Hollow Be Thy Name, Berry Clever, Google Gaga, Weather Warming & Pine Dining

Taken from Lynne’s weekly column ‘Green Scene’ for the Western Mail
7^th January 2023

Happy New Year to you all; I wish you a happy, healthy and trouble-free 2023.

Hollow Be Thy Name

I spent a lot of the Christmas holidays walking the local lanes, mountains and canals and acknowledging beautiful old trees – many of which seem to be defying death.  They have the most scant and hollow trucks supporting substantial canopies, and a host of wildlife and it never ceases to amaze me how little of the trunk seems to be needed to ‘sustain life’.

To get a bit more technical, a hollowing trunk is actually natural process and is not necessarily a sign of a poorly or dying tree. The centre, or ‘heartwood’ of a large tree is dead anyway; it is only the bark and a thin layer under the bark (the sapwood) that is alive.  The deadwood is slowly decayed by fungi, which is perfectly content in the deadwood and will rarely touch the living sapwood.

Of course the trees know what they’re doing – they will have spent years storing up minerals in the wood in the centre of the trunk and when it decays the minerals are released and used again by the tree.

And there are other benefits to being hollow.  A tube is often stronger than a solid cylinder as nature demonstrates with bones, quills, tusks and horns.  So a hollow tube is likely to help the tree react better in high winds, allowing it to ‘give’ with the wind.

Some of these hollow trees will go on to live for another 20, 40, 60 or even 100 years, depending on the species and as long as it is structurally sound.

Berry Clever

I also noticed two holly trees still boasting scarlet berries.  Despite it being thought that these ‘late’ berries are bitter and ignored by the birds, there is a far cleverer reason for it.  Cue the mistle thrush.  Often referred to the mistletoe thrush by myself as a kid, (and never corrected by my dad, who thought it was ‘funny’), the mistle thrush is indeed named after it’s love for mistletoe berries.  It is much bigger and a bit ‘greyer’ than the song thrush, with a longer tail.

And it’s incredibly clever.

The mistle thrush eats seeds and fruit, as well as worms and insects and it’s favourite mistle toe berries.  It is also fond of holly – and rowan – berries and if it finds a tree that is particularly plentiful in berries it will be fiercely territorial and guard this food source closely, so ‘saving it’ for when other sources are lean.  Often two birds will defend the same tree which seems to be better than losing out altogether.

So if you do see a holly tree with berries on at this time of year, if you watch closely, I bet you’ll spot a vigilant mistle(toe) thrush nearby.

Always having had a high regard for my feathered friends, I have never understood the insult ‘bird brain’, and interestingly research shows it is indeed a misnomer. Recent findings show that a bird’s brain is in fact packed with many more neurons than first thought.

It is thought that these neurons could endow birds with better sensory abilities and motor skills, including potential functions like reasoning and planning for the future, for example.

Seems a ‘no brainer’ to me!

Google Gaga

Google has published its most searched-for terms of 2022, and they’re as random as ever. The most frequently asked question starting ‘How many’ was, ‘How many cities are there in Wales?’  I mean, how on earth does that get to be at the forefront of so many minds – and to the degree that you feel the need to check it?  The answer – to save you checking – is seven.

The other 4 most frequently asked questions (of the top 5) were:

2. How many countries end in “-stan”? (Also seven)
3. How many people watched the Queen’s funeral? (28 million in the UK)
4. How many doors are there in the world? (Lots)
5. How many episodes are there in the fourth series of Stranger Things? (Nine)

Weather Warming

Not surprisingly, last year was the warmest year on record with every month, except December, being warmer than average. And that cold snap during the first two weeks of last month made it the coldest start to December since 2010.

The Met Office has also published its annual global temperature forecast for this year and says 2023 is likely to be one of the hottest years on record.

Aside from brief spells at the beginning of last January and at the end of last February, the UK’s total rainfall accumulation remained persistently below average for 2022, with the exceptionally dry spell during the summer tipping us into drought conditions.

And while it wasn’t a White Christmas for the vast majority of the UK, because a small amount of snow and sleet were recorded falling on Christmas Day at some stations in Scotland and Northern Ireland, that means that it was technically a White Christmas.

I don’t really understand that – it’s like saying one drop of rain makes a wet day.

On his website ‘Weather Without Technology’, David King reminds us that the 13^th January is St Hilary’s Day and is often the coldest – and wettest – day of the whole year, and adds that historically, the 12-14^th are also often bitterly cold.  Although my phone app says it’s around 8 or 9 degrees through to the 16^th January.  That would mean we have the first two weeks under our belt, relatively comfortably, weather-wise – a real bonus when you work outdoors.

Pine Dining

A reader saw that I ‘repurpose’ my real Christmas tree outdoors to use as a diner for the birds and thought I would be interested to know that top chefs are encouraging people to recycle their real Christmas trees by eating them themselves!

They advise that the needles can be used to flavour everything from ice cream to gin, and will provide a handy vitamin C boost too.

They are calling it ‘pine dining’.