Wolves Wild

I didn’t notice it arrive, but a second parakeet joined the female at the top of one of the West Park trees [yesterday’s post]. Whether the angle was better or more light was on it, but it was possible to see this one’s red “collar” on its neck feathers: it was a male. It almost immediately began courting the first arrival. He appeared to preen some of her head feathers, and did pluck some of the leaf buds from the tree, feeding them to her, repeating this several times.

We thought it was likely that they would begin mating. But we left them to it, thinking that would be more likely if they didn’t have an audience. Instead we walked around the lake and, as chance would have it, were in a position to see the cormorant catching and eating a fish [posts earlier this week].

This is yet another small inconspicuous weed with tiny white flowers. This one is a bittercress, possibly wavy bittercress Cardamine flexuosa.

Once again a lone parakeet high in a tree, hard to see clearly because of the branches below. It was a female, but this was only proved by later events. Occasionally preening, occasionally stretching to nibble at the tender leaf buds nearby, the bird seemed totally undisturbed as I cricked my neck directly underneath.

I’d been watching for about five minutes, and the bird must have been up there for longer, when things began to change.

To be continued …

Growing at the base of the same tree trunk as yesterday’s whitlowgrass (and many others by main roads round the city) another weed with even smaller leaves and even smaller white flowers. This one is Danish scurvy grass (Cochlearia danica), and wherever it grows, it is within inches of the road itself.

The plant is a halophile (salt lover). Until the 1960s, it only grew in Britain in a few coastal locations. But then human activity allowed it to spread. Lots of upgrades of main roads, including a spreading motorway network, at the same time as the introduction of more systematic gritting of icy main roads. The splash zone on the verge of those roads only needed a touch of soil to provide perfect growing conditions for the scurvy grass. The draughts in the wake of passing cars and lorries then provided a breeze to help spread the wind-bourn seeds.

A similar process had happened a century or so earlier, when the burgeoning railway network had aided Oxford ragwort to going from being an escapee from the city’s Botanical Gardens to an endemic.

The cormorant flapped its wings on and off for four minutes or so, then relaxed them and started scanning the water more keenly. Another minute or so scanning, then off it dived again. This time it came up without a trophy.

Back on the perch again, then diving again after only a brief pause. Once again, surfacing without prey. It swam around, diving a couple more times with the same result. As we left, it was still swimming in the same area.

An inconspicuous weed growing at the base of one of the roadside trees, its white feathers even smaller and less conspicuous. It was common whitlowgrass (Draba verna), presumably another of the plants once thought to have medicinal properties. Whitlows are painful infections of fingertips.