Not Counting Hen Harriers

An hour standing on the edge of Flanders Moss at dusk at the end of a bitter winters day might not appeal to many but a small group of hardly souls gathered on Sunday for exactly that. We were out to count roosting hen harriers. Hen harriers are a bird of prey that is in trouble. They are persecuted in many places where they try to breed so their numbers across the country are much less than they should be. For this reason a lot of effort is put in to count their numbers both their nests on moorland in summer and their roost sites in winter. At this time of year these birds spend the day hunting alone for small birds and mammals, quartering low over rough vegetation listening and watching for the rustle and flutter of prey. But come evening they fly off to a traditional spot where groups of birds roost on the ground. And we are lucky that Flanders Moss is one of those places. There is a coordinated count of hen harrier roost sites across the country when every month at a set time hundreds of people set themselves up to watch an area and the totals give an idea of how many hen harriers are wintering in the UK.
So on Sunday with the temperature well below freezing, a skim of snow across the ground and a biting wind nipping across the moss we set off to the tower. My daughter Holly and I met up with Stephen, Betty and Tony and went up the tower to scan the bog surface. Peter and Darren from Thornhill walked out to the north east corner to get a view across the edge of the moss. At first their was a bit of chatter as people retained some heat from the cars. All experienced counters different people had different tactics to stay warm. Stephen drank huge amounts of tea and wore what looked like knitted wellingtons. Tony had what can only be described as a headdress on, Betty came with a banquet and Holly just talked a lot. A few members of the public drifted around the boardwalk for a quick Sunday constitutional while glancing at the fancy dress party on the tower. Our hour long watch went from half an hour before to half an hour after sunset and it quickly became apparent that it wasn't going to be much of a sunset. The light colour of the day just gradually seeped out of the day, someone was downing the lights very slowly. A couple of wrens traded churrs, a buzzard came off the surrounding fields trailing two jackdaws and a fieldfare or two chuck chucked overhead but no hen harriers. The peak time of sunset past and now few words were spoken as the cold sucked the heat out of us bringing down our core temperatures. And still no hen harriers. With 10 minutes to go Holly was starting to stamp her feet and mumbled about having no toes left but still no hen harriers. And then it was the end of the hour, Peter and Darren phoned from the other side to say that they had seen a merlin but no hen harriers and made our final scans. "Male" said Tony and amazingly in the half light he had picked up a male bird coming in very late, drifting through the scrub briefly and disappearing. Stephen saw it before it went but Betty, Holly and I all missed it. There was then a general stamping of feet, waggling of fingers and we wobbled back down on numb legs to try and get our circulation going on the way back to the car, leaving the tower black against the inky sky. One bird was better than no birds, but even our best count in the last eight years has been only four. Once back in the truck we had some chocolate and hot juice, put the heater on full blast and our faces went tight and itchy with the blood starting to move again. So for Holly and I we had an hour getting frost bite, hypothermia and not seeing any birds but it was still magic. Being able to watch a place like Flanders Moss close down for the night in winter gives a glimpse in the window of the everyday detailed goings on on this myterious and atmospheric bog. Sometimes you need a reason such as a hen harrier (non) count to make you get out and see it.

Cranberries

We were on TV last night. Well Flanders Moss and Stephen were. Flanders had a starring role in the BBC 2 TV programme "Grow Your Own Drugs" when presenter James Wong came to visit the site, shown around by Stephen Longster, Site management officer for SNH, specifically to look for cranberries. He was making cranberry minced pies and came to see the real thing on Flanders. However when it came to cooking in his nice kitchen he had large quantities of American cranberries bought from a shop. There is a good reason for this, collecting cranberries in the wild on Flanders Moss is a non-starter as they are scattered so thinly on the ground. Collecting them before Christmas not only would take days to get enough for a teaspoon of sauce but also probably involve frostbite, trench foot and drenching in water-filled ditches.

But it was not always so, going back to 1876 Dr. Buchanan White noted in the Perthshire Society of Natural Science that in the Scottish Borders enough cranberries were collected to be sold in the local markets. He also remarked that cranberries were a good way of producing a crop off unproductive land, a cultivated 5 ft sq piece of bog could yield up to 1 quart (2 pints) of fruit. Of course cranberries are coming back into fashion because of the health giving properties but it is hard to imagine anyone getting that quantity off a piece of bog today.

If you are on your winter stroll around the boardwalk look out for the thread-like stems with tiny scaly leaves and if you are lucky a gleaming jewel of a fruit. They are in fact beautifully adapted to living on the bog, the stems grow across the surface ever keeping ahead and above the growing sphagnum. The tiny leaves with their white hair-covered undersides are designed for the plant to loose as little water as possible. This may seem strange in a plant that lives in an incredibly wet situation but bogs are places where there is very little food for plants and when it transpires water it can loose valuable salts and minerals that are difficult to replace on a bog hence the need to lose as little water as possible.

The moss is a fine place for a winter walk and the new viewing tower is adding to the experience. This morning with everything crispy with frost, pinkfeet winking overhead and long tailed tits ticking at eye level in the tree tops, the bog was stunning. Eleven red deer, hinds and calves, were wandering north into the middle of the Moss after spending the night on the better grass of the surrounding fields. And to show how you should always keep your eyes peeled I looked down on a chap and his 2 dogs as they walked round the boardwalk watched unnoticed only 20 yards away by a roe deer and her fawn. People tell me that they don't see any wildlife from the boardwalk but maybe the tower will just help people see a bit more .

Happy Christmas

Green Christmas Trees - Take 3 (and no more)

So this is the 3rd and last of our Christmas tree events, it's the Sunday work party where we take a group out onto the Moss. We go far out to a part very few people make it to and they get to cut themselves a Christmas tree from the Scots pine seedlings and for this pleasure get to spend the rest of the day cutting a load more down. For this event people have to book to limit numbers. 15 hardy souls gathered at the track end at 1030, 5 less than hard souls obviously had second thoughts and didn't turn up. We packed everyone tightly into landrovers to go down the track and then made our way out onto the Moss. Some of the group were regulars and are familiar with the moss but some were new and it is always interesting seeing the moss through their first impressions. The Moss is a strange place on the best of days but in thick fog it becomes stranger still. Single twisted birch appear and disappear as we wobble and stumble our way out over hummocks and tussocks. Voices are softened and colours washed out. It takes a little while for newcomers to get the confidence that they aren't going to sink out of sight and develop a way of walking on a surface that is like a giant duvet. We picked a large misshaped pine as a base for lunch bags that people would be able to find their way back to and set them working. It is amazing how much a group of determined people can do and this lot were hard core. Laura who has come several times always counts the number of seedlings she cuts, last year she cut about 300 in the day, this year slightly less as we had further to walk but that means allowing for different capabilities the group cut at least 3000 pine seedlings. Lunch is taken quickly (its too cold to stop for long) and standing up (it is too wet to sit down) and then they are straight back to it. To allow time to get off the bog in daylight (in the broadest sense) we stopped cutting bat 3pm but some were so keen we nearly had to take their saws off them. The walk back through the eerie contorted forest is more mysterious. Legs and arms ache but luckily rucksacks are lighter with lunch consumed. We are finally back to the cars by 4pm in the twilight, individual trees are divided up and the over optimistic spend a frantic 15 mins trying to get a 8 ft tree into a Ford Fiesta. Everyone was cold, wet and tired but when I think of the 5 people who decided not to come out I don't think any of the work party would swap days.

Green Christmas trees - Take 2 (or more)

It is Thursday and we are out cutting Christmas trees again. But this time it is an all day work party organised for SNH staff so that they get a day away from their desks, experience Flanders on a glorious winters day, learn a bit about bogs and do some good for the Moss. Today we are clearing the lodgepole pines that have seeded next to the boardwalk. It is a slightly hazardous area to work because of all of the hidden water-filed ditches and it isn't the sort of day to get a wet foot. So we took everyone up the viewing tower to show them the lay of the land and where the ditches are before having a sweep stake for who would be the first to go in a ditch. Ian from Planning section proved to be the first and showed that it is still possible to work with a gallon of icy water in your boot. To prevent fights, arguments and disappointment everyone went out to cut their Christmas trees first, took them labelled back to the trucks and then started blitzing all that were left. These lodgepole pines look very like Scots pine and also don't loose their needles so once people have had one one year they often like to come back again the next. However this year I am going for a Sitka spruce also cut off the Moss. These spruces are especially prickly and I hope that this will prevent our 2 kittens at home from trashy the tree. I am looking forward to seeing their first climbing attempt.

Once the early fog burned off it was a very bright, cold, crisp day all day which brings out the best in the outdoor gear from the office staff. Anna from Dunoon was sporting a bright purple balaclava that made her look like a Christmas tree bauble while Vicky from Stirling went for the "hip"snowboarder look. Morag from Kippen had rung earlier in the week and knew about the work party so decided to walk around the boardwalk with her friend just as we were cutting and made us an offer that we couldn't refuse, a Christmas tree for 12 mince pies. Well with the energy being used up we would have cut her a tree for 1 mince pie but we didn't tell her that. Later on while most of us kept cutting Stephen got a bonfire going to clear up a lot of cut birch from a previous work party and this could very convenient be used to cook some baked potatoes to keep the workers happy. You see food should always play an important part in work out of doors.
I love this sort of work on the Moss as you have to get down on your knees to cut the pines low down below the bottom row of branches so they don't grow back and this gets you looking close up to the beautiful Moss carpet. The frost picks out every spiders web, the Ramalina lichens glow like miniature, birds nests on low birch while the red-topped Cladonia lichens with the star mosses in between form magical landscapes for the tiny people and mark out the slightly drier parts of the bog surface.
By the end of the day as the sun dropped and the temperature plummeted we had cleared most of the pines from around the boardwalk, burnt up a huge pile of birch cuttings, eaten 12 potatoes, taken home 10 Christmas trees and given 7 SNH staff a positive bog experience. And just to seal the day as we were coming off and glorious male hen harrier drifted onto the Moss to roost accompanied but a pair of scolding corvids.

Tina Turner's Wigs

I am on the Moss to look at the possible fencelines where we would like to reintroduce grazing. It is a cold, bright morning, a complete contrast to the previous few days and it is a joy to be out under a full sun for seemingly the first time in days. This corner of the Moss is strange and wild, it is edge land, on the very perimeter of the mound of peat but it hasn't had the attention of the "improvers" in the past that other parts have and so still has some of the natural features of an edge of a raised bog. It is a corner of collapsed twisted old sallow pollards that hint at a very different way of managing the land and huge tussock sedge mounds that look like a scattering of Tina Turner's wigs after a big concert. This corner is still very wet and in parts positively hazardous. Water drains off the surrounding lands and because it can't flow up onto the peat it collects on the moss edge. A mat of fen plants grow over the surface which when you walk across wobbles in a very nerve racking way. Beneath the mat is a metre or two of liquid peat and if you went through the mat it would really spoil your day. This is what the bog experts call "lagg fen" (the lagg being the edge of a bog). It is along the edge of this lagg fen that we want to fence. This will get an area grazed that hasn't been grazed for tens of years and the action of the stock will bring back the wild flowers that have become swamped by the rank grasses. There is a lot of planning for this type of work, landowners and neighbouring landowners to be met, graziers to be contacted, landowners agents to be avoided and possible fencelines to be agreed. And that is all before contractors are brought in to do the work.
Gradually the air warms up, the frost disappears from the mosses and grasses and the colour scheme of the bog goes from monochrome to harris tweed. A raven cronks in the distance and a couple of greater black backed gulls, strangers to the area, head south west almost certainly on a nefarious purpose. Out in the middle it feel like you are book-ended by the Wallace monument at one end of the Carse and the Mount Fuji-like Ben Lomond at the other end. Not good weather for bogs but it is due to rain tomorrow.

Green Christmas Trees

On Flanders Moss we have a lot of self seeded pines that if left will grow much bigger and help to dry out the bog. So we cut them down to keep the bog unwooded. But why waste them when they actually make a very nice Christmas tree, a bit different from the usual spruce but the key selling point of they don't drop their needles. So each year wherever possible we try to find "home" for these unwanted trees. After all, these trees are some of the greenest Christmas trees you could hope for. One of the "homes" is Thornhill Primary School who came, chose and cut a tree for their school. Below is what they did.
"On Thursday 3rd of December we went to Flanders Moss to choose our school Christmas Tree. When we got there Mr Pickett met us. We went up the watch tower and looked over the moss to look for the best tree. We then walked through the moss which was quite marshy and searched out our tree. It was a thin tree but quite bushy. Mr Pickett started to saw the tree with the help of Iona and Stuart. As the tree began to fall we shouted "TIMBER"!. The tree is back at school now and was decorated today by the P7 pupils. Thank you Flanders Moss.
Stuart, Iona, Scott & Ben (Green Fingered Friends)"

The right type of rain

Its raining, its winter and its cold. The snow covered slopes of the hills around Flanders glimmer in the murk. There are days like this on Flanders when it barely seems to get properly light and all life is dormant. But then I hear a quick churr of a wren hidden in the bog myrtle and the wink, winks from some pink footed geese nearby and I know that it is an illusion, life is out there and just dealing with the winter conditions as best as it can.

I am out on the moss to measure the monthly rainfall by emptying the raingauge. When working on bogs you become a bit obsessed about rainfall levels as rain is the only source of water to keep the bogs wet. After the month we have had there is more interest than usual in the amount of rainfall and the reading for November on Flanders is 231.4 mm (November rainfall average for Scotland was 256.7mm). So this has been a wet month, in fact since April 1997 (when we started recording rainfall on Flanders) there have been only 5 wetter months than this last month. However this is nothing compared to Cumbria where at Shap 621.4 mm was recorded for the month. But though a wet month is always good for the bog at Flanders we do prefer if possible the right type of rain. Ideally it should be a gentle sprinkle all day everyday as this would keep the sponge-like bog continually topped up. The Moss can only hold so much water so too much winter rain and it just runs off, heavy downpours at anytime can cause problems such as washing out dams put in the ditches and of course no rain for long period lowers the water levels in the peat so damaging the bog vegetation. So at Flanders we like lots of rain all the time providing it is the right type of rain. But this is an opinion that I find is best kept to myself !

Launching The Tower

The Flanders Moss tower is officially launched though luckily it hasn't left the ground. And how do you launch a tower ? Well you get the local primary school to perform a bog rap of course.
Last Monday we set up as marquee for the day in the car park and invited a whole load of people who have been involved in the Moss over the summer to come down and help us declare the tower open. Bruce Crawford, local MSP did the official declaration and was helped by 12 children from Thornhill Primary who performed their rap on the Moss to an audience of about 50 people. The speeches short and sweet and then everyone headed out to climb the tower to take in a view that no-one has ever had in the 8000 year history of the Moss.
A few facts about the tower:
- the platform is 7 m above the bog surface
- it is a bit like an ice berg as it is longer under the surface than above, the supporting piles go 10m down through the peat into the underlying clay,
- it is built mainly of Scottish oak,
- the architect was Robin Baker of Baker Associates in Birnam and it was built by Luddons from Glasgow, both relatively local firms,
- the design aims to give people a unique view across the Moss while merging into the landscape,
- the overall aim is for people to experience the wide expanse of the Moss without causing any damage to the fragile and hazardous bog surface.

I would be very keen to hear what people think of the tower so please feel free to comment on the blog or send comments to the SNH Stirling office.

And what is the Rap on the Moss ? Well over the summer, as part of the People, Peat, Poetry project Thornhill Primary School worked with Glasgow rap artist Louie to produce the Rap on the Moss so giving Flanders Moss more street cred that it has ever had before.

Starting to Blog

This is the first entry in a new venture for Flanders Moss. As far as I know in all of its 8000 years of existence there has never been a blog set up specifically about Flanders Moss. So I have taken advantage of this technology to launch a blog to keep anyone interested up to date with what is happening out on the Moss.

And it is an exciting time in the life of the blog. On Monday (23 Nov) SNH aims to open the newly built viewing tower that gives people a totally new view of Flanders Moss that no-one will have seen before.

I will let you know how the day goes and what the first visitors think of the tower after Monday.

In the meantime when out on the Moss on Wednesday tidying up the site in preparation for the opening, the view from the tower was enhanced by the ghostly dancing shape of a male hen harrier hunting across the north edge of the bog. With its slow, stop start flight, it quartered the heather searching for small mammals and birds and gleamed white against the muted colours of the Moss. Even if it only gives more people this type of view of the Flanders's winter spirit then the tower will be a huge success.