A walk on the wild side

 

The title of this blog posting is inspired by the song by the very appropriately named Lou Reed. It was suggested by our redoubtable Grillo driver, and yes, Noel was persuaded to sing the opening lines of that song. This was after we had covered Meatloaf’s “I would do anything for love – but I won’t do that.” We learned that a good quiz question is ‘what wouldn’t he do?’ It’s a good question. This led us to compare and contrast Meatloaf with Noel – in this case Noel Coward of “Terribly flat, Norfolk” fame. It turned out there were more contrasts than comparisons.

All this jollity went on while 18 of us laboured away on a cold but lovely winter’s morning yesterday, deep in the heart of the main reedbed. Your correspondent’s tiny hand was frozen for much of the time, brought on by too much handling of cold wet ropes and suchlike. My tiny toes were also chilled, but I don’t like to go on about it. On the way to the scene of the action a detour onto the ‘Bradfield Road spur’ of the boardwalk was essential, in order to view the frosted snowdrops.

This is why we love this place - so beautiful walking onto the common that morning…but the frost was daunting.

Winch operator Dave came up with a new method for transporting the heavy gear across the previously cut part of the frozen reed bed

Grillo driver John was gamely mowing the reeds, having already enjoyed that activity a couple of days previously, so we had something to shift from the word Go.

The pitchforking team were soon risking frostbite too.

And the winching crew were removing the fruits of those labours to the dumping site at the far extreme of this area (known as Area D).

Meanwhile, a separate contingent was hard at work cutting back the scrub that had taken advantage of the previous eight years to encroach into the reedbed, and to create dumping sites for the next session.

Care has been taken to leave plenty of scrub for wildlife, as it is a very valuable habitat in its own right.

We have in our group a superman, going by the name of Andrew: his energy equals six of mine! We were intrigued to see the mist that was following him about, until we realised it was steam coming from him in the cold air.

Deep holes full of murky water are a constant hazard in this section, as several people can confirm. That’s why wellies and preferably over-trousers are so necessary.

The half-time break provided welcome rest, and refreshment in the shape of delicious apple buns, courtesy of Nina – many thanks for those! It also provided the opportunity for the chill it creep back into my tiny toes, but I don’t like to go on about my suffering. Ken warded off frostbite by doing a little jig, all on his own.

Wet and cold gloves were draped over the tops of waiting pitchforks, in the hope of warming them up: they didn’t.

After a lot more forking and dragging and tipping out of the sheets it was time to start the final clear-up.

Including rolling the sheets - bottoms up!

Then all (all?) that was needed was the trudge back through the morass with all that heavy equipment, before deciding who was going to wheel what back along the boardwalk to the storage container.

Here’s how we left the site.

What a result - brilliant!

And here are the snowdrops, newly defrosted.

Here is Team Leader Margaret’s message of thanks:

Hello All.

When I went out first thing this morning with the dog, I thought all right-minded people would be curling up with a cup of coffee and the Sunday papers. How wrong I was. 18 wonderful people came on this beautiful crisp winter's morning. We battled frozen reed and slippery mud but made amazing progress. I can't thank you enough and I was pleased to be out there with you all. Much better than the Sunday papers with their doom and gloom. Your reward is to come and do it all again in two weeks’ time. A special mention to Nina for the lovely cakes at coffee time.

Thank you, every time you exceed our expectations. I hope you all get a great sense of satisfaction of a job well done.

Margaret for the team leaders.

Last time I shared some statistics of the amount of work we did in 2024. This time it’s all about the sightings reported:

During 2024 we sent 527 sightings to NWT, of which 339 were the relevant ones put on the whiteboard at the Lower Street end of the boardwalk (dinosaurs and family pets excluded). The remainder were sightings sent to your correspondent without them being added to the board, and records sent to the BTO’s wonderful Birdtrack database by the said correspondent (see https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/birdtrack) . Here’s how the 158 species break down into their broad groupings:

Birds	72
Mammals	9
Flowering plants	47
Ferns	1
Fungi	2
Amphibians	2
Bees	2
Butterflies	12
Reptiles	3
Beetles	2
Flies	0
Dragonflies	3
Moths	2
Spiders	1

 

We reported 177 species in 2023; the difference appears to be mainly in the number of flowering plant species reported (68 in 2023; 47 in 2024). No doubt they’re all still there, so it’s a case of urging visitors to the Common to note on the whiteboard what they see. It’s tempting to think that if it’s a common species it doesn’t need reporting, but the irony is that when these data are looked at in the future it will appear that they weren’t here at all!

Reedbedtime story

 After the previous arduous work party, we volunteers could have been forgiven for returning to the scene of the grime with trepidation. Good – because 12 of us did! Team Leader Margaret was excited to see that the sexes were evenly spread, with six men and six women. Strange what excites some people.

Recently I have hinted that by turning up on time I am usually preceded by several colleagues. This time I was a good ten minutes early, and ringing out across the Common was the aforementioned Team Leader’s voice, incredulous at the sight. Nice.

I had of course been preceded by the pre-cut crew by several days. Here they are taking a breather and surveying the consequence of their labours.

Such was the amazement at my early arrival that the moment of signing in had to be recorded for posterity.

Particularly at first, it was necessary to not overload the sheets, as we were shifting sodden vegetation left lying there for the past fortnight.

Winching is always done at the edge of the area under attack. It’s an essential job; here’s Dave looking pensive about what lies ahead.

And here he is giving a yellow bucket a stern look.

Once the winching is done the tipping out is next, leading to the creation of heaps of material. It can bring joy.

It is frequently undignified and the normal niceties of polite conversation don’t really apply. (Take for example, Team Leader Julie’s exhortation to “Channel your inner dung beetle” when we were struggling to turn over a particularly heavy bundle of reeds, wrapped in their tarpaulin. Motivational speaking at its best!) That, plus frostbite-induced hysteria, brought out a gale of laughter when wincher Dave spotted someone helping out with the turning out of a sheet. “Good morning, Sheila” was his formal greeting, and it’s surprising there was no hand shaking to accompany it. My, how we laughed!

There was a great deal of hard work done, and it’s rare to have three fully loaded sheets already waiting for winching, with the pitchforkers waiting for the fourth one to be returned to them.

There was no ice present today, but the ground and vegetation were soaking wet. Cold hands and feet were the norm, and it took quite a while to warm up those frozen fingers.

We had no Noel with us today, so we missed his humour and even his singing. As another Noel, Coward, famously said “Terribly flat, Norfolk.” Not here, not now. We were busy creating new hills; here’s Andrew at the summit of one.

Your own correspondent himself threw caution to the winds, or light breeze in this case, and surveyed the site from on high. It gave quite a different perspective.

Everything that goes up needs to come down, and the sooner the better.

It seemed a long time coming, but the half-time break finally arrived.

It was great to be joined for refreshment by the injured Team Leader Kevin, sensibly in his best coat, and also by the Legend of the Commons John Houlgate.

All too soon it was time to return to work, but hands and feet had gone cold again, so it wasn’t all bad. It was a case of ‘fork, drag, tip, repeat’ until many more piles of cut reeds had been removed. There is some already cut material left for next time, so we’re hoping it doesn’t get too wet and heavy in the meantime.

As each sheet is used for the last time each session, the folding team springs into action. It’s a well-rehearsed process, culminating in the ritual rolling stage.

Ever the Shakespearian scholar, John felt the urge to misquote from Macbeth: “Out, damned knot!”

Here’s how we left the site this time.

Here is Team Leader Julie’s message of thanks:

Hello all

This is a huge thank you to the 12 who turned out today on the Area D reed bed to clear more reed.  We were luckier with the weather this week, as it was dry (as in not raining) and not windy.  It was still cold but we all soon warmed up.

Unfortunately, it still was not dry underfoot - but amazingly no one took a dunking in the mud this week, so a round of applause for everyone's balance!  However, we still looked like the "dirty dozen" when we left the site!  Hope you have all cleaned up well and got warm and are having a well earned relax the afternoon!

We are making slow but steady progress on this tricky area. We will be back there in two weeks and will welcome all who wish to join us.

Take care,

Julie (for the TLs)

 We have mentioned the curse of unattended dog muck often before, but sadly it’s still a thing. We all know of the strange mindset that leads some people to bag the stuff in the approved manner, and then sling it into the undergrowth, or stranger still, hang it from the branches of trees and bushes, like some weird Christmas decorations. Someone recently left this, which seemed odd. 

And finally, a few statistics about last year’s efforts:

35 individuals volunteered in the year, with all of them attending working parties, and several doing other work as well.

Number of individual volunteers working in last 12 months: 35

Total volunteer hours logged in the year: 639.89

Number of working party sessions in the year: 18

Number of individual volunteers on working parties in year: 35

Average attendance per SSSI working party: 13.44

Number of individual attendances at work parties: 242

The breakdown of work is:

SSSI working party hours: 466

Pit hours: 61

School Common hours: 46.75

Boardwalk repairs (hours): 3

(Number of boards replaced) 6

Himalayan Balsam control hours: 34

Not bad eh?

 

 

 

Bog snorkelling in the Heart of Darkness

 The part of the main reedbed facing our attention yesterday had not been cut for eight years: it’s meant to be done every four, but last time only the small part of it we described in the previous posting was cut before that very nasty virus meant that almost everyone was forbidden to mix, even on reedbeds. The reedbed therefore took advantage of Lockdown to go absolutely wild – not to say livid. Here’s all you could see of it for most of the intervening period:

Not a very enticing sight, and of course the horror, the full horror, lay beyond. It was an undiscovered country, so long was it since human foot had set, er, foot there. In an act of peculiarly rural joint masochism, 12 of us turned out in the rain, relatively happy that the snow affecting much of the rest of the country was giving us a miss. Bravely, we penetrated into the morass; someone was bound to get a soaking. In fact we all got very wet and dirty, but Team Leader Michelle took the prize by staging a sit-down strike.

She enjoyed that so much that later on she toppled over backwards and got a full-length soaking!

The view greeting me as I trudged along the boardwalk at the start inevitably revealed several people already enjoying the fun.

They had set out the tools in anticipation: now all that was needed was a horde of volunteers.

Even they were not the first explorers; as can be seen from the above photo, John and Kevin had done a ‘pre-cut’ a day or two before. Sadly, Kevin lost an argument with Grillo’s starting handle, getting a broken finger as a souvenir, so he was on today’s sick list.

The first task on arrival is of course to sign in; no mean feat in the drizzle. Eventually your correspondent’s trusty pencil was the only implement capable of making a legible mark on the rapidly dampening paper.

Venturing onto the area under consideration, some icy patches were testament to the cold night, and the lucky escape we had had from the worst of the winter weather.

Long before I arrived (on time I might add), much preparatory work had already been done:

Laying out the sheets

Setting up the winch

And then the fun begins

It’s not all fun for the winch crew however, and no singing was heard this time. Problems with the rope coiling itself in knots slowed the winching down a lot.

It seemed like much longer than an hour, but at the appointed time the half-time break was announced, and the bedraggled crew assembled.

Break over, our one remaining fit Grillo operator was back hard at work. (Some dispute about the meaning of ‘fit’ here – ed)

It’s not easy steering a sheet in deep mud.

On arrival at the dump site the sheet of course has to be tipped out. Sometimes it’s easy, by using the winch, but the situation here did not lend itself to that, so it’s back to good old grunt work – and a lot of grunting went on!

I an attempt to speed up the process we ended up manually transferring material dumped off the sheets onto the heaps.

There was so much mud in front of the growing dump site that it made moving about there hard work (and as mentioned above, falling over was a constant hazard).

Finally, it was time to pack up, a few minutes early because we were all so wet and tired. Erudite comments, such as “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” were offered up while the tools were loaded onto trailers and wheelbarrows and trundled back to the store. Eventually we dispersed, looking forward immensely to doing it all again in a fortnight. There will have been massive clean-up operations all around the village; we hope Anglian Water was up to the challenge!

Here is how the site looked when we left it.

Here is Team Leader Margaret’s message of thanks:

Happy New Year to you all.

We have all heard of the magnificent seven but have you heard of the magnificent 12? Well, they were the amazing folk who turned out this morning. We knew conditions under foot would be bad but not this bad. As Noel said at the end, just walking through the mud was tiring! So thank you all so much, particular mention to Michelle who went over twice in the name of duty and Dave whose body went forward but his feet stayed behind. Also to Kevin who ended up in Minor Injuries on Friday, with the Grillo kickback being more than he had bargained for. What fun was had by all. The work you do is so important in maintaining the Common so thank you so much. If this has not put you off we look forward to seeing you in two weeks’ time when we return to the reed bed. Hopefully to a crisp winters day.

Thank you.

Margaret on behalf of the team leaders.