LETTERS, NOTES AND QUERIES

Containing this month: 
Dialect Names of Birds by Adrian Knowles
The Old Museum by Stella Wolfe
Lemmings in Suffolk? by Adrian Knowles
Holes between paving stones: follow-up by Adrian Knowles

Dialect names of birds

Around the Essex coast are several small saltmarsh islands called either Pewit or Pewet Island and an idle passing thought might assume that they are associated with the Peewit or Lapwing Vanellus vanellus. However, a more lingering consideration may bring the realisation that this is an odd association. Lapwings are not really saltmarsh birds – they are very much more associated with farmland in East Anglia. The truth about the island names was revealed by one of my colleagues, thumbing through some very old copies of the Journal of the Essex Field Club, Essex Naturalist. Apparently, then at least, “Puit” was a local name for the Black-headed Gull Larus ridibundus. This makes sense: the various saltmarsh islands are or were known breeding and roosting sites for these birds. Another local name for the Blackheaded Gull was Cob and there are also instances of Cobmarsh Island and the like, accordingly.

I would be interested to learn if this name of Puit was, or still is, used in Suffolk. The Ordnance Survey maps I have scanned do not reveal any Pewit Islands along the Suffolk coast, although the geomorphology here is not so predisposed to the formation of saltmarsh islands in estuaries as is the Essex coastline.

Adrian Knowles

The Old Museum

I have just read White Admiral 71. I expect you’ve had other replies like this. The old museum is being developed by the same local couple, the Amblers, who started Mortimer’s fish restaurant first on the waterfront where the Bistro now is, then at the converted electricity substation, before selling out to Loch Fyne not too long ago. Bob Entwistle (Senior Conservator at the Museum) told me they bought the old display cases from the museum to convert for use in the new restaurant. As it’s now 100 years since the old museum opened, this reuse is a timely celebration as the new owners are apparently keenly aware of their heritage. Stella Wolfe P.S. I have now heard that the place, to be called “Arlington’s” after the ballroom once there, is now open.

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Lemmings in Suffolk?

At various times over the last two years, a short stretch of pavement in Capel St Mary has been littered with up to seven dead bodies of voles and mice, at different stages of decomposition. Curiously, this stretch of pavement is only about 30 feet long and is shown in the photograph below. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the unfortunate mammals have fallen to their deaths over the parapet above and it is quite striking the I have never seen a corpse so much a one foot to the right of point B – they all lie between points A and B.

If this assumption is correct, what drove them to their deaths? The occurrence seems to go in sporadic bursts, rather than a steady stream of casualties. Were they fleeing from predators such as weasels and stoats, hunting in the verge above? If so, why don’t the predators cotton on to the fact that an easy supper lies awaiting at the bottom of the adjacent grassy slope? The bodies just lie there and slowly rot down. None of the more intact bodies examined shows any sign of outside injury.

I’d be interested to hear any views on this phenomenon. Subject to road traffic safety, it might be interesting to examine other similar parapets to see if the same thing happens there.

Adrian Knowles

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Holes between paving stones: follow-up

Alan Beaumont may well be right in saying (White Admiral 71, page 10) that the insect seen nesting in the ground between paving slabs was the digger wasp Crabro cribrarius, although there are other possibilities, such as the digger wasp Mellinus arvensis, with the latter perhaps more often utilising compacted horizontal ground. Both of these species provision their nests with flies, including hoverflies.

A well-trodden path would appear to be a frustrating place within which to excavate a nest tunnel, with every footfall at risk of kicking loose material back down the hole from whence it was mined at great effort. Such holes must also make small but effective plug-holes down which any heavy rainfall might easily drain, especially if puddled-up on a compacted path. However, several species of solitary nesting bees and wasps choose to nest in such places. Perhaps the most prolific exploiter of this micro-habitat is the digger wasp Cerceris rybyensis (I might alsNovember 19, 2011 9:12paths across heathland or other sandy places can be copiously punctuated by the miniature “volcanoes” of sand being dug out by this species. However, this species generally preys upon small mining bees and so is unlikely to be the insect observed by Alan. Several mining bees within the Genus Lasioglossum will also nest in hard, compacted ground.

One of Britain’s rarest digger wasps is Cerceris quadricincta. This has seemingly always been a speciality of the Colchester area and the 1903 Volume 1 of the “Victoria County History” for Essex notes that the species is “mainly an urban insect, for it forms its burrows in the public streets where, owing to alterations, two colonies have been destroyed recently”.

Following on from this, one might answer Alan’s question about whether or not his observation was another case of urbanisation of a species by suggesting that it is more likely to be another case of man paving over another insect’s habitat...

Adrian Knowles
SNS Hymenoptera Recorder,

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