Animal of the Week March 21, 2011 -- What else have I got in my garden?

After the foxes a couple of weeks ago, which have now quietened down a bit (although my nights are not without gekkering, and the foxes are sometimes noisy too), I thought I'd return to the theme of what noisy bloody animals have I got in my "garden" (a scrubby patch of paving with a couple of huge unregarded trees undermining the foundations of the property in which I rent a room).*

The foxes can still be heard scrapping some nights until about 3 am, at which point the "dawn" chorus of blackbirds, robins, blue tits, great tits, and wrens takes over. As Eos wraps her rosy fingers around the residential towerblocks of the Brandon Estate, the crows, oddly social as they are in London, join in with their percussive conversational cawing. With the sun up, from high atop the television ariels seagulls begin their evocative mewing, which despite being distinctly lacking in proximity to the briny deep summons a whiff of ozone to the nostrils, or perhaps that's just my bedroom.

So far, so native. But a recent addition to the local cacophony, and perhaps the loudest part of it is this week's animal of the week Psittacula krameri (ring-necked parakeet). For people living around southwest London ring-necked parakeets have been a familiar sight for a few decades now. But recently they have spread from their stronghold around Richmond, first west to Windsor and now north and east through the rest of London. They are now a common sight on Hampstead Heath and in the past couple of years they've colonised more central parks including Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens and even the grandest of all the parks, Kennington Park.

Ring-necked parakeets are native to a great swathe the old world from the foothills of the Himalayas to the forests of West Africa, but their closest natural home to Europe is the middle east. One -- likely apocryphal -- story of the birds' arrival in the UK puts their origins with the release of parakeets used in the filming of the African Queen at Shepperton Studios in Surrey. But given that parakeets are found in other major European cities including those in France, the Netherlands, and Spain (recently seen in both Madrid and Seville by yours truly), they are most likely descended from escaped pets.

Whatever their origins, the ring-necked parakeets seem to be here to stay. With tens of thousands of birds breeding in the UK, and sporadic sightings all over the country, if they haven't made it to you yet, it's perhaps only a matter of time before their raucous noisy fast flight becomes a familiar sight, certainly around major urban areas.  The birds are unmistakable: noisy, bright green, pointed wings and a long tail make them quite unlike anything else you are likely to see, and if they live near you, you will notice them in no time.

As with any introduced species, there's a fear that they might upset the ecosystems in which they find themselves outcompeting native birds, especially when they expand in such number. But then London and the home counties to the west are already so disturbed by human activity, perhaps that is how they have managed to establish themselves so successfully in our gardens, which, after all, are home to many alien species already -- the parakeets in my back garden sit in an enormous eucalyptus tree and an out of control fig.


*Not for long. Once again I need to move since the landlord is selling this place. If you hear of anyone with a room anywhere in London, please do let me know.

Animal of the Week March 14, 2011 -- World's smallest primate sucks bugs

Having not followed Hollyoaks for the past couple of months, you might feel that my opinions on what qualifies as good television aren't really worth much. But recently, using the BBC iPlayer, I watched a quite marvellous hour featuring the man, the legend, David Attenborough.

Following on from the Madagascar series, Dave was making a return trip to the world's fourth largest island ostensibly to investigate the story of the extinct elephant bird. On an earlier visit for the Zoo Quest series in the 1960s, Attenborough had been handed the fragments of an almost complete egg that was laid by the largest bird ever to have lived: its eggs had a circumference of 1 m and a volume equivalent to 160 chicken eggs. Although David did have his egg dated (about 1400 years old) and had a look at the reasons why the birds might have become extinct (climate change, habitat loss, human's eating their eggs -- the olden-day Madagascans must have been stacked), the show was far more a return journey to the island he had first visited 50 years earlier than an investigation of the bird. Contrasting new footage with old, there was a quite magical sequence in which Attenborough filmed indris, whereas for Zoo Quest to film these lemurs had taken days of painstaking observation for a few minutes film, now David was able to get up close to a study group. The obvious joy on his face as an adult indri reached down and took leaves from his hand was a pleasure to behold. Anyway, yeah, watch it, it's on iPlayer and it's great.

Mark Carwardine

But it's not the elephant bird that's animal of the week, and it's not the largest living lemur the indri, no it's the smallest lemur, indeed the smallest primate Microcebus berthae (Madam Berthe's mouse lemur), which Attenborough also encounters as one of the new species not known when he first visited the island. Weighing just 30 g and measuring only 9 cm in length, it's no surprise that Madame Berthe's mouse lemur was discovered in just 2000 in Kirindy Mitea National Park.

In fact, many of the mouse lemurs have only been described in the past 20 years. Until 1977, all mouse lemurs were thought to be once species, the grey mouse lemur. But then some primatologist with a lot of time on his or her hands decided that some of the mouse lemurs in the south-west of Madagascar were more red than the others and recognised the reddish-grey mouse lemur as a species distinct from the grey mouse lemur. Genetic investigations in the 1990s and 2000s really opened the floodgates and now 17 species are recognised including Jolly's, Margot Marsh's, Claire's, and the smallest, this week's AOTW Madame Berthe's.

Whereas the grey and reddish-grey mouse lemurs are fairly widespread and resistant to extinction for the time being. Madame Berthe's and several of the others are found only in very limited areas and so are vulnerable to habitat loss. Mouse lemurs are omnivores and eat anything from tree sap, to insects, lizards and fruit, Madame Berthe's is, however, a specialist and obtains 50% of its food from an unusual source, the sticky secretions left behind by one species of plant-sucking bug.