Beware the ice

Yesterday I was meeting the Forestry Commission out on the Moss. John and John work on Coalburn Moss in Lanarkshire (amongst and whole host of other sites) and have plans to start restoration work there to make their moss wetter. This means damming ditches so they had come along to Flanders Moss to see the damming work we have done there. It wasn't the best day to show them as it was beautifully sunny but very cold, it had been -8 C at home, and we really wanted it to b wet and wobbly to get a feel for the bog hydrology (water works). But we headed out to look at big and small dams, dams made of peat and recycled plastic and talk flow rates and fluid dynamics. Gradually the sun had an effect and burned off the hoar frost, bringing the sphagnum carpet back to life as its rays touched. Now the ditch that we had to cross to look at the last dam wasn't big and the ice was thick so I crossed fine and the first John crossed OK as well. I don't know if John no.2 was maybe a little heavier or carrying too much gear but the next minute he was through the ice and in the freezing ditch up to the top of his legs. He took it very well all things considered and we headed quickly back to the car park to prevent frost bite setting in. I hope it doesn't put him off, if it did that could have a drastic affect on the recovery of Coalburn Moss.

Crow Country

After a week away on holiday I went out to the Moss to get a feel for it again for one of the scheduled hen harrier counts. So an hour spent over sunset in the tower on a gloriously still, crisp, clear and very, very cold evening was perfect. It was so still that any utterance by any bird for hundreds of yards around could be heard. A couple of cock pheasants tried to outdo one another, a distant carrion crow shouted from a tree top and a couple of ravens cronked like distant laughter. Then the silence was shattered as a microlight took off from Easter Poldar airfield. The pilot must have had a truly amazing view but I wonder if he ever wondered what the effect of the racket the machine makes has on others. Once the sun dipped below the horizon deer wraiths appeared on the moss. Roe deer were betrayed by their white bums, red deer materialised out of the scrub edge, first 1, then 3 then 12 before it was too late to see. And then it was time with no hen harriers seen again. They are still using the moss but just haven't been seen on the last two official counts. I headed back to the truck and started down the track before pulling up. There against the navy blue sky were several hundred jackdaws and rooks wheeling around, splitting and joining like a group of big clumsy starlings. Just a small group compared with most roosts these birds were going through their daily preparations for roosting where they fly group aerobatics and call their heads off before heading to the tree tops for the night. A book called Crow Country by Mark Cocker that I read recently describes it far better and in more detail than I ever could if you wanted to know more. Some of the best sights of the day can be from everyday common birds that you might normally ignore.

Crunching bog

The Moss has been looking absolutely fabulous these last few mornings. I have been out meeting contractors and counting birds and for once this has coincided with blue skies, crispy cold air and plenty of sun. After the quiet bird count on Monday I had a better day on Tuesday with the first chaffinches singing, a few surviving wrens spotted and best of all my first drumming greater spotted woodpecker of the year. Did you know that woodpeckers hit their heads against a tree at a speed of 20mph and this would flatten a normal bird's skull. But woodies are specially adapted with a thicker skull than other birds, more flexible neck joints, a beak that isn't rigidly connected to the skull and cushioning caused by the powerful neck muscles to withstand the shock. And just to show how well they are adapted they also have stiff feathers around the base of the beak to stop sawdust and wood chips flying up their nostrils, handy huh !
Yesterday as I headed out across the crisp, frozen, crunching moss I misjudged the edge of a ditch and one leg went through the ice nearly to the top of my thigh. There was no danger and I sorted of pinged out again with my waterproof trousers stopping me from getting very wet. But it could have made an uncomfortable walk back.
But as you can see from the photos it is well worth a visit out to the tower and boardwalk for a dry view of the snow capped surrounding mountains.
However apologies for the state of the access track to the car park. A few people have commented on it and we aim to get it patched up as soon as possible but that can't be done until the frost comes out of the ground. When that is is any ones guess but in the meantime I hope you enjoy the snow and frost for the scenic views.

Silent woods on the edge

Today I was counting birds. I was carrying out a 2 hour bird count for a specific 2km square as part of the BTO Atlas, an attempt to map the distribution of the UK birds. The first hour was along the woodland edge of Flanders, the second hour was to be back across the open moss. But the birds were thin on the ground. Carrion crows, rooks and jackdaws stalked the farmland but in the woods it was silent. These edge woods, a bog habitat called the rand, are an under rated place. They are not of the conservation value or the majesty of the open bog vistas but are achingly beautiful in their own right, the subtle pattern of tall straight birches broken by the occasional twisted and gnarled tree made beautiful by disease. In the gaps the floor is littered with gonks of battered Molinia grass and scatter cushions of Polytrichum moss. But so few birds. Only a party of great and coal tits, goldcrests and treecreepers passing through make it onto the notepad. It has been a hard winter and some will have perished but it maybe just that others have moved to places with more food like gardens. Not a robin or a wren were heard so spring will tell if they have survived and returned. In the past these woods have been the dumping ground for the local farms and the evidence of this abuse it still there, amongst the metal work a fine bog, on a bog. The only sign of more recent abuse a single birch felled and removed, most probably for Christmas logs.
At half-time it was time to head out onto the open bog and face up to the nagging north wind. Out there a couple of crows hang around. Are there bog crows and farmland crows and do the bog crows chose to be there ? Or do they just move around all habitats looking for feeding opportunities as they go ? But the bog was as quiet as the woods, not a peep of a meadow pipit, not a chack of a stonechat nor pheep of a reed bunting, just the rumble and hiss of the wind. But Flanders always delivers and suddenly charging low over the moss with the wind went a peregrine looking as tight and muscular as a greyhound. And 5 minutes later a red kite sauntered north scoping the ground as it went. I finished up at the High Moss Pow where a line of old, twisted hawthorn mark an ancient land boundary. A final list of only 17 species of birds a poor haul even for winter on Flanders.

Cheeky trees and Denzil Washington

It is Sunday on a cold murky February morning and we are out on the west edge of the Moss dismantling a pheasant pen. Why ? Well in its past life Flanders Moss used to be shot over quite a lot. A previous shooting syndicate decided to build a huge pheasant pen but when they finished they left a huge pile of junk and collapsed fencing which should be on one of Scotland's top nature reserves. So we have a hardy band of volunteers who are going to do the demolishing. But it is not just demolishing, we aim to recycle or reuse as much as possible. Some already has been used for giving grip to bridges and for building hen runs and everyone on the work party is looking at what they are dismantling to think what they can re-use the materials for. Ballangrew wood is a dry edge to Flanders and is filled with a mix of straight and twisted trees hinting at an unclear, mixed history. Some of the wind-blown biggest look like a moss covered whale skeletons lying abandoned in the wood. By 1230 everything was done in perfect timing for lunch, the highlight of which was Di's smelly cheese, no actually it really was good.
Smelly cheese digested we head south through the wood to tackle rhododendron seedlings. This is an area where over the years we have been tackling the invasive rhodi and seem to be winning. The huge bushes have mostly been killed but like the aliens films it keep coming back. Seeds in the soils every year sprout into life so we sweep through the woods pulling seedlings as we go. A little heave today is much easier than a major operation later. Through the woods we see the creative browsing of the increasing deer population with the beautiful topiary of the holly bushes. Rhodis blitzed we head out onto the open bog and have a go at pulling and snipping the pine seedlings that are spreading out onto the moss. Claudine swears at the cheeky trees, the smallest that are often the most difficult to put out. She's French. A large brown hare lopes off the moss disturbed by us from his bog siesta.
On the way off the Moss the highlight of the day, we find a small hummock of Spahgnum fuscum, a rare sphagnum moss that has very firm brown hummocks. For a bog manager this is exciting and very beautiful but Di starts muttering about Denzil Washington and I know that I have lost them, its time to go home.

Pinkies and the Beeb

It was a bit murky as I drove down the track to the car park at Flanders yesterday, a fresh inch of snow covered the ground and the sun was yet to break through the Carse mist. I clocked the usual rooks and pheasants pinching the sheep's food from their troughs and suddenly pulled up with a sudden jerk as I realised that the stubble field next to the track was absolutely filled with birds. It took me a moment to realise that they were pinkies, pink-footed geese and there was an awful lots of them. I got to the end of the track going very slowly so as not to spook them and then did a quick estimate of numbers. 2500-3000 was the guesstimate and quite a site they made. The sounds of their calls came in waves across the field (pinkies make more of a "wink wink" sound, greylags more of a "wank, wank" - this method of telling them apart isn't for sharing with all visitors on the moss) as they walked back across the field away from me. I did a quick scan across the group for any other species of geese that might be mixed in, in the past we have seen a few barnacle geese, a snow geese and even an odd hybrid mixed in with flocks at Flanders. I also checked for neck rings, these are coloured bands around the neck with a unique code on them that researchers use to track individual birds. They are much easier to read in the field than leg rings. The bustle and noise of the geese moving from field to field as they fed and of more geese flying in in groups brought the landscape alive as the sun burned gaps in the mist and back lit the scene.
I had gone out to Flanders to meet a Tim and Maeve from the BBC. They are making a series of programmes about man's impact on the landscape and were interested in the peat clearances of the 18th and 19th century. They had come to see Flanders not so much because of the bog itself but to see the contrast between the remaining bog and the land where bog had been cleared from. It is hard to get over to people the shear effort that went into the clearing of the peatlands on the Carse, hundreds of thousands of peat were removed to get at the good agricultural land underneath, this activity would have totally dominated local people lives 200 years ago. The landscape would have looked very different with smoke from the burning waste peat rolling over black fields, the workers houses almost indistinguishable from the land itself, and everything stained black. I am not sure if I was able to get this over to the BBC crew but they were very taken with the wobble of the bog when you jump up and down on it and the ease that you can push a stick into the deep soft peat. So we will have to see how they will portray the moss of today.

A good day ends with gerkins

Yesterday was a good day. We got lots done and pretty much according to plan for once. Stephen, Nick, Ash and myself headed off to the west side of Flanders to do a number of jobs. Firstly I managed to catch up with one of our neighbouring farmers for a chat. You can do a lot of more work chatting over a fence than chatting over the phone. Stephen, Ash and I then headed off to Ballangrew wood to remove an old sign post and put in a new one. Why 3 of us ? Well the sign designers have over the years been designing bigger and bigger signs and it takes 3 of us to lift the current version into its hole. The next version will probably need a helicopter for installation. We also managed to cut back the rhododendron that was narrowing down an access track and pick up some timbers from a replaced bridge so that we can reuse them . All this and we didn't get our tracked wheelbarrow (called an iron horse) stuck despite being nearly knee deep in mud at times. Meanwhile Nick was using his finely honed Ray Mears fire lighting skills to get a damp fire going in Ballangrew meadow that was to burn up some cut gorse. We joined him at lunchtime and set to to burn a huge pile of gorse that had been cut before Christmas on a volunteer work party. Stephen and Ash then went to patch up a crack in ditch dam while Nick and I finished off the burning up. I then met up with a fencing contractor to look at a job nearby. So by half past four we had completed all the tasks that we had set out to do and were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. By then the fire had died down a bit and Stephen was able to weave his magic. Stephen is to bonfire baked potatoes what Michelangelo is to sculpture, but it is not just the potatoes, he always surprises us with fillings. Last time it was olives, this time it was gherkins. Fantastic. Sitting around the fire, aching after a long day it tasted fantastic even in the steady drizzle that had started. Goodness knows what he will do next time.