Monthly Archives: January 2012

Bogs and Bonfires

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Wednesday was the weekly volunteer conservation task up at Greenham Common, and a welcome break for me from filling out grant applications and website building. The midweek group carries out practical tasks and wildlife surveys at various sites including Greenham and Crookham Commons, Bowdown Nature Reserve and Thatcham Reedbeds.  These all fall into a larger area designated as the West Berkshire Living Landscape project, a conservation initiative run jointly by BBOWT and West Berkshire Countryside Service to improve wildlife habitats and promote involvement and appreciation by local people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week we were at Brackenhurst (an area on the south side of Greenham Common), which is also one of the sites that I help survey for reptiles.  We were clearing birch scrub from a wet valley bog (or mire) that runs down to the woodland edge there, to enable it to remain as an open wet habitat rather than getting taken over by trees and drying out.  A lot of practical conservation in the UK consists of this sort of thing – halting the natural development (or succession, as it’s known) of open habitats like heathlands, marsh and grasslands, because for most areas in Britain the natural state would be woodland.  It might seem a funny sort of way to help the environment – cutting down trees – but heathlands such as Greenham cannot be managed as open habitats by grazing alone, and without this kind of intervention most areas would ‘scrub up’ and become woodland… With a consequent loss of wildlife species associated with open habitats.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plants that are found in these damp valley bogs include Sphagnum mosses, Sundews (Drosera species, carnivorous plants), Cross-leaved Heath Erica tetralix and Bog asphodel Narthecium ossifragum.  They are also valuable to animals such as dragonflies, Bog Bush cricket Metrioptera bracyptera, and reptiles and amphibians including Grass snakes Natrix natrix and newt species.  It being only January, there wasn’t much wildlife in evidence to be photographed: a Buzzard Buteo buteo flew over, whistling loudly, but lacking a zoom lens my photo of it wasn’t worth posting here – unless you have a good imagination!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Usually we stack some of the cut scrub to make habitat piles that will be used by small mammals, insects and other animals: we also burn some of it, which has the pleasant side benefit of boiling our storm kettle for tea breaks, the mainstay of all voluntary conservation work.  We still had some munchables left over from our Christmas barbecue, so everyone tucked into gingerbread men and biccies whilst finding time to admire items of protective clothing, such as Mike’s kneepads!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ade (West Berkshire Ranger) and Roger (BBOWT Living Landscape Project Officer) who usually manage the Wednesday work parties were both busy elsewhere

this week, so under the capable supervision of four BBOWT trainees we cleared a considerable amount of scrub, with a midway lunch break featuring (of course) more tea and biscuits.  Conservation can be quite hard physical work, so it’s always heartening when task leaders understand the importance of keeping their volunteers’ caffeine and blood sugar levels regularly topped up!  A process that was further aided by the discovery of a bag of marshmallows (also left over from our Christmas bash).  Toasting sticks were deftly whittled into shape, and soon people were tucking into smoking caramelised treats with only a few minor tongue burns (approximate core temperature of toasted marshmallows being slightly less than the centre of the Sun).

These Wednesday volunteering sessions are always enjoyable, whatever the weather, and the people who come are friendly and often very knowledgeable about local wildlife. Anyone can join and all tools and protective kit (work gloves etc) are provided, you just need to bring a packed lunch if you’re staying for the whole day.  Ade or Roger are the folks to get in touch with to find out more – see my links to West Berkshire Countryside Service or BBOWT at the start of this blog entry.

Intrepid BBOWT trainees demonstrate safe marshmallow toasting technique!

 


Striding into the New Year…

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After a suitably festive Yuletide (spent largely with family and friends) which featured a lot of winter feasting, what better way to welcome in the new year than with a long walk across the countryside… So on a rather grey and rainy January 1st, two friends and I set out on a yomp around the vicinity of West Kennet and Avebury.

 

2011’s warm early spring weather resulted in phenomenal crops of wild fruits of all sorts.  Whilst red (and hence most attractive to birds) fruits such as holly berries and rose hips are now scarce, crab apples still decorate hedgerows, whilst sloes and ivy berries cover twigs so thickly that branches were drooping downwards under the weight.  We kept ears and eyes alert for winter thrushes such as fieldfare and redwing, but to no avail.  Plenty of blackbirds, robins, finches and other smaller birds, though.  And the scent of foxes and badgers was heavy along the hedgebanks as we walked along.  We half expected to see rabbits foraging but maybe the rainy weather was keeping them below ground.  Such a contrast with the heavy snows and prolonged freezes of the preceding two years.

 

I’m wondering if we’ll get severe winter weather in January or February?  Some of my friends further north have had snow on the hills, but apart from a few hard frosts it’s stayed mild in southern England.  We noticed on our walk that fungi is still much in evidence, including the Jelly Ear Fungus Auricalaria auricula-judae, whose scientific name reveals an older common name supposedly derived from the belief that Judas Iscariot hanged himself from an Elder tree, on which this fungus commonly grows.  While some reckon it to be a wild food worth trying (both Richard Mabey’s Food For Free and Roger Phillips’ Wild Food give recipes), its texture isn’t hugely appealing and it needs long or imaginative cooking to render it palatable.  As you often find the Chinese equivalent (aka ‘Wood Ears’) in spring rolls and stir fries, maybe do as they do: slice very thinly and cook well until tender.  And try not to keep in mind that you are eating something that essentially resembles a severed human ear.  Yum.

 

Halfway along our walk with the rain now taking on that familiarly British quality of penetrative persistence, we took temporary shelter in West Kennet longbarrow.  In fact when we first arrived it was standing room only inside, so we drank coffee leaning against the sarsen stones and watched the clouds scouring across the Wiltshire countryside with somewhat gloomy drama.  Once the throngs had thinned somewhat we spent a few minutes in meditative silence in the damp darkness inside the chamber, atmospherically lit by a couple of candles left by previous visitors.  (And also lit through the slightly less-atmospheric glass tiles cemented into the ceiling.)  At around 5,600 years old this tomb predates Stonehenge by nearly half a century. Without wanting to succumb to an attack of yoghurt weaving, you can feel the weight of millennia when you stand quietly in there.  When Neolithic folk were building this, wheels were the latest thing and the plough had yet to be invented.  Archaeological work has showed that the barrow was used for burials and ritual for 1,000 years… So hardly surprising that there is still a presence of some sort to be felt there now.

 

The rain and ourselves continuing, our walk took us over the A4 and past Silbury Hill, following the route of the beginnings of the River Kennet (or “the baby River Kennet” as our route guidebook would have it).  Unsurprisingly after a year of scant precipitation, the “baby River Kennet” was not in evidence, consisting of a ditch with a few watercress plants and little else.  With April 2011 having been the driest in the UK since reliable records began in 1910, chalk streams like the Kennet are suffering from low flows of record proportions.  In November 2011, fish started dying in their thousands as stretches of the river near Marlborough dried up, and Thames Water have launched Care For The Kennet, the UK’s first awareness campaign aimed at reducing water usage to protect water supplies and the local environment.  Perhaps hard to keep drought in mind on a rainy New Year’s Day… Yet water has become another resource in high demand and suffering from subsequent supply issues.

 

Taking shelter at the National Trust’s barn museum in Avebury village (blessed be the young man at the museum desk who allowed us to picnic on the benches along the inside of the barn without demanding the £4.90 admission normally charged to visitors) gave us a chance to dry out our layers, resulting in a lively comparison of our assorted weather gear.  I was smug in a new waterproof jacket, after months of cursing my old one which was no longer so much deflecting rain as absorbing it.  The various merits of waxed cotton, wool and the wicking effects of overlong top halves settled to everyone’s satisfaction, we refuelled on Christmas cake for dessert and then set out on the last leg of our new year’s journey.

We circled an arc of the ponderous sarsen stones that ring the village, patchworked with lichens that almost seem to glow in the damp weather against the grey sandstone.  Each of these massive naturally-carved blocks has a unique character.
I was reminded irresistibly of Terry Pratchett’s troll characters: I’m pretty sure that I know which one is Detritus.

 

The last port of call before heading away from Avebury back to the Ridgeway was the serpentine roots of the beech trees that grow just east of the circle’s outer ring.  A thick carpet of beech leaves had blown into rich brown drifts at the foot of the slope below the trees, but the roots themselves were exposed.

Here and there on the trees’ twigs people have knotted ribbons and scraps of cloth, some carrying wishes whilst others are simple offerings.  Whilst being cheered that people still have a relationship of sorts with natural magic, there is a big part of me that hopes that in future folks will tie on something that will decay and disintegrate, e.g. woven grass or leaves, rather than the random oddments of cloth and plastic that seemed to be most people’s choice.  Thus the trees’ branches will be free to grow unfettered.  Like leaving burning candles in ancient stone shrines (a practice which is known to be damaging to the stone), leaving offerings of any sort at natural places could be done with sensitivity and environmental mindfulness.  Groups such as SOSS (Save Our Sacred Sites) and ASLaN (Ancient Sacred Landscape Network) as well as individuals have been working quietly to ensure that less ritual ‘litter’ is left at sites such as Avebury and West Kennet.  It is wonderful to be able to visit such places and experience them in a way which is meaningful to me: hopefully increasing numbers of visitors will consider the cumulative impact of their footfall and leavings, treating these sites with the respect they deserve.

 

Darkness came on as we gained the Ridgeway, heralded by the cawing of hundreds of rooks gathering in pre-roost flocks in the damp Wiltshire fields.  Cold rain set in again as our boots trod over the chalk soil, much as travellers 5,000 years ago along this same track may have turned their footsteps towards shelter and warmth as winter dark descended.  We were wet, muddy and cold… but energised by our new year sojourn.  The January wind had blown all of the last year’s cobwebs away and we feel ready to encounter what 2012 will bring.

Out with the old and on with the new!