Monday 20 May 2019

Record those sightings!

Perhaps the most noticeable innovation Norfolk Wildlife Trust has made on the Commons so far is the introduction of a whiteboard at the Lower Street information point for visitors to tell everyone about the plants and wildlife they have seen. A small thing perhaps, and hardly an original idea, but it has been seized on by visitors who have already left a record of 26 species seen (or heard) in the 17 days since the board went up.

The board is being regularly photographed to capture what has been recorded, and then the records are transferred to a list and passed on to NWT. Obviously, it fills up, so the older records are rubbed off to make room for new ones - simples! Here's the latest one.


Please, please, do add your sightings whenever you visit - every record adds to the picture of the richness the Commons hold.

As well as recording what makes the Commons their home, another golden rule is "if you have a camera, take it". I have taken a lot of photographs here over the years, but I don't always feel like carrying my camera around the Commons. Inevitably, that is often a mistake, as it was today. Firstly, I had a rare good view of a reed bunting taking a beakful of food to its young. I was actually trying to spot the singing reed warbler, which was very unlikely to happen, but how I would have liked to get a photo of the bunting showing such interesting behaviour!

Further along the boardwalk a magpie (or Magenpie as Gerald Durrell used to call them) was posing at the top of a bare tree. Due no doubt to centuries of persecution they tend to be wary of people, but this one was unusually confident, and a camera with a half-decent lens would have made a good image, showing off their beautiful plumage well. In the event, my phone on maximum zoom had to suffice. Here is the result, heavily cropped and manipulated, but still very poor. Strangely, it is not a bird I have ever managed to photograph on the Commons well enough to publish on the website.


STOP PRESS!

We had been recording species for many years whilst the Commons were under the management of Southrepps Commons Trust, and made lists available on our website. The most recent of those lists, for birds, moths and most particularly plants are now available from the NWT website at https://www.norfolkwildlifetrust.org.uk/wildlife-in-norfolk/commons/southrepps-common

Thanks are due to NWT for hosting these lists and many of the photographs taken on the Commons over the years.






Thursday 16 May 2019

Cart carted off and Balsam bashed


  
This week we waved good bye to our trusty cart that John H had made in 2010 to help in the hauling of the cut reeds, which we used to do by pulling loaded tarpaulins:


Then we used the cart, a great innovation which allowed us to transport more cut material at a time, with much less effort, across the wet ground. At the dumping site we could then simply push the material through the cart as it was tipped up - a massive improvement on the very strenuous previous method of turning the drag sheet over by hand. See the cheerful faces!




That cart served us well until John came up with his next innovation; hauling the tarpaulins with a winch, reducing the amount of effort required even further. Now the cart has gone to NWT’s Woods team. 



This morning eight happy folk disappeared into the growing recently cut reed and sedge to hunt out the Himalayan Balsam. We tried this early approach for the first time last year with success. This year, due to the cold weather, the plants were not as big and were difficult to spot amongst the nettles, sedges and reeds. We still managed to find enough to keep us busy for an hour. The little blighters were good at hiding and an area that had been covered by two of us when walked through by a third, still produced seedlings. Unfortunately this correspondent is not as good at remembering to take photos of the work, too busy doing it as if... So here is the team having a well deserved cup of coffee at the end. It looks like it had been very hard work! We will return in about a month to see what else we can find. Unfortunately this technique doesn’t work in the full height reed bed, where we have to wait for the Balsam to show above the 6 foot reeds, so that will have to wait until July or even August.
  



Sunday 5 May 2019

Fabulous fungi and other firsts




For all the ubiquity of fungi, fungus fancying is at best a minority interest; only the fruiting bodies make themselves available for most of us to enjoy (sometimes gastronomically).  We can all recognise a toadstool, especially the white spotted red beauty that is Fly Agaric, but most of us are completely unaware of the vast array of fungus species around us. Without fungi the world would not function; they form an essential part of the system of recycling that nature has worked out over the aeons, and are also very often essential companions for many plants to be able to grow at all.

This is a field in which rigorous scientific expertise is required: fungi experts are mycologists, and (here at last is the obvious pun), no doubt fun guys to hang out with. On 18th March the Norfolk Fungus Study Group led by research permit holder Steve Pinnington visited the Commons to survey them in a mycological sort of way, and logged 101 species, amongst them Alder Bracket, Scarlet Elfcup and Dusky Puffball. Pick of the crop however was Antrodia serialis  – a species never before recorded in Norfolk, and rarely anywhere else in the UK. It is a whitish crust-like bracket fungus and was found on some discarded old boardwalk timber. Its main population centres are the Himalayas and Africa: what with that and the Himalayan Balsam growing on the mountain ranges of Southrepps (see below), it can no longer be right to say “Terribly flat, Norfolk”!

To the rest of us non-mycologists, a fungus really does have to make its presence known to attract our attention. The Fungus Study Group found the excellently named Scarlet Elf Cup (Sarcoscypha austriaca) but your correspondent is happy to report that he too had found it the previous month. It was still there for the NWT Chief Executive Pamela Abbott to enjoy when she came to mark the transfer of The Commons to NWT. Here’s my photographic effort.



It turns out that fungi have often been given wonderful common names, examples from those recorded on the Fungus Study Group visit being: Oak Blackhead; Nettle Pox; Hairy Curtain Crust; Blushing Bracket; Scurfy Twiglet (I’m no fan of twiglets myself); and Frosty Bonnet. One they didn’t find, probably because they came in Spring and I found this one in Autumn, is Jelly Ear. This was growing on a twig next to the Jubilee Boardwalk, and was once again so obvious that even I could see it. 



This being the time when Spring turns slowly into Summer (or as I write this, with an Arctic wind blowing, back into Winter), no major working parties are operating on The Common. However, do not despair – the Himalayan Balsam season is fast approaching, so do look out for calls to arms to come and help restrain this pernicious invader from choking everything else around it. As growing Himalayan Balsam likes to consort with equally vigorous nettles, it is wise to dress accordingly. No doubt you too could look like this!



Meanwhile, away from fungi and plants, there have been several very exciting bird sightings on and close to The Commons. Near Pit Common were recently found a Great Grey Shrike and a Ring Ouzel, and very shortly after a Pied Flycatcher was found in the alder carr half way across the Common: to the best of my knowledge, this is a first recorded sighting of this species on our Common. No doubt all were passing through to their eventual breeding spots; they certainly didn’t hang around long enough for many people to enjoy. In reverse, a Redwing was spotted in a garden just opposite the Common. This was either a bird that had simply missed the boat in migrating back up north with its friends, or perhaps it was too weak to make the trip. Anyway, here it is: