gardens where suitable larval food plants grow, which include a wide range of shrubs and deciduous trees such as willows, birches, hazel, limes, elms and oaks, where eggs are laid in late spring. The resulting nightfeeding larvae whilst having dull grey colouration, are remarkable in form, with a convincing resemblance to notched twigs affording highly efficient camouflage from predators in daylight hours. When fully grown a pupa is formed underground with the adult moth emerging the following spring when conditions are favourable.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Peter Littlewood, Young Peoples Trust for the Environment

Doing the school run (or more accurately walk!) on a bright morning in early February, I was aware of a marked increase in birdsong around us. Spring, at least as far as the birds are concerned, is already upon us. The cacophony of tweets and chirps indicates that they are starting to think about building nests and finding mates for the upcoming breeding season.

Whilst the weather is starting to become milder again, many birds may find that their food is still scarce. And even when the spring comes, they need plenty of energy for breeding and then for feeding their young. So you can really help by feeding them through the early part of spring.

Over the page you'll find a few ideas for some environmentally friendly single-use bird feeders, that you can make at home. They’re a great way to involve your children in helping feed the birds and get them interested in identifying different species and watching bird behaviour. Some of these feeders even rot away naturally after the birds have finished with them too, so although they’re single-use, they don’t cause lasting environmental damage.

You can research the types of foods most likely to attract certain birds, but a good starting point is a bag of mixed birdseed and some suet pellets. These can usually be found in most supermarkets and pet shops, but are the best value when purchased in large quantities online or ideally locally, from the likes of C.B. Brett & Son and Sherborne Market Store.>

Pine cone bird feeder Pine cones make a great basis for a natural bird feeder. Birds will be able to peck the seeds from the spaces in between the scales. 1 Tie a piece of string securely to the top of the cone, so that you can hang it in a tree. 2 Roll the pine cone in any sticky food (lard, honey or peanut butter will all work well) then roll it again in a bowl of birdseed, so that all the spaces are filled up with seeds. 3 Hang the finished pine cone feeder from a branch. Somewhere in sight of a window is best, as it will allow you to observe the birds from indoors, where you’re unlikely to startle them.

Half orange feeder Another easy feeder can be made from an orange or grapefruit half after you’ve squeezed the juice from it to drink.

1 Make a cross shape by using two wooden skewers to pierce the halved fruit skin. 2 Tie some string to the skewers where the cross intersects. 3 You can then fill it up with seeds, or a seed and lard mix before hanging it from a branch.

You’ll need to keep a watch on this one because the orange or grapefruit skin won’t last too long before it starts to rot. When it does, it will drop from the branch it’s hanging on. You might want to collect up (and possibly even re-use) the skewers.

Or for more advanced DIYers… If you’re looking for a longer-lasting version of this design and you’ve got some tools handy, you could try using half a coconut to hold your birdseed mixture. You’ll need to be very careful sawing the coconut in half (remember that you’ll need something to catch the coconut water in). You will need to use a drill to create the hole for threading the hanging string through too. Then you can mix up a bowl of different bird seeds and some lard to make the mixture sticky. Spoon the mixture inside the shells and leave it to settle. So long as your mixture is solid enough, you’ll only need one hole in each coconut half, because you can hang them vertically from a branch.

Recycled bottle or carton feeder You could also use a variety of other containers to create bird feeders with loose seeds. For example, a carton can be repurposed as a bird feeder, by cutting large holes in three of the four sides. Remember to start these holes a couple of centimetres from the base of the carton, so that the birdseed you fill it with won’t fall out of the sides.

There are lots of designs online for making bird feeders using plastic drink bottles too. YPTE has one such design idea here: ypte.org.uk/downloads/homelearning-activity-make-a-bird-feeder, but there are lots of others available too!

By involving your children in these activities, you can help them to understand how we can sometimes repurpose what would otherwise be rubbish into something useful. They can also discover the difference between biodegradable and non-biodegradable materials. And you might just spark a lifelong interest in bird-watching too!

You can find information on these and lots of other birdrelated activities you can do at home in YPTE’s home learning pack on garden birds - ypte.org.uk/downloads/ home-learning-pack-garden-birds

SCARED OF A BEE STING?

Paula Carnell, Beekeeping Consultant, Writer and Speaker

What if you’re scared of bees? My parents would affirm that I was a ‘flapper’ when it came to bees, wasps, or any insect in fact! I would never have dreamt that one day I’d be barefoot and gloveless handling bees on a desert island as I was two years ago! I believe that when we have a fear of something, it’s worth digging a little deeper to discover what the real fear is. With bees, it’s quite justifiable, as a sting hurts. There is also a genuine possibility of anaphylaxis, and even death if not treated soon enough. Most fears, when analysed come down to a fear of death.

So, why do we fear death so deeply? A long-term friend of mine passed away recently. He was merely a week short of celebrating his 100th birthday. I’d known him for around 30 years and we’d often discussed death. He’d been widowed twice and would often say how he wished he wasn’t still alive. He did have faith and believed that he would be reunited with his loved ones on death. This surprised me as he often spoke as someone who wouldn’t believe in anything that couldn’t be proven. Some are terrified of dying as with their faith they’re fearful of going to hell. A greater fear can be the loss of a loved one. Imagining a life without a spouse, parent or child can be unbearable and so we can be tempted to overprotect our loved ones.

The question then is what is life all about, that we should fight so hard to keep it? Changing our perception of threats can also help. The Chinese used bee stings as therapy in acupuncture long before they were replaced with needles. Apitherapy continues around the world today, a high value put on bee venom. I heard the inspirational speaker David Goggins speak on this subject. He says his greatest fear is to die, and on meeting God at the pearly gates with his large flip chart, to be shown all the great things God had planned

etraveler/Shutterstock

for him, which he rejected in turn for a safe life. I can really relate to this.

As a creative and sensitive child, my teens were filled with confusion and doom as I contemplated a world without me. My tendency to ‘give it just one more day’ took me right up to my early thirties when the massive shock of my first husband running off with a shepherdess left me devastated and traumatised. I had to live for our two sons, aged one and three, plus I had my business, my only income. A dear friend lent me the series of books by Neal Donald Walsh, Conversations with God. At the end of the third book, God had divided himself into an infinite number of ‘souls’ to experience what being God wasn’t. After all, how could God remember what love was if he’d forgotten what love wasn’t? A soul had stepped forward asking God if it could return to earth to experience pain and grief as it had forgotten these feelings. God agreed and asked for a second soul to come forward and help the first soul experience these painful emotions. After some mutterings, a brave soul stepped forward and said ‘I will.’ He continued, ‘You will know deep in your soul that I am here to help you, and that you requested my help.’ At that moment I felt huge understanding and compassion for my ex. He had indeed helped me experience deep wounding pain and trauma, and I knew that on some cosmic level, it was to help me, though I didn’t remember asking for it!

This moment of understanding also made me realise that I had a choice of whether to stay or leave the earthly plain. As you’ve probably guessed, I decided to stay. That decision, being as conscious and considered as it was, has given me great strength to ride some pretty stormy seas. Since that decision 20 years ago I have actually become fearless, making friends with the giant spider I shared my bathroom with, shaking a rope swing bridge over a rapid river in Peru on the way to Machu Pichu, travelling the world alone, starting a new business, snorkelling the ‘Rip’ on Direction Island (never again, that was terrifying!) and of course keeping those scary stinging bees.

The joy of living is such a gift, one most of us only appreciate when it’s too late. With only taxes and death being certain, how do you want to enter the pearly gates? David Goggins says he wants to surprise even God, with ticks by all the possibilities, and a scribble at the end with achievements even God didn’t expect to write!

If the purpose of life the wise 99-year-old suggested, is to love, then surely that means to love life as well as each other. The more we love, the more we find to love, even insects are worthy of our love and deep connection. Bees I believe understand this as when they sting – they lose their lives, so they choose who and when to sting carefully as it comes at the greatest cost. Perhaps they don’t believe in heaven, more connected to the circle of nature and stardust. They return to the earth to then feed the flowers that feed their sisters and daughters. The circle of life and death continues, each only existing because of the other.

This spring, should we each take the time to consider what makes our lives worth living, and what do we want to celebrate when we meet our maker? Then ignore the fear and do it anyway, what’s the worst that can happen?!

Sherborne Science Cafe Lectures Rob Bygrave, Chair, Sherborne Science Cafe

THE GEOLOGY OF SHERBORNE

Speaker: John Whicher

Landscape, as any budding geographer knows, is dependent on climate and geology and the remorseless and unrelenting application of physical and chemical processes. Climate, we are critically aware of; it occurs where we live our everyday lives. Geology is more of a mystery; we see its surface expression but the rocks below are an unknown to most people. Yet, geology tells us much of past states of the Earth, previous climates, historic global calamities, past flora and fauna through fossils as well as accounting for landscape and local building styles. Science Cafe welcomed John Whicher, previously a medical man, with a keen geological interest, and form in publishing geological research, to speak about the geology of Sherborne. He is a local man who attended Sherborne School as a boy.

Inferior Oolite is the rock which defines Sherborne being the cover for the immediate

Reproduced by permission of the Geological Society

area. The Inferior Oolite consists of several different layers representing different depositional environments (deposited ~174-164 Ma).

Sherborne Building Stone (SBS) is the main strata of interest for commercial purposes and still extracted at Frogden Quarry to the north east of the town. One interesting feature of the SBS, and one which can detract from its utility as a building stone, is the network of calcified pipe-like structures in a horizontal plane within the stone. These are Thalassinoides and are not uncommon in sediments. They represent the fossilised burrows of now, long departed, Jurassic organisms. With most Thalassinoides, the burrowing organism cannot be identified, but in the SBS uniquely, fossils of ancient lobsters have been identified as the builders of this considerable underground network.

A North Dorset excursion After marine deposition, there was gradual uplift during the Cretaceous Period (the period immediately following the Jurassic) and Jurassic strata assumed a shallow tilt to the south east. Tilting and gradual erosion of the Jurassic rocks led to exposed strata in the west being older than those further east (see image). >

The alternation of exposed beds of clay and limestone, being of unequal durability and hardness resulted in differential erosion producing a distinctive ‘lobsided’ landscape with outcrops being hard limestone rocks and the valleys soft clays. As limestone dips, the clay covering is gradually washed off exposing the sloping surface of rock, the gentle ‘dip slope’. Towards the top of the slope, the dip ends in an escarpment (scarp slope), steeper and more rugged being more resistant to erosion. Sherborne lies at the foot of a dip slope which is good for warmth and drainage. A journey from west to east along the A30 allows notable Jurassic rocks to be examined because the driver will be travelling along the slices of ‘bread and butter’. In Yeovil, the Bridport Sands formation of the Upper Lias is the starting point (near Argos). At Babylon Hill, the escarpment is of Inferior Oolite protecting the softer sand below. The driver then proceeds over Inferior Oolite before cutting across the Fuller’s Earth formation. Fuller’s Earth clays were used extensively for washing wool (hence the name). It is claimed that several clay layers within the formation are of volcanic origin. There were no volcanoes in Dorset at this time and a possible source, if true, is from volcanic activity within the North Sea area. Fuller’s Earth is somewhat of a nightmare for civil engineers as it is mobile and sticky when wet.

Continuing, Forest Marble is noted, a prominent part of the scenery to the south east of Sherborne. Then comes the Cornbrash, at the top of the Middle Jurassic, so named from the observation that corn grown on soil overlying this rock was particularly successful. Forest Marble is found near Henstridge, a hard stone with a slate layer within it and full of broken shells. Oxford Clay lies at the boundary of the Upper and Middle Jurassic and is followed by Corallian limestones made up from coral reefs. On the Corallian ridge, a few quarries still operate. This is followed by another clay layer, the Kimmeridge Clay, the highest bed of the Jurassic in this neighbourhood. Kimmeridge Clay is well exposed on the Dorset coast, often dark and bituminous with oil shale in places (the village is home to a working oil well, in operation since 1959). On this journey, faults are often found, the most prominent of which is the Poyntington Fault where the succession of rocks is affected, not only by vertical displacement but by a considerable horizontal displacement of ~3km. Notable contributions to better understanding the Jurassic in the Sherborne area were made by father and son members of the Buckman family of Bradford Abbas. James Buckman senior (1814-1884), was a former professor of Botany and Geology at the Royal College of Agriculture at Cirencester. He continued his interest in agriculture, botany and geology and branched out to mastering local archaeology. He was a founder member of Dorset Natural History Field Club. His grave and commemorative stone can be found at St Mary’s churchyard in Bradford Abbas.

More details of this report are available on our website

sherbornesciencecafe.com

__________________________________________________________________________ Wednesday 23rd March 7.30pm The Hydrology of Sherborne A talk with Dr Paul Webster. The Digby Memorial Hall, Digby Road, Sherborne