Flowers, sunshine, showers

Posted on June 16, 2013 by Becca

The busy days of early spring and lambing have been followed by the equally busy months of April, May and early June, with my outdoor learning work filling most of my time. Despite our Arctic spring (courtesy of the jet stream’s wanderings), the seasons have been ever so slowly inching forwards, and although today is grey and rainy there are signs that we may have more of a summer this year than in 2012. Here’s hoping!

Most unusually, we did have a sunny and warm Bank Holiday Monday in early May. This was a great relief, as on the day I was paddling a home-made raft with a team of other volunteers down the Kennet and Avon Canal, taking part in the Crafty Craft Race to raise funds for Five A Day Market Garden where I work and volunteer. We paddlers worked in shifts to propel our catamaran-like craft the five miles eastwards from Kintbury to Newbury: you can see from the photo below that a fun time was had by all! (I’m the one paddling at the rear of the craft, in case you were wondering.)

Astonishingly, our ‘Ghostbusters’ team (hence the ‘spooky’ facepainting) won the race in our category! I put it down to all of us Five A Day Market garden volunteers getting lots of healthy exercise and fresh organic fruit and veg. (Plus having a superbly engineered craft, designed and built from an old swimming pool cover by Ghostbusters team member Dennis – kudos to him.)

Before the early May Bank Holiday weekend, warm days were rare enough that when they showed up I tried to get out to enjoy them as often as possible. One sunny weekend in late April I went out to see what spring flowers were in bloom, and discovered the most phenomenal bank of Cowslips Primula veris near Speen, thousands of plants in full flower.

Walking around Snelsmore Common the same weekend, I was struck by how many plants had been brought into simultaneous flowering by the warmth, after so many weeks of unrelenting cold. In Withy Copse, Wood Anemones Anemone nemorosa and Lesser Celandines Ranunculus ficaria were flowering together, starring the ground with white and gold. The large purple-blotched arrowhead leaves of Cuckoopint Arum maculatum were everywhere, while just the leaves of Bluebells Endymion nonscriptus were showing.

The trees were only just showing signs of waking up, with few buds opening to release the tips of new leaves, so there was still plenty of light reaching the ground layer where these fabulous woodland flora grow. In another woodland (Briff’s Copse near Hamstead Marshall) I found Moschatel Adoxa moschatellina, a diminuitive little plant that’s always been one of my favourites. Moschatel comes from the Greek word for musk, as the plant has a somewhat musky smell; its other common name is Town Hall Clock, so called because the five-sided flower is said to resemble the faces on a clock-tower.

Of course with the spring and summer flowers opening, there is finally some nectar and pollen for insects to find. With last year being such a dismal one for British butterflies, it’s even more pleasing than usual to see them on the wing on sunny days. I spotted this Peacock butterfly basking at Snelsmore Common in late April, before it swooped off at high speed as all the Vanessid butterflies seem to do.

Snelsmore Common was also the site for a singing picnic that I organised for local choir Sing The World, which I co-lead with my friend Tessa. We gathered down there on 3rd June to share food and drink, followed by an hour or so of harmony singing as the sun slowly set. A grand way to spend an evening, in my opinion. I love the way that singing unites people of all backgrounds and ages, there’s nothing quite like it. Currently I’m just starting to plan songs for my next singing workshop, which will be on 19th October at the lovely barn conference centre at Elm Farm Organic Research Centre near Newbury. I’m looking forward to it already!

With last year’s challenging weather it was nice to hear some good news about local wildlife conservation: the success of BBOWT’s Heritage Lottery Fund bid for the five-year Linking The Landscape project in West Berkshire. I attended a conference in mid-April organised by BBOWT, at which they were celebrating the previous five years’ conservation work done by BBOWT and West Berkshire Council on the local areas covered by the Living Landscape scheme. I had been involved both as a volunteer and as a freelance consultant in the Living Landscape scheme and the new funding bid, so I was very happy to hear the great news that all the sterling conservation work done so far by volunteers and professionals alike will not only be safeguarded but extended, for the benefit of local wildlife and local people.

The conference itself was an interesting day, with a fascinating speech on landscape-scale conservation projects across the UK by ecologist and Head of Planning and Environment for Forest Enterprise England, Jonathan Spencer. One of his points was that landscapes and wildlife are best protected when conservation is integrated with community needs, including economic needs – and vice versa. This is a message that I think many people, both environmentalists and developers, are still struggling to come to terms with. There’s often a sense in this crowded country of battle lines being drawn up, when actually it would make far more sense for conservationists, businesses and local communities to work together to develop ways of managing our land that allow for sustainable living and plenty of space for wildlife. Good food for thought!

During the afternoon of the conference we had the chance to take part in some workshops on a range of different topics: amongst other things I participated in a training session for monitoring the effects of grazing regimes on the heathlands and grasslands of the commons, with West Berkshire ranger Adrian Wallington and ecologist Thomas Haynes. The aim of this is to recruit volunteers to carry out simple plant surveys to help monitor the effects of the livestock grazing on vegetation on the commons, hopefully to improve management for all kinds of wildlife. What better way to spend an hour two on a sunny summer’s day, than sitting in the sunshine looking at flowers? If you agree, why not get involved by getting in touch with Adrian Wallington and asking him for more info.

Another highlight in April was going on a camp with Thatcham Young Rangers to Rushall Farm, in the Easter holidays. As the weather leading up to our camp had been pretty miserable, we kept our fingers crossed… And luckily, we were blessed with more or less dry days! The Young Rangers were total stars: most of them had never camped or slept away from home before, but they all mucked in and had a great time. We visited the farm animals, helped migrating toads reach their pond, built bivouacs in the woods, and sang so loudly round our campfire that they probably heard us in Reading! Because of the very cold night the kids pitched their tents inside the farm’s 300-year-old Black Barn, bedding down amidst much giggling. All of us adult helpers involved received beautiful handmade Thank You cards signed by every child, with the fervent request “Pleeeeeeease can we come and camp here again next year?”

We are now in the heart of the school visit season at Rushall Farm, with the field teaching team working at the farm most days of the week. In mid-May one of my fellow field teachers found some Early Purple Orchids Orchis mascula in Oaklands Copse at the farm, and was kind enough to tell me about them. Their spotted leaves had evidently been nibbled by deer or rabbits, but the pink flowers themselves had survived: a lovely sight amongst the trees.

Schools have also been coming to Five A Day Market Garden: Castleview School from Slough brought three classes of pupils on visits, which were great fun for children and adults alike. Not fazed by the showery weather, the staff and pupils got stuck into sensory and gardening activities, finally making three fabulous scarecrows, one of which is pictured here. The school brought a really positive and creative attitude with them that made working with their groups a total pleasure: I look forward to seeing them at Five A Day again next year!

On the gardening front, things are finally starting to get going on the allotment that I share with my friend Tessa. The rise in temperatures brought our strawberry plants into flower, which in turn brought out the honey bees from the hives in the corner of the allotment site. We’re hoping that this will be a better year for veg growing, as last year was pretty much a wash-out. So far the signs are promising: we’ve enjoyed our first crop of asparagus since creating our asparagus bed three years ago, our broad beans and sugarsnap peas are coming on a treat, and we finished off the last edible bits of last year’s brussels sprouts: the tender green tops and yellow flowers, which I discovered tasted jolly nice when incorporated into a sweet potato and feta salad.

As part of a planned new housing development, our allotments at Speen are threatened with possible relocation to a new site only 30 metres from the Newbury Bypass. Allotment members and the local community are currently being consulted about the proposals, with a public exhibition of plans for the suggested development at Speen Hall on 19th June. My feeling is that I support the provision of new social housing (of which some 40% of the proposed development is supposed to be), but no way do I want to be gardening on the edge of the bypass. Hopefully an alternative site for the allotments will be found which matches the peaceful current setting… Otherwise I may have to dust off my direct action techniques and dig out my D-lock! The plans are very much at the early consultation stage, so hopefully the feedback from allotment holders and others will produce a better solution for all concerned.

At least the slow start to the growing season this year has meant that I haven’t had to spend all my free time weeding the allotment, so I’ve been able to go out exploring for more wildlife. On a trip with the Young Rangers group to Padworth Common local nature reserve in late May, we were surprised to find a glowworm larva sitting on the edge of one of the corrugated iron sheets used as refuges by reptiles on the site.

Glowworms are actually a type of beetle: the adult females have two brightly-glowing segments on the underside of their rear abdomen, which they use to attract the flying male beetles on summer evenings. They feed on tiny snails and although said to prefer chalky or limestone soils can be recorded anywhere with suitable habitat: open vegetation such as grassland or hedges. The peak for finding glowing females is usually July, so why not have a look at a few sites in your locality and see if you can find some.

Staying with the theme of nocturnal and crepuscular wildlife, at the end of May I went on a bat monitoring and moth trapping evening organised by BBOWT and Berks and South Bucks Bat Group, on the southern side of Greenham Common. As the evening was mild (and teeming with midges and mosquitoes!) we were hoping for some good numbers of bats, but alas all the bat nest boxes we checked were empty and there were few calls picked up by our bat detectors. We were lucky enough to catch a couple of Pipistrelle bats in the mist nets set up by James Shipman and other BSBBG volunteers. These tiny bats can each consume up to 3,000 insects in a single night! After spending several hours being bitten despite liberal amounts of insect repellent, I was silently wishing the Pipistrelles good hunting.

The bat action being less than stellar, I joined the moth trappers for a few hours of identifying the various moths and other night-time insects lured in by the lamps and white sheets placed around the common. I love moth trapping: there’s something quintessentially English about sitting in the dark peering at moth identification books and fluttering beasties in bug pots, periodically bombarded by bemused cockchafer beetles. I’ve yet to meet a moth enthusiast who isn’t also a thoroughly nice person. Enthusiasm is infectious, and frankly I find the geekiness of entomologists rather loveable. I’m well aware that this qualifies me for geekdom myself: it’s an identity I happily embrace, along with my many other guises. Oh, and moth trappers always make sure that good biscuits are conveniently to hand, as you can see on the left-hand edge of white sheet.

In early June I went on a dragonfly and damselfly identification course, one of the many Developing Your Skills workshops that BBOWT run across Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. If you volunteer for BBOWT these courses are free of charge, but even if you pay, at £30.00 these courses are excellent value for money. This particular day was led by local ecology consultant Adrian Hickman, a very knowledgeable naturalist who can communicate what he knows in a clear and accessible way. Adrian’s morning classroom sessions focussing on identification features were reinforced by an afternoon fieldwork session on ponds around Greenham Common. And once again the sun was shining, so we had good amounts of sightings of Broad-bodied Chasers, Emperor Dragonflies, Large Red Damselflies (pictured above) and Azure Damselflies to name a few.

I’m looking forward to a summer of exploring nature and putting some of my newly-acquired skills to use: but one of the perks of working in environmental teaching is that even when I’m at work I get lots of opportunities to notice and appreciate the natural world. Recently I’ve started giving illustrated talks to groups, about subjects including wildlife gardening, foraging for wild foods and environmental education. It’s a genuine pleasure to be able to share my enthusiasm for the natural world with even more people, adults and children alike. A love of wildlife is catching, but unlike other infectious things, it’s really good for you! It’s good to see the BBC promoting their Summer of Wildlife, which will hopefully get more people turned on to nature in their own locality. I’ll certainly be out there: peering at moths, sniffing plants, studying dragonflies. However you plan to spend your summer, I hope you enjoy it too.

Wood anemones at Snelsmore Common

Digging ponds and singing songs

Posted on January 20, 2013 by Becca

2013 is here… So a very Happy New Year to you all. May this year be a good one: peace, health, prosperity, happiness, the whole shebang.

The festive season was certainly a good one for me. I got to catch up with more or less all of my family, including sundry nephews and one of my great-nieces (who is, of course, a total cutie). My mum came through a complicated spinal operation successfully and is recovering well, for which I am hugely thankful. And despite the generally discouraging weather (day after day of grey cloud and rain) I did get out into the wild winter countryside on occasion, as well.

One of many highlights was going to stay with my oldest brother in Norwich for a few days over new year. Not only is he a host par excellence (and a very good cook, to boot) but like me he enjoys rambling along by the sea. We made a trip up to Hunstanton (where the photo at the top of this blog was taken), which is right up on the north-west edge of the sticky-outy bit of Norfolk. I’d never been there before; it’s a funky old Victorian seaside town with the most amazing pink and white cliffs, kind of like coconut ice. (Anyone else remember making that when they were a kid?)

Both the white and red upper rocks are types of limestone, the reddish colour caused by staining with iron. There is also a brownish-red sandstone known as carrstone, similarly iron-stained. The limestone strata are full of fossils – a condition which my brother took full advantage of by spending a couple of busy hours working with his rock hammer to extract several really nice brachiopod fossils.

Being in a more beachcombing mood myself, I strolled for a while along Hunstanton beach, which is littered with curious rounded boulders somewhat reminiscent of stromatolites. Crouching down to eye-level with these boulders put me into what felt like a strange mythical landscape, with rounded hills rolling away to the horizon of the sea.

There’s even a genuine shipwreck on Hunstanton beach: the remains of the 1907 steam trawler Sheraton, mostly buried in the beach. This former fishing boat did duty in both World Wars, ending up rather ignominiously as a target ship for artillery practice. She drifted from her morrings in 1947 and was washed up on the coast, to be nibbled away at by salvagers until all that remains is the bottom section of her hull.

After my Christmas and New Year familial wanderings it was back to work in early January. I had been due to help a team of people build a pond before Christmas, but freezing weather and then flooding had forced us to postpone. In the first week of January however it finally stopped raining so we were able to get to work. You may ask, “How does it take whole a team of people to build one pond?” Well, this wasn’t your average garden goldfish pond. No… This was more on the scale of being a minor civil engineering project. For all those who’d like to try this at home, here’s your step-by-step guide to building a very large wildlife pond:

Step 1, get a nice shiny mechanical digger to dig out a hole the size of, oh say an Olympic swimming pool.

Step 2: ensure pond hole conforms to the exacting design of top ecologist and pond-builder supremo Rod d’Ayala.

Step 3: assemble a team of highly-skilled, energetic and fetchingly-attired pond construction staff (aka ‘The Hired Muscle’).

Step 4: pick out stones by hand from pond hole and cover any loose earth with puddled chalky clay (N.B. getting muddy is a vital part of this process).

Step 5: line the entire pond (sides and bottom) with two layers of tough underlay material, to protect pond liner. Note that boots must be removed first, so enabling all those involved to spend the entire day padding about in the pond hole with soggy socks.

Step 6: lift roll of waterproof rubber pond liner (weighing over 600 kg) to edge of pond using digger, then pause to make sure you’ve got it lined up exactly the right way round because if you haven’t it’s going to be rather difficult lifting it out again.

Step 7: let the liner unroll!

Step 8: use your highly-skilled team to unfold the liner and get it tucked beautifully into position. (A great team-building exercise, this.)

Step 9: cover the whole thing with another two layers of underlay material, then cover that with a six-inch layer of topsoil lifted in by digger and spread by hand with shovels. Create marshy and shallow areas within pond by heaping up soil, following Rod’s cunning and intricate pond design.

Step 10: go home to a hot bath and generally ache a lot for a few days afterwards.

Actually, Step 10 should probably be wait for pond to fill with water… So I will re-visit the site over the next couple of months and see how it’s getting on. Watch this space. The pond has been built mainly to encourage toads, so it’s hoped that it will be full enough with water for them to find it attractive as they emerge from hibernation and start to do their courtship and spawn-laying in February. Fingers crossed.

Aching muscles or not, pond building was certainly a great way to start the new year. Being out in the fresh air and helping to create a valuable habitat for declining British wildlife, plus all the Eccles cakes I could eat… Life could be a lot worse!

January continued to be inspiring, with an opportunity for me to attend the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network annual gathering, which was held at Wortley Hall near Sheffield. As a co-leader of Newbury-based community choir Sing The World I’ve been a member of NVPN for a couple of years now, but this was my first gathering – and what an amazing weekend it was. About a hundred incredibly creative and talented singing teachers and voice workers, gathered together to share ideas and teach songs to each other, in a lovely old country house set in beautiful Yorkshire landscapes.

Wortley Hall itself is an amazing place: a former private residence, it was bought by an independent co-operative organisation known as Wortley Hall (Labour’s Home), with the intention that it would be used by the working class as an education and holiday centre. Today it is still run on co-operative principles, and hosts all kinds of gatherings and events ranging from socialist celebrations and conferences to weddings and parties. My paternal grandfather was a strong socialist, so it felt wonderfully familiar to be roaming around a building whose rooms and wings are named after the likes of Keir Hardie, Robert Owen and Sylvia Pankhurst. In the current political climate it was heartening to be somewhere which celebrated a long tradition of radicalism and social justice. A whole bunch of us even sang The Internationale on the hall staircase – in four-part harmony, of course!

Not only was the hall itself a beautiful and peaceful place, but the staff there were friendly and the the food excellent. All of us at the NVPN gathering were working hard over weekend, so it was great to have such a lovely venue. Being singers, of course we kept the bar filled with song every evening… Until 2am, on one occasion! It was impossible to go to bed when there were always so many wonderful voices joining together in harmonies, wherever you went. Music was everywhere: in the bar; over breakfast, lunch and supper; during workshops; even on a 2-hour singing walk around the surrounding countryside (much to the amusement of a Ramblers group we met along the way). I feel very fortunate to have enjoyed such a great weekend, both from a professional development viewpoint but also because I made so many friends.

So all in all, it’s been rather a good start to 2013. Hopefully this is a good omen of things to come… I certainly plan to be getting out and about a lot this year, working and visiting friends and discovering all kinds of new and wonderful places. I’ll leave you with the wish that your own year ahead may be filled with good things too. Have fun, stay healthy, play in the snow and sing whenever possible. Or dance, if that’s your thing. Or do both! Looking forward to the adventures the coming year will bring…

Midwinter musings

Posted on December 26, 2012 by Becca

Well, it’s been a wild and wet few weeks leading up to midwinter. On the few clear frosty days we’ve had, I’ve tried to get out and about as often as possible to make the most of the winter sunshine. Even when it’s bitterly cold, sunlight is a valuable commodity at this time of year. Especially after the predominantly cloudy summer we’ve had: several of my friends have remarked that they feel sun-deprived, as if their bodies are craving a top-up. As one of the benefits of sunshine is that it enables our bodies to synthesize vitamin D, a substance important not only in bone health but also good immune system function, it’s not surprising that we’re all craving a bit of brightness at this time of year.

Luckily I have several friends who enjoy the great outdoors as much as I do, so I have had the opportunity to go on some lovely winter walks. The photo above was taken at the end of November at the RSPB’s Otmoor reserve between Oxford and Bicester. Three of us had been planning for some time to go and see the fabled winter starling roost there: a purpose thwarted in previous years by weather and work commitments, but finally achieved this winter… And it was truly worth the wait. I’ve seen photographs and films of starling roosts; watched a small one in London, over Wandsworth Bridge; but finally getting to see the Otmoor spectacle was a real treat. We were lucky with both the weather (freezing cold, but sunny and windless) and with the numbers of birds (around 30,000 starlings). A few birders with whom we watched the roost told us that most of the evenings they’d come out, the numbers of starlings had been smaller and the flying display very brief… But on that Friday we had almost an hour of watching what has to be one of the most magical wildlife displays in the UK.

Unfortunately you will have to take my word for this, as I was so busy watching the roost that I neglected to take any photographs. I did attempt to film a few parts of the display with my little compact camera, but the resultant blurry clips do more to capture my excitement (lots of off-camera “Whoa!” noises) than the beauty of the spectacle. Starlings perform these extraordinary massed aeronautical manoeuvres for a number of reasons: warming themselves up before roosting for the night; competing to gain the best perches amongst the reedbeds; foiling potential predators such as sparrowhawks with the confusing numbers and rapidly changing direction of their flock. But when I watch this display I am simply swept up in the beauty of it. The ebb and flow of birds, cresting and falling in dark waves against the winter sky. Thousands of individuals transformed into a single entity, turning as one; then suddenly dividing into two clouds of beating wings that form into a heart shape, a drop of water, a rising hill: one cloud passing in front of the other and being reabsorbed, before the whole flock rains out of the sky into the waiting reeds.

Otmoor is worth a visit at any time of year, not just when the starlings are doing their stuff in winter. Its reedbeds and wet meadows support a huge range of bird species throughout the year, as well as dragonflies and damselflies in summer. And it costs nothing to visit, although making a small donation to the RSPB to support their ongoing conservation work there and at other sites across the UK would be a nice gesture.

This winter I have been busier than usual in the run up to Christmas, with field teaching work continuing throughout November. The Young Rangers group that I help to run at the Nature Discovery Centre in Thatcham has continued to be popular with local children, even now that colder weather and dark evenings have moved most of our activities indoors. We had a fun time carving pumpkin lanterns for Hallowe’en, and also making models of rockhopper penguins – which later ended up being used in a noisy but fun game of penguin skittles! Northern rockhopper penguins are mostly found on the remote Tristan da Cunha islands in the Atlantic Ocean, where their numbers are declining catastrophically. The RSPB is carrying out research to try to establish the causes of this decline: possible factors include climate change, overfishing and competition from other animals. Again, money is of course needed to support this conservation work, so if one of your New Year’s resolutions is to help wildlife then consider donating to the RSPB’s UK Overseas Territories appeal.

In November I also had the opportunity to revisit the RSPB’s east London flagship reserve at Rainham Marshes. I and a colleague were shadowing the RSPB field teachers there for a day as they worked with a local school, getting some ideas for developing our own teaching practice back at Thatcham. When we arrived the site was cloaked in freezing mist, which cleared slowly throughout the day to give some atmospheric views across the Thames estuary to the docklands beyond.

Rainham is an interesting site to visit, not just for wildlife and the excellent education facilities (I had major gadget envy for some of their teaching resources!), but also for the history of the landscape there. Gazing out over the foggy marshes I found myself reminded of the opening scenes in Great Expectations, with a young Pip startled by the appearance of the convict Magwitch out of the mist. I’ve always found the juxtaposition of industrial and natural landscapes fascinating, and Rainham is certainly a place with stories to tell.

Closer to home, I’ve been exploring some of the woodlands around Newbury. My old hiking boots finally gave up the ghost and I treated myself to some new ones, so this gave me an opportunity to break them in on short rambles in the beech woods around Cold Ash. With all the rain we’ve had the ground was pretty much a quagmire underfoot, but curiously it hasn’t been a good autumn for fungi – at least not on the sites I’ve been visiting. I did however see quite a bit of spalted beech wood on my walk – timber with a characteristic pattern of differently-shaded areas separated by dark lines.

These markings are caused by different types of ‘white rot’ fungi growing through the wood, bleaching out some areas and forming dark boundary ‘zone lines’ where two fungi meet. It’s common in beech and other hardwood trees, forming attractive patterning in timber that can then be turned or carved into bowls and other objects.

As well as exploring on foot I’ve been cycling quite a bit, especially along the Kennet and Avon canal towpath. In early December I cycled to Kintbury for a pint at The Dundas Arms, not realising that for most of the last mile or two the towpath was not so much adjacent to the canal as in it. High amounts of rainfall and maintenance work on some of the canal’s locks meant water levels had risen over the banks, making for somewhat soggy cycling. By this point on my cycle ride I was pretty determined that nothing was going to stop me enjoying my pint so I persevered, discovering en route that the secret to negotiating flooded towpaths is essentially just to keep pedalling, no matter what. I made it through the mire with freezing wet feet and a soggy bottom, but nothing that couldn’t be remedied with some Good Old Boy and a bag of crisps.

After frequent rain the ground is fairly well saturated, with standing water and flooding to be seen pretty much everywhere around Newbury and Thatcham. We’ve been lucky enough to escape the serious flooding that has caused so many problems in other parts of the UK, for which I’m very thankful: it must be hard for a lot of people to celebrate Christmas this year, displaced from their homes or businesses by inundation. Once again we seem to be suffering from ‘extreme’ weather events. After bemoaning the serious lack of winter rainfall last year, with consequent knock-on effects on habitats, wildlife and agriculture, the current heavy rainfall and consequent flooding may seem a touch ironic. But solutions to both issues may lie in the development of more sustainable water management systems, for example rainwater harvesting (RWH) and sustainable drainage systems (SUDS). I recommend reading this interesting article by Brian Pickworth, which explains how both flooding and drought could be tackled by the adoption of integrated systems for managing our water resources at times of peak and lowest availability.

A major part of any strategy for regulating water and managing the increasingly serious problems of flooding and droughts in the UK will have to be ensuring that we conserve as much of our natural wetland habitat as possible, of course. Much criticism has been levelled at the drainage and development of our floodplains, whether that be for housing or for agriculture. As a nature conservationist my sympathies are of course firmly on the side of wetland wildlife, which is the main reason why I’m opposed to the development of the so-called ‘Boris Island’ Thames estuary airport. The only case the airport-building supporters seem to have is an economic one… Although given the long-term costs of flood damage and other issues associated with unsustainable developments like these, someone clearly hasn’t been doing the math.

I’ve noticed recently that economic arguments are increasingly being used as a justification for development decisions that make no environmental sense. If any greenie dares to query the potential impact of anything ranging from fracking to nuclear power, it’s suggested that they are collaborating in some kind of Luddite plot that will drag Britain inexorably downwards in an apocalyptic economic disaster. I hope that people aren’t cowed by this financial McCarthyism. Using fear as a tool to push their own agendas is a technique long beloved by governments, but I’m hoping that in this age of access to information most of you will seek the science behind the headlines and prevent the destruction of ecosystems that are, ultimately, what keep all of us alive. It’s lovely to be able to fly abroad and visit beautiful places, but not at the cost of accelerating climate change and destroying our own native habitats and wildlife.

Ho ho ho… ‘Tis the season to be jolly, so I’ll end on a less polemical note! The nicest thing for me about this festive time of year is that I get time off from the pressures of work to go out and explore the countryside, as well as to catch up with friends and family. So in that spirit, I wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year… And may you have a peaceful, healthy and prosperous 2013.

Sunset at Otmoor.

Three months later…

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Becca

If the title of this blog entry seems a trifle enigmatic, let me dispell the mystery: it’s been three months since I last wrote a blog entry. Lawks! How did that happen?

Well it happened, of course, because I’ve been a tad busy. All good stuff, many adventures and projects and work-related developments, but for several weeks other things (including this blog) have had to take a back seat for a while. The allotment that I share with my friend Tessa has also been somewhat neglected, or at least hasn’t received the kind of TLC that we were both able to give it the previous year. To be fair, the rather moist summer we’ve had has meant finding a spare half day to work on our plot when it hasn’t been siling down with rain has been virtually impossible. It’s also meant that an awful lot of veg that we planted did not do well: broad bean plants rotted and died, salads were a disaster area, peas were decimated by pigeons, even courgettes (which we’re usually reduced to putting in carrier bags and leaving anonymously on people’s doorsteps) fell prey to the slugfest that has been this year’s growing season. The only things that did well were our asparagus, Festival squash (pictured above) and some O’Driscoll drying beans (pictured below). These last are a Heritage Seed Library variety that grows like a runner bean, and is picked in late autumn, giving oodles of pleasingly white and purple speckled little round beans that I’m looking forward to eating. I grew mine from a few seeds donated by a kind friend.

With all the rainy weather I resorted to growing a few things on the windowsills of my flat (which helpfully face due south), including the biggest basil leaves I’ve ever seen in my life and a crop of ‘Apache’ chillies that are so spicy they are probably contributing to global warming. I am a chilliholic (I used to eat the ones that came pickled in jars of vinegar, then drink the vinegar) but these have given me a new respect for chilli-dom. They apparently score 75,000 – 80,000 on the Scoville Scale of chilli hotness: to give you some context, jalapeño chillies score about 2,500 – 8,000 on the Scoville Scale. I’m not sure whether to cook with the Apaches or stockpile them as lethal weapons.

Work has been full-on pretty much all summer and into the autumn, apart from a week off in early August to go to Voice Camp (of which more in a later blog). Despite the adverse weather conditions it’s been a good year so far for field teaching. I’ve especially enjoyed doing some Forest School sessions with the Thatcham Young Rangers youth group I co-lead. The Forest School ethos is that activities are hands-on and largely child-led: we leaders gave instruction in safe and correct tool use, establish some ground rules… Then let the kids choose their own activities. We’ve had den building, fire lighting, stick whittling, tree climbing – in fact, pretty much everything I used to do as a kid, but which most children today are usually not allowed to do. Even just getting messy was a novelty for some of them – though they soon got the hang of it, especially when they discovered how to make facepaints from elderberries and mud!

It’s been great being so busy, but because I’ve been teaching on Saturdays as well (running some wildlife gardening courses for adults) I have missed having weekends to go exploring. Last Saturday was free and I took advantage of the mild autumn weather to go on a yomp around Combe, a few miles southwest of Newbury. Amazingly I didn’t see a soul during the three-hour walk. I started high up on Walbury Hill, where the gorse and brambles lining the track were hung with cobwebs silvered with mist.

It was a perfect day for walking, cool and bright and still. There is something about being high up on hills and ridgelines that is wonderfully exhilarating. You’re about as far away from the sea as you can get in Berkshire, but there is something of the feel of the coast when you’re high up on the downs. It got me thinking about cliffs and the sea as I walked along… Maybe next year I will do some of the South West Coast Path when I’ve got a long weekend or a week free. In the meantime I was happy to be striding out over the hills, enjoying the autumn colours that are starting to show spectacularly in woodlands and hedgerows.

I know from my teaching at Rushall Farm that it’s been as tough a year for farmers as it has been for veg growers, so I was interested to see in one field a straggly crop of maize, interspersed with dense drifts of Scented mayweed Matricaria recutita. I wondered for a moment what kind of maize crop would have been gathered in after the cold wet summer – until I remember that maize is commonly grown as a cover crop on land where pheasant shoots take place. The mayweed was pretty, anyway.

My guess about pheasants proved correct. Once I cut into the woodland, the wretched things kept exploding from the undergrowth like demented banshees. It’s a mystery to me why pheasants sit quietly until they’re almost underfoot, whereupon they burst out in a flurry of scolding clucking and whirring feathers that causes any passer-by to suffer near cardiac arrest. I haven’t eaten pheasant for many years (although my maternal grandpa was a bit of a dab hand at poaching, family lore has it) but by the time I’d walked through the small woodland I would’ve quite cheerfully stuffed a few into an oven. The phrase “too stupid to live” kept coming irresistibly to mind. I know it’s not the pheasants’ fault that they’re here in such vast amounts in our countryside, and they are strikingly handsome birds… But boy, are they dumb. Maybe they have to be, for the purpose of pheasant shoots. I could be wrong, but I suspect that the average toff who goes pheasant shooting (and at a cost of around £1,000 per day, I’m guessing that most of the participants are toffs) prefers his flying targets not to be too quick-witted.

If I sound a bit jaundiced it’s because I am. It’s tricky; I work a lot in rural areas where being anti blood sports is not well looked upon, but it’s the ‘sport’ element of it that I dislike. I’d rather people shot and ate deer, if they have to shoot anything. We could certainly do with a lot less of those around, and in the absence of wolves I guess we could fill that ‘top carnivore’ niche. I don’t object to people knocking off pheasants and eating them per se. It’s the whole industry of it that bothers me – that and the way some gamekeepers and landowners see pheasants as privileged creatures to be protected at all costs, even if that means destroying actual native British wildlife. Our local MP and Minister for Wildlife and Biodiversity Richard Benyon controversially tried to introduce a programme for Defra to fund the capture of buzzards and destruction of their nests. Fortunately the resultant uproar from conservationists – not least because the proposed scheme was based on anecdotes of pheasant chick predation rather than any kind of scientific evidence – forced the government to back down. Or as Richard Benyon put it, “In the light of the public concerns expressed in recent days, I have decided to look at developing new research proposals on buzzards.” Mmm.

Buzzards are actually commoner than they used to be, largely thanks to the successful reintroduction of red kites (one pictured above) into England. A lot of work was done with landowners and gamekeepers to prevent the newly introduced kites from being shot or poisoned, with the result that buzzards have also benefited. I’m really glad that these large birds of prey are making a comeback: my heart never fails to lift when I see them wheeling and soaring over freshly-ploughed fields at Rushall Farm. And towards the end of my walk around Combe there were a few red kites circling above me, riding the air currents over the downs… A fitting end to a good day’s walking.

Speaking of Rushall Farm, I had a particularly pleasing moth moment there at the end of a field teaching day this week. I had just finished cleaning the toilets (the glamour of working in outdoor education!) and spotted a very spanking Merveille Du Jour moth sitting on the toilet door. This moth’s name translates as ‘Marvel of the Day’, and it pretty much was. It feeds on oak Quercus spp., of which there is a good amount at Rushall thanks to the well-managed semi-natural ancient woodlands on the farm. All supported by funding such as the Higher Level Stewardship scheme which Rushall succeeded in gaining this year: a good example of how farming can benefit the environment and wildlife.

This weekend has started clear and cold and sunny, so I made the most of yet another free Saturday to stomp around Snelsmore Common for a couple of hours. The wind was bitter but the woods were looking fabulous: full autumn colours and drifts of leaves bowling around in the gusts. I found an Amethyst Deceiver Laccaria amethystina among the beech leaves, looking like it had been put there by a set designer. Fungi are the coolest things: they recycle dead leaves and wood, and many form dense networks of underground root-like hyphae which grow in close association with the roots of trees and other plants, benefiting them enormously. Fungal hyphae are tiny: in one gram of woodland soil there can be an astonishing 100 metres of hyphae… Yet the largest (and oldest) living thing in the world is a fungus: Armillarea ostoyae (Honey fungus to you and me) in the Blue Mountains in Oregon, one specimen of which has hyphae covering 965 hectares. Epic. How can you not like fungi? Especially as when they do pop their fruiting bodies up above ground or out of logs, as the familiar toadstools or mushrooms we’ve all encountered, they manifest in such a funky range of shapes and colours.

Autumn being the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, the other good reason to walk through the woods at Snelsmore Common was to glean the ground underneath the many Sweet chestnut trees Castanea sativa that grow there. I was half expecting the squirrels to have got there first, but there were actually lots of nuts to find, especially when I rootled about under the thick litter of orange-brown leaves lying on the ground. I’m not sure yet how I’ll cook ’em up – maybe something involving mushrooms, which go well with sweet chestnuts’ rich earthy sweetness. Or possibly brussels sprouts, although it’ll be a while yet before ours will be ready on our allotment. Maybe I can cook and freeze the chestnuts in the meantime…

So by coming back to allotments and food, I’ve come full circle. Must be all this healthy outdoor walking giving me an appetite. My Festival squash are sitting cheerfully in a corner of my kitchen, from where I regularly choose one to roast or stew. I won’t be carving one for Hallowe’en, because they’re just too yummy to waste as lanterns… Though I might carve an ordinary pumpkin anyway, for a bit of fun. I’m looking forward to Hallowe’en – or Samhain, the old Celtic new year, as I celebrate it. In the half term holiday week I’ll be running some ‘Creepy Crafty Creatures’ family events at Five A Day Market Garden which will focus on bats, owls, spiders and other spooky wildlife; plus another wildlife gardening course for adults, so I’ll be keeping busy. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a photograph of a very gorgeous creepy creature found on our allotment this summer: a beautiful toad who’d made herself at home catching the slugs feasting on our strawberries.

Happy Hallowe’en for next week!

Ychydig o law…

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Becca

The talented multilinguists among you will of course have spotted that the title of this blog entry is in Welsh, and a very useful phrase it’s proving to be at the moment too. Translation? “A spot of rain.”

As a field teacher constantly working outdoors, I often use the phrase “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing” as a way of getting students to dress less for fashion purposes and more for the vagaries of British seasons. However, even I have found myself musing in the past week that perhaps it would be nice if it rained more at night rather than the frequent torrential daily downpours we’ve been getting. I know that we desperately need water, but as I cycled to the train station in yet another ‘heavy shower’ I found myself yelling “Stop raining!” As I write this, rain is battering my windows yet again, and the forecast for early May is ‘largely unsettled’. Thank you, Met Office. I think I will go and buy a new pair of waterproof trousers.

Luckily, when I went to stay with a friend in south Wales in early April we had at least one day of perfect sunny weather. We took advantage of this to go walking around Dinas Head on the Pembrokeshire coast. This part of Wales is a National Park and popular with walkers, with a lot of steep ups and downs along cliff edges (vertigo sufferers beware). The glorious views across the bay to Fishguard and out across the Irish Sea are worth a little exertion… And a stiff onshore wind kept us from overheating on the uphill stretches.

I love the sea in any kind of weather, so this was pretty nearly a perfect day for me: a long walk outdoors, fabulous views, sunshine and a picnic on the beach at the coastal village of Cwm-Y-Eglwys at the halfway point. There was plenty of wildlife to get distracted by along the way as well: gorse and violets, wheeling gulls overhead and even a rocky outcrop garnished with what looked to be Guillemots (Uria aalge). As I was carrying my camera I hadn’t brought binoculars along as well, although a helpful lady (who turned out to be an RSPB member) assisted with identification. If you are good at birds and can make them out in the picture below, let me know if she got it right.

On the way home to my friend’s house in the wilds of Dyfed we stopped off for a visit to Pentre Ifan, a Neolithic stone tomb dating from 3,500 BC or thereabouts. The earth mound that would once have covered the 16-tonne capstone and uprights has gone, leaving the stones standing dramatically against the Pembrokeshire skyline. As it was late in the day we had the site to ourselves, which was probably the best way to view it. A suitably peaceful end to a windy but gorgeous day.

The following day dawned cloudy and wet, so we made the best of it with an expedition to Carreg Cennen, a ruined 13th century castle near Landeilo. Perched on a hilltop with what modern estate agents would probably call ‘commanding views of the surrounding countryside’, Carreg Cennen reminds me of all the castles I ever visited on school trips, when I used to clamber over ruined battlements and daydream heroically about swashbuckling exploits. As I recall, I was always an outlaw or daring raider, rather than any of the castle’s legitimate aristocratic inhabitants. Obviously watching too many episodes of The Flashing Blade had a lasting effect on me.

If you should go visiting Carreg Cennen yourself the most important bit of kit to take with you is a torch, because in the limestone underneath the castle is a long narrow cave that visitors can explore. In these modern days of health and safety obsessiveness it was heartening to be able to scramble down the steep narrow entrance passage, treacherously slippery steps and claustrophobic pothole unhampered by any kind of fussy warning notices. I for one thoroughly enjoyed banging my head on the low stone ceiling. Good old-fashioned British fun.

Since school term has started again after the Easter holidays my field teaching work is back in full swing at Rushall Farm and for the RSPB at Thatcham Nature Discovery Centre; but I also had an interesting photography job in mid-April, covering the opening of BBOWT’s new environmental education centre at Woolley Firs near Maidenhead. When I worked as a countryside ranger in Maidenhead a few years ago I met Woolley Firs Conservation Trust founder Rosa Lee, who was passionate about her vision to turn the site into an education centre for young people. So it was wonderful to see her dream finally realised, as a result of many years of hard work by herself, other trustees, corporate sponsors and of course BBOWT volunteers and staff.

After spending a hectic afternoon photographing VIPs and children from St Luke’s Primary School I had a chance to admire the site and all the latest interactive IT gadgetry that BBOWT education officer Lyn will be using when teaching. You can probably tell from my photos on the BBOWT website that the centre will be very popular with local schools, and I’m looking forward to popping in again soon for a visit to watch Lyn in action.

As the weather continues to be on the doleful and damp side, I’m snatching the opportunity to get and about whenever there’s a break in the clouds. Last weekend I managed to meet up with another friend for good long ramble from Pangbourne along the Thames towards Mapledurham. The photo above is of a scarecrow en route that has been steadily evolving over the several years we’ve been doing this walk.

On the slopes around Mapledurham there are fine examples of Chiltern beechwoods, and bluebells were just starting to come into full flower. Wafts of bluebell scent drifted towards us as we walked along: even with the occasional inevitable (you guessed it) heavy shower of rain, it felt good to be out enjoying the English spring. I am particularly fond of blue flowers and there’s something almost hypnotic about the indigo-blue of bluebells when they are blooming en masse. That intense blue haze striped with light and shadow is a particularly British woodland experience, one we should value highly. That our native bluebells Hyacinthoides non-scripta are threatened by climate change, habitat loss and accidental cross-breeding with the non-native Spanish bluebell Hyacinthoides hispanica is something that all of us should be concerned about. If you’re a gardener, I urge you to avoid planting Spanish bluebells if at all possible. It’s not always easy to find British-grown native bluebell bulbs or seed, but it is possible.

Our walk homewards led us back along the Thames valley to Pangbourne (resisting the urge to visit Mapledurham watermill, as the entrance fee was so steep it roused our righteous ire). One of the less usual sights of the Chilterns that we passed on our return journey was field after field of peacefully grazing alpacas. I failed to get a photo of one, although I did take a picture of a pleasingly spotty horse in a neighbouring field. I believe the technical term for this breed is appaloosa. I have long left behind my (exceedingly brief) horse riding days, but a childhood fascination with cowboys will never leave me and I feel sure that if I ever did get an opportunity to ride the range, an appaloosa horse would be just the ticket. With me wearing a black stetson, naturally. If it happens, rest assured you will read about it here.

Snake charming and lashings of ginger beer

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Becca

It has been a few weeks since my last blog entry: part of the reason for this is shown in the photo above, i.e. it’s been lambing time at Rushall Farm. This has obviously kept the farm staff very busy, and likewise the education team – everyone wants to come for a visit during lambing time, so all the field teachers have been working flat out. Which is not say that it hasn’t been fun. I’ve had some great school groups and done a lot of striding about up hill and down dale in the sunshine. It’s been great to have become part of the regular team at Rushall, and I’ll be back there again throughout summer term too.

The preternaturally warm early spring weather lured me out on my days off work, too. I went on a pleasant trudge around Donnington Castle one Sunday in March, and explored the woodlands behind to see what wildlife was stirring (apart from a dozen or so Newbury families sunbathing on the grass around the castle itself).

Castle Wood is an ancient semi-natural woodland, a woodland with native tree species that has been there continuously since 1600 AD. Such woodlands often have high biodiversity: they are rich in plant, fungi and animal species and provide valuable habitats in the British landscape (which has lost almost 90% of its original woodland cover). As someone who has spent a not inconsiderable portion of my adult life up trees trying to stop roads being built through ancient woodlands, I am probably biased… But I do like a good old woodland to potter about in. It’s almost as much fun as rock pooling or beach combing: that same mix of wildlife discovery, striking landscape and a sense of adventure.

Ironically, it is human management of such woodlands that best conserves their wildlife value. Traditionally woodlands such as these would have been a source of timber and firewood, with some of the trees coppiced – cut down near the ground and allowed to regrow several smaller stems – on a rotation cycle, thus yielding a crop of timber but also opening up clearings and allowing flowers, insects and birds to flourish in the increased sunlight. You can see in the photo above a Hazel tree, which was probably last coppiced 50 years ago. In a ‘normal’ coppice rotation cycle, it would have been cut every 10 – 20 years, depending on what the resulting timber ‘poles’ would have been used for. Today woodland management such as coppicing is largely carried out by conservation organisations, although some land owners do harvest timber sustainably. At Rushall Farm, Joo – one of the field teachers – makes high-quality charcoal from wood sourced from the farm’s woodlands, which he sells locally. It’s always worth buying British charcoal rather than the stuff you see on garage forecourts – this is generally made from tropical forests. British charcoal burns hotter and cleaner, too.

I found this 7-Spot ladybird Coccinella 7-punctata trundling over the moss, happily prospecting for food in the mild weather. Good to see one of our native ladybird species as opposed to the now-ubiquitous Harlequin ladybird Harmonia axyridis, a species originally from eastern Asia which can out-compete and even feed on our native ladybirds. The whole ‘alien species’ issue is a hot topic in conservation and gardening circles, and rightly so: it costs conservation bodies, local authorities and environmental organisations millions of pounds each year to tackle problems caused by the spread of invasive plants and animals such as Japanese knotweed Fallopia japonica, New Zealand pygmyweed Crassula helmsii, and American Signal Crayfish Pacifastacus leniusculus. If you want to help control the problem, check out some of the links above and choose your garden plants carefully.

The warm temperatures have brought lots of spring flowers out early too: I spotted Coltsfoot Tussilago farfara beside the pond at Thatcham Nature Discovery Centre. This dandelion-like bloom always sends up its flowers with their curious scaly stems before its broad downy leaves appear. Reputedly the flowers can be brewed into a nice wine, whilst the leaves were once dried to make herbal tobacco. They have what I would describe as an apple-like scent if you crush them. The scientific name comes form the Latin tussis meaning cough: a syrup of Coltsfoot can be used to treat persistent coughing.

Cycling back from Thatcham along the towpath I came upon a whole bank of Sweet violets Viola odorata, many of the blooms the white variant of this particular species. As mentioned in my previous blog entry, I can’t get enough of violets so I lay full length on the bank in the sunshine, sniffing up their scent until my nose was anaesthetised and I had a big silly grin on my face. Luckily no-one came along the towpath at that point and found me, or they might have suspected I was under the influence of something slightly stronger than Coltsfoot wine.

It’s great to have so many peaceful and lovely natural spots within easy cycling distance of where I live. I took advantage of the continuing sunny weather to stop off for a picnic after a day’s teaching, in a secluded little spot tucked away in the reedbeds near Thatcham. Apart from the occasional distant roar of passing trains (a sound that I find quite soothing) it was basically just me and the Chiffchaffs (Phylloscopus collybita) doing their onomatopoeic thing in the willow scrub. A rye bread sandwich, a bottle of ginger beer and thou, as Omar Khayyam might have said had he been there. Which he wasn’t. So I got to drink a whole bottle of Fentimans ginger beer and eat all the posh crisps myself. Life doesn’t get much better than this.

Lest readers of this blog think I spend most of my time slacking off, I hasten to add that I have actually been working very hard over the past few weeks. One of my jobs is assisting ecological consultant Rod d’Ayala with the reptile surveys he is carrying out in the Greenham and Crookham Commons area. In particular, the surveys are aimed at identifying breeding and hibernation sites for Adders Vipera berus.

As Britain’s only venomous snake the Adder has unfairly been saddled with a fearsome reputation, but these wary creatures are very sensitive to disturbance and will usually get out of your way long before you see them. If you do something silly like trying to pick one up and get bitten, it’s highly unlikely to be fatal: the last death in the UK from an Adder bite was in 1975. If you stay on footpaths and don’t go poking around in the undergrowth on heathlands (where Adders tend to be found) then you should be safe enough. If you like to walk your dog in these areas, my advice is to keep it on a lead (which you should be doing anyway, if you’re walking through a nature reserve). As a reptile surveyor, I follow a specific route and check known locations for Adders and other reptiles, but even I find it hard enough to track them down. When I do come across an Adder I try my best to get close enough to take a clear photograph of the markings on its head and neck, as these enable us to identify individual animals and thus assess how well populations are faring on each site they are known to occur. The photograph below is of a particularly handsome and fat male I spotted on Crookham Common, curled up peacefully sunbathing in a clump of heather. Beautiful, isn’t he?

Of course I see lots of other wildlife while I’m out surveying for reptiles. On sunny days there have been quite a few butterflies about, including Brimstone Gonepteryx rhamni, Orange tip Anthocharis cardamines, Peacock Inachis io and Comma Polygonia c-album (pictured in the photo below). All of these early-flying species overwinter as hibernating adults (except the Orange Tip, which overwinters as a pupa), and consequently emerge in spring hungry for sources of nectar. You may also see them sunning themselves on south-facing banks or sheltered stretches of footpath, warming up their flight muscles ready to go searching for food. One thing that often surprises people is how territorial butterflies are: I watched a Comma sunbathing on a farm track at Rushall, where every few minutes it would dart upwards and see off any other butterflies that happened to fly past it (including a rather startled Peacock), with a rustle of flapping wings.

Whilst wandering through the woods at Rushall at the end of March I did see quite a few flowers blooming, including Primrose Primula vulgaris, Wood Anemone Anemone nemorosa and even some very early Bluebells Hyacinthoides non-scripta. Much as I love Bluebells, there is something slightly eerie about seeing them in flower in March… Climate change sceptics, please take note.

Another insect I spotted that appreciates Primroses and other spring flowers is the helpfully named Bee-fly, Bombylius major. Resembling a small bumble bee with its furry body and hovering habit, the Bee-fly also has an enormously long proboscis that it uses to feed on nectar, perching on flowers to do so. Female Bee-flies can often be seen flying low over the ground to search for tell-tale small holes marking the burrows of beetles, solitary bees and wasps. When they find a burrow they will lay their eggs in the soil, sometimes flicking them in with their legs. When the eggs hatch out they find a ready meal in the larva of the beetle, bee or wasp that was the original inhabitant of the burrow. Perhaps not the most savoury of life cycles, but I like Bee-flies: there’s something quite otherworldly about their appearance, and for me they are one of the signs of spring having truly arrived.

Sunshine and my allotment beckon, so my adventures over the Easter holidays (visiting a friend in south Wales) will have to wait until my next blog entry. I’ll wind this piece up by hoping that all of you have had a good Spring Equinox and Easter. As the hosepipe ban commences here in drought-ridden West Berkshire, I’m wishing for rain but hoping that most of it will come at night, rather than when I’m teaching school groups outdoors. Now where did I put my waterproof…

Lesser celandine (Ranunculus ficaria)

Stop Press: Winter Not Yet Over

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Becca

It’s that time of year when weather can be at its most British: sunny and mild one day, wild and wet and cold the next… And the past week has been true to seasonal form. Last Saturday I was cycling around Thatcham Reedbeds after working with the Young Rangers group at the Nature Discovery Centre. Glorious sunshine had brought out local people and the wildlife, and I found not only Blackthorn Prunus spinosa in flower but also catkins on the Alders Alnus glutinosa around the edge of the lake there.

From Blackthorn we get the phrase ‘Blackthorn Winter’, which refers to a spell of cold weather often coinciding with the blossoming of this early-flowering native shrub. Blackthorn flowers appear before the leaves, which makes them easy to differentiate from Hawthorn Crataegus monogyna. The other plant that could be confused with Blackthorn is Cherry Plum, Prunus cerasifera; but this tends to flower earlier still than Blackthorn, grows taller, and is largely lacking the long sharp woody thorns that Blackthorn bears in abundance. I can testify to the wounding power of these: some years ago I spiked my arm on Blackthorn during a conservation task, and unbeknownst to me the brittle thorn broke off inside the muscle… From whence it was surgically removed some four weeks later, after I’d begun wondering why my arm wasn’t healing up.

Alder is another interesting native tree: usually found growing alongside water or in damp woodlands, it bears long catkins in the spring from which the wind blows clouds of pollen onto its smaller cone-like female flowers (last year’s woody ‘cones’ are visible in my photograph). Alder wood has the useful property of not rotting when under water, an attribute that led it to be used for making bridge piles, sluice gates, water pipes and clogs. It also produces a good quality charcoal that was once used in the production of gunpowder. It is a valuable tree species for wildlife, supporting leaf- and nectar-feeding insects and seed-feeding birds, as well as helping to stabilise waterside banks with its roots. In folklore Alder had a somewhat sinister reputation as the pale timber appears to bleed after felling, turning from its pale freshly-cut colour to a bright orange-red.

There was a lot of bird activity on this mild day too, with smaller birds such as Great and Blue Tits, Blackbirds, Robins and finches hectoring each other from the bushes whilst waterfowl were busy on the lake. No sign yet of the Sand Martins returning to their deluxe nest box complex (that you can just see on the lake island in the photo above), but lots of paddlers about: Mallards, Shovellers, Tufted Ducks, Great Crested Grebes, Coots and Moorhens with their comedy feet, Mute Swans and of course the ubiquitous Canada Geese. People feed the birds on the lake (usually grain that is bought from the Nature Discovery Centre, helping to generate a little extra income) so there are always plenty to see.

Our Young Rangers session was about recycling and Fair Trade: the children divided into two teams (boys and girls, inevitably) and built ‘buggies’ from recycled materials that were then raced against each other. ‘Team Girl 6’ were the overall winners, success largely due to their superior abilities to co-operate and work together, it seemed! Notably, their buggy included a matchbox luggage compartment for storing useful stuff, and was accompanied by a selection of nifty team flags. I predict that Jeremy Clarkson should be worried.

After playing some ‘Unfair Games’ we made spring chocolate cornflake nests, using Fair Trade chocolate. The kids even made some for me and co-leader Becky, as well as other staff at the Discovery Centre, so I was nicely fuelled up for my bike ride back home afterwards. Just before I set off I discovered my first Sweet Violet Viola odorata of the year, flowering on the sunny bank near the centre. They have sweetish scent which is unlike any other flower, and which possesses the curious power of temporarily anaesthetising your smell receptors. I’m not sure what evolutionary benefit this would confer, but it remains one of my favourite early spring wild blooms. The leaves are also the foodplant for Fritillary butterfly species, should you need any further encouragement to find room in your garden for a few violets.

Early flowers are appearing and so are the lambs at Rushall Farm, the first mob of ewes having begun giving birth. This is the start of what will be a flood of over 1,400 lambs by Easter – and many hundreds of school children and youth groups who come to the farm on educational visits, too. I was teaching at Rushall this week and will be almost every weekday from now until Easter: we had two schools of ‘littlies’ who were fun to work with, and on Thursday we all got to see a ewe giving birth to triplets – high excitement! The kids were awe-struck and asked lots of questions about the process (especially about the gory bits). Steve the shepherd handled the whole thing very competently with the assistance of a veterinary student on work placement at the farm, even managing to keep a running commentary going whilst rummaging about inside the sheep. Very impressive.

After a rather nice mild end to the week, Sunday came over decidedly wintery again, which was frustrating as I’d been stuck indoors with a stomach bug on Saturday and was pining for some fresh air. I decided to head for the allotment anyway, whereupon the rain turned into near-horizontal snow. Digging up leeks in a howling blizzard is an interesting experience; whimpering slightly I managed to get my harvest in and scuttle home to a hot bath, with leeks for supper. The allotment hasn’t got much going on with all the cold weather we’ve been having: our broccoli won’t be ready till late spring or early summer, and our cabbages probably fall into the category of ‘baby vegetables’ at present. It’s a bit like waiting for Christmas. I’m still munching my way through last year’s frozen runner beans and courgettes though, so I’m not complaining.

The aforesaid stomach bug was particularly annoying as it prevented me from going along to sing at a ‘Ukes For UNICEF’ charity benefit festival in Berkhamsted on Saturday. Unfortunately that left my co-performer John in the lurch, although he of course managed to give a successful ukulele-playing solo spot. And we did have a good night earlier in the week at the Unplug The Wood open mike at the Lion Brewery in Ash. It was standing room only and people were very complimentary, plus I won a bottle of wine in the raffle so a good evening out! For those of you who weren’t there, there are a couple of videos up on YouTube of me singing with John on uke, should you be so inclined to have a listen.

The coming week sees me busy teaching at Rushall and co-leading Sing The World community choir in Newbury, so fingers crossed for weather that feels more like spring than winter as March marches on. I spotted some Lesser celandines Ranunculus ficaria starting to open on a south-facing hedgebank as I drove home last week, beautiful little starry yellow wild flowers that shout “NECTAR!” at any passing insects who may have been brave enough to come out of hibernation…
So for their sake and mine, hopefully some warmer days will soon turn up.

Snowdrops and Stabilisers

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Becca

From sub-zero freezing conditions only a week ago to increasingly mild days where hedgerows are alive with the racket of bird turf wars… Yep, spring is approaching. My car is better (hooray!), wildlife is stirring about (a friend told me yesterday that he’d seen his first Adder of the year) and winter is beating a retreat.

Snowdrops Galanthus nivalis are a flower traditionally associated with February, especially the seasonal Celtic festival of Imbolc (or Candlemas, in the Christian faith) that is celebrated around 1st February. Taken from the Irish i mbolg meaning “in the belly” or oimelc meaning “ewes’ milk”, both refer to the fact that this is the season for lambing. I’m particularly fond of snowdrops and other early spring flowers: there something almost miraculous about a plant which shoves its way through still-frozen ground to produce a flower that only the hardiest of early-stirring insects are likely to discover. As a result, most snowdrops in the UK reproduce by division of bulbs rather than by seed… Yet where they occur in woodlands and hedgerows they can often multiply to spectacular proportions, creating a starry carpet of white flowers against blue-green foliage that is second only to the display that bluebells produce later in spring.

No-one seems entirely sure whether snowdrops are a native British wild flower or not: they are native to continental Europe, so while some botanists seem to believe that they were introduced to this country in the sixteenth century, others suggest that perhaps there were isolated wild populations already here that were augmented by human plantings. The whole native/non-native wildlife species debate always stirs up strong opinions, but until genetics definitively proves the snowdrop’s origins one way or the other I guess we’ll just have to be content with enjoying looking at them. One local site that is well-known for its snowdrop vistas is Welford Park: there is an entry charge for viewing the gardens but some of the funds raised go towards local charities. I’m also reliably informed (by some friends who went there last weekend) that the tea room there has deeply satisfying cake.

Being the kind of naturalist who loves grubbing around in the leaf litter, I often get down on hands and knees to examine small stuff more closely, so I can recommend the view of snowdrops from this angle. Try turning one of the delicate flowers carefully upward to peer inside: around the yellow anthers, a graceful tracery of spring-green veining marks the inner tepals (tepals being botany-speak for a type of petal). It’s every bit as attractive as a lily or an orchid, albeit on a smaller scale.

Returning to the lambing theme, mid-February saw me up at Rushall Organic Farm with the rest of the farm’s education team, for a training day prior to the very busy school visit season that starts as soon as the lambs begin arriving. Rushall Farm is a popular environmental education site for schools from all over the local area and also from London, running sessions for all abilities and ages from pre-schools to A-level students and above. I started working there in 2011 and have enjoyed every minute: although I’ve been a field teacher for about twenty years now, I had little experience of farm education (despite my grandpa having been a farm manager), so it’s been both challenging and fascinating for me to lead sessions at the site. Because of the students’ age range and variety of habitats, in any one week you can be teaching about soil science, crop rotation, organic principles, freshwater biology, economic diversification, woodland management, minibeasts, or simply experiencing the fun of holding lambs and feeding livestock.

Rushall is a mixed arable and livestock farm and sheep are a big part of its operation (providing about a third of its income). There are nearly 800 pregnant ewes currently gathered in the lambing sheds, scoffing their way through high-energy and protein feeds such as beans, oats and silage. The first lambs are due any day now, which is when many schools want to visit: there is a big “Awwww” factor in cuddling lambs, although we try our best also to instil some of the more important messages about farming. Food security and sustainability are (finally) rising up the political agenda in the UK as well as world-wide, and with the increasing cost of fossil fuels which underpin ‘conventional’ farming methods, it’s likely that organic farming will be playing a bigger role in supplying some of our food needs. At present only 4% of British farmland is organically managed (as compared with 10% in Denmark, Austria or Italy)… So it looks like we could do better.

The argument oft trotted out against organic food is the cost: but interestingly, this is becoming less of an issue as food prices overall have risen steeply in past months. The central principles of organic farming are to work with natural systems, sustain soil fertility whilst minimising environmental impact, ensure ethical animal treatment and protect and enhance wildlife and natural habitats. Personally, I’m prepared to pay a little bit extra for most of my food to ensure this. Most people eat more than they need to anyway (and then spend a fortune on expensive gym membership or diets), so maybe supporting British organic farmers with at least some of your food shopping budget might be a better way forward.

Of course, the livestock part of the farm is not about cuddling lambs but about meat production. (Vegans, look away now.) As well as sheep, Rushall has a herd of about 100 suckler cows and calves. In a suckler herd each cow will ideally calve once a year (in January/February at Rushall) and suckle her calf for eight or nine months; the calf then goes off to be finished (i.e. continue growing for some months before slaughter for meat), whilst the cow has a few weeks rest before becoming pregnant again. It’s a fairly inefficient system with a high carbon footprint, which is why farmers are always looking for ways to improve the process. One of the solutions has been the development of a new breed of cattle known as the Stabiliser: a cross between four different breeds (Red Angus, Hereford, Gelbvieh and Simmental) to produce a cow that combines traits which are desirable for livestock.

On our training day we were joined by Neil Rowe, farm manager for Manor Farm in Oxfordshire (owned by William Cumber, Rushall Farm’s owner). Neil give us a fascinating presentation about the Stabiliser breed, which Rushall’s cattle herd is now largely made up of. Stabiliser cattle can calve younger than other breeds (at two years rather than at three), tend to be healthier (because of hybrid vigour), cope well with all climates, have small calves (and hence easier calvings), are docile and convert food into beef efficiently. Because of these beneficial traits, they are worth twice as much as other cattle breeds. The only problem (as Neil saw it) is the breed’s name, which at present has virtually zero recognition with UK consumers when the meat is marketed, despite it tasting (apparently) as good as prime Aberdeen Angus.

I like cows and I’m (mostly) vegetarian so the whole beef industry thing is problematic for me, but in a mixed organic farming system livestock contribute significantly to soil fertility via their manure and also form part of a wider countryside ecosystem and landscape which I am deeply attached to. On an economic note, world demand for beef is high and production is falling: in the US, 42% of grain in 2011 went towards biofuels production rather than to animal feed. One of Neil’s current projects is to develop an international scheme for Fair Trade certification of animal feed (such as grain), which seems to me a worthy endeavour that I wish him lots of luck with.

Neil also had some interesting views on the current bovine TB issue. Badger culling is being proposed to start in autumn 2012 in areas of Somerset and Gloucestershire, despite current evidence indicating that this will not ameliorate the bovine TB problem and may even exacerbate it. More attention should be given to issues such as poor cattle husbandry, feeding animals with maize (which impacts their immune system) and most importantly illegal cattle movements. Neil made the startling point that there are roughly seven million cattle movements every year in the UK… and only four inspectors.

On a happier and hopefully less controversial note, John Bishop (Rushall’s farm manager) was able to share with us the happy news that the farm has just been accepted into the Higher Level Scheme (HLS) where the government gives money to farmers specifically for undertaking measures that support wildlife. Rushall is already also in the Organic Entry Level Scheme (OELS), so the two combined payments will hopefully form a significant part of the farm’s income over the next few years. This is a good example of positive government involvement in the countryside… It would be nice if there was more of it. Some of the wildlife improvements will include creating species-rich semi-natural grassland, planting wild flower margins, carrying out management to support nesting and breeding birds and looking after waterside meadows on the farm. So hopefully, we will be seeing even more wildlife around Rushall than we already do.

Although many of the schools who visit Rushall do so to see the livestock, I have to own a persistent attachment to the apparently less-glamorous world of invertebrates and plants. Apart from pond dipping and minibeast safaris it’s not always easy to sell children (or adults) on the attractions of bugs, whilst plants seem even less interesting. But I persevere. So to conclude this blog entry, I leave you with the intriguing world of leaf miner insects. Even in the depths of winter you can find evidence of this particular group of small animals who make their homes in leaves and stems, munching their way through the tissues whilst remaining largely hidden from possible predators. It’s a bit like living in your bed for the winter with an endless supply of food, something I’m sure which has appealed to most of us at some point during the long dark days of January. During our training day we went on an invertebrate sampling walk and found the distinctive mines of Phytomyza illicis in the leaves of a Holly Ilex aquifolium. So next time you’re on a winter ramble and want to impress someone, you can casually point to a Holly leaf and murmur, “Ah, Phytomyza…” I plan to try it, anyway.

Phytomyza illicis mine in Holly leaf

Environmental Education and Sustainability

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Becca

At the end of January I had my first day of teaching in 2012 for the RSPB, at the Nature Discovery Centre in Thatcham. A class from Sulhamstead and Ufton Nervet Primary School spent the day following our ‘Sustainability Matters’ education programme, to link in with the themes of sustainability and the environment that they are following this term back at school.

‘Sustainability Matters’ is a cross-curricular programme that covers a range of topics including energy, waste/recycling, water, biodiversity, food production, local land use and climate change. The day works on three levels: using hands-on activities to develop understanding of topics and processes, discussing the children’s own feelings about the issues involved, and finally addressing where to go from here – what actions they can take to support the planet’s ecosystems, safeguarding the future of wildlife and themselves.

We’re lucky in Thatcham to be able to use the Centre building itself as a valuable teaching resource. It incorporates many sustainable design features including a woodchip boiler, solar panels for heating water, rainwater harvesting, a green roof and light wells in the classroom. One of our activities is a ‘Sustainability Trail’ where we send the kids off in small teams (with adults posted at strategic points for safety reasons) to find various features in and around the building, and then solve questions relating to issues such as water, energy, food and recycling. This type of active self-directed learning, as it’s known, is a valuable educational tool. Giving young people some autonomy and responsibility for their own learning may sound risky, but in practice it pays off big time.

I’m often impressed by the thinking that the children I teach demonstrate. Pupils have complex and often heated discussions with each other whilst trying to solve the questions along the Sustainability Trail: one team, trying to work out the average amount of water used daily by a UK household, came up with the idea of thinking how much water a running tap produces in six seconds, then multiplying that by ten, then multiplying that by sixty, then multiplying that by twenty-four… Thinking outside the box! Or outside the sink, maybe.

Another activity was a roleplay about sustainable land use, where the children worked in teams representing interested parties at a public enquiry (to decide what would be done with a disused gravel pit). One pupil asked, “Should I vote for the team who I think has made the best argument, or should I vote for what I feel is the right thing?” After the final vote, another pupil declared, “I want to say that although I voted for the landfill company today, in real life I would vote for the wildlife group.” An encouraging endorsement from the upcoming generation!

Later in the week I was at Thatcham again, with the West Berkshire Living Landscape Midweek Team that I often volunteer with. (For details of how to get involved with the team, see my ‘Bogs and Bonfires’ blog post, before this one.) This week we were tree planting around the Discovery Centre’s newly improved car parking area, a rewarding task (despite having to dig holes in near-frozen ground). As with every urban area, traffic is a challenging issue in Thatcham: whilst the huge popularity of the Discovery Centre and nature reserve with local people is encouraging, the amount of indiscriminate parking by visitors has sometimes ruffled the feathers of those living nearby. The increased number of spaces now provided should mitigate this, and an innovative ‘Park and Stride’ scheme has been incorporated for parents with children at the nearby Parsons Down Junior School. And the hundreds of native trees which have planted around the parking area will provide good woodland and hedgerow habitat for all kinds of wildlife.

It certainly felt like early February, with the freezing weather we’ve just been having. But last week I found this Winter Aconite Eranthis hyemalis flowering in the garden of Thrive near Reading, when I attended a couple of workshops that were part of an initial consultation process for the development of a Local Nature Partnership in Berkshire. Kelly Thomas (Berkshire Nature Conservation Forum, BBOWT) is working to bring together all local groups who may be interested in being involved in such a partnership, whether they are working in nature conservation, community and social issues, education, health, farming, business… Or anything, really.

The idea is to work collaboratively to safeguard Berkshire’s wildlife and habitats, whilst also meeting social, educational, health and economic needs. There was quite a mixture of groups and some interesting ideas came out for taking the LNP forward in Berkshire. The plan is to apply for formal LNP status for Berkshire in the first half of 2012, so watch this space… Hopefully there will be updates following from the workshops soon.

The longer days and (mostly) better weather means that I am out and about on my bike again, which is great for me and for the environment – so double win! When working at Thatcham I can cycle along the Kennet and Avon Canal towpath, then I cut in to the Discovery Centre via the reedbeds. Even at this time of year there’s always lots of wildlife about: I’ve seen roe deer, foxes, moorhens, mute swans and the occasional kingfisher. Canal traffic is minimal in winter but there’s still a few narrowboats moored up or putting along, giving off lovely smells of woodsmoke from their chimneys as I pedal past. Back in the summer I narrowly avoided cycling over a Slow worm that was sunning itself on the path; at this time of year the more usual hazard is turning up at work with frostbitten ears.

One of the best things about cycling regularly through the local environment is the sense it gives you of the seasons unfolding. Although temperatures this week are icy, spring is definitely on its way, with plant shoots breaking the ground and birds getting stroppy in the hedgerows. I’m enjoying the frosty sunny days and plan to get out on a walk this coming weekend with my camera… And it’s not long until the onset of snowdrops, daffodils and lambing!

Hellebore flowering at Thrive

Striding into the New Year…

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Becca

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!

Rowanleaf

Writing, Singing & Teaching About The World

Tag Archives: seasons