Bun Fight At The Ebblake Corral

Just to get everyone up to speed: I'm back home in Dorset and, yesterday, was back at my work placement at The Hedge Project. Manpower was needed as this was round up day. We have a herd of cows that are let out to graze on various sites, including Holt Heath, Sopley (near Hurn airport) and Ebblake, which is a patch of forestry commission land near Verwood.

The cows graze these patches and this has many ecological benefits if the correct amount of grazing is allowed (see http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/conservationgrazing). The trouble is that, with these sites a good few miles apart, the cows have to be transported there and back. This has to be done via a  trailer. Think of the smallest space that you could fit four cows into and you've got an idea of what the trailer involves. The trailer has to be small, and the cows crammed in for their own safety, basically. You can't put seatbelts on them but, if you're a cow, another cow crammed in right next to you works pretty well as an airbag in an emergency. Now, considering that it's hard enough persuading people to act in their own best interests, cows are not much different. They don't particularly want to go into the trailer and weigh over a tonne, which makes persuading them quite difficult. But then there's the fact that they all have to be rounded up in the first place.

Ebblake is a forestry commission site, as I mentioned, and as such is mostly pine forest, plus a marsh and some very thick scrubby new growth pine and birch. All in all a very primeval looking place, and not at all ideal for a cattle round up. In one corner was a gate, next to a corral, which is a pen specifically for putting cows into. The site itself was a large rectangle with a barbed wire fence surrounding it, and we could be pretty certain that they were inside that.

In fact, as we arrived, we could see them up a path in the distance and, when we were all ready to go, a rattle of a feed bucket and the round up call (basically 'yeeeeeeeeeeeeep') had the whole herd trotting towards us. I had been warned that the round up 'could take an hour, could take five hours' and, one time, took three weeks. Everything was just looking good for the 'one hour' end of this spectrum when one cow, a British White who appears to be the matriarch of the group, got spooked and ran off into the woods, taking most of the herd with her. Two had successfully been got into the corral and were standing there with a 'wait, what the hell's going on?' expression while the rest bolted.

Now cows are all about gentle persuasion. Especially these ones, which are easily spooked and so we had to locate where they'd got to and then for a line behind them, gently persuading them forward. Our team consisted of Dale (who's cows they were) Kayleigh, David, Callum, Mark (I think? sorry) and myself, all armed with 'cow persuasion sticks', or 1m lengths of blue pvc piping.

Now, persuading them forward was easier said then done. We located them on the far side of the scrubby bit of woodland and, with the fence at one end of our line, ushered them forward. You'd think that eight cows would be easy to locate in these circumstances but you'd be wrong. In the densest bit of the woods, you had to really move to keep them in site and, out of site of each other, we had to keep talking so the others would know what we were doing.

Long story short, everything got a bit complicated in there and I ended up tailing three cows, the British White and a Devon Red and her calf*, while the rest of the herd emerged ended up a few hundred metres to the left of me, luckily with most of the rest of our team tailing them. They seemed to be getting on just fine, with the cows on the path and heading towards the coral, so I continued tailing my cows as they meandered back through the woods.

The path that I mentioned ran in a sort of crescent shape from one gate to another, and the cows and I relocated each other by one of these gates. By now, the rest of the herd were in the corral and were not feeling particularly happy about it. The big British White that I had been following began bellowing back at them and then, taking the Devon Red and the calf with her, began ambling up the path towards them. At this point, I couldn't believe my luck. After all this effort and fumbling around in the undergrowth, they were just going to amble right up to where we want them.

And they did. I'd phoned ahead to warn as a four of the cows were being persuaded into the trailer. This had just been completed when my three turned up.  Then came the final, intensely nerve wracking, bit of getting the final three into the corral without either spooking them or loosing any of the others.

This was completed, the cows were loaded and delivered to our other site at Sopley, several miles away, where they were put out to pasture while we spent the rest of the day pulling ragwort.

There they wandered around, getting know their new pasture and eyeing us suspiciously as we passed.



*A joke based on the Northern Ireland accent: Three cows in a field, which one's on holiday? The one with the wee calf.

Porpoises In The Minch

Heading back home and we took the 7am CalMac ferry from Stornaway to Ullapool. This involved getting to Stornaway for 6am, which meant leaving Callanish at 5.30am and so on. Luckily, I was wide awake as, about 40 mins into the 2 1/2hr journey the sea out to the side of the boat began boiling, as at least a couple of dozen porpoises popped out of the water. The display must've lasted at least 30 seconds - long enough for me to get my phone out of my pocket, unlock it, get the camera fired up and take THIS picture.

So, yeah. At this point I should point out that, the reason that most of my pics are of plants is that they have the advantage of staying the heck still. Animal pics have a major disadvantage from this point of view. Still, the sea was as glassy smooth as this for the entire crossing and on the right of the pic is the nice, wide window of the 'Loch Seaforth' that gave us such a panoramic view.

Using the magic of modern digital technology, I managed to enlarge the pic so you can see that it is indeed a breeching porpoise and not a bouy or a bit of flotsam.

I'm afraid that you'll have to believe me when I say that this was the tail end of the entire sea being full of porpoises doing just this.

And then, just as quickly, they were gone.

More Orchids. Morchids.

When I said a couple of posts ago that orchids just litter the roadside around here: here's a fairly extreme example of that.

This is a common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) which, as the name suggests, is one of Britain's commonest wild orchids. The roadside that I spotted it next to was the main road between Stornaway in the Isle of Lewis and Tarbert in Isle of Harris. Technically, they're the same island - as in there is no water between them - but while Lewis is predominantly flat, Harris is not. The road winds up the side of a mountain over looking Loch Seaforth and we stopped to admire the view. 

You can't blame us, really, can you? Harris makes Lewis look like the garden of eden. This, we joked, was 'troll country' and were listening to Norwegian band Wardruna just to add to the effect.

I went for a short wander up the hillside and spotted this little beauty on the marshy soil. Photographing the picture at the top came at the expense of my knees, kneeling in the damp bog but I think it was worth it.

Still more orchid pictures to come.
The Common Spotted Orchid http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/species/common-spotted-orchid

Wardruna. The song's about Odin and sung in old Norse.

Pretty Pictures Of Flowers

In yesterday's post, I mentioned 'matter', which was the 'fertile plain' between the alkaline sea and the acid moor? Well here's an example of that. The yellow-ochre patch to the right is seaweed and I'm afraid I don't know a damn thing about seaweed so can't help you on that. To the left is grass (I'm guessing marram grass) and the pink flowers are thrift (Armeria mafitma). Thrift is tolerant of salty sea water - I've seen it quite happily living underwater in a nearby loch - and so can handle the occasional high tide.

This is the same patch of land, showing the large tussocks and the channels of water running between them. The area is prone to very violent winter storms, and these patches are built on tiny patches of earth on a bed of very tough rock. The rock in question is lewisian gneiss, which is a type of granite and igneous, if you remember your geology from school. Some of the oldest rocks in the British Isles apparently, although I thought they were all pretty old.

Now, moving inland, the place where we are staying comes with a croft, which is a patch of land that comes with the house and is intended for agricultural purposes. It is used occasionally for agricultural purposes - specifically grazing sheep. However, a quick jaunt around provides some surprising finds. Not just the northern marsh orchids as described in the previous posts (I've counted six in the immediate garden of the house alone) but such beauties as these:

This is Red rattle (Pedicularis palustris) or marsh lousewort, which was very prolific on the site. This is a 'hemi-parasitic' plant, which attatches it's roots to the roots of nearby grasses and 'borrows' water and mineral salts. Back down south, it  and it's cousin yellow rattle are often sewn into fields to improve biodiversity, as the grass there would otherwise crowd out everything else. Here, it just grows of it's own accord in a scrubby, rush infested bit of sheep grazing land.

According to the 'Reader's Digest Field Guide To Wild Flowers of Britain', which I found on the shelf here, it got the name 'lousewort' from a theory that it infected sheep with lice. However - and again according to the same book - lousewort is popular with snails and snails are carriers of liver fluke, which can infect sheep. Unhealthy, liver fluke stricken sheep would have been prone to catching lice and then spreading lice through the rest of the flock. Happily for sheep, shepherds and wildflowers, sheep are inoculated against liver fluke these days.

This is a round-leafed sundew (Drosera rotundifolia), which is a carnivorous plant. The leaves are covered in red hairs, each of which is covered in a droplet of sticky liquid. Midges mistake them for water and get stuck, where upon the leaf curls inwards and the insect is digested. Like all carnivorous plants, it also photosynthesises, so the insect-eating is an addition to, rather than a replacement for, the actual nutrient factory of photosynthesis. Chomping the occasional insect allows the plant to thrive on a highly acid bog with very few essential plant minerals.  

So there you go. There's more, much more but we'll get round to that presently.

Orchidorama

Just to get everybody up to speed, I'm on holiday on the Isle Of Lewis in the outer Hebrides at the moment and am keeping my eye open for anything interesting. We'd already spotted porpoises, jellyfish and a dead monkfish before we'd even got there and, on arrival, we were not disappointed!

The western Isles, which are a very remote, wet and windswept place are renowned for their machair, or beds of wildflowers. This is from the gaelic for 'fertile plane' and represents a flat bit of coastal land, stuck at a fairly neutral pH level between the alkaline sea and the acid bog of the inland.

To expand briefly on that, all soil is either acid, neutral or alkaline. Soils such as chalk, which is the predominant soil type down where I live on the south coast, are alkaline while "good" soils tend towards either neutral or very slightly acid. It's one of those things you get a lot in ecology, where a healthy soil helps maintain a healthy soil. Plants die and are eaten by various critters, down to and including microbes, which creates a rich hummus that is ideal soil for plants to grow in.

It's one of those weird, chicken and egg type situations, where perfect harmony is perpetuated somehow. However, in some places, heavy and persistent rain will wash all these nutrients out of the soil. The western isles are all about heavy and persistent rain. And wind. This makes the soil very acid indeed and, as we know acid and microbes do not get along very well. The rain washes nutrients from the soil, making the soil more acidic, which inhibits microbial life in the soil and microbial life is basically the bottom of the pyramid that all life rests on. Without it, nothing happens.

Last time I was up here, it was February 2015 and I was moving stones around amongst other things. Down south, even in February, when you moved a stone, lots of little critters like woodlouse and centipedes would scurry out of your sight but here... nothing. Not even worms. It was one of the best illustrations of a line in a text book that I'd ever seen. Without microbes, stuff does not rot and so you get great, springy, squishy matts of peat building up over the centuries. Remove a core from these bad boys and you can bring up seeds going bucket just after the last ice age.

So, just to recap, rain washes out nutrients, creating a highly acidic soil. This creates a difficult environment for most plants - the interior of the Isle of Lewis is not thick with fields of wheat, for example - however, this makes it a just fantastic habitat for plenty of rare plants. Orchids, for example.

The four pictured are in the driveway of the place where we are staying. Just to confirm that: in the place where we are staying, there are at least four wild orchids IN THE DRIVEWAY. The one in the picture above is a good foot high. According to my research, it's a northern marsh orchid, on account of the fact that it looks like one, it's in the north (we're about 20 miles south of the most northerly point in the British isles) and it's on a marsh. Dactylorhiza praetermissa to give a species name, though be warned I am not an expert, just a bloke with a book on wild flowers.

This one was probably a common spotted orchid, although according to this same book, they tend to grow on lime soils, which this very much is not. But putting all that aside, isn't it pretty? And they're all over the place. Literally: you look in a roadside verge and think 'oh, another orchid'. Back home, I got quite excited when I saw a few on a roadside verge that had specifically been planted for wildlife. Here... they just grow.

Anyway, just to wrap up, this is not the machair that I described above. That is mostly buttercups and daisy as far as I can tell. This is on the acid bog that covers most of the island. More to follow... stay tuned.

Software Issues

And we're back.

Apologies for the long silence, this was due to my lap top refusing to hook up to the wi-fi. After days of typing in the password and getting nothing, Mrs Zoom says 'let's have a go', does exactly the same thing and then logs straight on. I can only put the problem down to internet voodoo.

Meanwhile, if you've been following my instagram (zoomgordo) then you'll have been seeing all the many pictures that I'm about to bombard you with. My iPhone connected fine to the wi-fi for some reason, just not my laptop.

Anyhoo, we're on the Isle of Lewis in the outer Hebrides, within sight of Callanish stone circle and the place is absolutely teeming with interesting stuff. We'd spotted a pod of porpoises swimming along side the ferry, and that was before we'd even got there. That damn near capsized the boat as Mrs Zoom pointed out the window and said 'ooh, look, porpoises' and everybody rushed to that side of the boat for a look.

Then there was the desicated deep sea monster we spotted washed up near the ferry at Ullapool. Basically, a jaw with a tail on the end that we decided was probably a monkfish.

I reckon it was dumped catch from a fishing trawler, rather than a native of the sea loch. But still, an interesting find and one that the dogs could appreciate too.

Then there were these, also spotted on the beach. They're moon jellyfish, apparently Aurelia aurita (never take my word for anything, btw).

So yeah, update number one and we haven't even got their yet.

More From The Lake District

With nowt much to do but read books and walk dogs, we did both. Oh and sank a few pints at the microbrewery where we're staying.

Some Cladonia fimbriata on a dry stone wall.

More lichen, also on a dry stone wall. A very vivid yellow and a lot of it about.

An elder. Possibly the largest elder I've ever seen. A very elderly elder in fact.

More lichen. No idea of species as my ident book's back in Dorset.

And a very pretty stream, that proved very popular with the dogs.

An Afternoon In Cumbria

Sorry about the lack of updates in recent days. For reasons that I'm not going to go into right now, things have gotten a little complicated. I am currently en route to the Outer Hebrides with Mrs Zoom and dogs in tow for what was sposed to be a nature spotting holiday.

Technically it still will be but, as I mentioned, it's all got a little complicated.

Meanwhile, we're on a stop over in the Lake District, just outside Ings, between Keswick and Windermere. As you can see from the pics, it's very nice indeed.

Further updates are entirely dependant on my logging successfully into the wi-fi when I get there.

Another Part Of The Heath

Despite being very familiar with Heathlands, having spent the last 3 winters volenteering on two National Trust owned ones, Godlingston and Holt Heath, I'd not actually seen them very much in the mid summer. Therefore, last Thursday came as a pleasant surprise.

We were ragwort pulling on Holt Heath and the bleak, brown, ant-filled wastes of winter had given way to a beautiful panorama of rare plants, buzzing insects and skylarks singing above us.

This is common cudweed (Filago vulgaris) which is a heathland specialist - quite rare although not protected like broad-leafed cudweed. I must admit it took a lot of searching through wildflower ident books to find it.

The whole heath was covered in spider's webs. I believe this is the web of the labyrinth spider (Agelena labyrinthine), a handkerchief-sized web with a funnel in the middle.

And fox gloves (Digitalis purpurea) which were growing through the gorse bushes and looking very lovely.

 Info on these plants and animals looks pretty sparse, so I recommend you cut and paste the latin name if you want more info.

Gordo In The Lion's Den

Anyone remember the Sunday School story about Daniel in the lion's den? From memory (and we're talking along time ago when I heard this story) Daniel was a christian saint (possibly) who was in the desert (or somewhere) and happened upon a lion. Ok, I'm slightly wishing I hadn't started this now, as my memory of the story is shaky at best and I can't be bothered to research it.

So yeah, back up to the story: Daniel comes happens across a lion. The lion has a thorn in it's paw, which Daniel removes. Years later, Daniel is being fed to the lions in a Roman circus but it turns out that the lion that's sposed to eat him is the very same that he did the whole podiatry thing on all those years ago. The Lion does not eat Daniel.*

This story came to mind as I watched a vet remove a stone from a cow's hoof this week, which, involved getting this limping cow into a cow-sized aluminium cage called a cattle crush. These remind you of something you might find in a bondage club and are designed specifically so that cows can be examined close up without the cow or the person examining the cow being damaged by their panicking or kicking out. The cow has to be herded into a pen, then let through a gate in the pen, through a roughly cow's width corridor and to the end, where you crank a bar down behind their backside and a clamp around their neck. It's the cow sized equivalent to an arm lock and, from there, you open a panel to get to their feet. The affected foot had to be tied to a sort of cow-footstool, not only to prevent it from kicking the vet in the face  but to support it's weight as cows are heavy and don't sit very well on three legs.

The vet set too, washing the cow's hoof and then scraping the hoof with a special knife till she found the offending flint in the cow's hoof. All the while, the cow was not enjoying the experience at all. Which was understandable, as I wouldn't particularly like my foot being poked about if I had a massive splinter in it. Nor did the cow like the stuffing great anti-biotic injection that it got afterwards, with the vet having to make two attempts as the cow was thrashing about too much the first time.

To get back to my original point - and I'm very aware that the whole Daniel in the lion's den story is probably a bit made up - but still, really? Removing a thorn from a lion's paw? Really? Bearing in mind that a cow's main danger to you is it kicking you or squashing you and yet we had to shove this cow into a fairly major bit of iron mongery in order to get near it. And that's without any sharp claws or teeth or predatory instincts.

Anyhoo, the cow was released from the crush and sauntered back to the field, limping slightly less and making a recovery over the course of the rest of the day. Whether it remembers our kind treatment and will repay us I don't know. Again, I remain sceptical.

*My friend Lucy has since corrected me on the actual story of Daniel in the lion's den, which nothing like my version. I may be confusing it with a story about Christian martyrs told by an RE teacher. This all probably happened over 30 years ago.

Rock, Paper, Chainsaw

Remember rock, paper, scissors? Well, using a chainsaw is much the same. As we know, rock blunts scissors, paper wraps around rock (I'm not sure how that defeats a rock but hey, I didn't make the rules) and scissors cut paper.

Now, if we were to substitute 'paper' with wood - as paper is made of wood - and 'scissors' with chainsaw we have the following: chainsaw cuts wood, rock blunts chainsaw and wood doesn't necessarily wrap around rock but it does occasionally wrap around a chainsaw.

To explain: we were out crosscutting a load of fallen branches today. To cut a long story short, it was close to the end of a hot day that I'd spent in a pair of thick chainsaw trousers. Most of the work had been completed and the boss (it's a work placement, so I do the majority of the work their for free but he's still very definitely the boss) asked if I could take down the cracked willow to finish the day off.

The cracked willow was a tree that had cracked quite close to the bottom and then regrown as two trunks from the same stump. One of these trunks had cracked again and, despite having a rather ugly looking 6' long tear above this crack, had continued to grow. This is fairly typical of willow, which will push on through pretty much anything that you or the world and it's weather can throw at it.

The place where the willow tree was growing was at a field boundary, with a barbed wire fence on one side and a ditch immediately behind. This left a very small space for me to work in and, if you have ever done a tree felling course, the one thing that they drum into you is that must always have an escape route. Now, between the ditch and the fence and the hawthorn thicket directly behind me, my options for escape were limited to say the least. Vaulting a 5' high barbed wire fence is not ideal at the best of times and especially not in chainsaw trousers.

Anyway, nothing ventured... the next problem was the actual felling of the tree. It had a considerable lean on it in the direction of fall and so I opted for the text book 'dog's tooth cut'., or 'boring' cut. For this, you cut out the wedge in the direction that you want the tree to fall, as is normal in tree felling. This wedge cut, or gob cut or whichever of the many names it has, gives the tree a little clear space to fall into, so that the felling can be nice and safe and controlled. With a normal tree, you would then do a horizontal 'felling cut', leaving a 1' by 1' "hinge" of wood in a nice, controlled, safe felling. However a strong lean in the direction of felling means that there is already a lot of weight in one direction and the trunk is already under a lot of tension. The tree can split before you have cut through. Which is a bad thing. This, as you'll know if you've ever watched 'Axemen', is called a "barber's chair". I'm not sure why it's called that but it's still a bad thing and is particularly likely with a willow.

So, instead you get the nose of the bar (the bar being the thing the chain goes round, the nose being the bit of it that is s'posed to be furthest away from you) and cut with that directly into the wood. A 'bore' cut, y'see? Or a letterbox cut. You bore your way through to the other side and then widen this slit until it is about a third  the with of the tree. Then, you do the final cut, 45 degrees down from the edge of the tree to the wood-free space left by the bore cut. And then, bam, the tree comes down.

Of one third of the tree in my case, as there remained the tricky bit still to do. Also, smoke was actually coming off the chainsaw so I decided to walk across the field to get the slightly meatier spare one to finish the job. Once across the field, where all our kit, fuel etc was stored, I inspected the spare chainsaw, then had a quick drink to replenish my fluids and set back off across the field. Arriving back at the tree, I fired the chainsaw back up, surprised that it started so easily, having not been used all day and set to work.

Not long afterwards, it ran out of petrol, which was odd as I'd just checked that it was full. Then it dawned on me that, when I'd stopped to have a drink, I'd put down the new chainsaw, then picked up the old one and carried that over. After a few choice words, I trudged back across the field, swapped chainsaws over then lugged the big one back over to carry on with the task in hand.

There remained the second trunk to cut which, from a safe felling point of view had 'aaaaaaaargh!!!' written all over it. A big split running through it and a big hollowed out centre. I'd cut the other trunk quite high up, so had to cut it again much lower down. This came away as one lump, leaving a crescent shaped, hollowed out, trunk from which the remaining two cuts sprouted. With 1/3rd of this trunk already missing, I did a felling cut from the back and, bam, down this bit came as well.

So, very tricky tree felled safely. I would have been quite smug if I wasn't hot, aching and wanting to get this job over and done with. It was still leaning on the fence, so I had to cut it free. Wire blunts chainsaw although chainsaw also tends to break fence. Basically, don't get the chainsaw anywhere near the barbed wire. Bad things will happen.

Now, the final little twist to the tale is about tension, as the tree is now lying along the ground and, if you cut into it willy-nilly, the branch will 'pinch' the saw and jamming it in place. The chain will not turn, the saw will not cut and there's nothing else to do but switch it off, swear a few times and then trudge back across the field to pick up the other one. Then, fuel it up, walk back across the field and cut the same branch a few inches to one side.

Having finally cut everything away from the fence so that it was all lying on the ground, I decided to quit while I was ahead, pick up both chainsaws and then lug them back across the field one last time. Happily, everyone else was about done for the day and so all we had to do was lug all the kit back to base. Oh and go home, shower, eat, replenish fluids and then go and do my actual job working in a pub for the next five hours.

So, just to summarise: Scissors (chainsaw) beats paper (wood). Paper occasionally pinches scissors. Rock still blunts scissors and barbed wire just plain ruins your day.

Some More Random Pics of Insects.

Small Eggar Moth caterpillars 

Yellow Shell Moth

Polygon spathula

So yesterday,  I was reading 'The Ancestor's Tale' by Richard Dawkins and discovered the existence of the paddle fish. 

An interesting species in it's own right but, if you have a sense of humour like mine, you can't help but laugh at it's taxonomic name: Polygon spathula.

More info on the paddlefish: http://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Polyodon_spathula/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fysqA0tr4qo

The Petrified Forest

Right next to the beautiful chalk downland meadow that I described yesterday is a yew forest, which remains one of the freakiest places I have ever been to. Seen from the other side of the valley, it looks much as a wood should do, but get inside and the place and it's a monochrome scene of bare ground and leafless branches. 

To me, it always brought to mind the seventh circle of hell in Dante's Inferno, written in the 1300s about a (hopefully fictional) walking tour through hell. One of the circle is called the 'wood of suicides', where the souls of those who commit suicide are transformed into a wood full of brittle, dead trees. 

Or possibly, the petrified forest on Skaro, the home planet of the Daleks, as explored by William Hartnell and friends in the first series of Dr Who.

What it really is, is a forest of yew trees, possibly dating back to the bronze age and definitely from at least the middle ages. Yew trees are evergreen, meaning that they never shed their leaves and evergreen woodland tends to be less biodiverse than broadleaf for just this reason. In broadleaf woodland, the trees shed their leaves in the autumn and regrow them in the spring, giving several months in which light will penetrate to the forest floor. This is why these woods have thick matts of bluebells and other flowers in March and April.

Evergreens do not do this and, while conifers are tall and thin, yews spread out  up and sideways and, in an established yew forest such as this, barely any light penetrates.

Without light, photosynthesis cannot happen and, without photosynthesis, barely anything else happens, so there is no matt of vegetation on the forest floor, just a thin layer of leaf litter and, below that, bare earth. This makes the topsoil very vulnerable to erosion, with only really the roots of the trees holding it in place.

Chalk soil is already free draining, and therefore not the most fertile (as described yesterday). So, altogether, the place is hardly the most fecund environment for new growth. 

That said, the place is not entirely dead of life. Where there is a break in the canopy, there will be a little oasis of green, while the outer edges are dotted with ash saplings and inch or so high. We saw a couple of badger setts and some deer, both of which probably appreciate the cover and the relative peace that the woods gives them, while the canopy was full of the twittering of birds and the floor covered in snail shells.

It just goes to show that nature will find a way and, just because you don't see anything, it doesn't mean that there is nothing there.

Some more info on these woods and other yew forests around the country: http://www.ancient-yew.org/mi.php/yews-at-sites-of-antiquity/104

The Seventh Circle Of Hell in Dante's Inferno: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wood_of_the_Self-Murderers:_The_Harpies_and_the_Suicides

A Yew Forest that you're allowed to visit (and don't have to clamber over a barbed wire fence to get into) plus some more florid prose on yew trees:http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2000/oct/07/unitedkingdom

Dr Who episode  'The Dead Planet', first series December 1963:
https://vimeo.com/108169426

...and show notes:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/daleks/detail.shtml

Over The Hills And Far Away

Another day, another nature photography expedition with the missus. This time to Hambledon Hill, an iron age hill fort near Blandford. 

This is classic calcareous grassland. Chalky soil, so alkaline, free draining and with a very thin soil layer. This makes it good wildflower habitat, as we can demonstrate:

This is Bird's Foot Trefoil. Also known as 'bacon and eggs' for some inexplicable reason. Although bird's foot trefoil is hardly the most obvious name either. Also 'granny's toenails', although I'm seriously wondering at this point whether whoever wrote my wildflower ident book was taking the mickey.

Read more: http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/species/birds-foot-trefoil

This is classic grassland. As mentioned above, due to the thin soil and chalk beneath, it's not very fertile. Basically, if you are grazing cattle and sheep on these hills, there is a limit to how much it can be grazed, as the grass will have to recover. It's all about how many animals you can have on how large a patch of land.
Then some time around the early twentieth century, artificial nitrate fertilisers were invented and suddenly, you could take a patch of thin soil such as this, plough it up and seed it with rye grass or something similar, fertilise it regularly and graze cattle much more intensively. This was called 'improved grassland' and was great for farmers, great for cheap lamb and beef but not so great for wildflowers.

The flowers and plants that had traditionally grown on this sort of soil had adapted to a marginal, very frugal, environment. So, if you then suddenly made that environment less marginal and invited an extremely virulent grass onto the scene, those marginal plants found themselves crowded out.

 

And so now we roll onto grassland restoration, which attempts to return these areas to their previous species-rich status. It mostly involves not fertilising the soil and maintaining grazing on the land but at a much less intense level. On this evidence, it seems to be working. 

Read more about calcareous grassland restoration HERE

Have a look yourself sometime if you're in the area. It's a beautiful place and has some fine views of the county. Reminds me of a song, in fact.