Great spots

Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopus major)

Occasionally, we get an unexpected visitor to our feeders. For a while, it was a wary female Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopus major) who snuck in for a quick nibble of sunflower seeds or fat balls every now and then. Her all-black nape identified her as a female; a male would have had a small red patch on the back of his neck. We know there is at least one breeding pair in the neighbourhood, as we regularly see them flying back and forth over the garden, and hear their challenges ringing from the strip of Holm Oaks along a nearby roadway. But we don't often get to see them in the garden itself – too few trees, presumably! 

Great Spots are common and widespread from southern England to southern Scotland, and have recently colonised several areas in Ireland. Unlike the ant-eating Green Woodpecker, they are almost exclusively arboreal, spending little (if any) time on the ground. Their strong claws and stiff tail feathers help them to prop themselves up as they hitch their way up and down tree trunks and branches. The broad white wing stripe and bright red undertail help to separate them from the smaller (but also black and white) Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, which lacks the stripe and the red undertail. Sadly, Lesser Spots are now very rare in the U.K. and would certainly be extremely unlikely in our garden. Like all woodpeckers, Great Spots feed primarily on insects, but will also eat some seeds, particularly conifer seeds. They're also know to take bird eggs and nestlings.

Against the wall

Wall Screw-Moss (Tortula muralis)

While most of the garden goes into some level of hibernation for the winter, mosses are an exception. Right now, many of them are in their prime – lush and green and studded with numerous spore capsules. Our windowsills, roof tiles, and the top of the stone wall between ours and a neighbouring property are currently bristling with the lance-straight sporophytes of Wall Screw-Moss (Tortula muralis). This is one of the commonest mosses on brick and stone in Britain, and one of the first that neophytes like us learn to identify. Like the Grey-cushioned Grimmia (Grimmia pulvinata), this one has a long hair (called a "nerve") that extends from the tip of each leaf, as seen in the picture below. (Click on the picture to see it at a larger size.) Its leaves, when wet, like now, are bright green and opaque, developing into little cushions about a centimetre high. When it's dry, as in the summer, those nerves make the moss look frosty grey. Currently, the spore capsules end in spiky caps, but once the spores have finished developing, those caps will drop off. Then, a network of twisted hairs known as the peristome (the partial remnants of dead cells) which surround the mouth of the spore capsule will help to ensure that the spores are dispersed gradually rather than all at once. Given the vast number of little colonies sprinkled throughout the garden, this must be a pretty successful strategy.

Showing the twisted peristomes