Competition in nature is one of those concepts lectured upon at university but that gets a limited deal in popular wildlife shows, especially compared to its twin natural processes of predation and mutualism. In a world where resources are finite, the theory goes, species that require those resources will compete against other, until either the weaker competitor goes locally extinct or one species finds a slightly different niche from its rival, defusing the competition.

But there is a third way. In my post the other day I mentioned about yellow rattle and how it sort of mediates the competition between wildflowers and grasses. Tonight I went to another meadow and found some rattle that is already ready to rattle These are the seed pods.



If a predator (or parasite, in the rattle's case - it apparently gets some of its nutrition from the roots of its neighbouring plants) is inclined to go for the most powerful competitor, the weaker species will, of course, benefit. This seen all over the place in the natural world. I guess I've probably mentioned this before on here but there was a study in Texas a while back that looked at how coyotes were influencing the diversity of rodents. Obviously, coyotes kill rodents...but what initially looks bad for rodents is actually very good for most of them. In an area kept coyote-free, the number of rodent species dropped from eleven to one as coyotes, through preying on highly dominant kangaroo rats, had been keeping competition in check. Predation is good for those that don't get eaten, as the saying goes

(I can never pass up the opportunity to put a coyote photo on my blog Needless to say, this is from Alberta last June.)



Anyway...back to the North Downs, and the point of all this is to explain why I found so many pyramidal orchids Anacamptis pyramidalis in the meadow where rattle had reduced the grass density



A couple of other shots: the foxcubs are still being themselves



And this is a slightly shy male bullfinch who visited the front garden a couple of mornings ago.