SEA MONSTER ON EBAY

Fleur wrote yesterday to tell us about this item on eBay. They are two hand-coloured woodcuts on one leaf from the classic German edition of Pliny the Elder translated by Johann Heydens. They are from 1565, and my avaricious heart wants them.

But they are, as Fleur points out, a bit pricey...

The museum will have to do without this time.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=400066288368

FLEUR FULCHER: Be more reserved

Over, once again, to the divine Ms F. who is discovering the joys of the English countryside.

There are dozens of nature reserves in my county, Devon, and I'm sure there isn't a county in the country that hasn't got at least a handful. We've taken to going to these reserves, inititally because of a lack of money but now because it is truly our favourite thing to do. Meshaw Moor, a small reserve, was the one we've been to most, in the few times we've been we haven't seen a single other person there but we have seen a huge variety of wildlife; marbled white butterflies, skippers, spiders, a barn owl and baby toads to name but a few.

The plant life is also spectacular, I've started going through the website of the Devon Wildlife Trust and looking for the plants with the best names - corky fruited water dropwort anyone?

The DWT's 'Little Bradley Ponds' have been our latest discovery and again we've not seen anyone else there; this was partly a shame as it is such a marvellous place and partly wonderful as we had the whole place just to the three of us. They have recorded over 20 types of dragon and damsel flies at these ponds as well as the acely named giant water scorpion, which we have yet to catch a glimpse of (pond-dipping nets at the ready).

Yesterday's trip to the ponds was extra spectacular as we saw one of the most elusive (although common) of this country's beasts: nudging over some rotten wood we saw some little dark shapes run off into the plants; a closer looked showed them to be juvenile common lizards. This, combined with several butterflies I've never seen before (brimstone, and a blue butterfly I haven't looked up yet; lazy, I know). These trips have also helped me like spiders a little more, as instead of thinking their only aim in life is to land on my bed with a size-inappropriate THUD in the middle of the night, I now like watching them zoom out of their funnel shaped webs and grab some poor minibeast or other.

So, drag yourself, your partner, your mum, children, friends and possibly the dog along to your nearest reserve and I promise that the next time you go there will be no dragging involved.

STRANGE SOUDAN SOFTSHELL

Some weeks ago, when Fleur last visited, we showed her this. It is a softshell turtle carapace, which was donated to us by Lionel Beer from the collection of his late father. It has the word `Soudan` written inside, so presumably is African in origin.

It is interesting because of the unusually large fleshy `skirt` around it, which does seem atypical for normal softshell turtles, and even for the flapshell turtles (Cyclanorbis).

Fleur wrote to us afterwards:


Hello Jon, I found this on a site about ethnography; as you can see it is very similar to the shell you have and yours does have 'soudan' written on it. Obviously this one has been shaped as a shield and yours has not but it does look a lot like it.

The original posting includes this sentence:

"You find this type in the southern Soudan and different nilotic tribes are possible. Attached mine from the Bari. The shell is very hard and in my opinion a very good protection for every stick fighting match."

ANOTHER TERATOLOGICAL TURTLE

Another strange turtle freak from the peculiar website that Fleur found...

Yes, two heads!

This Yellow Belly was that one in a million born with two heads.

It was born in June, and has been doing very well ever since.

It is well past the early fragile stage. The head on the turtle's left is the dominant one.

Both heads feed and move independently.

Considering it's extreme rarity, special care should be given to be sure the turtle is set up in an easily navigated, turtle-friendly environment.

The keeper who orders this turtle will truly have something very special....

I am in a moral conundrum here. On one side I think that there is something very morally dubious about selling lusus naturae to people as pets. The whole ethos of responsible pet keeping as promoted by our magazine The Amateur Naturalist is that when wild animals are kept in captivity it should be as a celebration of the diversity of wildlife in the world, and in as natural a habitat as possible. This is the most un-natural wild animal that one could possibly hope for.

But golly, I want one.

http://www.theturtlesource.com/turtle_subcat.asp?id=125698412

FLEUR FULCHER: Latest internship diary

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. She is spending the summer as an intern at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. This is her story....

Sorry for the large break in diaries, but I've been a busy thing of late. My placement at RAMM continued to be excellent, having worked on a more complicated whale rib. I have now learned how to use a product called microballoons (tiny glass spheres) to mend the bone as well as pigments and paints to colour the infill. My confidence at colour matching has increased dramatically.

A fellow intern and I have been doing a brief survey of some of the Natural History collections, including the fascinating bird's eggs collections, some of which were given by the police after being confiscated from rather naughty oologists of the illegal type.

The Natural History collection at RAMM is large and encompasses many things, from Moa bones to mongooses (mongeese?), from mantises to mosses. All of it is very interesting and a lot is of very good quality. This resource is a treasure for the local community and for scholars of the subject and it is lovely to find a museum that values its Natural History collections. This placement has made me more sure that I wish to specialise in Natural History conservation and I hope to take a course in the next couple of years that will enable me to work with specimens preserved in liquid (how very Hogwarts).

Some of the surveying has led to some marvellous things to look at: a cabinet full of tiny jewel-coloured hummingbirds, a replica elephant-bird egg, a selection of tiger skulls and an Eskimo curlew being amongst them.

Many museums and a minority of the general public feel that Natural History collections are unfashionable, and sometimes politically incorrect (oh how I hate that phrase!) due to the 'colonialness' of things like taxidermied animals and animal heads. This is misleading as these items not only provide scientific information on animals but also a look into the attitudes people in the past had to animals and their habitats.

At RAMM there are bones - and even skins - of many extinct animals. There are a large quantity of Moa bones, a partial moa egg, Diprotodon bones, an Eskimo curlew and several passenger pigeons. No matter how these were collected they are undoubtedly very important and should be (and are being) looked after carefully and well.

I now have a month off from my placement, but I hope to write some other things during that time. I return to RAMM in August and shall resume this diary.

The Stone Curlew pic is, of course, copyright to RAMM and is used with their permission.

TERATOLOGY: STRANGE HALVED TURTLE

What is it with Fleurie and lusus naturae?

Once again it was Fleur who pointed this one out. She sent me the link at the bottom of this page purely because she knows that I am fond of turtles. However, have a butchers at this one. It is priced at two hundred bucks, which is not particularly steep for a creature like this. The website blurb reads:

This one of a kind turtle hatched with a color anomaly like no other... It's entire right side is very dark with lots of black coloration. The same for its feet and right side of it's head. The left side is light or normally colored.

The left feet, and side of the head are also light, or normally colored.

What triggered this anomaly is possibly a geneticist's dream project... (It calls to mind an episode of the original Star Trek series.) This turtle is 6 weeks old, doing very well and behaves exactly like a normal colored Yellow Bellied Slider.

If it were an insect I would say that it was a halved gynandromorph, but a turtle?

http://www.theturtlesource.com/turtle_subcat.asp?id=125698412

TERATOLOGY: White (but not albino) stag

Fleur writes: I know this video is ancient but I thought you'd like it and greatly dislike the majority of comments on it....

FLEUR SENT US...

...this collection of natural history specimens from a Texas museum. Good stuff.

Donated by the Nations family and collected by D.A. Cleveland starting in 1880, there are more than 150 species of bird eggs on display. Three of the species are extinct. B.F. Hicks – Mt. Vernon Historical Society “Knowing that there were 161 Passenger Pigeon eggs left on the planet earth, and only 27 Carolina Parakeet eggs left, we spent $55,000 making this small room with the climate control and the lighting, and up to national archive standards and brought in Smithsonian experts and consultants to do it right.”...

Read On

KIWI WITH WEIRD FOOT

Fleur Fulcher drew our attention to this:

Sometime before 1938 a Mr C. Haylock collected a kiwi with an unusual foot near Kawhia. The left foot lacked pigment and was presumably a pale pinkish colour in contrast to the normal brown of the kiwi's leg and foot. Now, as a dried specimen, the foot looks like it has been dipped into a tray of whitewash. In all other ways the kiwi's colouration is normal. It is a half-grown bird and is an example of the North Island brown kiwi (Apteryx mantelli), found originally in forest throughout the North Island but now much reduced in range as a result of habitat destruction and the impact of predatory mammals. Albino individuals turn up occasionally in most bird species, as they do among humans.

Partial albinos are also common in birds, for example, the common blackbirds are sometimes seen about town with patches of white plumage. The Kawhia kiwi is presumably a partial albino.

FLEUR'S INTERNSHIP DIARIES

The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that Fleur's diaries are back online, courtesy of those jolly nice folks at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. I think that I may have been a trifle premature with my comments yesterday (which have been removed, by the way), because they apparently have given young Fleur permission to go full steam ahead with her blog-journal.

So all's well that ends well....

FLEUR FULCHER: Fleur's Internship Diary Weeks Four and Five

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. She is spending the summer as an intern at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. This is her story.......

It has been a hectic two weeks both at work and at home, so I can only apologise for the missing week from my internship diary.

Last week started with me in Launceston; I had wanted to be allowed to help the curators to see how they work. Tony Eccles, the curator of Ethnography let me help him take down an exhibition about the great plant collectors of the Veitch nurseries. They had by the outbreak of World War one introduced 1281 plants to the west, including over 200 orchids and the Pocket Handkerchief tree we have one of in our garden.

The rest of the week was taken up with more shells including the prettiest ones yet and more herbarium. On the Friday I was again helping Tony, we took some rather ace objects to be photographed. My favourite was a Tongan club.

This week we have been doing a variety of things, yet more shells, even more herbarium action and condition checking the Cuvier's Beaked whale skeleton which is being remounted.

On being told that there was a Moa skeleton in the stores, I found it whilst looking for a whale rib and took a few pictures. On Friday I also saw a specimen of Passenger Pigeon, a bird whose story I'm sure you're all familiar with. It looked ordinary; not being an ornithologist I wouldn't have thought it unusual if it appeared in my garden. But nonetheless seeing it in such close proximity was quite emotional, it was on a table, between a pair of hummingbirds and the shell of a small turtle.

Friday afternoon found Catherine crawling around finding bits of bamboo under a tiger (one of 39 shot in 10 days by George V, the git), and found me checking pest traps as we had found a couple of live booklice, in one of them were two odd looking insects I couldn't identify, on asking some of my superiors they couldn't identify it either although the Assistant Natural History curator thought it was a type of winged Psocid (booklouse) however we were unsure if he was right and may send photographs of it to an expert. It was a rather long legged, bristly winged beastie of about 2 or 3 mm in length. Maybe I shall include a pic of it next week if I can.

So all in all I am still loving my work placement and hope that I can get a job in a museum like the one I'm working at now.

Fleur's bosses at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum have been kind enough to allow her to write this blog, even though it is not usually their policy to allow such things. We would like to thank them for this, and to point out that all pictures of museum specimens are copyright to the RAMM

TERATOLOGY - LOST AND FOUND - FROM FLEUR

How does the dear girl do it? Fleur Fulcher seems to have adopted the mantle of "Little Miss Teratology"

this season, but her latest find - a missing cat with extra toes - takes the proverbial bicsuit.

Well done dear

FLEUR FULCHER: Fleur's Internship Diary Week Three

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. She is spending the summer as an intern at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. This is her story.......

This week started the same as the others, with more shell cleaning, this week it was some rather amazing looking Jamaican snail shells, some as small as 2mm across, thankfully all remained intact after my ministrations. We also got to watch as a whale skeleton was moved, so that parts of it could be cleaned and then put back. Apparently it is a Cuvier's Beaked Whale and shall be displayed when the museum re-opens.

The most fun part of the week, however, was Friday when we were checking the herbarium for pests; whilst vacuuming and checking we found many things, chunks of rock with 100 year old lichen on, huge dried mushrooms in old soap boxes, and lots of plant samples in old envelopes with Victorian stamps on. My fellow intern found a book-louse, a tiny little thing which enjoys munching on books and suchlike objects.

After finding this, the box it was in was quickly wrapped with polythene and parcel tape to be frozen, whilst this may seem mean to the louse, it is apparently a humane (louse-ane?) way of killing them. Museum pests are actually quite interesting and some are moderately cute even if they are in the wrong place, drugstore beetle is my current favourite.

Less charming are spiders, who, althought they don't eat the objects do leave poo all over them that is quite hard to clean off!!

This internship has made me love what I do even more than before, and I've learnt a huge amount.

Many museums require volunteers even if you haven't a related qualification, so why not get involved? You get to see many things that aren't visible to the public, and get a new view on how museums work.

Fleur's bosses at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum have been kind enough to allow her to write this blog, even though it is not usually their policy to allow such things. We would like to thank them for this, and to point out that all pictures of museum specimens are copyright to the RAMM

FLEUR FULCHER: Fleur's internship diary week 2

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. She is spending the summer as an intern at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. This is her story.......

We have been continuing with the cleaning of shells and their boxes, which despite predictions to the contrary I still love. In fact I am starting to wonder why I never found snails interesting previously the most delicate object yet was some 100 year old freeze dried snail eggs.

This week we also learnt more about how the documentation works in a museum, something which my fellow intern grasped far more quickly than I. I did, however, get to help with the wrapping of a donated Rhino horn for freezing. Objects such as that horn have to be frozen when aquired to kill any pests that may be living within.

When working on the shells we were on the lookout for Byne's disease, which oddly is not a disease at all but rather efflorecense caused by a reaction with acid vapours in the air. the beautiful wooden cabinets that such collections are often kept in are one cause of these vapours.

Working at a rate of about 200-300 shells a day there are still many days of shells left, but there are other projects to be working on, these might include historic man-traps, helping check the stores for signs of pests and helping to freeze objects that need it.

We've met more of the other museum staff, and I'm starting to understand more about how a museum works. Catherine went to South Molton museum to help with putting up an exhibition, and next time I shall be helping in a different museum.

A similarity I have noticed between members of the CFZ and the people I work with is a noted fondness for cakes of various types.

Fleur's bosses at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum have been kind enough to allow her to write this blog, even though it is not usually their policy to allow such things. We would like to thank them for this, and to point out that all pictures of museum specimens are copyright to the RAMM

More Gynandromorph Fun

Totally coincidentally, as I was writing the article explaining gynandromorp[hs, Fleurie sent this link with some amazing pictures of a halved gynandromorph swallowtail....

http://www.pbase.com/bob_r/mutant

FLEUR'S INTERNSHIP DIARY - Week One

When I was younger I visited the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter a lot, sometimes once or twice a month as it was free.


The exhibits that appealed to me most were the animals and the shells, the animals were in a big room, a tiger shot by a king, a hippo and a giraffe with, apparently the tail of a cow.


The shells were upstairs in beautiful wooden cabinets that I still covet to this day.


I have just finished my diploma in Conservation (Museum Coservation: The job of being a conservator, who restores and maintains museum exhibits) and am starting the MA in September so I needed a placement. Having got a summer internship with the conservation team at RAMM along with my friend Catherine we are becoming very well acquainted with the shells, there are about 30,000 and all need to be checked and cleaned to go in their snazzy new place once the museum reopens.


We are based in a purpose built building in Exeter and I have been gazing upon deceased animals to my heart's content. Hummingbirds, Hippos and Helix pomatia are all there.


This week has been a good learning curve for me, I've learnt to mix up the conservator's adhesive of choice (paraloid), check a stuffed bird which is going on loan (I did mix up left and right until it was pointed out, oops), look round the textiles department (very very lovely!) as well as cleaning over 400 shells.


Being in the Museum Stores also lets one see things that wouldn't normally be on display, there's a real human skeleton, cabinets of birds eggs, butterflies and moths, and the spirit store where all the animals in jars and bottles are kept, the room smells of formaldehyde and looks somewhat like I imagine Professor Snape's office at Hogwarts to look like.
I also met the Curator of Natural History today who was very interesting and explained to us about how the eating habits of certain thrushes can change the populations of snails with different banding patterns and also told me more about Partula snails and the sadly extinct Quagga! Feel free to ask me any questions about conservation, I'll do my best to answer! (and if I don't know I'll ask people who do)

Fleur's bosses at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum have been kind enough to allow her to write this blog, even though it is not usually their policy to allow such things. We would like to thank them for this, and to point out that all pictures of museum specimens are copyright to the RAMM

THE BIG THREE: Fleur Fulcher

A FEW WEEKS AGO WE ASKED VARIOUS BLOGGO REGULARS TO TELL US WHAT WERE THEIR TOP THREE FAVOURITE MYSTERY ANIMALS... AND WHY

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. After a gap of a few weeks during which she has been about her studies, she is back and as charming as usual....

Choosing three cryptids is a little like going into an antiques shop and trying to choose only three things I want.

Of course for me one would be the Moa, the giant flightless bird of New Zealand, it is due to this magnificent mega-fauna that I got into cryptozoology at all and therefore discovered the cfz. Apparently wiped out by 1500 there have nonetheless been reports of them from remote valleys and beaches, a girl, Alice Mckenzie saw what may have been one in 1880 and again in 1889. she herself did not say it was a Moa but thought perhaps it was a Takahe (itself thought extinct at the time) but she realised it wasn’t when she later saw a stuffed Takahe.

There were several types of Moa ranging from the truly gigantic Dinornis robustustus, to the smaller ‘Little scrub moa’ which is the one Rex Gilroy and his wife have great hopes of finding.

Another of my favourites would have to be the tatzelwurm, apparently found in Switzerland. It seems to be some sort of lizard with only small legs, but it makes up in temper what it lacks in legs. Whilst one of these creatures was apparently found dead in 1828 and sent to Heidelburg museum where, as is usual with such bodies, it vanished. There is, however, a photograph of the Tatzelwurm, but as it appears to show a rather cheerful looking carved model I’m not sure how much value should be placed upon it.There are a few pages on this mountain-dwelling marvel in the book ‘Dragons: More than a Myth?’ by Richard Freeman, but I first learnt of it by looking at the wikipedia ‘list of cryptids’ which is a wonderful, if sometimes fairly silly resource for the cash strapped crypto-fan.

The last of my favourites was very hard to choose, and not quite as fun as the lilliputian gin drinking elephants mentioned by Chris Clark. It is the Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), and if I could choose one ‘extinct’ animal that I would want to be rediscovered well and thriving then this would be it. The giant and rather silly looking beast was discovered in 1741 by Georg Steller, although it was already well known to the people native to the lands it lived near. By the time it was discovered by white men the sea cow was already endangered, due to a mixture of over-hunting and lack of algae due to the rising population of sea-urchins. But still, it could have held on to existence if the hunting had been stopped.

The sea cow became extinct in 1768, only 27 years after its official discovery. There have been odd reports ever since from the remote seas where they lived, in 1830 a Polish naturalist was sure he had seen some sea cows on Bering Island and in 1962 Russian Whalers (familiar with the wildlife in those waters) thought they saw a whole group of them.Could they still exist?

I think it unlikely, but I wouldn’t entirely dismiss the possibility.

GUEST BLOGGER GEORGINA EDWARDS: Fox = bad, badger = good?

It is always a pleasure to welcome a new guest blogger, but this is a special pleasure, because it is the first time that we have had two generations of guest bloggers in the same family. Georgina, who was pivotally involved in the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau during the glory years, is also the mother of bloggo regular Fleur Fulcher.....

Foxes are classified as vermin, they can be legally shot. They steal and eat poultry on a comparatively small scale and occasionally take a weak new born lamb. The cost of their actions to the national economy is negligible.They keep down the rabbit, rat and mouse population and by and large do not seem to upset the natural order.

Badgers are protected, they cannot be interfered with in any way without a permit. They transmit bovine tb. The estimated cost of bovine tb to the economy in the year 2003/04 was £89 million, in compensation to farmers, research etc. Not all of this cost can be laid at the door of the national badger set, but a great deal can . The last official badger population survey was in 1997, when it was estimated that badgers had increased by 77% in the previous decade. Current evidence suggests that this increase has continued. There doesn't seem to be an agreed position as to why this should be, although a farmer friend of mine thinks it is partly due to the increased planting of maize. These tall crops allow badgers to travel along new corridors and also give them an additional food supply well into the autumn.

I live in Mid-Devon, I have a large garden and live across the road from farm and woodland. I could take you out almost any night of the year apart from deepest winter and find you a badger, most nights they go through my garden. Several times a year I have to ring the council to get them to take away a dead badger from the road outside.

I suspect that a great many supposed fox predations of poultry are actually down to badgers, although Mr. Reynard is of course the main offender Until I moved here I had no idea that badgers took as many if not more chickens in some areas, than foxes. Unlike foxes, badgers will tear their way into timber chicken houses and if cornered they can be very unpleasant. My nextdoor neighbour, who incidentally happens to be a local Lib-Dem councillor cornered one in his dressing gown at 3am, (the badger of course being in the garden not in the dressing gown).

Now I come to my real gripe. I have lived in Surrey, Hampshire, Somerset, and Dorset . In all these places I have been visited in my garden by my favourite animal the hedgehog and also sadly seen many of them dead on the road. I moved to Mid- Devon nineteen years ago, during that period I have never seen a live hedgehog. I have see a couple dead on the road and saddest of all found one that had been predated by a badger in my garden .

Having done a bit of research before writing this to ensure that I had my facts correct, I am horrified to learn that badgers are not only wiping out the hedgehogs, but are endangering bumblebees and ground nesting birds.

Now I would hate to live in this country without badgers, but would someone explain to me why badgers are protected and foxes considered vermin.

FLEUR FULCHER: Who loves the Beetles

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. After a gap of a few weeks during which she has been about her studies, she is back and as charming as usual....

Whilst I was a bit disgusted by articles (both recent and from a few years back) about Japanese boys making male Stag Beetles fight each other, I wasn’t very surprised. Little boys of all cultures will enjoy fighting and many also enjoy making other creatures fight each other. This doesn’t mean that they will turn into serial killers or even that they perceive it as cruelty. My brother and I (when aged maybe 4 and 5) used to pull centipedes apart and feed ants to fish and so on, but we both love and respect nature now. children are, after all, far closer to being animals than we would like to think.. (and that isn’t a slight on children!)

But some types of stag beetle are getting rarer and the thought that instead of getting a chance to mate they are being made to fight each other in Japanese school cafeterias is a bit of a downer.

However there is a slight positive to this story, apparently many of the boys (and girls?) who own the fighters rear them themselves and enjoy studying them as well as the more brutal side to it. Many of them will doubtless stop the fighting and through their pets come to love the natural world and the fascinating side to many invertibrates.

Leaving Japan alone for now, what about the Stag beetles of the UK? The one that we here refer to as the stag beetle is in fact only one of about 1200 species in the family Lucanidae. Our largest beetle the Lucanus cervus is a charming and intriguing creature, even when I was a squeamish teenager I loved these particular bugs. Living in Epsom there were many of them, you’d find them pootling down the paths in the park, lurking on your (somewhat rotten) doorstep and particularly on Epsom Downs where they have an excellent stag beetle conservation scheme.
But if you happen to live anywhere in their habitat there are things you can do to help these personable little chaps.

On this website you can learn how to make a home for stag beetle larvae - http://ptes.org/index.php?page=211

And if you are lucky enough to own or look after any woodland then you can do your bit by ensuring that some fallen trees remain on the ground to rot and provide the ideal habitat, also compost heaps, wood sheds and wood piles are favourites.

If you know that you do have stag beetles in your garden then you can also help them by keeping your cat indoors during breeding season as cats, magpies and badgers are the main predators of the beetle.

So in conclusion, we all like Stag Beetles, even those Japanese schoolchildren who hopefully will learn from their small charges that it is better to watch them in the wild than to make them fight.

FLEUR FULCHER: Cider with Fleurie

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. After a gap of a few weeks during which she has been about her studies, she is back and as charming as usual....

One of the things I definitely need in the garden of my dream home is an apple tree (or a few apple trees..) I’ve always been rather obsessed with apple trees to tell the truth, the cottage we lived in when I was younger had some large Bramley apple trees and an ancient half rotten sometimes wasp infested Rattler apple tree, this last was the one I claimed ownership of.

But whilst I may wish for orchards galore of traditional varieties, some people are not so keen it seems.

English heritage say that we have lost 60% of our orchards since the 1950s, this is a shame not only because it means we are making less delicious cider but also because traditional orchards are an excellent habitat for many types of wildlife.

Traditional fruit orchards are one of the places where bee numbers are not declining rapidly, the immense amount of blossoms on a fruit tree are heavenly to bees and other insect pollinators.

There is also the fact that many of the fruit varieties being lost may be unique, apple and plum varieties are often local only to one county or even town, at Killerton in Devon there are fruit trees that are found only on one historical estate. So who knows how many types have already gone forever? (whether or not they made decent cider, this is sad)

The rather pretty and odd looking Noble Chafer beetle is one of the creatures that is declining due to its liking of orchard habitat. Beetles especially like well established orchards as the trees are allowed to become old and gnarled and therefore make good homes for them. There are also often stacks of rotting wood in these habitats, ideal for even more creepy crawlies. Another rather nice looking beetle that likes orchards is the Longhorn beetle.

Birds also revel in the orchardy joy, possibly due to the edibleness of the aforementioned crawlies.

The lovely Lesser spotted woodpecker is one who particularly likes fruit trees as they provide ideal homes. Bullfinches, house sparrows and spotted flycatchers are also fans.

The areas around the trees are also important, traditionally grazed by sheep they have rarely seen pesticides or weedkillers and therefore are likely to provide a haven for plants that have become scarce elsewhere.

So if we wish to keep up the biodiversity in England, we should try our best to hang on to our remaining orchards, and therefore all the creatures that make their home there.