While I have some speedy access....

.....the last couple of weeks here has been amazing; on what turned out to be my last day's diving here last friday we scored 3 turtles, 4 sting rays, a nurse shark and an 8 foot plus diameter eagle ray (so big that my first reaction was manta). There have been sharks on most dives (a few people are reporting seeing more around at the moment) and yesterday a quick stop passing a random salt pond produced a shock 4 flamingos as well as a load of migrating waders. Sadly this time tomorrow I'll be at the airport preparing to depart. I'm not going straight to my new location however; there'll be some brief wanderings in search of sharks, mega-reptiles and a few other bits and bobs of interest. Updates may be limited for another week or so though I'm afraid.

Worldless wednesday - Dioon edule

Roadside racer

I pulled over on a dirt road the other day to make a phone call and having finished my chat, heard a rustle in the vegetation nearby. This curious and big Antillean racer was watching me intently.

This is the anegadan subspecies; Alsophis porturicensis anegadae and would eat skinks, ameiva and perhaps (but hopefully not) the odd rare iguana hatchling. Though treated as non-venomous, it seems these guys probably have a mild venom that will knock over small lizards and mammals (and occasionally cause swelling in bitten humans). Speaking of small lizards, tomorrow I hope to photograph something amazingly cool to show you all - if it doesn't happen tomorrow it won't happen at all so keep your fingers crossed for me.

Hmmm......

Still suffering from poor internet access (and packing up the house) so posting will probably be sporadic until next week at least. Sorry guys. Notwithstanding the painfully slow loading time and the fact that this is not the sort of thing I usually post, I couldn't resist sharing this shot of my camera table taken just before I packed it up. You may notice something that should not be there.......

PS - the last few weeks we've been seeing a lot of turtles and sharks; I've got some very cool underwater shots stacked up for you

Hedge Pt III: Fruits....

As we've seen hedges can provide wonderful habitats for birds and small mammals offering food and shelter. One of the more obvious ways in which they can help is where the plants chosen produce a lot of food in the form of fruit, nuts and berries. We'll look at berry producing hedgerow shrubs in another post but in this post I'll be dealing with some fruiting hedgerow shrubs and trees that will be familiar to most people. I've posted before about hedgerow apples arising from throwaway cores and also about crabapple cultivars but in this hedge what I had in mind were simple wild crabapples that would produce an abundance of small round fruit for the birds and perhaps supplement our crabapple jelly production a little. What I got when they started fruiting years later was this:

As you can see its unquestionably a cultivated fruit apple of some kind. I think what happened was this. The crabapple plants and a number of others were given to us as spares by a grower who had produced a load of native plants for the local council. It turned out later he had also produced some plants of the county's own heirloom apple cultivars (most counties in the UK have (or had) their own apple cultivars for years many of which are now lost or rare) and I'm guessing these are some of them or seedlings influenced by them. It doesn't really matter; thrushes and blackbirds will still tuck in and if I was doing this again on a bigger scale I'd be tempted to throw in wild crab apples, cutting grown (as opposed to grafted) crabapple cultivars and some random apple core seedlings in to see what sort of a mix of colour and size I ended up with (all I need now is the lottery win which will let me buy a farm to rehedge!). The same chap helpfully provided some "wild pear" which seem to be of a similar semi-wild origin. Like apples these will provide fruit for the birds and small mammals as well as insect attracting flowers.

We obtained some "true wild pears" from elsewhere so I'll await their development and fruit with interest too. The "truly wild" relatives of a couple of other fruits made it into the hedge. These were the wild cherry or gean (Prunus avium):

And the cherry plum (Prunus cerasifera)

Anyone who has tried to get a crop of their domestic relatives will be well aware of how much these fruits are appreciated by the birds. I was surprised by how big the cherry plums were; impressive fruit for what is still a small specimen. If one wants to get a bit clever, one option is to do away with wild forms and hedge entirely with things that produce fruits for human consumption (a "fedge" is the term frequently used for this but that's just ridiculous), you can even choose larger fruiting species of thorn as a base to take this to a higher level. Its worth noting that most of these species fruit better as trees and some will not fruit at all if the hedge is very neatly pruned. If like me, you like your hedges a little shaggy you'll be fine but the other option is to choose certain specimens to prune into trees rising above your neatly pruned hedge.