ONE OF THE NICEST BLOGS I HAVE SEEN IN AGES

Creating a mini "wildlife habitat" on a tiny balcony in Hulme, inner-city Manchester UK

I plan to regularly update this blog with practical details of how I created a mini “wildlife garden” on my tiny balcony, together with regular photos of the wildlife I’ve attracted so far.
I hope it inspires readers to think about how all of us can take practical steps to encourage and support our urban wildlife, and to see how easy it is to bring our fascinating “natural world “to the bleakest window box or inner-city balcony.

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MUIRHEAD`S MYSTERIES:THE MANCHESTER MOTH

Folks, today I want to make a brief mention of what has become known as the Manchester Moth and unfortunately it will have to be very brief because I left my papers on the moth with Lizzy a week or so ago for her to have a look at. I do remember that about 50-60 specimens of this moth were found on Kersal Moor near Manchester but all but about 3 were destroyed by the irate landlady of the habitation of the discoverer because he had spent all his money on drink and could not afford to pay his rent, so she threw his moth collection on the fire!! I do love these 'human interest' stories.

The mystery is how did the moth get there in the first place? It has never been seen since, the other two specimens are in the Natural History Museum in London and in a museum in Melbourne. Dr Dmitri Loganov an entomologist at the Manchester Museum (where the accompanying photographs were taken by myself) believes that caterpillars from either India or the U.S. may have somehow got to a cotton mill near the moor and later developed into moths. So the next stage is to track down entomologists in those countries to see if they have any further information.

Please will you be very kind and NOT reproduce these photos for your own purposes as I am hoping they will get their first showing when The Mystery Animals of Greater Manchester is published in a few months. I may even try and take better ones.

Rich

D E V O S O C I A L F O O L S

If you obey society`s rules
You will be society`s fools
You`ll obey and then disobey
You`ll disobey and then obey
You thought your mum and dad were fools
You never wanted to listen in school
Now your mind wont go
Where you want to take it
You got a ride but you`re not going to make it

GUEST BLOGGER LIZ CLANCY: The Rochdale Goblins

It is always nice to be able to introduce you all to a new guest blogger. Possibly the nicest thing about the CFZ bloggo is that it is a living, breathing community, and new people arrive on a regular basis. I can't tell you anything about Liz, apart from the fact that she bought some books from us at Uncon, briefly spoke to Richard, and had a charmingly old-fashioned habit of referring to me as `Mr Downes`, when everyone else calls me `Jon` or `Hey You` (or somethimes something more scatological), until I told her not to. She is obviously one to watch...

Touchstones is a charming museum, art gallery and local studies centre in Rochdale, Lancashire. It contains a wonderful little café where they serve best peppermint tea I have ever tasted.

My favourite feature in the former Rochdale Central Library building, however, is a small unassuming white telephone tucked up a corner in the local history section. There are actually several of these and not one performs the function intended by Alexander Graham Bell but my favourite will dial up any one of a four local legends provided you press the right button.
According to the over-enthusiastic actress employed to record The Rochdale Goblins (the best of these stories, in my opinion), the people of Saxon Rochdale (or Recedham as it was then known) wanted a parish church on the bank of the river Roche. Plans were drawn up, builders employed and stone was cut.

The morning after the first day’s labour the worker’s returned to the construction site to find it bare. After hunting the surrounding area all day the materials were discovered at the top of a steep hill overlooking the river. Everything was slowly dragged back down to where it should have been and tired but relieved, everyone went home.

Next morning, though, same thing again: all stone and equipment vanished, again to be discovered at the top of the hill. These trials went on for some days until some bright spark suggested the local goblins, who must have been there first, didn’t want the Christian edifice on their land and were responsible for the disruption of the work. It was thus decided Rochdale should take the hint; the church was built on top of the hill overlooking the town and river, consecrated in honour of St. Chad and still stands there to this day; intact and still in use.
Since Touchstones itself is built on the bank of the Roche, though, one must assume that goblins have no objection to cultural centres; either that or they are as fond of peppermint tea as I am.

GUEST BLOGGER LIZ CLANCY: Monkey Town

It is always nice to be able to introduce you all to a new guest blogger. Possibly the nicest thing about the CFZ bloggo is that it is a living, breathing community, and new people arrive on a regular basis. I can't tell you anything about Liz, apart from the fact that she bought some books from us at Uncon, briefly spoke to Richard, and has a charming habit of referring to me as `Mr Downes`, when everyone else calls me `Jon` or `Hey You` (or somethimes something more scatological). She is obviously one to watch....

It was from the friendly little town of Heywood in Lancashire that I descended on UnCon in November 2008 for the first ever time. I was looking for anything to do with ape-men and I was not disappointed. I sat like a five-year-old at story-time through Richard Freeman’s almasty talk (genuinely convinced he had caught one and would bring it out any second; I even primed my camera just in case!) and bought every book on the CFZ stall that mentioned Bigfoot in the contents list.

You see, British Bigfoot has fascinated me since childhood. Growing up in nearby Rochdale I heard tales of Heywood, or Monkey Town (or Ape Town) as residents and neighbours call it: a little mill town where the people have long brown tails and the pubs have holes in the bar stools to accommodate said appendages. This was a place where monkey-men and human apes roamed the streets and local woodland; where it wasn’t safe for ordinary men and women to walk alone lest they be accosted by Roddy McDowell’s less benevolent cousins.

When I moved to this place of wonder almost three years ago I eagerly cased out the local pubs with my mate Donna for incomplete bar-room furniture. I took the dog to the Roch Valley Nature Reserve in case Bigfoot lurked under the footbridge over the river like the troll from the old fairy tale.

Alas, my hopes have recently been dashed. Ape Town has a railway line and a station; now mainly used by the East Lancashire Railway Preservation Society; and this line was built by Irish navvies who pronounced the Heap Bridge section “Ape Bridge.” The nickname stuck and ever since Heywood has been proud to call itself Monkey Town.

There is a little hope, however: on a recent late-night walk through town I did notice a group of very suspicious-looking hominids in black tracksuits, swigging beer and puffing on spliffs at the back of Morrison's.

GLEN VAUDREY: The lost grey seal of Dobby's Lock

Whenever I find myself in a new place with a few hours to spare I try to visit the local museum to see what cryptozoological delights it might contain. While I have yet to find an example of anything resembling either a stuffed almasty or a glass case containing a giant spider with a body the size of a dinner plate I have nevertheless spotted a few items of interest.

The first thylacine I saw (don’t get too excited it was stuffed) was in a dusty cabinet in of all places Kendal museum, it was a while ago and all I remember about it was that it had a vague hint of purple about it. Having taken a few pictures of the unfortunate creature I then promptly misplaced them and it would be over ten years before they resurfaced. Frustrating as the search for those photographs had been I had at least the knowledge that I hadn’t lost a photo of a live thylacine.

The next rather surprising animal that I found was an out of place seal. You could say that being stuffed and put on a plinth in Warrington museum is about as out of place as a marine mammal could get and you wouldn’t be far wrong. What was truly remarkable about this grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) was how it found its way into the museum’s collection.

It was on the 17th June 1908 that the lock keeper at the delightfully named Dobby’s Lock on the River Mersey two miles upstream from Warrington noticed something unexpected in the water, an adult male grey seal. The reason that it was so unexpected is that this point is over twenty miles from the sea and considerably further still from the North Wales coast where it was believed the seal had come from.

For the creature to have reached so far it would have had to have swum up the Mersey as far as Howley weir which it was assumed to have cleared with the help of a high tide, and then continued on its way westward. The seal may have successfully negotiated Howley weir but Dobby’s lock proved more of a challenge.

Despite its obvious desire to make the journey all the way to Manchester the seal managed to get no further than Dobby’s lock for in the all too familiar ending to tales like this it was promptly shot dead. It then took a good number of men to drag the 8ft 5in long, 104 stone body out onto the quayside where it was laid out for public viewing, for a small charge of course. Word of the seal soon got around which resulted in the Warrington Museum Committee purchasing and mounting the specimen for the princely sum of £7, money well spent it seems for after it went on display in the museum’s gallery in the summer of 1908 there were an extra 14,000 visitors by the end of that year as a direct result of the interest generated in the fate of one lost grey seal.

GUEST BLOGGER GLEN VAUDREY: Turtle Tales

Glen is a very new recruit to Planet CFZ. Indeed, we had never heard from him until a few months ago when he wrote - slightly diffidently - to us, asking whether he could write a volume in our ongoing series The Mystery Animals of The British Isles. We asked him for a proposed synopsis and a sample of his writing, and were overawed by what we received. Here was a man who loved both words and the countryside, and could use one to describe the other in poetic but always down to earth terms. We were beginning to come to the conclusion that here was someone that Bob Marley would have described as a `Natural Mystic`, when the final manuscript arrived, and we knew that we were right. So we asked him to be a guest blogger..

The only sighting of a cryptozoological nature that I can claim to have had was of a turtle, well actually it was three turtles, which used to pop out from the murky depths of the shopping trolley-choked waters of a cutting of the River Irwell, known locally as the Old River, in a town called Irlam.

Many a warm day you could sit in the beer garden of the pub that stands on the riverbank and watch not only the rats scurry about but also out on the still water the three turtles sitting on their own special half-submerged log, what type they were I couldn’t say unless there is a breed out there called the ‘German coal scuttle helmet turtle’. But that was years ago when I was still living in the sunny outskirts of Manchester.

These days my knowledge of turtles is still just as poor but fortunately you don’t need a great deal of knowledge to spot turtle stories in the press. Earlier this month the Edinburgh Evening News (10th January) featured a story about a pig nosed turtle under the delightful if questionable headline ‘Club’s turtle is a real stud’. The article told the tale of Hugo the pig nosed turtle that had for the last six years been living in a tank inside an Edinburgh night club, El Barrio. He might well have lived there for a lot longer if it hadn’t been for renovation work at the club, this meant Hugo had to go and so the plucky shelled fellow has found himself heading off to the Scarborough Sea Life and Marine Sanctuary where it is hoped he will become part of a breeding program.

Now if Hugo had been a marine turtle the future would have been a little different. Last June the BBC website told the tale of two loggerhead turtles that had been washed ashore. The first turtle, with the rather sensible name of James, washed up at Blackrock beach, Bude on the 26 January 2008, with a second one, unfortunately named Dink, turning up a week later on Putsborough Beach, Woolacombe. After five months rehabilitation the two loggerhead turtles were flown out to Las Palmas, Gran Caneria to be released back into the wild.

And what you may ask is the point of this tale? Well it seems that if you are a rescued turtle there is no such thing as Sun, Sea and Sex. You either get the sun and the sea or just the sex.