Sarah Barnsley, of the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, (PTES) presented a talk on 16th February entitled ‘Why Hedgerows matter’.
Sarah talked about some of the wildlife that lives in hedges, illustrated with beautiful slides, and how it is beneficial for them to cut hedges as late in the winter as soil conditions allow, to preserve the fruits as long as possible. She followed on to describe different hedgerow structures which result from different management practices, and how ideally the hedge will have a blended edge of scrub leading further out to long grass. Hedges can be assessed as to how healthy they are, in terms of how many woody species there are making it up, how well connected it is with others or woodland, its width, and how well it’s been managed. Sarah pointed us to the Great British Hedgerow Survey on the PTES website, which scores the overall health of an individual hedge, and provides management advice accordingly. She explained how under-managed hedges can eventually go through the process of succession to eventually turn into a row of trees, whereas an over-managed hedge, cut hard every year to the same height and width will become gappy and open, eventually disappearing. Sarah then described a hedgerow management cycle, which when done properly, rejuvenates the hedge so it keeps its structure and species diversity. This involves the hedge being cut every three years approx. 10 cm longer, along the top and sides, than the last cut. The hedge therefore continues to expand for some years (Sarah suggested between 10 and 40) before being laid or coppiced. Laying involves thinning out and cutting the individual trees near the base and bending them over. Sarah showed us several slides illustrating different styles of this ancient craft before revealing that the most favoured one in her view is ‘conservation’ hedge laying where very little of the hedge is thinned, so it is all laid to form a wide dense well-structured hedge. After the very well presented talk full of fascinating facts and advice Sarah took questions from the large audience (52 in the hall and 11 on-line). Hedges are well loved by the community and some of the questions reflected the concern about the over management of many of our hedges. Sarah fielded them well and the audience, which included at least 6 landowners who went away with plenty of food for thought. by Peter Shallcross Our AGM will start at 7.00pm for a brief run through of the minutes of last year’s meeting and the 2022 accounts. We urge as many members as possible to come along. The hall should be open half an hour before we start, so this year you can even enjoy the proceedings with a glass of wine in hand. The talk will start at 7:30pm and we shall hear from Sarah Barnsley on 'Why hedgerows matter'. Sarah is Hedgerow Officer for the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, and a huge hedgerow enthusiast, working to promote these humble countryside heroes. Hedgerows form a key component of our natural heritage and provide many vital ecosystem services and functions. They connect up our countryside and provide essential food and shelter for much of our wildlife. From nesting birds to hibernating hedgehogs, well-managed hedges can provide abundant resources for animals, birds and all manner of insects. Yet, to maintain a healthy hedgerow network into the future, we need to manage hedgerows according to their natural lifecycle. Clive Whitbourn, National Trust Ranger, started his talk with a focus on Hambledon Hill, the 47 hectare hillfort which came to the National Trust in 2014. It is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a photo from 1940 showed how bare the hillfort was 80 years ago. Now the hillfort is managed lightly, with scrub kept low and any erosion kept at bay with terrace reshaping to preserve the profile of the ramparts.
Clive showed us the methods they use with wooden frameworks buried deep to support hessian bags full of chalk, which bulk out any damaged areas, with turf from the ditch placed on top. The chalkland grasses grow through and thrive. He mentioned that the south and south-west ramparts of Hambledon Hill are best for butterflies. Cattle scraping for minerals – they can go on binges to self-medicate - and visitors wearing down paths, all play their part in erosion. Roboflail, a mechanical AI cutter, is being used on some of the NT sites to great effect to keep the scrub low and save the man hours for other tasks. The NT relies on volunteer help on many of their conservation projects. Hod Hill is Dorset’s largest Iron Age hillfort and is unusual because it has a Roman fort nestled within, built at a time when the invaders needed to defend their capture of this Durotriges stronghold. Clive showed us how the framework and hessian bag method was also used to repair a bridleway here. In terms of nature conservation, Texel sheep are good grazers and White Park cattle are brilliant for rough pastures. Yellow Rattle, which suppresses coarse grass growth, is doing well at Winn Green and there are plans this year to brush-harvest the seed from there and broadcast it to the newly purchased Clubmen’s Down, a 30 acre piece of arable. Across Clive’s patch and the various Downs and hillforts, uncommon species are being noted: Bee and the Great Butterfly orchids, and the unusual Autumn Lady’s Tresses; Waxcap fungi; Marsh, Silver-spotted and Danville Fritillaries, Grizzled Skippers, Small Blue and Adonis Blue butterflies; Great Green Bush-crickets and Glow worms. Clive’s talk gave us plenty of inspiration for visiting these places, particularly in the spring and summer! Our first talk of the year will be given by National Trust Ranger Clive Whitbourn. Clive has responsibility for the day-to-day management and nature conservation of a number of the Trust’s properties near here with great landscape, archaeological, and biodiversity importance, including Hambledon Hill, Hod Hill, Fontmell Down and Melbury Down, Turnworth Woods/Ringmoor and Win Green. He will describe some of the things that make these sites so special, and also some of the challenges of managing them, both for conservation and for the enjoyment of the visiting public. The Victoria Hall, High Street, Tisbury and its bar, will be open as usual from 7:00 p.m. Members and those under 21 have free entry and we welcome any visitors to join us and pay a guest fee of £2. Please bring cash! Izzy Fry gave us a fascinating talk on bird ringing last week at our final meeting of the year. The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) regulates bird ringing in this country and Izzy has built up a huge amount of experience over the last 4-5 years in a range of locations and with different mentors, and even at night for the nightingales and nightjars, as she works towards a professional qualification.
As always Izzy's photographs were beautifully clear and expressive, and we were treated to a panoply of stunning close-ups of birds and saw how the fine meshed nets, which gently capture the birds, were stretched out near field boundaries. The birds go still in these nets and don't flap, so there is no harm to them in the process. Tall ladders (12 feet or more) can be set up for inspecting raptor nests and there are even ring sizes for baby birds which are delicately handled by those who have a special licence. We heard how the ringing of birds has helped to further our knowledge about migratory journeys, when the codes from the leg rings of captured or dead birds are reported back to the BTO from overseas. The practice of doing regular bird-ringing in the UK also contributes to our understanding of the populations of species around the country, as it provides valuable longitudinal data sets for the BTO. Rebecca Twigg started her talk last week by stressing the relative unimportance of honey bees compared with wild pollinators such as solitary bees, bumblebees, moths, butterflies, hoverflies and beetles. She gave several examples of solitary bee species that are commonly found in gardens such as the Ashy and Tawny mining bees, as well as the recently arrived Ivy bees, and explained interesting details about their lifecycles and habitat requirements. Later, she gave us examples of the best garden flowers for pollinators, natives as well as exotics.
She stressed the importance of having flowers blooming all year round, with Heathers from late winter, Lungwort in early spring and continuing right through to early winter with Mahonia, for example. Rebecca explained how she restocks her garden by swapping plants, growing from cuttings and collecting seeds rather than buying from nurseries. Rebecca pointed out how planting in drifts is so important, so the bees don’t have to waste energy flying between individual flowers, making sure there’s a variety of flower types, e.g., Foxgloves for long-tongued bumblebees and daisies for short-tongued hover-flies. Rebecca then spoke about creating different habitats in gardens, to provide for the diverse requirements of different pollinators. Drilling holes between 5 and 8mm and pencil length into wooden panels, logs or posts placed in warm, sunny situations can provide valuable nesting sites for solitary bees. The importance of having areas of short and longer (flower rich) grass in a lawn to cater for mining bees, which need warm soil to complete their lifecycle, was emphasised. We recommend walking the Salisbury Bee Trail which Rebecca is responsible for laying out and for which she won an award. by Peter Shallcross This month we welcome Rebecca Twigg, founder of Salisbury's Secret Garden. Rebecca is an organic gardener with a passion for the natural world who received a DEFRA award for the Salisbury Bee Trail project. She has now started a new community garden at the Five Rivers Health and Well-being Centre and an additional ‘green space kick start’ scheme for those wanting to take on a patch of ground themselves. She says: “Exploration outside is absolutely in my heart, there is something magical about immersing yourself in nature …these interactions shape our values and abilities to manage in an ever-changing world too.” As last month, the Victoria Hall bar will be open from 7:00PM to serve wine, beer and soft drinks before the meeting. We plan, as usual now, to live-stream Rebecca’s presentation over Zoom for anyone not able to attend in person; I’ll send out the Zoom link to members a few days before. Attending our meetings is free for members and anyone under 21; adult visitors are asked for a £2 contribution. If you are not a member but would like to come along, please get in touch via the contact form. The Victoria Hall is on the High St, Tisbury, opposite the garage. Leif Bersweden was brought up near here so visiting us last month was, appropriately enough, something of a return to his roots. A bright, engaging speaker, he was bursting with enthusiasm for his subject.
He set about the topic by describing how he became interested first in animals and then in plants and flowers as a boy, and went on to describe the journey he recently made across the whole of the British Isles, largely on bicycle, to explore the range of plants that grow here, their habits and their habitats. He travelled as far west as the lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, as far east as the South East corner of England, at Deal in Kent, via the Norfolk Broads and Scarborough in Yorkshire, as far north as the Shetland Isles, and across the island of Ireland to sites in both Derry in the north and Cork in the far south west. Much of his talk was made up of descriptions of the sights and specimens he found most amazing; some that we may consider familiar such as the glorious spring-time carpets of bluebell woods on the South Downs or in Hampshire; or the unfamiliar characteristics of common plants such as the fact that Lords-and-ladies is capable of generating heat; or the truly unexpected carnivorous greater bladderwort, growing in the Norfolk Broads. Leif’s sheer delight at all of these was truly infectious; a delight to listen to. The background, of course, which he did not shy away from, is that wildflower populations are threatened everywhere, by population growth, changes in agricultural practices and intensity, and by climate change. And the familiarity people used to have with wild plants in their locality, their names, their uses, has largely disappeared. But there were light hearted touches, too, such as the anecdote he told of how embarrassed he was when apprehended, camera in hand, while taking pictures of a particular plant native to a coastal sand-dune, by a couple of members of the nudist colony that also occupied the area. Overall Leif’s message was determinedly up-beat. Our wildflower heritage is something wonderful and to be cherished. He filled his audience with enthusiasm and pleasure that reflected his own – and sold a fair number of copies of his recently published book as a result! by Richard Budden In September, we had the last field trip of the past season and the first talk of the new season.
The talk was on Rewilding archaeology, and was given by Ed Treasure, an environmental archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology. This was an interesting follow-up to our visit to Underhill Wood Nature Reserve, which some of us were lucky to be able to visit in April. Ed gave us a thought-provoking talk, starting with two definitions, one for environmental archaeology (the study of human and environmental interactions) and for rewilding (the reinstatement of natural processes, learning from the past), explaining how archaeology can be made relevant to approach current problems. Ed went on to explain why archaeological data, particularly palaeoenvironmental reconstruction, is relevant for the current interest in rewilding and acknowledged there are many ways of rewilding, in between two poles of "do nothing" and "do lots". Less than 1% of UK land is explicitly dedicated to rewilding, and most detailed baseline studies go back just 50 years. For example, what is officially referred to as ancient woods are areas of woodland that have persisted for just 400 years: 1600 in England and Wales, and 1750 in Scotland. This is hardly anything from the perspective of archaeology! Taking archaeological evidence into account, baselines can be brought back to several millennia ago, but the key question we need to ask ourselves as potential rewilders is, which specific moment of the past do we want to restore? One point of Ed's talk that may surprise our members is that archaeological evidence shows there is no true native woodland remaining in Britain. Although there are areas where woodland has been continuously present since the Early Holocene (the period after the last glaciation), the nature of this woodland has changed considerably. Ed also discussed the concept of wildwood or primeval forest, the woodland existing for a period after the last glaciation, from 12,000 years ago. The traditional view of this wildwood was of a closed canopy wood with some small clearances, until the first farming societies that started opening up the landscape. Ed referred to the first critique of this traditional view, Frans Vera's model, by which the primeval wood would have been in constant flux, with a mosaic of habitats "managed" by a range of large herbivores and beavers roaming in the landscape and creating openings. Vera's model is highly popular - it is one of the foundational ideas behind the rewilding project at Knepp, with which many of our members are familiar - and while the idea of the fluctuating woodland cover still holds true, the model has some problems that have arisen when contrasting some of its underlying hypotheses with the archaeological data. For example, it has become evident that large herbivores and beavers cannot be the only factors in creating openings in the landscape because most of these were absent from Ireland (unlike in Britain, where they were present) in the prehistoric past and environmental archaeological data tells us that Britain's and Ireland's landscapes were very similar. The role played by other factors, like carnivores, humans and fires for instance, are still under investigation. Another example given by Ed, this time closer to us, was the current development plan for the New Forest. Although this plan does not explicitly mentions "rewilding", it essentially proposes something of the sort, because it aims to make the NF more sustainable and reinstate the natural landscape of beech woodland and heathland. Ed highlighted that heathlands were created in the Bronze Age, a mere 4-3,000 years ago and that, although beech is native to the UK, beech woodlands only became common in the medieval period as a result of human management. So restoring those landscapes may be great to provide habitats for a range of wildlife, but are they truly "natural"? In summary, Ed didn't necessarily give us answers to many questions but I think this is one of the highlights of his talk. I am an environmental archaeologist too and I feel very uncomfortable when other archaeologists make big statements about the past that are largely interpretative and based on a series of disconnected facts; archaeological knowledge, like in many other disciplines, is not static and made of unsinkable truths. Ed rightly relativized the possible pathways for rewilding (it all depends on what specific time-landscape we want to restore) and he demonstrated the fluctuating nature of archaeological knowledge (and, therefore, of our understanding of the nature of the landscapes in the past). Rewilding can be a heated topic, but there isn't necessarily a right or wrong way of going about it, it just depends on giving careful thought to what we want to have for our baseline. You don't need to be a big landowner to be able to rewild anything, you can start with your small patch of concrete in the backyard or even with your windowsill. You can find out more about rewilding on the Rewilding Britain website. by Inés Lopez-Doriga On Thursday 15th September at the Victoria Hall in Tisbury High Street, starting at 19:30, we shall hear from Dr Ed Treasure of Wessex Archaeology who will talk to us on "Rewilding Archaeology".
A moment’s silence will be held at the start of the meeting as a mark of respect for the late Queen Elizabeth ll. If you haven't already signed up to the talk and want to come, please let us know via the Contact form. We can also send out Zoom links for those who prefer to stay at home. Guests are welcome for £2 per ticket. |
Photo: Avocets (Izzy Fry)
The headers display photos taken by our members. Do get in touch via the Contact Form if you'd like to submit a photo for selection.
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