The Earth is Singing

Lovely Verbascum sp with Viper's Bugloss along the Chemin de Dio. I don't think it is Verbascum nigrum, but rather Wavy-leaved Mullein (Verbascum sinuatum) from the way the stalks branch from a central stem a bit like a floral candelabra. And the stem is hairy. The flowers are particularly lovely and goes well with the purple of the Viper's Bugloss.

Butterflies need minerals are can be found 'mud-puddling' or even on dung.

Definitely bugs (insects/arachnids) are good, all of them!

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Cleopatra (Gonepteryx cleopatra) is a lovely butterfly that pretends to be a leaf. Is this why they always seem to dangle feeding from the edge of flowers so they are camouflaged among the leaves? They are a Mediterranean species that likes woodland edges with scrub and hedgerows wonderfully messy with wild flowering plants all mixed up together. Here, the female (I think, males have yellow on the wings), is fluttering around the 'overgrowth' around a ditch/irrigation canal at the end of the Chemin de Dio, a very lovely spot. She has remarkable antennae and white legs, and oh, what a long proboscis! Apparently, the caterpillars feed on buckthorns, of which there are several in gardens around here and the French common name is a more modest Citron de Provence. It is found further afield in southern Europe and North Africa. Adults overwinter on the buckthorns and appear from February to April, and a new generation of adults through to August, even October (would that be a third generation that overwinters)? They seem to like blossom and purple or pink flowers like this Red Valerian, Scabious, Rosemary, Viper's Bugloss, thistles and clovers.

Thick-thighed flower beetle (Oedemara nobilis) is one of my favourites, even though they are common around here. I always love seeing them flitting between flowers or with wings tucked away, sunning themselves on petals or sipping some nectar. This is a male, hence the thick thighs :D They are so tiny and light, I barely feels them crawling across my hand, when I tempt them onto it, only of course because they have strayed into the house and I put them outside on a flowering plant again. 😍

What a lovely flutter-by butterfly! I think this one is Pieris brassicae, a female Large White butterfly who just loves to lay her eggs on members of the cabbage family. Butterfly specialists think that members of the White family stay immobile with wings partly opened in the morning to reflect the sunlight inwards to warm their bodies. I took this photo of an individual female in the late afternoon down by the river, among the grasses and leguminous plants (some wild brassicas) where there are bright sunny spots and dappled shade courtesy of the black poplars.

It's been a good morning for a walk. The Chemin de Dio is a jumble and tumble of wild plants along an old and abandoned irrigation canal. This White Bryony is in partial shade but has a lot of visitors, most of whom I was unable to capture on photos, flies, bees, this one was taking a pause from collecting to push grains pollen into her pollen 'sacks' (i.e. the hairy back legs. What a beauty! 😍

Municipal vandalism along the river Orb. A few weeks ago I published a blog post about how magnificent this river is/was for wildlife, the banks and island covered in wild flowers where bird nests, others picked for grubs in the undergrowth, swallows, house martins and swift swooped low over the water to hoover up the rising insects, where butterflies frolicked among the grasses and wild flowering plants, tall enough to be home for lizards, snakes and small mammals. This habitat for biodiversity should be the town's pride, instead it was cut down to the ground, everywhere through out the town and now that stubble has just dried out, the last water evaporated so that the soil with bake hard over the months to come, the microbial life in it die, the water when it dow rain just run off because the roots and dead and the soil hard. Why do they do this? We all know that tall vegetation with hold water long, with allow water to sink into the soil, that a multitude of species rely on this vegetation so close to the river. Over course, now it is available for people, for dog walkers, for tourists, for people who go fishing for the fish raised in tanks and released into the river for the sport. Are these good excuses to remove habitat for so much wild life on which so much more wild life depends.

I can't help recall one of the Psalms I learned as a child (out of context of course": By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept.." Because I did, I sat on a bench and wept. Do they not realise we are living through the 6th Mass Extinction due to loss of habitat?

I wept as Robin Wall Kimmer says, remembering the frogs and toads cavorting there just a few weeks ago: "Weep! Weep!” calls a toad from the water's edge. And I do. If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again."

A sudden flurry among the ripples and...yep! It's a white wagtail (Moticilla alba) dipping among the stones in the middle of the river for insect larvae completely undeterred by the fast flow of the water. And, of course, coming up with the catch. What a wonderful bird, well camouflaged in this environment!

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Jacqueline Fletcher updated the description.
15 September 2019 ·
This group is for those people who recognise that we are currently living through a biosphere crisis that is systemic and requires a whole-systems, or holistic, approach to mitigation and adaptation. Climate change is only one element in this systemic crisis and to focus solely on the 'climate crisis' is misguided and even dangerous. To focus solely on fossil fuel energy as the cause of this 'climate crisis' is also misguided and dangerous.

The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 created three UN Framework Conventions to deal with three threats to the biosphere: the UN Framework Convention on Biological Diversity (UNFCBD), the UN Framework Convention on Combating Desertification (UNFCCD) and the UN Framework Convension on Climate Change (UNFCCC). These three conventions together represent the systemic crisis we humans have created but over the last couple of decades we have come to focus solely on the latter. Focussing solely on fossil fuel emissions gives rise the the absurd notion that we can fix the problem through a transition to alternative energies. This profound over-simplification also creates the delusion that climate change causes biodiversity loss and desertification. It does not.

This is not a group for climate change deniers. Climate change is happening, but it can only be addressed as part of a much more complex Biosphere Crisis in which all three elements interact in the living organism known as the biosphere. It is a group for those who recognise that we are part of this biosphere, the web of life, can share ecological knowledge, projects and support. Welcome!

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Fascinating! The Artic ecosystem is more diverse and active that most of us imagine.
"Every spring when the sun rises in the Arctic after months of darkness, life returns. The polar bears pop up from their winter lairs, the Arctic tern soar back from their long journey south, and the musk oxen wade north.
But the animals are not the only life being reawakened by the spring sun. Algae lying dormant on the ice start blooming in spring, blackening large areas of the ice.
When the ice blackens, its ability to reflect the sun diminishes and this accelerates the melting of the ice. Increased melting exacerbates global warming....the viruses feed on the snow algae and could work as a natural control mechanism on the algal blooms....Viruses are normally much smaller than bacteria. Regular viruses measure 20-200 nanometers in size, whereas a typical bacterium is 2-3 micrometers. In other words, a normal virus is around 1,000 times smaller than a bacterium.
That is not the case with giant viruses, though. Giant viruses grow to the size of 2.5 micrometers. That is bigger than most bacteria.
But the giant viruses are not only bigger in size. Their genome is much bigger than regular viruses. Bacteriophages—virus-nfecting bacteria—have between 100,000 and 200,000 letters in their genome. Giant viruses have around 2,500,000...Giant viruses were first discovered in 1981, when researchers found them in the ocean. These viruses specialized in infecting green algae in the sea. Later, giant viruses were found in soil on land and even in humans.
But it's the first time that giant viruses have been found living on the surface ice and snow dominated by microalgae...A few years ago everyone thought this part of the world to be barren and devoid of life. But today we know that several microorganisms live there—including the giant viruses.
"There's a whole ecosystem surrounding the algae. Besides bacteria, filamentous fungi and yeasts, there are protists eating the algae, different species of fungi parasitizing them and the giant viruses that we found, infecting them. In order to understand the biological controls acting on the algal blooms, we need to study these last three groups....
At the center of the giant viruses is a cluster of DNA. That DNA contains all the genetic information or recipes needed to create proteins—the chemical compounds that are doing most of the work in the virus.
But in order to use those recipes, the virus must transcribe them from double-stranded DNA to single stranded mRNA.
Normal viruses can't do that. Instead, they have strands of RNA floating around in the cell waiting to be activated when the virus infects an organism and hijacks its cellular production facilities.
Giant viruses can do that themselves, which makes them very different from normal viruses....mRNA is therefore an important marker of viral activity. In other words, mRNA-recipes of certain proteins show that the viruses are alive and kicking....Because giant viruses are a relatively new discovery, not a lot is known about them. In contrast to most other viruses, they have a lot of active genes that enable them to repair, replicate, transcribe and translate DNA.
But why that is and exactly what they use it for is not known.
"Which hosts the giant viruses infect, we can't link exactly. Some of them may be infecting protists while others attack the snow algae...."

Giant viruses discovered on Greenland ice sheet could reduce ice melt Every spring when the sun rises in the Arctic after months of darkness, life returns. The polar bears pop up from their winter lairs, the Arctic tern soar back from their long journey south, and the musk oxen wade north.

This is my latest blogpost, about the river, water and all the living creatures that rely on it and also maintain its health. It's about walking along the river and discovering, leaning from the river and redrawing the maps of this place to include all life. I have allowed myself to be inspired by the indigenous botanist/forest ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, hill water Nan Shepherd and others who find ways to connect with the 'natural world' and of course by the living world itself. If you like it, please share it, we have to find ways to learn from 'nature', and to learn how to protect it from our destructive tendencies.

The River Intimate Relationships Part II If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.1 We are all attracted to water and also tend to take it for granted unless we live in a semi-arid region w…

A young heron on the river caught a frog for supper! What a lucky shot!