Tree worm

You may (or may not) recall that during my earthworm course I discovered that earthworms climb trees.

On Day 3 in Sulehay I found a worm in a tree. It was in the nice bowl between the trunks of a coppiced oak.

You can actually see it - close to the centre of the image.

When I looked closer, I saw that it was doing something else they talked about in the course - namely sort of extending its oesophagus at the front opening to pick up little bits of soil.

You can't see that very well in the video.

It is - you may hear me in the video - an adult, as you can see the saddle clearly.

The tree offers a lot of tasty stuff for a worm - decaying wood, moss and leaves. We also saw various fungi in there.

Other news: today the crows were very odd. The Driveways behaved normally, but the Unbraves and Divines were jittery. The three Divine kids were waiting and flew toward me but landed at a fair distance. The parents were in a tree. When I left, no one approached the food - highly unusual - until I was a long way off. Then the young waited until the parents came down before hopping over. The parents filled their craws, intermittently chasing off the young, and when they flew off to bury the goodies, instead of grabbing their chance, all the babies flew away as well.

When I went back to the Unbraves, all three were there. But the parents flew off to cache, leaving Four and two pigeons.

Four soon followed, at which point, pigeons and gulls took their opportunity to feast.

Now, I hadn't been for two days - after appearing daily since my return from Qatar. But after I'd been away for five weeks, the crows were not like this. So I don't think it was me.

The starlings were all talking in the trees above.

And this made me wonder if the bird grapevine was warning of something? A change in the weather? It was due to rain heavily that night. But this is England, that's not exactly unusual.

Another mystery.