Wildlife through the year: September

September is a time of fallen fruit - here's a selection from the pavement, clockwise from top left, crab apples, lime seed, pine cone and hazelnut...

Throughout 2010 I am revisiting the little green nature book that accompanied my childhood and seeing if the plants and animals featured in its monthly sketchbook pages are still around.

The book is “Wild Life Through the Year” by Richard Morse and it was published in 1942. You can read about earlier months here.

September 2010 in South Wales has been a mixed month with much rain but also some clear blue-sky days. Autumn is definitely in the air and the leaves are starting to turn and to fall.

In the garden there has been a second flush of flowers on the Choisya ternata and the Mahonia media Charity is just starting to flower as the Hydrangeas fade. Otherwise there has been not a lot of floral colour apart from Nasturtiums and Fuchsias in the garden.

Seeds are everywhere - this is a dainty willowherb (Epilobium)

On the garden bird front we are still back to the natives – dunnocks, robins, blue, great and coal tits, blackbirds and song thrushes, plus the greedy magpies, wood pigeons and collared doves.

A robin (Erithacus rubecula), now mature, has started to sing lustily...

In mid September the robins started to sing vigorously and beautifully again – perhaps to stake out their territories for winter.

One very pleasant surprise was a chiffchaff now being tame enough to land on the birdbath. I hope it stays, but according to Wildlife Through the Year…

“Very often our summer visitors steal away silently and unobtrusively, but that is by no means always the case. Chiffchaffs and willow warblers, for example, sing freely as they travel southwards, and you may often hear their farewell songs in quite unusual places at this season…”

Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita) on the birdbath in September 2010...

The grey squirrels and the fox are still ever present in the garden and it is very much orb-web spider time.

My one big wildlife adventure in September was to take a two-hour walk to work along a wooded path by the river, which you can read all about in my blog page A city walk on the wildlife side.

Here is what you would expect to see in September in the 1940s…

From a September wildlife sketchbook in the 1940s...

1. Ripe fruits of ash 2. Swift 3. Ivy in flower 4. Garden spider in web 5. Chicory 6. Ragwort 7. Skylark 8. Giant wood wasp 9. Mushrooms 10. Common cord-moss 11. Harvest-spider or harvestman 12. Herald moth

1. Ripe fruits of ash

Ash keys in the garden (Fraxinus excelsior)

Most of our garden trees are ash (Fraxinus excelsior), so we have this wildlife observation on our doorstep.

A huge old ash tree at Brannbolstad, Sweden, photographed by Helen Read during her study tour of tree pollarding techniques in Europe

In Scandinavian mythology the world tree or world-binding tree, Yggdrasil, is usually an ash.

This painting of Yggdrasil by mikioku is one of many exploring the same theme on the Deviant Art website

Ash wood has a beautiful pale but warm colour and looks lovely in the form of bowls or furniture.

Since the ash features in Scandinavian mythology, it seems appropriate to feature this ash-wood rune set, to show the pale but warm colour of the worked wood

2. Swift

Swifts (Apus apus) flying, a picture by Keta

For many migrant birds it’s time to go south for the winter. As Richard Morse says:

“Some species leave us very early – puzzlingly early in the case of the swift and a few others. It is no uncommon thing to see swifts moving southwards even in July, and by the end of August most of them have usually gone. September swifts, in fact, are scarce enough in most places to be worth recording.”

Certainly the swifts I sometimes see overhead in Cardiff seem to have gone.

Amazing close-up of a swift's head from Birds of the World online

3. Ivy in flower

This ivy (Hedera helix) on the Taff riverside path seems to be still in bud...

I don’t often notice the flowers of ivy (Hedera helix) although I do notice the later black berries. But when I lived in a village we had an old wall covered in ivy and when it was in flower it was full of wasps, which rather attracted attention to it.

Ivy was one of the things I was looking for on my walk along the river Taff and I did find one tree full of it, pictured here.

A tree covered with ivy (Hedera helix) on a path beside the River Taff in Cardiff...

On the very last day of September I saw this ivy in flower on a city street...

4. Garden spider in web

My picture of a garden spider (Araneus diadematus) in its orb web...

According to Wildlife Through the Year…

“In September the spider season is at its best, and there is no end to the interest that these abundant little animals an afford, even to a casual observer of their ways.”

The other main orb-web spider in my garden, Metellina segmentata

I guess these spiders have been around all summer, it’s just that they are only now fully grown. The low autumn sun also attracts attention to their wonderful rainbow-shiny webs.

I recently bought an A4 folding field guide to spiders to identify them, despite my arachnophobia. It’s fascinating but I find myself feeling physically ill looking at the big pictures of what are actually quite acceptably small spiders. I have a sliding scale of fear – depending on the design of the spider, outdoors I am usually OK with anything under an inch long including its legs. As for house spiders, urgh, immediate terror!

Another orb-web spider in the garden, possibly Cyclosa conica

A pretty little sheet-web-weaver (Linyphia triangularis) on the Pelargonium...

These two sheet-web spiders were apparently mating over a day or so (although at first they held each other at arm's length and I wasn't so sure), but I haven't been able to identify the species yet...

I think this pale, leggy spider is Pholcus phalangiodes...

5. Chicory

Chicory (Cichorium intybus) in the Netherlands, by Teun Spaans

The Camp coffee label

This is very pretty, but is not a plant I would recognise. I wonder if it still grows much in the wild – possibly more in the arable lands of South East England.

However, I did grow up with Camp coffee, a cheap liquid coffee with chicory essence popular in the UK after the war. It was very bitter, from the chicory.

Its label featured a Gordon Highlander in the days of the Raj in India.

According to Nicky’s Nursery in Kent, which sells seeds of wild chicory…
“Chicory flowers July to October. Bright blue flowers that close after midday. Often cultivated for medicinal purposes and also used as a vegetable or coffee substitute. Habitat waste land and field margins. Excellent food for tortoise.”

Wikipedia has much to say about chicory in all its varieties, some grown for the leaves, some for the roots, and these are sometimes confused.

The chicory cultivated for the bitter roots is Cichorium intybus var. sativum, while the varieties cultivated for salad leaves include white-veined, red-leaved radicchio and white chicory, called endive by the French – this is kept white by growing the shoots underground and never letting them see the sun.

Confusingly the French also use the name chicorée for curly salad-leaf endive (Cichorium endivia).

6. Ragwort

This ragwort (Senecio jacobaea) on the Taff riverside path is much the worse for wear compared to those I saw in August...

Ragwort isn't the only yellow dandelion-type plant around. This sow thistle (Sonchus oleraceus) grows at the side of the city street...

7. Skylark

Skylark and young by John Gould

I have never seen a skylark (Alauda arvensis) up close and my only memory of seeing and hearing one singing – a fluttering dot on high – comes from a visit to the ramparts of the Iron Age hillfort of Maiden Castle in Dorset 30 years ago.

I also have a soft spot for the skylark because I went to a grammar school called Larkfield and our school magazine was called Alauda.

The skylark is a passerine bird – along with more than half of world bird species. That means it’s a perching bird (or songbird), of the order Passeriformes, from the Latin passer, meaning a sparrow.

It is a bird of farmland but changing agricultural practices have seen its numbers decline to about 10 per cent of those numbers 30 years ago when I was climbing Maiden Castle.

According to Wikipedia the skylark has declined because cereal crops are now grown over winter as well as through the summer and this means there are not the open stubble fields for skylarks to feed over the winter.

How to describe the skylark’s song? There’s no better way than to listen to this performance of The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams. It so wonderfully evokes the poignant, rising song and the British countryside over which the little bird used to fly so much more frequently.

Or you could listen to the real song on the RSPB website.

At school we used to sing “Alouette, gentille alouette…” (“Skylark, pretty skylark”) but only now do I realise that it’s all about plucking the little songbird to prepare it for cooking! The French love of cooking songbirds for the table is controversial, so I won’t follow that thought through…

8. Giant wood wasp

Giant wood-wasp (Urocerus gigas) by Robert Dzwonkowski

Says Richard Morse…
“The so-called giant wood-wasp, in spite of her yellow-and-black colour, her humming flight and her sting-like ‘tail’, is not really a wasp at all, and is quite harmless – at least to human beings. The apparent sting is used for boring holes in trees, in which her eggs are laid.”

The Latin name is Urocerus gigas and it is sometimes called a “horntail” for obvious reasons.

I haven’t seen a wood wasp, although we do have ordinary wasps (Vespula vulgaris) in a nest under a garden wall – which I am trying to stay away from.

As usual I have a mystery insect this month (see below). Any ideas?

I haven't yet been able to identify this fly-like insect on the Buddleia...

NOTE: Harri has kindly commented below, suggesting this is a hover fly Volucella pellucens. I have looked at pictures and he could be right – although I seem to have taken the picture from an odd angle which makes it look a bit skinny!

9. Mushrooms

OK, I'm cheating - these white button mushrooms are from Tesco, much easier than foraging...

Although foraging for edible fungi (mushroom is a common name for these) has become quite fashionable, it’s also a little dangerous. In France there’s a tendency to take the fungi you find to a pharmacy to test them to ensure they aren’t deadly poisonous.

Usually, though, we now buy our mushrooms from the supermarket. The commonest are white cultivated “button” mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) and big, flat field mushrooms. But when did they start to call these grown-up versions of button mushrooms “Portobello” mushrooms? There’s posh…

Portobello mushrooms - what we used to call plain old field mushrooms...

Field mushrooms are meaty and I recall we once fried them for breakfast when my big brothers brought some home from their dawn wanderings when I was a child. Probably with black pudding.

10. Common cord-moss

Earlier in the year I thought I had my garden mosses all sorted and identified. But now I am starting to have doubts. I now wonder if what in May I decided was Mnium hornum or Swan’s-neck thread-moss may actually be Funaria hygrometrica or common cord-moss.

I’ll leave you to decide…

Garden moss in September rain - but I'm lost for identification. Maybe it is Funaria hygrometrica...

In may I identified this as swan's-neck thread-moss (Mnium hornum), or is it common cord-moss (Funaria hygrometrica)?

Well Wikipedia says this IS what Funaria hygrometrica looks like - picture by Frank Vincentz

11. Harvest-spider or harvestman

Harvestman (Phalangium opilio) on the wall in early September...

Says Richard Morse…
“The so-called harvest-spiders, which are so conspicuous everywhere just now, can be distinguished from the true spiders by the complete absence of a waist.”

Harvestman (Phalangium opilio) alongside a Nasturtium seed on a Heuchera leaf...

12. Herald moth

Beautiful image of Scoliopteryx libatrix, the herald moth, from a French site where the common name is given as Découpure, meaning a paper cutting or clipping...

The Latin name for the herald moth is Scoliopteryx libatrix. It’s a lovely thing, but I regret I have never knowingly seen one. According to Wildlife Through the Year it comes out of hibernation in April and goes back in as early as September, although I have seen more recent accounts online that suggest it is around until November.

I can see why the herald moth is so-called - its colouring reminds me of a herald's tabard, like this one, the tabard of the Chronicler of Arms of Castile and Leon

I haven’t had much luck spotting moths in September, but I did see this red admiral butterfly on my study window ledge…

Red admiral butterfly (Vanessa atalanta) on my window ledge...

You can find more pictures from my September garden here.

See other months in the Wildlife Through the Year archive