2024-04

30th April 2024

Last week, during a brief visit to Jerusalem, I managed to have a short walk in Gazelle Valley. Of course, I was hoping to see galloping gazelles, but they all appeared to be taking a siesta, and none were to be seen. I saw nothing swifter than a spur-thighed tortoise ambling along in the undergrowth, seemingly oblivious to all about it. No gazelles, one tortoise, but there were many thousands of purple milk thistles. And amongst the sea of purple were just a few milk-white milk thistles, which are a sort of albino version of the purple norm. Honey bees were buzzing around the thistles, or perhaps they were killer bees. Africanized honey bees, also known as "killer bees”, are a hybrid of western honey bees, East African honey bees and European honey bees, and are more aggressive than standard honey bees by far. They have earned their name, as a result of more than a thousand human deaths. I thought it best not to get close enough to check out which variety these actually were.

The last few days have been unseasonably hot – more than 40 degrees, so we kept a low profile, just as the gazelles did last week. When we’d had enough of the cool indoor temperatures we ventured out into the heat for a tortoise-paced walk in the Switzerland Forest. Artichoke thistles (cardoons), which look similar to and are just as purple as milk thistles, were in abundance. Artichoke thistles are a wild artichoke and are less likely to be on your dinner plate than cultivated artichokes. The purple milk thistles in the fields were losing their purpleness and were turning white with age, as we do, but this is not the same process as causes the albinos of Gazelle Valley. A mynah bird at the edge of the fields was having a field day, at the expense of a couple of grasshoppers, who hopped out into just the wrong place. Before long we returned to our air-conditioned home and left the thistles and mynahs to enjoy the sunshine and sizzle in the heat.

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18th April 2024

There were not many birds out and about on Mount Arbel yesterday but there were very many lovely pink flowers, and pairs of butterflies at every step. These flowers, blush centaury thistles (Centaurea crocodylium), are found in Northern Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Despite their Latin name they’re not crocodilian, though their ‘bite’ is quite sharp. They seemed like a magnet for butterflies and bees. The pictures here are:

1. A clouded yellow butterfly that resembles a leaf when it folds its wings up. The white wing spots look like an insect has bitten through a bit of the leaf leaving a hole to tell predators that it’s foliage rather than a butterfly. That’s fine unless a predator just happened to like eating leaves!
2. A not-so-white, Bath white butterfly – called thus after the City of Bath in England, which is itself named after the Roman-built baths there.
3. A buff-tailed bumblebee, which, funnily enough has a buff-coloured tail. There’s a popular myth that given the shape and weight and wing size of the bumblebee it should be aerodynamically impossible for it to fly. Clearly, it’s a myth, as it can and does fly – though, in a very erratic sort of way, as no doubt, Rimsky-Korsakov would have confirmed. In a fight with a hornet, a much more adept flyer, the bumblebee would easily be outmanoeuvred. But scientists have recently noticed that in such a fight the bumblebee drops like a lead weight to the ground, taking the hornet with it, and the impact is sufficient to allow the bee to escape.

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12th April 2024

At Ramat Hanadiv, recently, we ran into a fritillary butterfly, with a lovely chess or checkerboard pattern on its wings. It flitted from flower to flower and didn’t settle for long at all – and when it did settle it kept its wings upwards. Then it ‘frittered’ away! At the gift shop there was a book called ‘Butterflies of Ramat Hanadiv’ - and a rather lovely book it is, with colour illustrations and descriptions of the butterflies and their caterpillars in Hebrew and English. We bought it, of course – it wasn’t expensive. The author, Dr Rachel Schwartz-Tzacher, explains that Israel is home to eight different (but all similar-looking) species of fritillary, but only two of them are seen at Ramat Hanadiv – the lesser spotted fritillary and the Jerusalem fritillary – ‘lesser spotted’, not necessarily being a description of how often it is seen. After much deliberating I worked out that the fritillary we had spotted was a female Jerusalem fritillary (Melitaea telona).

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Now that I have found a butterfly expert in Israel I wrote to Rachel with a question, and she was gracious enough to reply.

I asked Rachel why the caterpillars (Ocnogyna loewii - Ocnogyna tiger moth) that I filmed in February at Nachal Tzippori, thrashed about so much. I had thought it was a defence mechanism against predators, but she told me that they are making silk – they secrete from their lower lip a sort of liquid silk which dries and solidifies when it meets the air. They do it to manufacture a silk tent to shelter them from predators. Man uses such moth caterpillars to produce silk – so next time you buy a silk scarf or a silk tie, you’ll know where it comes from.

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Animals have four legs, or in our case just two; insects have six legs, spiders have eight and centipedes and millipedes have many more (but not quite as many as it says on the box). Animals, though, never have more than four legs – not even spider man. But last month a six-legged gazelle was spotted (and photographed) in Southern Israel. It has four normal legs, which it uses in the usual manner, and an extra two growing out of its back, and these rest on its back as it goes about its day-to-day activities. These extra legs are the result of a rare genetic disorder, known as polymelia.  Israel’s gazelle (the Mountain gazelle - Gazella gazella) is an endangered species – there are just 5000 individuals presently in Israel and very few anywhere else. Perhaps this genetic aberration comes about because inbreeding is a consequence of very small populations.

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11th April 2024

Apparently the least frequently seen herons are the black-capped (or black-crowned) night herons (hereon I’ll just call them night herons). The night heron is also known as the quark bird. It doesn’t get this name because it’s made up of billions of subatomic particles, though it certainly is, but because its quack or squawk sounds a bit like ‘quark’. It’s no great surprise that they’re not seen so often, as they are nocturnal birds and are out and about in the dark. That said, the herons I see most often are in fact night herons, which seem to like to spend their mornings by the lakeside in Tiberias.

They’re short and stocky and would lose out competing with larger more agile herons.  So, instead of battling with the bigger birds for limited supplies of food, they hunt at night. Their huge red eyes help them see better in poor light, and their plumage is good for night work – dark feathers on top so that they’re not seen by nighttime predators and light feathers underneath which helps them to avoid being seen by the fish on which they prey.

Like all herons, they’re expert “still fishers” waiting patiently for long periods for their catch. And so, if they do come out during the day, you don’t have to be too quick to get a good still photo. This bird kindly posed for me a couple of days ago.

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4th April 2024

This week we’ve been soaking up the sunshine – it’s been about 32 degrees for the last few days. Ramat Hanadiv was looking resplendent in yellow when we visited on Sunday and yellow trees and shrubs are much in evidence in the Switzerland Forest too. Particularly spectacular are the yellow mimosa trees with their fluffy yellow honey-scented balls, looking like static yellow fountains.

So, I was somewhat surprised to discover that yellow doesn’t actually exist. Well, if I’m being more accurate, I should say that I discovered that scientists have discovered that yellow doesn’t exist. This is a little strange because we all see yellow, all the time – which is better than seeing red all the time. The science is far beyond my proper understanding, but with my simplistic mind I think it’s a bit like this: – the colour we see is reflected light that appears to us as yellow but isn’t actually yellow. I must be awfully clever to see things that don’t exist – a pigment of my imagination!

Isn’t it strange that the mimosa tree, Acacia saligna, is known as blue-leafed wattle. But then again, if yellow doesn’t exist, I suppose it’s not so bizarre to think of green leaves as blue leaves.