A wildlife diary
Mary Smith 33 Gaynes Park Road, Upminster, Essex RM14 2HJ
This is the twentieth article I have written under this heading. I fear I am getting boring
and samey, so if anyone out there wants to take over with a regular feature of general
natural history interest for a while, please let me know and you can start tomorrow.
In April we visited RSPB Rainham, mainly to botanise, but Peter Wilson (molluscs)
came with us too. He spent most of his time fishing in dykes and ditches and he found
lots of things not only molluscs. He called us over to see a Great Silver Beetle (put this
name into Google, and then click on images), which is quite rare and is certainly a
wonderful beetle. It is about 5cm long and is by far the largest Diving Beetle of the 90 or
so species of them in Britain, and one of Europe's biggest beetles. The silver in its name
relates to the layer of air trapped under its body by numerous hairs, giving it a silver
appearance when seen from below. A short search on the internet indicated that it is
confined to southern England and prefers still water especially in dykes and ditches on
grazing marsh, so the RSPB reserve is clearly just right.
On 25th April I was planting out young tomato plants in my garden. This task requires
lots of compost, so I dug quite a lot out of our 'in use' compost heap (as opposed to the
other one which is the 'building' heap; they change over about every 3 years when the
'in use' one is used up) to put into the large holes for the young plants. As I was digging
in the heap, a Common Toad fell out, but did not move. It had clearly been hibernating
there, several inches inside the back edge of our heap. 1 gently picked it up and moved
it to the far edge of the heap, which I hoped was a place of safety, surrounded it with
leaves and shaded by a large bucket. Half an hour later I went to the heap again, to get
more for the next row of tomato plants, and the toad had gone. Clearly it had woken up
with a start and moved away on its own. But why was it still hibernating this late in the
spring? Toads have been 'at it' in nearby ponds for weeks now, so why did this one get
left behind? 1 do hope our garden group of foxes don't find it tonight for supper. Instead,
I hope the toad stays and tucks into our copious supply of large molluscs.
Talking of molluscs, I sometimes remember to survey the area roundabout before planting
out our precious tomato plants. We have some old lengths of concrete scattered around
the edges of our vegetable area to fill gaps below the fence with next door (to try to limit
passage of cats, foxes etc). And I know these blocks harbour large numbers of molluscs.
So I turned up some, and one big block had a huge number of snails and slugs, all of
which I chopped into mincemeat, so to speak. But it occurred to me that the snails were
probably Garden Snails Helix aspersa, and using my little ancient book of molluscs, I
was fairly sure I had named them correctly. But the slugs baffled me. These big chaps
were mainly pale yellowish grey-brown, with distinct darker grey spots. I thought that
if there is a Leopard Slug, these must be that. But of course there were none such. So I
4 Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 57, September 2008