Wildlife expert and outdoor education leader MIKE BAGSHAW finds a sinister forest-dweller in our midst.

IN my column last month, I speculated on how 2013’s strange spring weather would affect the emergence of St Mark’s flies.

Traditionally, these insects take to the wing as the first of the hawthorn flowers appear near the end of April or beginning of May. Well not this year.

As I write this, the ‘may blossom’ is almost a month overdue and those distinctive hairy flies are still underground in their pupae. This has got to be the latest spring I can remember and it’s all thanks to that Arctic month we had back in March.

Now that the warmer weather is finally here, plants and animals are rushing to catch up, and I’ve really enjoyed watching it happen in the woods near my home. Miniature white radar dishes of wood anemones and wood sorrel have been following the sun across the sky for a few weeks now, with lemon-dab primroses filling the floor-spaces in between.

Very recently, those heralds of early summer, the bluebells and early purple orchids, have finally shown their hands and joined in the great blooming. All of a sudden bees and butterflies don’t know which way to turn – there’s pollen and nectar everywhere.

It was while I was admiring the burgeoning spring flora beneath a hazel coppice recently that I noticed four or five of the strangest looking plants I’ve ever seen. They each consisted of a stem about six inches tall, with 15 to 20 small flowers in a line up each stem, but no real leaves.

What was most unusual, though, was their colour – or lack of it. The whole plant had a pale, grey/pink hue, almost like that of sickly human skin.

Crucially, no part of the plant had any green to it at all. The overall effect bore a passing resemblance to a jawbone complete with dentures, a fact which has led to the common name of the species – toothwort.

As any schoolboy or girl will tell you, the green-ness of most plants is caused by the chemical chlorophyll, which enables plants to make their own food from water, carbon dioxide and sunlight, using the famous process called photosynthesis.

Quite clearly, the toothwort cannot make its own food, so it must be getting it from somewhere else, and the details of where and how it does it are both strange and sinister.

The fact that I saw my toothwort flowers beneath hazel trees was no coincidence, because below ground, their roots grow into the hazel’s own root system and steal food from the trees.

Toothworts are parasites – floral versions of mosquitoes, sucking life-giving fluids from their hosts. Stranger still, they can also supplement their diet by trapping flies in those innocent-looking flowers and eating them. So, not just parasites but carnivores as well.

Parasitism in flowering plants is a rare phenomenon in our country but there are one or two other species found in Ryedale that use the same food-stealing strategy.

Toothwort is a member of the broomrape family, all of which are parasites, and one of its relatives can sometimes be found on our roadside verges (when they’re not devastated by mowing machines).

As its name suggests, the knapweed broomrape uses a thistle lookalike plant called knapweed as its host. In high summer look out for an all-brown version of toothwort but about a foot tall.

Another summer-flowering parasite can be found up on our heather moors but it is much more difficult to spot.

The dodder plant consists of just a thin, pink, climbing stem which wraps itself around the twigs of ling or gorse to feed, and small pink flowers which are easily lost among the acres of purple heather.