Nature notes | Wild Eco Design

I want to tell you about my old solid oak door through the thoughts that I had while restoring it for over a fortnight.

Our terrace house was built circa 1678 but I don’t know when the door was crafted. The house is made of stone, probably carted down from Hadrian’s Wall, four miles north. The oak door is one of the last handmade artisan doors left in the street. It has character and it is hung on the wrong side.

Below are some of the things I thought about.

A seedling survived

The acorn that germinated and became my oak was spared a gall wasp that would have made it infertile and disfigured. Then, the young seedling made it through nibbling deer and disease. As a young tree, it managed to grow up (presumably protected by its mother*) into a tree large enough to make a door.

Oxygen

Recently I read that a single tree supplies oxygen to four people. 1:4. So my oak tree gave breath to four people at a time, over a span of maybe 15 or more generations, if it lived for 600 years.

Age and history

There are many annual rings on my door. Oaks can live up to 1000 years. So my door’s tree may have witnessed the feudal system, knights in shining armour (Langley Castle is just a mile up the road), maybe the English civil war, and more events thereafter, before it became a door.

Ink and the written word

From Roman times until the 19^th century, black ink was made from tannin rich oak galls*. Just think of the rich written legacy that resulted. Holy scripts, Shakespeare, and the early printers relied on those galls.

oak galls *[flickr.com: photo by Trevor King]*

Wildlife

Woodland design from my card and notebook collections

GO TO WOODLAND CARD

Insects

Oaks can support more than 200 insect species, supplying vital food to insect-eating birds and animals.

The gall wasp

We can thank the humble gall wasp for the ink noted above. When a gall wasp lays an egg, the oak makes defensive cells around it, forming a gall deformity. Inside the the gall, the larva develops and pupates into a new gall wasp. In the Autumn people harvested galls to turn into ink. (I have added a link to this process at the end of this blog.)

Animals

I imagine my oak tree began its life well before modern times. This being so, it may have been home to red squirrels (now pushed out by American grey squirrels) and the once plentiful pine martens. Some wild boar might have rootled for morsels below. Perhaps a wolf passed by or a lynx hid there. And who knows how many nests were built to renew bird populations. My oak may have supplied flowers to hungry dormice in the spring.

Shade plants

The wood wide web

My oak would have belonged to a wood wide web. This is made up of a vast network of mycorrhizal fungi (represented by the white lines in the design above). Within this network complex relationships are built between trees, plants, micro-organisms and the soil below.

GO TO LIVING SOIL NOTEBOOK

Mushrooms

The wood wide web, probably, popped up chanterelles, honey mushrooms and red fly agaric mushrooms in the autumn. The people nearby in all likelihood gathered the honey mushrooms and chanterelles and cooked them in butter for a tasty autumn treat.

Woodsmen (they probably were men)

A woodsman would have picked my oak and used an axe to cut it down. The oldest, biggest oaks were used for churches and cathedrals, so my oak was probably smaller and easier to fell. And then there are the skills to season the wood and make the door. It’s taken me two weeks to restore my front door, and I’ve felt that I haven’t the time to spare. (I really need to work on my new design collection.) So who ever made my door was patient and meticulously accurate with angles, numbers and safety.

The Earth

All the above would not have been possibly without the unique place the Earth occupies in the Universe. Being a tilted planet, we circulate the sun once a year at an angle that gives us seasons, solstices and equinoxes. Over four and half billion years of light, combined with water and gases, our ball of rock got cellular and then multi cellular life. With plants and trees, we got oxygen and energy rich plant food for hungry air breathers: birds, animals, you and me.

Environment Mandala — Environment mandala

As I sanded and cleaned, treated and oiled I generated all these thoughts. I do this quite often with objects. It can be a tap, or a dress or a cup of tea. It makes me feel rich and grounded, with a sense of belonging, wherever I find myself.

* A mother tree is a real thing. Mother trees send signals to their young through chemical reactions and via the wood wide web of mycorrhizal fungi.

* How to make oak gall ink video

a dung beetle fashioned out of scrap metal by a talented Zimbabwean crafter

As a child of the savannah woodland, southern Africa, seeing a dung beetle rolling a well-formed ball of dung was an exciting experience, but not uncommon. On a farm, with a flock of blackhead Persian sheep, cattle, and a variety of wild animals, there was plenty of dung. Now, these encounters form a delightful corner in my mind. So much so, I was tempted to call my creative business Dung Beetle Design!

If you look closely at my Wilding environment print, for example, you will find lots of dung beetles. Go there. Find them just behind each animal where dung falls. Click on the magnifying glass at the top right. And count them if you like. They are there, providing vital eco services and acting as valuable eco indicators.

Dung beetles 101

Dung beetles occur on every continent, except Antartica. Where there is animal dung, there are dung beetles. And if the dung is no longer there, the dung beetles disappear.

Dung beetles are coprids, from the Greek word ‘kopria’ which means manure. They rely on residual nutrients in dung, including essential amino acids and fatty acids. They secure their future by laying eggs into nutrient rich dung nests.

Not all dung beetles roll balls! In fact, there are three broad types:

rollers (telecoprids): collect dung and roll it to an underground burrow
tunnellers (paracoprids): build underground chambers beneath dung and carry it down
dwellers (endocoprids): live within the dung itself.

Dung is a fleeting resource (animals move), so the beetles have to be quick, and fight for their portions. And, some dung beetles are dreadful thieves, – ‘kleptocoprids’!

Dung beetle eco services

If it weren’t for dung beetles we would probably be buried in animal poo and tormented by parasites and flies. They perform valuable services. They:

clean up animal excrement
reduce the breeding of animal parasites
reduce the breeding of flies
disperse seeds from fruit-eating animals, and provide nutrients for their healthy germination
cycle organic matter into the soil
aerate the soil, which increases porosity and water percolation
create good conditions for soil microorganisms to thrive – earthworms, centipedes, nematodes, soil mites, soil bacteria, earwigs, slugs and springtails. (See Living Soil A5 Notebook in my shop )

All told, dung beetles play a critically important role in the wellbeing of wild places. They help enhance soils and domestic animal health because they reduce the need for fertilizer and chemical controls of flies and animal parasites. No wonder the Egyptians worshipped the scarab! Ancient farmers knew their value.

Dung beetle eco indicators

Today, environment scientists study dung beetle populations to monitor animal population diversity especially in forests and grasslands. As we know, human activity and modern farming practices have had a huge impact on nature and there are fewer and fewer truly wild places left.

dung beetle and wild boar — Dung beetle and wild boar

To survive, dung beetles depend on mammal populations. Most dung beetles are species specific, meaning they use the dung of a particular type of animal. This means that if an animal species is lost, the dung beetles, specific to that species, go too. In places, where wild animals and traditional small-scale farming have vanished, seeing a dung beetle is now rare. So, a decrease in dung beetle species can tell us that there is a loss of animal diversity.

Threats to dung beetles

loss of animal diversity
use of animal anti-parasitic pharmaceuticals (endectocides)
use of pesticides
use of animal antibiotics (dung beetles don’t do well on excreted anti-biotics)
altered diets of farm animals – grain instead of grass, upsetting dung beetle dietary preferences
altered breeds of domestic animals e.g., introducing European cattle to Africa, upsetting the dung beetles that prefer African cows
monoculture and agribusiness.

My hopes

My main hope is that you have enjoyed finding out about dung beetles. They have a special place in my heart. But more than that, I hope you can see how important these humble and fascinating beetles are to life on Earth. If you haven’t thought about them much before, I hope this piece triggers questions about how we farm, care for soil, and consume the Earth’s gifts. It’s not always easy to see, from our modern houses in built up places, just how our way of life impacts on nature. And my aim is to raise my own awareness and share it with others through my art, design and writing.

A Reader’s comment

Lovely Ann! I do love a dung beetle myself. Its quite astonishing to think of these silent services rendered to the earth and that they keep us going. God bless the dung beetles of the earth.

Bridget Krone, author of Small Mercies, South Africa

Category: Nature notes

All in an old oak door