Birding for beginners: India

n a trip for the glorious Indian nuptials of Roald Dal and Radish, some bright-eyed eco-geeks took the wonderful opportunity to travel across the world and, after the feasting and dancing, attempt to see as much of the local wildlife as possible. For a few of us, it was the perfect chance to practice our novice birding moves.

Lesson 1 for the reluctant birder is a simple one; leave the country. If you happen to be someone who feels a little overwhelmed by the brownness of the UK's finest avian residents, the perfect way to muster some enthusiasm is to go elsewhere. Luckily for us, India offered up a range of winged beauties, vivid colours and fancy shapes to make the shallowest wannabe birder go 'ooooh'.

There were numerous lessons learnt on our travels but only some come with photographic evidence, taken by Laveesh, finest hat-wearing ecologist in the land. Ready with bins, book, pen and camera we identified 93 species, and saw a few more. Here are just a few of the birds, and lessons, for your pleasure...

Seeing large charismatic species gives you confidence - White-bellied Sea Eagle, Goan coast

It's ok to have a favourite when it wears zebra stripes - Orange-headed Thrush, Goan Ghats

Watching birds tackle their prey makes them much more interesting, doubly so when you're on a tropical beach - Common Sandpiper, Goan coast

Hoopoes will always bring a smile to your face, even when tired and dehydrated - Hoopoe, Hampi

Learning to love herons will make your stay next to paddy fields much more rewarding - Indian Pond Heron, Hampi

When you are this handsome, you do not shy away from your public - Plum-headed Parakeet, Hampi

 

All birds are fond of ruins and elephants. Fact. - Ashy-crowned Sparrow Lark, Hampi

One can never see too many species of Kingfisher - Stork-billed Kingfisher, Keralan backwaters

Wherever you are in the world, Cormorants look like crooked umbrellas - Little Cormorant, Keralan backwaters

A bird requires impeccable balance when residing on spindly vegetation  - Purple Heron, Keralan backwaters

Birding is easiest when you breakfast on the balcony - Red-whiskered and Red-vented Bulbuls, Keralan Ghats

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, birds will turn their back on you - female Scarlet Minivet - Keralan Ghats

And sometimes, they are attention seeking posers - male Scarlet Minivet - Keralan Ghats

All roads lead to India for the chickens who crossed them - Grey Junglefowl - Keralan Ghats

Night birding is best with good hearing - Jungle Owlet (we think!) - Keralan Ghats

And finally, the lesson that holds true everywhere, there is always something small and brown that you can't identify!

An unknown Prinia? - Hampi

Naturally, some of the most exciting sightings were imprinted not in pixels, but only our minds, and we jumped around with glee seeing wonders such as a very unexpected chestnut coloured female Sri Lanka Frogmouth, and the Malabar Trogon.  We admired the punk-crested Black Lored Tit, watched open-mouthed as the huge wingbeats of a pair of Great Hornbills echoed above us in the Western Ghats, and saw a Black-rumped Flameback woodpecker scamper up palms in the backwaters. We learnt that the best way to pronounce 'Drongo' was with an Australian accent, and preferred to call the Greater-racket tailed Drongo the 'fancy-tailed'. Rufous and White-bellied Treepies made us happy, the tails of Asian Paradise Flycatchers and blue flashes of Velvet-fronted Nuthatch causing much geeky joy. We also saw an awful lot of Egrets.

Our final few days were spent around Kumily and the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary in Kerala, an area whose hills were etched with tea plantations and spice gardens were tucked into lush grottos. Before leaving we packed our bags with sweet and pungent vanilla, conker-like nutmegs and tiny green rugby balls of cardamom. Since returning from India my favourite way of using some of these aromatic delights has been in a cardamom and orange syrup cake.

It's a version of wonder cake, the extravagantly named recipe I wrote about last February. Follow the recipe as suggested, using ground almonds and vanilla essence. In addition, finely grind the seeds from 5 cardamom pods and grate the zest of one orange and add to the dry ingredients before adding the oil etc. When you've stirred it all together, sprinkle flaked almonds over the mixture before baking.

While it's in the oven prepare the syrup, bash two cardamom pods and add to a pan with 40g sugar (granulated or caster) and the juice of 1-2 oranges. Put on a low heat until the sugar has dissolved and then set aside for the flavours to develop. When the cake is cooked and a golden brown, remove from the oven and pierce all over with a skewer in between the almonds. Strain the syrup and pour over the hot cake, it should be absorbed as you pour. Allow to cool before slicing. It is a very aromatic and sticky cake, good with hot black coffee and memories of India.

First attempt - no flaked almonds, but it's nicer with!

Warm Winter Passing

eap day in a leap year, winter seems to have gone, shifts and stirrings appear. Boxing day primroses finished 2011, Lesser Celandine flowers waved yellow as January began. February frosted all life at the start, now there's crocuses, butterflies, snowdrops and bees. Adders in East Anglia, frogspawn all over, Todmorden toads on the 27th, and no time to take a breath.

Hello, spring.

Cold weather comforts

ovember is often full of pumpkins, roots and stews, tea as recommended by Radish below, nourishing baking and that dark steel blue rain reserved for the boundary between autumn and winter. And so it has been, with some added dairy-free kitchen experiments, one of the best being a cobbled together pumpkin and leek quiche.

No soggy bottom here...

To make this you'll want roughly the following:
A blind baked pastry case using pastry of your choice
1 small butternut squash or pumpkin
2 small leeks
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
1-2 tsps English or wholegrain mustard
Freshly ground nutmeg
1 packet silken tofu (pressed to remove liquid)
~ 1/2 cup soy milk
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180C or Gas mark 4.
- Cook the finely chopped onion and garlic gently in a little olive oil in a large frying pan.
- Add the butternut squash, cut into small cubes (1-2cm ish) and chopped leek. Saute everything gently for 10-15 mins until all the vegetables are soft.
- Blend the tofu, soy milk, mustard and nutmeg until smooth. Season to taste.
- Add the tofu mixture to the vegetables and mix before adding to your pastry case.
- Cook for 30-40 mins until golden brown and set in the middle, and allow to cool for 5-10 minutes before slicing.

Silken tofu experiments also led me to the quickest and richest chocolate pudding... All you need is a block of silken tofu to blend until really smooth with a couple of spoons of cocoa powder and maple syrup, and then add in whatever you like best with chocolate, try peanut butter or finely chopped stem ginger. If you blend this and then add it onto a biscuity base and leave it to set for a couple of hours it makes a beautiful chocolate torte.

I got the chance to visit the lovely Collard Hill, scene of my June Large Blue Butterfly adventures this month, for the end of year wash-up meeting to discuss the season. Somerset was damp and green, and my feet remembered many of the hill's lumps and bumps as we walked the transect route in the rain, discussing the successful increase in Large Blues during 2011. Happily, we were also able to find a Brown Hairstreak (Thecla betulae) egg on the Blackthorn hedge, and peered at its intricate golf ball like indentations through a hand lens. Unfortunately, my camera couldn't get that close.

Lepidopterist finger for scale.

There was some further Lepidoptera related excitement when I went out to the woods one evening with the Yorkshire mothmen... It being chilly there wasn't exactly a lot of activity, but by peering at the trunks of Beech, Birch and Ash trees we found the somewhat elusive flightless females of the Winter moth (Operophtera brumata) and Scare Umber (Agriopis aurantiaria). We also found a pair of copulating Winter moths, sometimes you can watch a female drag the male way up a tree trunk, in order to get to her favoured ovipositing spot. Sadly my photos are not amazingly clear as it was rather dark out, but the local moth blog has some good close ups of the females.

Lady winter's vestigial wings

Birch for a bed...

Scarce Umber girls are stripy

Nippy Novembrr eco-endeavours require some dense sustaining baked sweetness to keep one going, which has mainly been taking the form of flapjack. I like them to be slightly crisp rather than soft and stodgy and my favourite recipe works well with either butter or dairy-free margarine. You'll need:

150g butter or margarine
70g light brown muscovado sugar
3 tbsp golden syrup
pinch salt
125g jumbo oats
125g porridge oats
200-250g combination of dried fruits, nuts, seeds, chocolate.

Grease or line a 30 x 20 x 4cm baking tin and preheat the oven to 180C or Gas Mark 4.
- Heat butter, sugar and syrup gently in a pan until butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and allow to cool a little.
- Stir in the oats, salt and dried fruit etc. If you want the whole flapjack to be chocolatey then stir in your chocolate here and it will melt through, if not, allow it to cool some more and then plonk choc chunks in so they remain whole.
- Put the mixture into the tin and spread evenly. Bake between 20-25 mins, until golden brown. If you prefer softer flapjack, bake for less time, and if you like crisper, it'll need slightly longer.
- Remove from oven and allow to cool completely in its tin. If you fancy decorating it a little, melt some chocolate and drizzle over the flapjack then allow to cool before cutting.

You can put pretty much anything in this, recently i've tried dried pear and crystallised ginger with dark chocolate, and coconut chips, cranberry and dark chocolate with sunflower and pumpkin seeds. Mmm, time to embark on more winter walks armed with oats...

Coconut and cranberry

Misty Hills

It is the season of the short rains in Kenya. The Taita Hills are lush and wet. We sleep to the beat of rain drumming on our metal roof and wake up in a house drenched in mist. The red-chested cuckoo is constantly singing its three note song which sounds like 'it will rain'.

Can you see the man in the cliff with a big nose?

It is a wonderful time to look out for creepy crawlies. As soon as the sun comes out of the clouds the garden is buzzing, humming, clicking and chirping with bees, wasps, moths, butterflies, grasshoppers, beetles, spiders & other arachnids.
 

Two adorable dogs, a puppy to die for and a whiny but sweet cat have adopted us for better or for worse. Mr Dal is very concerned about their nutrition and feeds them wholesome vegan food as a supplement to whatever it is they are hunting. Unfortunately we do not see many birds from our house, we believe they might have been killed as they can be crop-pests.

The cutest little puppy in Wundanyi

It is also my favourite time of year to have countless cups of tea (actually my favourite would be the monsoon but this is just as good). And not just any kind of tea – a special masala tea with ginger and mixture of spices – cinnamon, cardamoms, cloves, black pepper and nutmeg. The most comforting and tasty tea would be made by boiling tea leaves with milk/milk alternative and then adding sugar and spices. But if there is a ready spice-mix to sprinkle on teabag-tea, its just as yummy!

Masala tea and peppermint tea with ginger biscuits - perfect for elevenses (And did you know that according to Wikipedia the term 'elevenses' was first used in East Anglia :))

Adventures in Meddling

runchy gold, rust and red tree shrapnel is carpeting the pavements, darkness is falling at four-thirty, wood smoke is permeating the valley, and autumn is well and truly here. Being alternately mud-spattered or wrapped up in voluminous knitwear at this time of year is strangely comforting, but before settling into such a rhythm, I spent rather a lot of October gadding about...

It started off in glorious Grasmere, before quick jaunts to Scarborough's shores and ghost hunting with Pudding Pie in York, a delightful trip to Brussels and Ghent, before the main event; East Anglia, the scene of so many MSc moments. Given that I am, alas, once again without work, what better way to spend time than bother those of you who do have eco-geeky jobs? So I started off with Mrs Teacup, who now works in community development for local food in Suffolk. She took me to an allotment, which is getting turned into a community orchard, and we happily weeded away in cold sunshine, while other volunteers dug a very big hole.

If you like orchards brandish your garden forks! Well, that's one.

While at Mrs T's, I gazed with interest upon two huge platters of Medlars, gathered from a tree in Dunwich. They were being left to blet (rot to a delicious ooziness) before being eaten. She very kindly gave me a few, and they've slowly been ripening to collapse in my fruit bowl. Tonight I ate my first 'naked' Medlar, and it was lovely. It has the grainy texture, but not the juiciness of an overripe pear, and tasted delicate, almost like partly cooked crumble filling. There is a particularly evocative and almost joyously lascivious description of the bletted Medlar from an enthusiast who urges one to 'nip the medlar in its side as if you are a vampire and its tender, turgid, russet-skinned being is a plump neck. Now suck its guts out.' Ooh er.

Blet you darn Medlars!

Next up was Mr Watervole, who is very busy and important working for the National Trust at Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast, looking after its glorious wetland haven for waders, vegetated shingle, and decrepit abandoned MoD buildings. And a really big nuclear bomb. Mrs Teacup and I got to experience the Orford Ness ferry, saw much damp red Salicornia, watched diggers build new lagoons and walked through the strange shingle at sunset.

If you ask nicely you can ride in the Landrover...

A short, flat train ride took me to Norwich, where I headed to Goat Manor, home of Luscious Lemon, the lovely Grazing Officer at the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. On a truly beautiful blue Saturday we cycled through narrow lanes to Buxton Heath, one of the sites she looks after. In search of the ten or so Dartmoor ponies that graze the heath we wandered around in thick afternoon sunshine, avoiding the mire, but finding no equines. Finally, on our way home we screeched to a halt on our bikes, spying the cheeky faces of the ponies peeking over a gate at a side entrance. They were rather enthusiastically curious, and quite boldly surrounded us. Unfortunately this suggested that they had been fed by visitors to the heath, which is not ideal for semi-feral beasts... Hopefully with a little more interpretation (my favourite!) on site, they will start to keep their distance from people again.

A golden evening on the heath.

They all have names, I just can't remember them...

A rather momentous moment for the blog now, as the first actual Battenberg makes its appearance. . Not homemade, but made especially delicious by eating it off Ms Lemon's wildflower and moth covered crockery! Well deserved after finding two lonesome and chilly Green Brindled Crescents (Allophyes oxyacanthae) in the first moth trapping session at the Manor. One day, it'll be a carefully hand constructed chequered creation gracing the tea table.

Mrs Teacup I hope you approve!

Now that the season of conkers, treacle toffee and dragon breath is upon us, it's time to reacquaint ourselves with those sustaining foods that will, ahem, cushion us against the winter. Behold, the veggie toad-in-the-hole! Oh, there will be more...

Mmm, fluffy and pillowy.

Butterflies vs Summer

ather unexpectedly, summer has offered us a sunny renaissance. This week has brought the warmth and calm that was much missed during July and August. I spent those months as a field assistant for a UEA project. Like Mrs Teacup, we were studying the behaviour of a range-expanding butterfly species in core and margin populations. In this case it was Brown Argus (Aricia agestis), with Common Blue (Polyommatus icarus) as our control species.

First Brown Argus of the season!

Also like Mrs Teacup, the summer activities involved chasing butterflies that had been caught and marked, before releasing them on a host plant or nectar source. As our study species were small, and often rather brown, there were many occasions when despondent field assistants peered around, vainly looking for a butterfly that had lured them into a false sense of security, nectaring for minutes on end, before promptly disappearing into the ether.

Ecology takes you to some exotic places, and this project explored the glories offered by Leicestershire and Bedfordshire. Such were our adventures up and down the M1, to sites that were full of dog poo, Dartmoor ponies, sunflowers and lovely landowners, ice cream sellers, dog poo, mites and brambles, motorbikes, cattle, secret glades, dubious dogging carparks, kites and dog poo. At all of these places we wandered, waving our butterfly nets to numerous cries of 'are they fishing?!' from children passing us by. We even got a little bit of sun, when we could watch our butterflies basking surrounded by flags and ragwort...

Boys watch butterflies

Bumblebees, geese and other lepidopteran delights distracted at times, bright Small Coppers, Ruby Tiger moths, visiting Clouded Yellows, Purple Hairstreaks at dusk and many ghostly Chalkhill Blues.

Icy Chalkhill Blue - Lysandra coridon

Another Chalky distracts me

A day off's visit to Canons Ashby, south west of Northampton, provided a gleeful episode of bonding with other visitors gathered around a huge Mulberry tree (Morus genus). Next to the croquet and quoits we stained our fingers and faces with beautiful ripe Mulberries, surreptitiously glancing around for National Trust staff ready to quell our feasting. As I am not currently imprisoned in a William Morris papered drawing room, I am happy to say we got away with it.

Here we go round the mulberry bush, guiltily stuffing our faces.

I returned to Yorkshire in September, to find an empty house and a fecund garden. One afternoon's foraging produced quite a haul of goodies, runner beans, roses, broad beans, strawberries, windfall apples, lavender, and some rather suggestive courgettes, the trombetti plants having rather taken over! Dinner that night was two bean salad, for which you will need:
broad beans
runner beans
walnuts
fresh mozzarella
basil
raspberry or redcurrant vinegar
balsamic vinegar
honey
olive oil
salt and pepper

- Pod and prepare your beans and lightly steam them. Remove from the heat and leave to cool slightly.
- Toast your walnuts in a hot oven for about 5 minutes. Remove and cool before using.
- Make a dressing with the honey, vinegars and olive oil. Season to taste.
- Rip up your mozzarella and mix everything together, adding in some torn basil.
Change cheese/herbs/nuts as you wish.

Before

After

The beans and courgettes are still going, the apple tree is 'rude with fruit' and tomato and pepper plants on the windowsills are laden, oh, autumn's bounty is nearly upon us!