Ask Not For Whom The Bell Heather Tolls...

We're out checking the cows on one of our sites, which was another bit of former heathland pine plantation.  'Checking the cows' involves counting them - none of them have either died, wandered off or given birth - and then giving them a quick visual once over for any obvious signs of injury or illness.

As we ride around the site, I spot a profusion of beautiful purple flowers. Looking around, they seem every where but I don't know what they are. So, I do what I normally do and get my phone out, take a picture and look it up in my wildflower book.

It's a very distinctive flower. I'm not going to say what I thought they looked like at the time, you'll have to use your own imaginations for that, but anyway I looked it up aaaaand it was....

.....bell heather. Yes, bell heather (Erica cinera). With one winter's experience working on Holt heath and two on Godlingston and Studland heaths, plus studying heathland as part of my course I fail to spot one of the commonest heathland plants and one that I've been walking over for years. Oops.

In my defence, all my heathland experience has been in the autumn, winter and spring. At that time of year, heathers are all a nondescript, unhealthy looking brown and you're usually stepping over them to get to the five foot tall, spiky, green and vibrant yellow gorse bushes. But still...

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.

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

Hey, Did Everything Just Taste Purple For A Second?

We've been on orchid watch for some weeks now, at a particular grass verge along an main road that we drive down regularly. The patch in question is next to a woodland owned by Dorset Wildlife Trust   and so we can thank them for this particularly beautiful little patch.

The orchid in question is an Early Purple Orchid, (Orchis mascula) which, as well as sounding great in Scottish, is one of those plants that I strongly suspect was named on a Friday afternoon. ("It sprouts early and it's purple. That's good enough, isn't it? Right, let's get to the pub.") To photograph it without accidentally destroying any more more orchids involved walking down the main road, then finding a gap in the traffic to crouch down to take the pic. These are just some of the risks I am prepared to take to to write this blog.

And, having risked certain death on a main road, we may as well nip in for a poke around the woods, with it's carpet of bluebells and wood anemone, plus a fallen oak tree that seemed far too good timber to waste on beetles! Kudos all round to the DWT. If you want to have a look yourself, it's called Ashley Wood and is near Tarrant Keynestone: 

http://www.dorsetwildlifetrust.org.uk/Ashley_Wood_Nature_Reserve.html