Snakes alive

Most people walking across the Common never see the snakes basking a few metres from their feet. For the snakes, and for many of the people, this is probably a good thing. But for a few of us who admire their sinuous beauty, these few weeks in March are a long-awaited spring spectacle.

Adders lie in little coils at the foot of scrub islands in the meadow, half hidden among the moss, dead grass and leaves. They often curl up together for warmth, in what look to human eyes like affectionate entwinings. From a distance you'd guess they were heaps of dog poo (which suddenly disappear from view unless you approach on tiptoes).

Grass snakes are much more elusive, a truly shy creature and lighting-fast when they shoot under cover. I hear them much more often than I see them. But yesterday I spotted a rather torpid one waiting to absorb some heat from fleeting sunbursts on a cold afternoon. Look closely at the photograph and you'll see that it's lying on top of an adder. I've seen these two species basking close together before, but never actually touching. Clearly, neither sees the other as a threat.

Fire trees

On a bitterly cold day, in brilliant sunshine, I walked among the fire trees on Ashtead Common. Twelve years ago fire raged through the Common for three days, destroying hundreds of veteran oaks. Flames took hold in a deep layer of dry bracken, defying efforts to extinguish them.

Some remnants of the burnt oaks remain as silent witnesses to the destruction. These monoliths, scorched and bleached amputees, create a bizarre landscape. In summer they watch over a herd of chocolate-brown Sussex cattle. In autumn bracken rollers crush the scrub at their feet, removing tinder for any future flame.

Look inside these hulks and you will find the remains of wasp and hornet nests, beetle burrows and deep hollows which once sheltered bats and birds. In this dead wood, you can read the history of the trees and the life of the Common.

In the winter landscape the fire trees stand proud against the sky, dominating the high pasture and casting deep shadows. They are like the grand old men of the Common, watching over it and offering a poignant warning against the destructive power of fire. There is something both beautiful and terrible about them. 

Blue sky thinking

Sky-blue sky over the Common today as I stood dazzled by the sun reflecting off the Great Pond. A heron stood statue-like on the shore, then flew over the water like some prehistoric beast. Further on I spotted an unlikely buttefly fluttering through the bare twigs of a tree. I may be going mad but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a leaf - probably a red admiral woken briefly from hibernation. Overhead a flock of long-tailed tits called my attention with their metallic tweets.

madagascar dreaming

Snuggled up under the duvet on a dark December morning, I'm dreaming of a white sandy beach, basking in tropical sunshine and lapped by the warm Indian Ocean.

beach lemurs?

Lemurs dance across the sand where the forest fringes the beach, sometimes pausing for a moment to cast a glance at the strange hairless creatures lying in the sun. They huddle together for safety, then spring back into the trees and disappear into the dappled foliage.




I wander down to the water's edge and wade out through the surf, jumping through the waves. As I swim across the bay, giants appear on the horizon, hurling themselves out of the brine to crash back down in spectacular back flops, sending clouds of spray into the air.
As twilight falls, I walk up the beach towards the path. A pair of saucer-like eyes shine at me from a low hanging branch. The tiniest of primates, a mouse lemur, has come to peer at me with intense curiosity.

Madagascar may be six thousand miles away but it's never far away in my dreams...

It's all the more vivid for having lived it (well, make allowances for a little poetic licence) with the UK/Madagascar ngo, Azafady. You can go too and volunteer your help with conservation or human development. Have a look at azafady.org!

Bitten

 

The unloveable Blandford Fly

I'm a self-confessed bug hugger and a trustee of a national charity dedicated to conserving invertebrates but this little critter is not one of my favourites. Even though it has a real ale named after it.

Last week I visited my allotment. Something prompted me to gently scratch the back of my hand and immediately a tiny pool of purple blood formed on the skin. Puzzling. Surely, I hadn't scratched hard enough to pierce a vein?

In the night, I woke up scratching a hot and swollen hand, the site of the "injury" no longer visible. By the following afternoon, my left wrist looked as if it had sprouted a giant puffball and my partner urged a visit to the doctor. My GP was puzzled too. It's always slightly alarming when a doctor looks worried.

Later, I pondered the possible cause, sitting with my hand propped up on a pile of cushions, knocking back penicillin and anti-histamine and feeling rather drowsy. The skin was starting to blister. Then I remembered reading something on Facebook: earlier that week conservation volunteers had been bitten by the Blandford or Black fly while working just a few miles away at the Sutton Ecology Centre.

Diving onto Google confirmed that all my symptoms matched. The Blandford Fly, named after an epidemic of bites in Dorset in the 1970s, is a tiny insect, just two or three millimetres long and lays its eggs in running water. One of its relatives spreads river blindness in Africa, but thankfully - at least - our resident species, Simulium posticatum, is not known to carry disease.

Blandford Fly ale is brewed by Badger with a not-so-secret ingredient (an enzyme found in ginger), said to reduce the effects of a bite. I'm hoping someone will track down a bottle for me as a Christmas present. Then again, I'm hoping I'll never need it again...

Nuts to dormice



Stuck for something to do this autumn? Why not spend a couple of hours scrabbling around on the forest floor, searching for chewed nuts? Not just any forest floor - you need to be under the canopy of a mature hazel coppice - and the nut you seek is a hollow hazelnut with a perfectly round signature hole. 

 This hazelnut is the holy grail of dormouse conservation. You'd be amazed how much you can tell from the marks on its shell.

Squirrels insert a sharp incisor and crack the nut apart. Woodmice like to hoard their nuts in secret stashes for the lean times in winter. Like bank voles, they leave distinctive bite marks on the shell. But the golden hazelnut hidden under leaf litter bears an almost perfectly round hole on its side with a smooth inner rim and tooth marks at a 45 degree angle to the hole.

a dormouse nut



Why so much fuss about a discarded, chewed nut? It's the only way to find out if dormice are living in the wood, without going to a lot of trouble and expense. These sleepiest of British mice are nocturnal and they scuttle around in the tree canopy. You are extremely unlikely to see one in the wild or find its nest. If you do find the remains of its dinner, you feel justified in putting up wooden nest boxes which at least some of the population will probably use.

Only then will you come face to face with the cutest critter in the woods and be able to weigh it, sex it and find out how many offspring it has.

 A few days ago we found seven dormouse nuts among hundreds of squirrelled shells on the floor of a hazel copse in Surrey, suggesting there is a viable population in the wood. On hands and knees, we sifted through damp leaf litter, disturbing spiders and woodlice and revealing buried fungi. Foxes must have wondered who had scraped so many patches of earth clean when they emerged into the wood that night. 



torpid dormouse

 Very soon now, the hazel dormouse will be curling up in a ball of leaves for its long winter sleep. It doesn't depend on hazel nuts to survive, so long as it has plenty of food from April to October: nectar, bugs, fruits and nuts. But it does need a connected habitat of woods and hedges and hazel coppice seems to suit it very well.








autumn beeches

I always think beeches are the most beautiful trees in woods. Here in the South East they romp across the chalk downs, scattering dappled shade and a carpet of beech mast. Autumn is a good time to see them, as the dying season turns their canopies from green to bronze.

Our ancestors planted beeches along ancient boundary banks. Their roots entwine along the bank, so you wonder where one tree stops and another begins. It's as if they've formed an unbroken line to keep enemies out of the wood. The pair above, seem to have lost their neighbours but are holding fast to each other like "best friends forever".

What I love about beeches is the sinuousness of their trunks: how they twist and turn, almost dancing towards the light. Somehow they are more light on their feet, more feminine than the oak. That and the beech's fractal foliage, a vivid lime green in spring contrasting perfectly with the bluebells at their feet, then burnished bronze in autumn against a stark blue sky.

Oaks are the kings and queens of the landscape, in woods and pasture. But beeches are their liveliest courtiers, dancing through the seasons.

Pondlife

Towards the end of last winter I dug a pond on my allotment and planted a bird feeding station nearby. The birds arrived soon enough, gobbling up fat balls and mealworms while they raised their chicks, and sometimes visiting the pond to drink in the evening.

Ponds take a little longer to develop. I planted flag iris, marsh marigold and water mint around the margins and water crowfoot in the pond itself. Two pond skaters were the first sign of animal life but my excitement was short-lived: they disappeared two weeks later, probably eaten by birds. Red damselflies made a brief visit in May, followed by a flourishing of not-so-welcome mosquito larvae.

In mid-summer, the water suddenly cleared, revealing teeming colonies of invertebrates: pond-snails, worms and tiny beetles. Soon after, a sprinkling of duckweed coated the surface and blanket weed began to form beneath it. By late August, my early amphibian dreams were almost forgotten...

As I sat by the pond one day, removing blanket weed, a pair of eyes caught mine, protruding from the water under overhanging grass. A tiny frog! I experienced a childlike sense of wonder and gratitude that it should choose to live in my pond. Then I glimpsed a diving beetle, rowing back and forth between the bottom and the surface.

Two days later I returned to the pond with my partner and a camera. He snapped away, as I planted some hollyhocks and over the next hour we counted at least six frogs, some of them much larger than the first I spotted. One of them was a giant and quite unafraid of us as he lazed in the shallows.

The magic of creating a tiny ecosystem more than rewards all the digging and waiting.

sap rising

Gazing up into the petals of this snowdrop in a West Sussex wood, I could almost believe in the idea of spring. The woodland floor gleamed with splashes of white under a gloomy sky and hazel stems dripped with golden cadelabra of catkins. Along the banks of a stream the snowdrops nodded their heads in the wind, like tiny white bells ringing in the annual renewal of life. Wild daffodils were just bursting open, above an understorey of violet leaves and bluebell shoots - promising a sequence of woodland flowers.

On this clay-covered corner of the South East we're splashing through the puddles of an unusually wet winter. To say nothing of the mud. When day after day dawns dim and watery, it's hard to believe that seasons scented with blossom and buzzing with bees are just weeks away. But despite the deluge, temperatures have been mild and the sap is rising. Buds are ready to burst on willow, hawthorn, apple trees and beech and hazel stems are bearing their tiny but exotic female flowers.

Last week we basked in warm sunshine on a fleeting and premature spring day: the first brimstone butterflies of the year took to the wing; sleepy queen bumblebees crawled out of winter holes; and the teeniest tadpoles hatched in a pool. Earth, keep spinning and roll us into another spring!

Wildlife friendly allotments

On a bitterly cold grey morning at the end of January, the allotment was looking bleak and devoid of life, but birds were singing from the hedgerow and a great tit was checking out one of the bird boxes on the fence: time for my first step towards a wildlife friendly plot. I put up the RSPB bird feeder requested for Christmas and filled up containers of seed and mealworms.

It wasn't the first step really. I've grown fruit and veg on this plot for two years without using any pesticides or artificial fertilisers, and while I had to clear some of the scrub against the fence, I left a decent patch of nettles for ladybirds and caterpillars and a bit of bramble to shelter other creatures. The ladybird larvae gobble up all the aphids on my runner beans and sometimes get loaned out to neighbours when they're overrun with blackfly.

Most of my neighbours are excessively tidy growers, removing every weed and cutting back the grass around the edges of their plots. Sometimes I feel a tiny bit ashamed of the messy bits on mine - but the shame disappears when I encounter a giant frog sheltering under a grassy bank.

Blue slug pellets seem to be de rigeur in springtime, especially around infant pea plants on my neighbours' plots. All the slugs end up in my little organic sanctuary - at least until they tumble into my beer traps. I don't like to kill them, but at least I'm not poisoning the birds and amphibians which eat them. My efforts at persuading fellow growers to shun the poison seem to fall on deaf ears, but I did manage to rescue a clump of teasels from the autumn tidy-up next door, so there must be some kindred spirits around.

Roots

"You are old, Father Oak", the Sapling said,
"And your bark has become very gnarled."

I'm lucky to live close to one of the best collection of veteran trees in England, with thousands of carefully tended ancient oak pollards. Walking among them on a winter's day, I see contorted old men and women lifting their craggy arms towards the sky.

Few of the human characteristics of old age fit these trees. They are not decrepit, frail, senile, past their sell-by date...

In the winter of their days, after a lifetime of 500 years or more, these veterans have reached the peak of their majesty, strength and usefulness. They have become living pillars of the landscape, sheltering bats, birds and hundreds invertebrates in their trunks and limbs.

Many of the great oaks have hollow trunks, rotten branches - all have cavities, cracks and crevices in their bark. But they have weathered the storms of centuries and seen many generations of mankind born and die. In that time they have given timber (through pollarding), shade to people and livestock, homes and food for wild creatures.

Their steadfast presence in the landscape engenders a deep sense of place in me and, in middle age, a desire to put down strong roots. As something of a nomad and a keen traveller in the early part of my life, I've always been driven by a restless spirit. Looking at these old men and women of the woods, I feel a growing urge to settle in one place and let the flotsam of life settle in my branches. For the first time I am in awe of rootedness.

Life in the snow

Colours and sounds drain from the landscape as winter sets in with an unprecedented heavy snowfall at the end of November. Wading through drifts on the Common, I find myself in a silent monochrome world. Brittle autumn leaves scattered on the snow like golden freckles are the only flecks of colour. Birds flit as dark flecks between the trees: restless and nervous.

Near the frozen ponds I spotted a roe deer resting on the snow at the edge of the woods. A heron flew over the ice without settling at any of its favourite fishing spots.

Yesterday, as the snow and ice melted and water vapour wrapped the trees in a gentle mist, our walking group set out on a circuit of the Surrey Hills to celebrate the midwinter festival. We trudged past a field of rabbits, so intent on grazing the first patches of grass emerging in the thaw, they didn't seem to notice our presence.

Starkness gives winter a quiet beauty. A time of reflection perhaps, before life re-emerges from the cold dark earth in spring. I'm reflecting on the changes at the pond below - photographed yesterday and in mid-May.

In praise of trees

The trees have begun their autumn dance of colours here in the south east. Splashes of yellow, crimson and copper light my journey to work, even when the sky is overcast. First to turn were special cultivars of ash planted around our borough by a tree lover from another generation. A wave of vermillion sweeps across their emerald green canopy from September, creating a stunning visual effect.



Chris Packham has declared 2010 a mast year, producing a bountiful harvest of fungi, berries and nuts: a wild store cupboard for mammals and birds preparing to overwinter and a hearty reward for human foragers. I've enjoyed a few meals of ceps and stinging nettle soup and stashed away jars of blackberry jam and crab apple jelly.



Going to an arboretum to enjoy autumn colours is probably cheating, as most are planted with the Japanese acer palmatum whose deep red leaves outshine our native trees at this time of year. But English beech is the tree I love most in any season, with its sinuous grey stems and, in November, a shower of coppery foliage. It certainly rivals its colourful cousin, the copper beech, whose leaves have the hue of deep burgundy wine - not copper at all.


As Roger Deakin writes in Wildwood, "Trees have the capacity to rise to the heavens and to connect us to the sky, to endure, to renew, to bear fruit, and to burn and warm us through the winter". For me trees are an annual clock to tell the seasons by.

Crab apple jelly

It's been a bountiful autumn for berries, fungi and fruits of all kinds. The hedgerows are singing with bright red haws and rosehips, while apple trees hang laden with fruit.

I gathered a bag full of crab apples from a tree close to our conservation work party, hating to see the fruit falling to the ground and going to waste. Crab apple jelly was once a staple of the country kitchen preserving tradition and surely simple to make...

Over the next week, I learnt just how much labour and craft are required for a successful outcome - not to mention equipment. It took a couple of hours to quarter five pounds of fruit, discarding those that were rotten inside, and another two hours to boil them to a pulp. Meanwhile I had to acquire a muslin bag to strain the juices and find somewhere to hang it over a pan to drip for at least 12 hours. Not easy in our modest kitchen

Foolishly, I assumed that with all that apple content, the juices and sugar would set easily - a process which took another couple of hours and the addition of extra pectin in the form of apple and lemon peel (later removed).

The finished result is a clear, crimson-red jelly which tastes exquisite and goes extremely well with buttered crumpets or homemade bread. I can only assume that aficionados in earlier centuries kept servants to make it in suitably furnished kitchens - or that country housewives had a lot more time on their hands, which seems unlikely.

I love cooking with ingredients foraged from the wild and crab apple jelly must be one of the tastiest products from the British countryside, second only to gently fried ceps. But twenty-first century cooking it ain't!

spindle

Today, while I was wandering around the allotment, looking for good ideas to steal, I came across a spindle tree dripping with berries.

It must be one of the most beautiful and delicate shrubs in our autumn hedgerows. My Collins Guide to British Trees describes it as "slender, sometimes spreading and rather twiggy".

In autumn the spindle dangles small sprays of pink four-chambered berries - not edible to us, but loved by foraging birds. "Delicate" is the perfect word to describe it's exquisite fruits, fine forked twigs and scattering of willowy leaves.

This particular spindle was dotted with outgrowths of pale green lichen on its outer twigs: the intricate miniature cauliflower heads in perfect harmony with the fragile beauty of the tree.

I don't think I'm even going to try to identify the lichen. It looks like the sort of undertaking which requires a microscope and a good lichen book, neither of which I have at home.

Does not knowing the names of things diminish our appreciation of them? I'm not sure in this case. I do enjoy walking through woods or along hedgerows, recognising the trees and shrubs by their names and knowing what their wood was used for or which berries and nuts are good to eat.

But sometimes I experience a greater sense of wonder, stumbling across a plant for the first time, my head filled with the input from my senses: sight, smell, touch, sound - rather than searching its memory cells for learned information.

toxic pennies

Somewhere on a secret and rather unexpected site in south-east England, a red data book species is thriving. In the middle of a civic park, Pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium) is attracting a lot of attention from honey bees, but completely ignored by an unsuspecting public.

It is a highly aromatic plant, with delicate and intricate mauve-blue flowers, and is known to like damp places where the surrounding grass or other vegetation is short. According to the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, it declined in England and Wales by 80 per cent between 1958 and 1998.

This member of the mint family has a rich history: used as a culinary herb by the Roman and to flavour wine by the Greeks, it is also a powerful toxin said to deter fleas (pulex in latin, hence the botanical name).

For hundreds of years women have turned to Pennyroyal tea to end unwanted pregnancies. While there is no medical evidence of its abortive powers, its lethal toxicity to the liver is well documented. A woman died in the US after taking the tea for a number of days in 1995. Yet the tea is still widely available on the internet as a herbal remedy.

After a lot of effort I managed to snap a few photographs of honey bees feasting on pennyroyal nectar. I wonder if their honey will contain any of the plant's toxins?

Nirvana wrote a song called Pennyroyal Tea for their album In Utero in 1993. The meaning of the lyrics is a little hard to fathom but you get a general sense of nihilism.

But back to the endangered status of the plant in England and Wales... According to the UK Biodiversity Action Plan website, pennyroyal has suffered one of the worst declines of any UK plant in the past 50 years. It thrived on lowland commons when grazing kept other vegetation short. Since grazing in these areas has largely disappeared, other plants have shadowed it out. Its stronghold is now in the New Forest (not local parks).

Old folk names for pennyroyal include Run by the Ground, Lurk in the Ditch and Pudding Grass (it was used to season stuffings for hog's puddings). It may be deadly, but it's beautiful.

See past the sting

This wasp is "sharing" my plate of free range roast pork on a summer's day in a pub garden - with my consent! Most people fear and hate wasps and tend to swat at them wildly, making them much more likely to sting in self defence. I find them fascinating and beautiful and most of my friends and colleagues think I'm strange.

But not all of them! Buglife is running a campaign to educate people about all the helpful things wasps do for us and trying to persuade people to stop swatting them. Have a look at buglife.org.uk .

Social wasps - the kind which try to share our picnics and cream teas in late summer - eat a lot of garden "pests", including aphids, flies and caterpillars. They build intricate nests of hexagonal cells by chewing up wood and turning it into paper and there the sterile female workers tend and feed the growing grubs.

By late summer the grubs have developed into adults and left the nest. The workers are no longer being fed sugary liquid secreted by the young and need to find other sweet feasts. This is when they are most likely to come into conflict with people.

In my experience, wasps rarely sting unless provoked. If you want to lure them away from your plate, try giving them a drop of sweet drink or jam on a far corner of the table. Then you might get the chance to watch and wonder from a more comfortable distance. (don't try this if someone in your group is genuinely allergic to wasp stings.)

A pint of badger

For the first time in my life I came nose to nose with a wild badger last week - just a thin pane of glass between us. My partner had organised a surprise outing to celebrate our anniversary and it was going to be down in the woods at dusk.

The hide was sunk into the earth at the foot of a hill in the woods: a hill riddled with badger holes. Once a large sett, it was now home to one sow and two boars. A cub born early in the year, after an exceptionally hard winter, had disappeared and is thought to have died.

A ranger sprinked peanuts in front of the window and we waited for the badgers to appear. A frog hopped over the woodland floor under some bracken, a wood mouse scurried nearby and tawny owls hooted from the tree tops.

A black and white mask flashed from the top of the hill. The sow lifted her snout repeatedly to scent the air and after a few minutes followed a round-about trail down to the peanut larder in front of the hide. Eventually she was joined by one boar, then the other - both with broader shield-shaped heads.

I'm sure they sensed our presence behind the glass, even though their eyesight is poor and we were sitting in darkness. From time to time, one would stop suddenly and look up in our direction, disturbed by a slight noise - their hearing and sense of smell are very acute. But mostly they busied themselves snuffling in the leaf litter for precious peanuts.

One of the boars stood up on his back legs and reached up with his front paws onto a half hollow tree stump directly in front of us. With surprising agility and lightness of movement, he pulled himself onto the stump and spent ten minutes picking nuts out of the hollow with his snout and claws. Somehow he looked very pleased with himself.

As the darkness thickened, the badgers made a final sweep of the area for any overlooked nuts, then trotted off into the woodland for their nightly forage. What a privilege to watch them from a front row seat. We retired to the pub over the road and ordered a round of Badger ale.

Reflections

Reflections

One of the reasons I started this blog was to give myself space to reflect on my experiences of nature and to share them with others. I took this photo in mid-June at a watercress farm in the Surrey Hills. It was a still, warm day and I had just seen my first wild dormouse in some woods nearby while checking nest boxes.



The woods were idyllic: a tangle of hazel coppice carpeted with wild flowers, including yellow archangels, and everywhere shafts of sunlight penetrating the canopy. And the dormouse we found was every bit as sleepy as the one in the teapot at the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland.



Somehow it was one of those serene summer days when everything seems to be in harmony and at peace. Beside the pond pictured above, I found a swan sleeping with its neck curled back along its body, looking as elegant at rest as in mid-glide across the water.

Butterfly corner

The silver-washed fritillary is one of our largest and most colourful butterflies and a strong flyer. My partner photographed this one on the edge of a woodland ride on a local common. We had stumbled on "butterfly corner": a crossroads in the woods with a small patch of grassy scrub at its centre, dancing with butterflies.


Common blue, male

This little patch was like a cloud of fluttering colours, constantly in motion. We spotted fritillaries, male and female common blues, a small copper and a handful of brown argos. Then we watched the entrancing courtship flight of silver-washed fritillaries, the female steaming straight ahead, chased by the male flying loops around her.


Why do we find butterflies so magical? Is it the colours, the delicate fluttering flight, or their ephemeral summer quality? Maybe all of these things. If only they could sing...

Speckled wood

Brown argos