Category Archives: Birds

Adaptable Elder – and a nice review of my book by Mark Avery!

One of the many things that I love about Common Elder (Sambucus nigra), and which I didn’t have space to properly convey in my article about the species last year, is just how adaptable it is as a species. The tree possesses a lot of what biologists term “phenotypic plasticity“. This is the ability of an organism to flexibly change aspects of its morphology or behaviour or physiology in response to differences in the environment. Plants are especially good at this because, if they find themselves growing in less-than-optimal conditions, they can’t just uproot themselves and leave for pastures new. This is obvious to anyone who has seen a houseplant struggling in a dark corner of a room: the poor plant will etiolate and bend as its yellowing foliage tries to reach the light from a distant window. The same plant grown on a sunny windowsill will be more compact, greener, and healthier.

When it comes to Elder, and indeed other trees, winter is often the best time to see this plasticity, when the trunks and boughs are not cloaked in greenery. On a coastal walk at Klintebjerg yesterday, I spotted three rather different phenotypes of Common Elder which nicely illustrate this environmental context dependency.

The first was a wind-tortured tree growing at the base of a low hill, directly in the teeth of the prevailing Kattegat weather, its trunk bent away from the sea and its branches lopsidedly pruned:

The second was a more fortunate specimen, growing in the lee of that same hill and allowed to spread its symmetrical arms, as though waiting to embrace any passing birds. It had clearly never been pruned back by the landowner, who had allowed it to grow as a fine, single-trunked small tree:

As we walked back down the hill via a narrow path, enclosed and over-topped by a fairy tale canopy of dense, twisted Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa), I spotted another phenotype, different again. I initially thought that they were the stems of a woody climber, perhaps Old Man’s Beard (Clematis vitalba) or European Honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum). When I looked closer it was clear that these were Elder, growing narrow and long, using the Blackthorn as support, as they struggled to reach up through the canopy to gain the light:

There were several individuals like this, presumably the result of seed dispersal by birds perched within the Blackthorn. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen Elder growing in quite this way before, but then how often do we get to peer deeply into the secrets hidden within a dense Blackthorn patch?

I had only planned to write about Common Elder today, but I can’t resist mentioning that, over on his blog, ornithologist Mark Avery has written a very nice review of Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship. He describes my book as having:

…a lightness of touch and tone that should not be taken for lightness of understanding….This is a fine example of a book which is pitched to increase the public understanding of ecology and evolution, and succeeds.

Thank you Mark, that’s very gratifying to read, and I’m glad that you enjoyed it!

Read my author interview and get a 25% discount off ‘Birds & Flowers’, ‘Pollinators & Pollination’ and other books from Pelagic Publishing!

It’s publication day – “Birds & Flowers” is officially out!

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After what seems like a long wait, for me at least, today marks the official publication of Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship! I received my advance copies on Friday, an event that Karin commemorated with a short unboxing video:

https://www.facebook.com/100000638827245/videos/2177574652581431

It’s been a long journey from pitching the initial idea to Pelagic Publishing back in early 2021, through the various drafts that have culminated in the finished book. As you can see from the images on this post and the endorsements on the publisher’s web site, Birds & Flowers has so far been warmly received. I hope that future reviews are as positive!

A few people have asked me what’s next. In fact I have definite plans (as in topics, provisional titles, the start of chapter structure, and even some initial writing) for three more books. The next one is actually about half written, but then I have been working at it, on and off, for 30 years! Watch this space for more details…

In the shorter term, Karin and I are returning (permanently) to the UK at the start of March. We’ve enjoyed our time in Denmark, it’s been a fun two and a half years, but we’re missing our immediate family plus we both have some interesting work possibilities to pursue. In mid-April I will be going to China for three months to work with my colleague Zong-Xin Ren at the Kunming Institute of Botany. I’ll be sure to blog about my adventures there!

In the meantime, if you buy my book or borrow it from the library or from a friend, please let me know what you think in the comments section below.

Read a preview of my new book ‘Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship’

The one thing I wish more people understood about flower pollination

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Obviously the title of this post is click-bait, as there’s LOTS of things that I wish more people knew about pollination! But here’s one that really gets my (Yule) goat.

I’ve lost track of the number of times that I’ve read statements in books and research papers such as “bees collect lots of pollen from flowers therefore they are good pollinators”. Even worse, I sometimes see studies where pollen has been removed from “pollen baskets” or other scopae, then used as a measure of the importance of those bees as pollinators.

In both cases it seems to have been forgotten that bees are collecting pollen to feed their larvae and pollen that ends up in scopae is generally not available for pollination.

That’s the purpose of the Venn diagram at the top of this short post, to remind us that there can be a disconnect between what bees are doing and what plants require: foraging for pollen only partly correlates with flower pollination. Indeed, the same argument applies to any animal that feeds itself or its young on pollen, including pollen wasps (Maserinae), Heliconia butterflies, and some flower-visiting hoverflies, birds and bats.

It’s not only loss of pollen from reproduction that’s important here: depending on the size and behaviour of the bees relative to the shape and size of the flower, they may go nowhere near the stigma, so even if they are carrying viable pollen, it can be lost as far as the plant is concerned.

Note also that many bee species will collect pollen from wind-pollinated plants such as grasses, oaks, etc. Indeed in some species the availability of such pollen is extremely important – see Manu Saunders’ review on this topic and more recent papers that cite it. Again, it emphasises the partial disconnect between pollen collecting by bees and pollination of flowers by bees.

Assessing which flower visitors are actually pollinators is not technically demanding but it can be time consuming. The minimum that you need is single visit deposition (SVD) experiments in which you expose unvisited flowers to one visit by the potential pollinator. Then you assess how much pollen has landed on the stigma or (better) whether the visit results in seed set.

If you want to know more about the evidence that’s required to determine if a flower visitor is or is not a pollinator, they are codified in the “Cox-Knox Postulates” that I discuss in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society.

Corrections to the first edition of “Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society”

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Books are never perfect. In the run-up to publication of Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship, I am all too aware that this is a truth that’s a cause of anxiety, and sometimes sleeplessness, for all authors. One category of imperfection is tipographical* errors have been introduced at some point in the process of writing and editing. In the past these were corrected in the first edition of a book by the inclusion of errata slips, and such errors are sometimes important in determining the true first editions of older books. On page 20 of the first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, for example, there is a misspelling of the word “species”**. This was corrected in the second edition but is an important marker of an extremely valuable book, intellectually and (now) commercially.

A second category involves errors of fact or interpretation or expression that, with hindsight and reader feedback, require correction, or at least acknowledgement, by the author. These are the ones that really make an author squirm inside, even though we know that they are inevitable: we are, after all only human.

It turns out that there are a few examples of both categories in the first edition of my 2021 book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society. Some of them have been corrected in the second edition, but if you purchased the first edition then these are what you should look out for:

P22 – ‘Unmated queens and males (drones) are produced by the colony later in the season’ changes to: ‘Unmated queens and males (drones) are produced by the colony from spring onwards.’

P30, Fig 2.9 – Correct ‘Tabaernemontana’ to Tabernaemontana

P51, Figure 3.8 – title – it should read C. rhynchantha [there’s an h missing]

P57 – ‘The bank that Darwin was referring to is on his property at Down House in Kent, and it was one he observed many times during his walks through the garden.’ changes to ‘The bank that Darwin was referring to is near his property at Down House in Kent, and it was one he observed many times during his walks in the area.’***

P146 – ‘I’ve even see them attack and kill honey bees’ should read: ‘I’ve even seen them….’

P169 – in the title for Figure 10.5, Anon (2019) should be Anon (1919) [in some presentation copies of my book I have corrected this and initialed the change]

P259 – this reference: Klein, A.-M., Steffan-Dewenter, I. and Tscharntke, T. (2003) Fruit set of highland coffee increases with the diversity of pollinating bees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 270: 955–961. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2002.2306.

Should be replaced by:

Klein, A.-M., Steffan-Dewenter, I. and Tscharntke, T. (2003) Bee pollination and fruit set of Coffea arabica and C. canephora (Rubiaceae). American Journal of Botany 90, 153– 157. doi: 10.1046/j.1365-2664.2003.00847.x

The last two have yet to be corrected and will need to wait for the third edition:

P119 – the Rader et al. study did not include birds and bats, just insects.

P262 – “Nabhan, G.P. and Buchmann, S.” should read “Buchmann, S. and Nabhan, G.P.”

That final error is really embarrassing because, as I point out in the chapter ‘The Politics of Pollination’, their book The Forgotten Pollinators was an inspirational one for stimulating research and action around pollinator conservation! I can offer no explanation for why the order of the authors got reversed in my head.

My sincere thanks to those readers who pointed out some of these errors. My hope is that Birds & Flowers has fewer, but I may be fooling myself…

*You see what I did there?

**Proof-reading is boring and soul-destroying for any author, but really Mr Darwin?!

***If there is an after-life, I’d like to think that Darwin’s now enjoying this error after my snarky comment in the second footnote. To which I’ll respond: watch out for a doozy of a footnote about a Darwin footnote in Birds & Flowers!

“Birds & Flowers” book update: here’s the list of chapters!

That’s a wrap! The manuscript of my next book is with the publisher

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Yesterday I sent the manuscript of my next book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship to my publisher, Pelagic. I’d promised the full draft by the end of May, and I did it!

But just as when a movie director says “That’s a wrap” at the end of the final day of filming, the hard work does not stop here. Two people have read the full manuscript as I was producing chapters and their suggestions have been incorporated into this draft. The publisher will now send it to a third, independent beta reader and once their feedback has been acted on it will go to a copy editor who will suggest stylistic changes, check for logic and consistency, and so forth.

At the same time I will be choosing which plates to put in the book, which images to use on the back cover, writing their descriptions and deciding where to cite them; checking the sources and further reading sections for each chapter and formatting the references; and producing an appendix that lists the scientific names against the vernacular names that I am using in the book. I also need to finalise the acknowledgements section.

Once all of that is done, the publisher will type set the book and send me the proofs to check. At the same time as I’m checking those I will construct the index, a process which worked well for my last two books, Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society (also for Pelagic) and Plant-Pollinator Interactions: From Specialization to Generalization (which I co-edited with Nick Waser for the University of Chicago Press).

As an author, producing a book is a long process that doesn’t end with the actual writing of the manuscript. It’s incredibly satisfying, however, and working with Pelagic on my second book for them has been a great experience. All being well, Birds & Flowers should be out by early winter.

Now, I have three options for the next book that I’m writing….which one to choose…?

Announcing my new book: “Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship”

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For the past year I’ve been keeping a secret from all but a few trusted confidantes: the subject and title of my next book! My publisher – Pelagic – has now announced it on their website and so it’s time to make it public. “Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship” will be the first book that covers bird pollination in its entirety, going beyond just hummingbirds, sunbirds and honeyeaters, to consider the more than 60 other bird families that interact with flowers, and the tens of thousands of plants that rely on them as pollinators. You can read more about it on Pelagic’s website.

The 3D mock-up of the cover shown above features an illustration by my good friend Stephen Valentine, a very talented artist who you may remember produced this painting of waxwings that Karin bought for my birthday a few years ago. I’m extremely pleased with how Pelagic have incorporated this into the design of the cover.

The book will be available by autumn I hope, if my writing schedule goes to plan!

A raw wind on the beach, bird song in the woods, and the hope of spring to come

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On Sunday Karin and I rode our bicycles down to the local beach at Nordstrand. It was a chilly day, maybe 4C, with a raw coastal wind that made it feel that much colder. Our local bit of shallow ocean – the Kattegat – is normally quite calm but there was a swell bringing in seaweed and the (very) occasional item of rubbish. I collected a golf ball but otherwise the beach was free of plastic. That’s the usual state of affairs here, despite it being a popular tourist destination in the summer. If only beaches elsewhere in the world were as clean.

As we walked Karin and I chatted about some of our plans for the coming year. We’re both working on our next books and relishing the process of swapping chapters to read out loud to the writer. The occasional hardy soul, also enjoying being out in the elements, passed us by and we nodded in acknowledgement. Above us the gulls were wheeling and calling, a constant reminder that they were here before us and will remain when we are gone. Moving from the strand line into the sand dunes we found a convenient bench to sit, drink from our water bottles, scoff some nuts and raisins, and admire the view until the cold wind won the argument and moved us on.

Walking back to the bikes we paused to look at the verdant moss growing on the steep faces of the dunes. Small seedlings had germinated in these planty blankets, a promise of growth and flowers during the year to come. Here and there birds had torn out sections in their constant search for insect larvae. Life goes on even in these cold days.

On our ride back through the neat summerhouses that are settled within the nearby pine woodland, male Great Tits were voicing their claims to territory. Spring is surely just round the corner, we hope.