Notes and Observations 13 Part 5

NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS (1) Please put on record the presence at Winston on this day (22nd August, 1966) of a white house-martin.

It is a light creamy white (more white than cream) slightly creamier on the underside towards the collar. It is singularly beautiful and is Aying with normal coloured birds. I shall try to find where it is nesting—if it is.

Rather more Strange (and both these events are verified by my family), I told four days ago how I had dreamed of a pair of white martins. So half the dream has corae true. We (wife, daughter, and seif) all saw the bird and watched it for ten minutes.

WHITE HOUSE MARTINS.

HUGH BARRETT, W i n s t o n .

(2) The roof of our house is one of the places where house martins congregate in autumn. Today (17th August) a white martin was in the crowd and we were able to watch it for some time. It was white all over except for a little shadow round the eyes.

Evidently this is the bird referred to in The Yarmouth Mercury as visiting a nest on one of the cottages at Haddiscoe Railway Station, which is only a few hundred yards by air from our house.

F. H. W . ROSS-LEWIN, St. Olaves.

AVIAN AFFAIRS AT BENACRE ROAD, IPSWICH. Our resident blackbirds nested in thick hawthorn before the leaves had developed, a spot below a tangle of honeysuckle stems being chosen.

Two chicks were hatched but only one was reared; the other was the victim of the snow and frost of the 28th and 29th of March; it was found dead on the path below.

Robins built a nest above the coal bin in a laurel bush, four eggs were laid and the chicks hatched. When only a few days old a mass of nesting material was seen on the ground and it was found that a cat had just been able to reach the nest and had clawed it down. Presumably the same birds built another nest in a thick upper part of the hawthorn hedge and one fledgling was observed; a few days later the nest was found to have been abandoned.

The blackbirds made a second nest at the top of a neighbour's trellis in the branches of a climbing rose, always approaching past the french window. Much of the material was taken from the lawn and once the hen was seen to dip the stuff in the bird-bath before bathing herseif. The cockbird fussed around apparently with impatience and then took a dip himself: incidentally the only occasion when he was observed to do so. In this instance too only one young survived.

A pair of song thrushes also nested here in the ivy of a lopped ash tree only about seven yards from the blackbird's nest. It is not known how many eggs were laid but it is curious that again only one young bird was reared. j^. p_ SPENCER

334 Transactions of the Suffolk Naturalists',

Vol. 13, Part 5

SOME OBSERVATION ON THE FEEDING OF FROGS. Early in May, 1966, we noticed that six frogs were living in a short water-filled ditch in the garden. At first they dived under the weed whenever we approached but in a few days took no notice of us, simply staying motionless with head and shoulders out of water.

We tried offering them worms, and found they would not attempt to eat them if the worm was put in the water. Put on the bank however they immediately went for them—first 'butting' them with their noses and then grabbing, and using both fore-paws moved the worm from side to side of the mouth and gulping it down. It seems they will not eat worms which do not move— perhaps the 'butting' is to see if they are alive—and will not go for them unless they are above eye level. Indeed a worm squirming in the water near them causes them to retreat as in fear.

After a week or so of daily worm offerings, the frogs became tarne enough to allow soft stroking with a wet finger and the sound of a voice was enough to bring their heads up from below the water weed.

When I moved a worm on the bank to a better position with the end of a thin cane a frog would often jump from the water and 'attack' the cane, butting it as it if were a worm.

H U G H BARRETT,

Winston.

NEST BOX BREEDING RESULTS AT GREAT FINBOROUGH. Twentyfive additional nesting boxes were erected at Great Finborough Park for the 1966 breeding season, bringing the total number to 125. Of these ninety-nine were occupied, ninety-one by breeding birds, six by birds which built but failed to lay. Two boxes were occupied by Long tailed Field Mice and Red Squirrels and two boxes were stolen.

Results from the ninety-nine boxes were as follows: Species

37 boxes occupied by Blue tits 18 „ „ ,, Great tits 1 » „ „ Coal tits 11 >1 >, ,, Starlings 5 „ ,, ,, Jackdaws 3 „ ,, „ Tawny owls 14 » i, ,, Tree sparrows 2 ,, „ ,, House sparrows Total

Eggs laid

323 131 10 50 21 6 133 7 681

Young hatched

249 95

Young reared

204 70

—

44 4 4 99 3 498

35 2 2 94 —

407

I think the great spotted woodpecker was to blame for the disappearance of seven young blue tits during the first week of June, as a hole was bored into the back of the nesting box large enough to extract the young birds. The great spotted woodpecker had three young of its own 300 yards away.

NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS

335

Eight full-grown young great tits in one box had the misfortune to have a nest built on top of them by a pair of tree sparrows which moved in causing the great tits to desert and their young to die. T h e tree sparrows reared one brood then moved about twenty yards to an unoccupied box to rear their second brood

-

R. J.

COPPING,

Stowmarket.

T H E STAG B E E T L E — A N E W LOCALITY. On 14th August, I found in the garden here the dried-up corpse of a female stag beetle.

This is my first record of the insect in this area, though it has been reported from Kersey and West Stow (see J. T . Clark Trans.

Suffolk Nat. Soc. 13: 87).

A male stag beetle was also shown to me by Mrs. R. N. Creasy at Belstead House on 29th May. p A Y N > Härtest. w H We see in the Proceedings of the Botanical Society of the British Isle that at their A.G.M. last April, 1966, Mr. P. J. O. Trist, O.B.E., was proposed and elected Regional Representative for the SouthEast Region. He succeeds Mrs. Russell whose four year term of office concluded. We are honoured to have a member of S.N.S. so promoted. j c N WlLUg THORN APPLE. Mr. T . C . Colchester seeing reference to Datura stramonium in our Transactions writes of it as common in Kenya. " I t was the first crop to appear in newly cleared land on road construction [that is so in this country], I recollect a road being made in a National Game Park when a party of us particularly remarked on a prevalence of D. stramonium at one point in the area supposedly unpopulated and to have been so for some time.

It turned out that there had been a village or temporary settlement at this point some years before. It is a weed which follows man."

J. C. N .

WILLIS.

PSORALEA AMERICANA, L. Mr. Morfey found this abundantly as a weed in his lovely herbaceous borders last August (Anglesea Road, Ipswich)—two or three foot tall with oval inflorescens on long peduncles arising from axils of leaves all up the stem.

I sent the plant to Dr. Perring of the Nature Conservancy at Monk's Wood and he replied that none of the people there knew it and he would send it on to Kew. T h e Kew authority said "the black dots on the leaves and stem are found in only a few genera of the Legumes such as Psoralea and this specimen is P. americana, L. It has nothing to do with America but is a native of S. Europe— Western Mediterranean area. Being very young, it looks a bit

336 Transactions of the Suffolk Naturalists',

Vol. 13, Part 5

queer at first, because the black hairs, as in Homo sapiens, L. turn white with age, and the bracts which dominate the inflorescence in bud shrivel as the inflorescence elongates. T o be on the safe side I have been through all the Kew Psoralea material, but there is no other species at all like P. americana."

I then looked up Psoralea in Linnaeus' 'Species Plantarum'.

He gives Lobel (1581), Dodoens (1616), and the Bauhins (1620) as authorities for its as Trifolium americanum, but questions their calling it American.

He describes seven other species of Psoralea, of which Bonnier gives only P. bituminosa for France Mid, Sud Est.—i.e., Rhone Valley and Provence.

I hope Mr. Morfey will find more of this rather ugly weed among his fine begonias next year and perhaps find some clue as to how it came to him. j c R WlLLIg W E A N I N G DATE OF SEROTINE BATS (Eptesicus serotinus).

On 18th August, 1966, amongst three Serotines caught in mist nets at Campsey Ashe were a lactating female and a juvenile male indicating that at that date some young of the year had been weaned, some had not. T h e male weighed 18 gms and had a forearm length of 50 mm. On 6th September, 1966, another lactating female and a juvenile male (20 gms, forearm 47 mm) were captured at the same place. CRANBROOK, Gt. Glemham.

L O N G EARED BAT (Plecotus auritus).

Mrs. Gartside sent to me alive a common Long eared Bat (P. auritus) captured at Snape in September, 1966. As noted in Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 13: 90, 1965, two species of long eared bat are known in England of which only the common one has hitherto been recorded from Suffolk.

I should be grateful for any specimens of Suffolk long eared bats, alive or dead, for identification.

CRANBROOK, Gt. Glemham.

RED SQUIRRELS (Sciurus vulgaris) AT W I N S T O N .

Mr. and Mrs. H. Long watched a Red Squirrel in the garden at Winston Hall for twenty minutes in September, 1966. This occurred in Square T M 1060 from which no squirrels were recorded in the Squirrel Survey, 1963-64 (Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 13: 82-85).

H . G . BARRETT, W i n s t o n .

GREY SQUIRRELS (S. carolinensis) AT FRESTON. DĂźring 1 9 6 6 twenty grey squirrels have been shot in the garden here.

MRS. LAVERTON, F r e s t o n .

NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS

337

BADGER'S (M. Meies) PATH OBSTRUCTED. In 1965 a new plantation was planted across a track which I have known for many years to be used by the Tetley Hill badgers. In July, 1966, a badger was found inside the plantation though no hole could be found in the netting. An attempt was made to catch and lift him over the wire but was discouraged by an angry growl. It took two men an hour to drive him through the gate by which time all three were puffed.

The badgers are quite strong again in Tetley Hill Wood though there is not so much activity in the Baylham Hall sett.

J.

VANE,

Darmsden.

CERCIDIPHYLLUM SPENCERI. It may interest botanists who have not broken down this polysyllable for themselves to know what this tree was like that has given Mr. Spencer such fame (Vol. 10 pt. 2). Though the word says that the tree had a leaf like a Cercis that does not refer to the form of the leaf but to the peculiar feature of where it grows on the tree—directly on the trunk and thick main branches, by small buds or short shocts.

There are two living species of Cercis—C. siliquastrum, the Judas Tree, native in the Mediterranean region and C. canadense, and two Cercidiphyllum japonicum and magnificum.

Many of us have seen with surprise lovely racemes of pink flowers hanging on the trunk and stout branches of a Judas Tree.

These arise from the same buds as the leaves.

Mr. Brett, the palaebotanist who examined Mr. Spencer's fragments of fossil wood (Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 2:128) from the London Clay at Alnesbourne Priory, Nacton, from this feature was able to determine the genus and make a tree of fifty million years ago (Eocene, early Tertiary) an ancestral relative of Cercidiphyllum japonicum which I saw near the Deben on the Little Haddon estate in 1956—the same year that Mr. Spencer found his specimen. Because of my curiosity about leaves growing in this unusual way, I sent a small piece to Kew and learnt this name for it.

J.C.N.W.