Tag Archives: brambles

Birds, Ecology, Hill Farming, Uncategorized

Faux Christmas?

A friend of mine has just returned to the UK having lived for several years on the other side of the globe. She explains her disorientation in time and space on the disruption to her seasons (I have no excuse!). It’s mid-summer here and mid-winter in New Zealand, where those who suffer from European nostalgia have a pretend Christmas.

Here on our smallholding in Mid-Wales we do something similar — opening our gifts on one particular day. It’s exciting. It’s bird-ringing day! Not their necks so that we can roast them with pigs-in-blankets and plum pudding, but counting all the year’s baby birds, catching the fledgelings that are about to leave their nests and, in particular, those in our nest boxes and ringing them. A right of passage — a birdy Bar Mitzvah — we should have a party!

At a time when we feel we will be overwhelmed by the sheer fecundity of our temperate rain forest, it is good to have some positive feedback for our efforts for wildlife. We are engulfed in 8 foot bracken and torn at by wildly flailing tentacles of bramble that reach out across the tracks to grab us as the mower clogs and stalls yet again, which is just as well as it is overheating.

The cloud of buzzing flies that pursue us fails to reassure us that our local biosphere is healthy or that forswearing insecticides was a good idea. But counting birds does.

Jon and Jan

The stalwarts from the Habitat Protection group have made their annual visits and this year has been very good for blue tits — 52 chicks from 5 nest boxes. How’s’at for productivity! It represents a lot of caterpillars! Lots of work from this top-of -the-table, enterprising species.

A better year for our “target” species, the more endangered pied flycatcher. They produced 24 chicks from their 5 nests. Up 20% but one of their nests failed completely last year — we suspected a great spotted woodpecker. It’s harder for pied flycatchers as they are migrants and have to co-ordinate their arrival with the weather and the caterpillars, not to mention competing with the locals for nesting sites and finding each other again as the males arrive first.

Pied Flycatcher

There was only one nest of great tits but they produced 7 chicks.

Great tit fledgeling

Three of our 14 boxes were empty; today I noticed a great spotted woodpecker squarking a warning to its own fledgelings — wildlife is a balance.

They also ringed a treecreeper fledgling hopping about and keen to be included. They tend to nest in the holes between the roots of the oak trees and in the deep splits in trunks, we watched one earlier this year taking lots of spiders to a nest on the hill.

So, inspired by all this avian fertility, we bash on with re-establishing the tracks to maintain some sort of access to our wild areas and woodland and uncover the diversity that is appearing and a weighty crop of rowan berries and wild cherries that are already keeping the blackbirds and thrushes busy.

This is the time of the year when we regularly lose our well and it is quite important that we find it in its nest of horsetail ferns and overgrown by all this burgeoning diversity. Here it is and it’s full.

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Hill Farming

Lamb and Blackberry

If you walk in the hills much in Wales you will occasionally encounter a strange, unpleasant smell.  Your impulse, honed over myriad generations, will be to head in the opposite direction because it is the smell of death.  If you are inquisitive you may poke around with a stick while holding your breath and you will find the decaying flesh hanging from the still-articulated skeleton — there will be lots of interesting insects and if you look carefully, with your CSI hat on, you might notice the brambles wound around the body.

You see, brambles grab sheep — they wrap them in their tentacles and the more the sheep thrashes and twists the firmer it is held — it does not last long.

Sometimes they escape

Sometimes they escape

Don’t fret — most places are so thoroughly grazed that the blackberries never get a hold — it’s when the sheep sneak into places they are not allowed that the trouble starts — when they get into woods where they are not supposed to go.

Stuck!

Here’s Gladys (you remember Gladys — the floppy, pig-mouthed ewe lamb with teddy-bear ears who wasn’t prepared to die as everyone knew she should). She is still testing the limits of survival.  Her baaing has dragged us out of bed — she and her friend are stuck — doesn’t look impressive because they have already eaten all the leaves and the thorny twine that binds them is embedded in their thick fleeces but they cannot get away and have to be cut free and the prickly problem painstakingly unravelled with much kicking and wriggling — thank goodness they are not fully grown!

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