Habitat management news

Many moons ago, in another time and place, whilst struggling to find some wildlife topic around which to build a blogpost, I wrote this piece:

Imperfect and Tense: Attack of the mechanised symbionts?

And here we are, almost fifteen years later, after a week of work which left little room for nature. Well, there was a drive-by Woodcock on my way to an installation in South Walls on Tuesday and a flock of Golden Plover in an industrial estate on Thursday, but precious little else to write about.

This morning I was unloading all the work gear from my car to, hopefully, dry it out over the weekend before it is required again on Monday. In the to-ing and fro-ing, I noticed several insects on the house wall. They looked like crane flies, but smaller, and their wings were tiny.

And it's the middle of November! What's going on?

Some web browsing later, I discovered that these are likely to be the flightless females of the crane fly Tipula pagana, a species which overwinters as an adult. New for me and the garden.

After emptying all the damp equipment from the car, I decided to remove the roof rack as there's not a work need for it in the immediate future. During this task, it became apparent that the car was developing its own biome. Near one of the tailgate hinges was a patch of lichen which I couldn't identify (some things haven't changed over the years 🙄) so I asked a local expert.

ID-ing anything from grainy photos is fraught, but AG was inclined to think this might be Phaeophysicia orbicularis.

Along the rubber strips at the bottom of the side windows, a favourite site for Nature to blossom, there were several clumps of moss, which was possibly Silver-moss Bryum argenteum.

However, the most notable find wasn't a fungus, an alga or a non-vascular plant. It was an actual vascular plant, probably an angiosperm at that, though only in its very early stages.

To my eye, if this is a flowering plant, these could be Coltsfoot leaves, but just how slowly will I have to drive for sufficient growth to take place to attempt a proper identification?!

Perhaps seventeen year old Volvos are an under-appreciated habitat within the UK? Certainly, the biodiversity management plan for this example is seemingly paying dividends, although not creating profits for car shampoo manufacturers.

So I will reiterate the sentiment from all those years ago:

"That life can exist in such an artificial, unhelpful and polluted place, does inspire hope for the future of the planet."