When you live an urban existence, you are aware of the natural world alongside you, but the pace of life can make it rather easy to spend most of your time somewhat oblivious to it. In fact, if you walk outside your house on a quiet sunny day and switch on your eyes and ears, it can feel like stepping into a different world, and when you start to really look around you the complexity of sights and sounds can be quite overwhelming.
The beauty of the Ealing Wildlife Group, aside from running an array of wildlife-centred activities for the local community, is that the Facebook group supplies a bespoke guide to the surprisingly vast natural world on your London doorstep.
Stand outside after reading a few day’s posts and it feels like you’ve put on a pair of augmented reality glasses, scanning the environment and overlaying the points of interest in your field of vision… Hobby nest, Marbled White butterfly, Cinnabar moth, Pipistrelle bat. The daily stream of pictures and comments about wildlife right here in Ealing provides a perfect scaffold from which to learn.
The fauna that comes up most often on the feed is naturally the most common and you find yourself effortlessly becoming familiar with them so that over time your attention shifts to the next rung on the learning ladder.
I noticed I’d gained enough of a hang of the plentiful and diverse local birdlife to want to shift my attention to the sometimes overlooked local insects, which are beautifully presented in technicolour on the group pages.
The perfect chance to engage with these critters came when the Biological Recording Company offered their expert leadership up to the amateur community invertebrate surveyors to join them in a weekend survey of Paradise Fields on Horsenden Hill in Greenford!
The feeling of stepping into another world became positively Narnian when I met up with the group in a busy metropolitan retail park in Greenford. The shops were bustling on a hot Saturday morning but as we travelled a few short paces through an underpass beneath the roadway, we emerged into a tranquil woodland basin of forest, meadows, and wetlands.
In conversation on all sides I started to catch excited mentions of the new residents that were expected to soon be arriving in the local waterways… none other than Mr and Mrs Beaver; I won’t go on with the humanising, there are interesting debates arising about the pros and cons of naming them. After a highly informative briefing by Citizen Zoo’s Elliot Newton, we set off down this exciting section of the capital ring footpath.
This location has been carefully chosen by a consortium of local community-driven conservation groups, including Ealing Wildlife Group, to pilot the reintroduction of Beavers into our urban landscape. I had heard of the project in passing and this was an amazing opportunity to find out more about it and see where they were going to be.
Known as ecological engineers the Beavers are expected to bring a host of benefits to the Ealing ecosystem. As we headed for the undergrowth on a thick carpet of dry wood and bracken that was the very definition of the word kindling, I did wonder if one of the benefits of the Beavers could be wildfire prevention.
Their damming activity is expected to lock more water into the habitats of Paradise Fields basin; situated in a gentle hollow that insulates it from surrounding traffic noise. Paradise Fields is a haven for vertebrate and invertebrate life with habitat variety in abundance.
The very first swipe of my sweep net turned up a tiny but vibrantly metallic-looking beetle, identified by a more knowledgeable group member as a Willow Leaf Beetle (Plagiodera versicolora). If the Beavers increase the water locked in the land here I imagine Willow Leaf Beetles, living on Willow tree leaves, might do quite well.
This brought into focus how the small changes brought by the new species can have quite a transformative effect on the relative abundances of other flora and fauna. So it was great to see and take part in, a small part of how these changes will be carefully monitored and studied.
As we continued our walk, it was brilliant to be with a group of people who appreciate that stopping every two minutes to look under a leaf is far and away the most fun way to take a walk. I quickly learned one of my most valuable takeaways from the day, that I’d been using a field magnifying glass wrong my whole life and you are supposed to squint with both glass and insect right up to your eye to really see the insect (or arachnid) in all their sensilla filled glory!
So what did we find?
A number of species that I’d seen photographed on the Facebook group but hadn’t seen myself before. A Cucumber Spider (Araniella sp) that really did look exactly like a little homegrown cucumber, or watermelon! Followed by a Cricket Bat Spider (Mangora acalypha). “Why is it called that?” someone asked, then gasped as they looked with the magnifier and saw it sporting an intricate and perfectly formed cricket bat motif on its back.
A Seven-spotted Ladybird (Coccinella septempunctata), which is the only thing I could feel confident to name to species level on my own, but everybody has to start somewhere. It was delightful to watch in my sample vial, on its back, wriggling its little legs about in the air, before being sent on its way.
Several beautiful moths and butterflies graced us, like the Cinnabar and Marbled White, and the slightly less showstopping but important nonetheless, Veneer moth. We saw Large Skippers, and Small Skippers though never side by side to tell which was which.
There were many shield bugs which were surprisingly varied and characterful; I was rather fond of the Bishop’s Mitre Shieldbug (Aelia acuminata) with its sturdy look and pointed head.
By midafternoon I was confidently discussing the distinctly ridged nature of its pronotum!
The ground underfoot was mentioned to be 50-million-year-old London Clay. The clayey soil in part of the meadow was so dry in this hottest June on record, that it had huge cracks six inches wide and twice as deep running in veins across its surface making it difficult to traverse.
A few weeks earlier, before the heat set in, it had been much wetter and was sampled for Earthworms by our expert survey leader. A rare, saddled variety had been found, but there was nothing to be seen there now. The Beavers may well aid climate resilience and make the hard dry soil a lot more Earthworm friendly.
A dead Heron turned a couple of heads as the more seasoned entomologists amongst us recognised this as an opportunity for seeking out certain species that may well be taking advantage of the carcass. They didn’t quite have the best gloves for the job so reluctantly gave it a pass this time.
The last net before we finished proved to be the most abundant of the day and we all swooped in to fill our vials before they could get away.
More Spiders, Shield Bugs, Red Legs, Black Legs, buzzing this and that, Wingless Nymphs, unidentifiable larvae, and the grand finale was a large, beautiful Cricket. Taken into a vial, inspected from all angles as he wriggled around, he was finally and jubilantly determined to be in possession of a hairy chest, allowing his entry onto the list of sighted species.
By the end of the afternoon, my sheet alone had recorded 23 distinct species of invertebrates to be recorded by date and location in the online iRecord database.
I was delighted to have seen so many, and I now join the excited group of Ealing residents eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Beavers. I can’t wait to return to rejoin the citizen survey of their invertebrate neighbours once they’ve settled into the neighbourhood and made their home.
Member, Helen McCormick, has shared her experiences with EWG in several blogs.