Seven wonders of UK wildlife
Starring a fish out of water, a flesh-eating plant and a bug that flies backwards...
Big mammals, venomous reptiles, walking fish, flesh-eating plants...
1 BRITAIN’S LARGEST LAND MAMMAL
There is nothing like the spectacle of a red deer stag in fullantlered glory to make you realise we have some very special animals on our tiny island. Cervus elaphus is Britain’s largest land mammal: a stag can reach 4½ feet at the shoulder; its antlers can account for at least another two feet. Red deer are numerous in Scotland, with scattered populations in the rest of the country including Norfolk, the Lake District, Exmoor and the New Forest. See stags fighting during the autumn rut and you won’t forget it in a while. The stags’ roaring bellows drift on the wind, along with a rather musky scent which they spread around their skins by wallowing in mud. Then antler cracks against antler, a very specific sound that has echoed down the glens for millennia. The battle determines who will mate with the herd of hinds – the old defender or the younger foe. If you thought we didn’t have any large, exciting animals then think again – and keep your distance.
2 A FISH THAT CROSSES LAND
Take a walk by a river on a wet night and you might be surprised to see a long, smooth fish moving through the grass. Eels can travel across land, moving from one water body to another through the darkness. A lover of slowflowing lowland rivers and fens, the life-cycle of Anguilla anguilla is a fascinating one. It all starts 3000 miles away in the Sargasso Sea where eggs are fertilised and hatch into larvae that float and drift across the Atlantic, developing into glass eels and heading for freshwater once they reach Britain’s estuaries. Here they grow into adolescent elvers, and then adults, spending up to 30 years in our rivers, feeding on snails, crayfish, tadpoles and fish eggs. When they’re ready to breed they turn silver and return across all those miles to the Sargasso Sea to spawn. Oblivion awaits: once they’ve fulfilled their life’s task, they die where they were born. For thousands of years eels have been an important food source for us, and wicker eel traps dating back into prehistory have been found buried in ancient river silts. In the 1800s eels as long as five feet and as heavy as 20lb were captured; numbers have recently dropped drastically though, and they are now an endangered species.
3 EMPEROR OF AIR AND WATER
Along canals and by lakes between June and August you might just bump into an emperor. Emperor dragonfly, that is. With a four-inch wingspan, this is Britain’s largest dragonfly, and most common in southern England and Wales. Males are pale blue, females greener, but both can be identified by a continuous black stripe down the back. Males are extremely territorial, waging fierce midair battle and sometimes tearing sections of wing off each other. All emperors are skilled aviators able to fly as fast as 30mph, as well as sideways and even backwards as they hunt insects and other smaller dragonfly species. The first two years of an emperor’s life are spent underwater as a nymph, but even here they are top predators, catching tadpoles by shooting out a hooked lip. In early summer, the larva will crawl up a reed stem and emerge as a winged adult from the shell of its former self: you can sometimes spot the exquisitely detailed exuvia left on a stalk. Just a few weeks of life await Anax imperator, but what freedom.
4 THE OLDEST TREES
In Perthshire, right at the geographical heart of Scotland, there’s a village called Fortingall, and in the corner of its churchyard is a ring of ancient yew trunks. In fact, they are the remnants of a single tree, whose heart wood rotted away long ago. Its age? Somewhere in the region of 2000 and 3000 years, although some say it could be as much as 9000 years old. And it’s now starting to change sex. The main tree is male, but one outer branch has recently started to produce berries, which is a trait of the female yew. Over 500 churches in Britain have yew trees in their grounds: some pre-date the church buildings and were thought to be sites of pagan worship. Yews were thought to help protect and purify the dead, yet every part of Taxus baccata except the aril (the red fleshy part of the berry) is highly toxic. In fact 50 grams of yew needles is enough to poison an adult and there have been many murders in history where yew was the chosen toxin. A lover of limestone soils, yews are widespread through the south and east of England, with a few cropping up in mountainous areas. A mature specimen can reach a height of 65 feet.
5 THE VENOMOUS SERPENT
The adder, on the face of it, should be considered one of Britain’s most dangerous creatures: its bite can kill a human. In reality, they tend to shyness and prefer to slither away long before we see them, and the last fatality was in 1975 (although any bite is serious and hospital treatment should be sought). These handsome snakes are identified by a dark zigzag down the spine and a V-shape on the head and are present all over mainland Britain. As cold-blooded reptiles they need to warm their bodies with energy from the sun and can most often be spotted basking, sometimes on the open ground of a footpath. Vipera berus can live to
Somewhere “Its age? in the region of 2000 and 3000 years, although some say it could be as much as 9000 years old. ”
6 THE FLESH-EATING PLANTS
Just like something out of Little Shop of Horrors, there are plants in this country that like to eat animals. Admittedly, the creatures they munch are very small insects and other invertebrates, but it’s nice to know we have flora to rival the Venus fly trap.
There are three families of carnivorous plant in Britain: sundews, bladderworts and butterworts. And why do they eat insects? Typically these species grow on damp, peaty uplands, in acid-rich environments that are low in nutrients, so the plants trap and ingest bugs to supplement their diet. Bladderworts live in water, with nodules – or bladders – on their submerged stems that open and close in a fraction of a second to trap whatever is swimming by. Butterworts ( flower pictured right) look like pale green starfish, and secrete a sticky substance from their leaves to trap prey, while sundews have hair-like tendrils with droplets at the end that glisten like dew. Insects are lured in, get stuck, and the leaf slowly curls up to digest the dying bug. And there’s no tricking these plants. Charles Darwin experimented with feeding them steak, cheese and pebbles, and found they only react to ones they can digest.
7 BRITAIN’S GREATEST TRAVELLER
The Arctic tern is a bird that chases summer from one pole to the other, flying a staggering 55,000 miles every year. In April they fly north to breed; in August they return south to Antarctica, clocking up two summers and eight months in perpetual daylight. About 53,000 pairs nest on the coasts of Scotland and a few places south of the border like Anglesey and the Farne Islands, but their main breeding grounds are up in the Arctic – as the name suggests. These beautiful white birds with black caps and tail streamers are also known as sea swallows, and you might also spot them on migration at inland reservoirs and lakes, where you can distinguish them from the common tern by their all red bill (common terns have a black tip to their beak). And these Sterna paradisaea can live up to 30 years, covering more than 1½ million miles on those fragile wings.