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should surely be found there when a cock bird flew around and
around overhead calling and giving its remarkable drumming
display. When we weren't squinting through binoculars there
were always plants (fine spikes of D. fuschii, the common
spotted Orchid), butterflies, damselflies and even early fungi
(Amanita rubescens) to keep us busy. But the birds won the
day with 53 species recorded, perhaps the best ever for a bird
group outing.
Chris Shennan.
Know Your Composites. 12th July, 1981.
It was pleasing to meet such a large group of people on
Sunday, 12th July, at Horne Row car park who wished to discover
that all those yellow flowers that look like dandelions are in
fact curious plants with names like cat's ears, hawkbits, hawk-
weeds and Hawk's beards. These common names are more confusing
that the scientific ones and consequently it is easier to learn
the apparently more complicated ones right from the start. I
always try and make people who come to my meetings do some work
and so I had duplicated an excellent key taken from "Wild
Flowers" by Gilmour and Walters in the New Naturalist Series.
The first thing to realise about composites is that the
structure which most people call the flower is in fact a bunch
of tiny flowers called florets surrounded by a series of green
bracts which beginners might mistake for sepals. These bracts
are collectively known as the involucre. If you break open the
head of flowers the individual florets can be easily seen and
around each one is a frill of hairs. These hairs are called
the pappus and develop into a parachute which helps disperse
the single-seeded fruits. In the yellow dandelion-like composites
all the florets have a strap-shaped "petal" or "ligule" which
extends out on one side. This distinguishes them from other
composites like thistles in which all the florets are tubular,
or those like daisies in which a central disc of tubular florets
is surrounded by a ring of ligulate or ray florets. The only
dandelion-like composite that has disc as well as ray florets
is the coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) which is not included in the
key. This plant flowers very early in the year before any of
the others. Armed with our keys we descended on the first
dandelion'. This had leaves covered in long white hairs and
creeping horizontal stems called stolons growing out of the