Barden Moor is an extensive water catchment area, on acidic rock (Millstone Grit), providing soft drinking water to the city of Bradford. The area is part of the ancient Bolton Abbey estate, and is now also in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. It’s covered in heather and moorgrass with areas of meadow and bog pools. It’s a fine place for an open airy walk away from the sometimes busy mountaintops, and a wonderful spot for nature.
Netty found some dusty but very well-made wooden animals, complete with attachment rings, evidently designed for use on a Nature Trail. She repainted all of them and we hung them around the reserve. The camouflaged animals – the newt and the frog – seemed to ‘work’ the best. We hope the children will have fun going around with their parents to find them. One or two may be quite difficult!
It wasn’t all wooden animals. As it happens, we saw some of the real things, November or not.
[Spoiler alert!] We went down to the pond to affix the Dragonfly, and spotted a small limp orange shape floating apparently lifeless at the surface…
Then we started mowing the Ramp Meadow with its remarkably fine stand of Evening Primroses …
… and found a real frog, escaping the scythes and boots.
The Forest School decorated Christmas Candles very gracefully.
It was a good day for amphibians all round, as we also saw a pair of Smooth Newts in amplexus in the pond. I didn’t get a photo for the good reason that unlike the Common Frog, they remain elusive and well-camouflaged at the bottom of the pond. And the frogs were still going at it full throttle, with around 20 splashing about beside the island.
Having lobbied the sitting Member of Parliament for the local constituency, Angie Bray, a few weeks ago, I thought I’d invite the Labour candidate, Rupa Huq, and see what she thought about nature.
She came along to Gunnersbury Triangle, together with two of her supporters to take some pictures and video clips of the occasion. I did my best to fit what I wanted to say into short bursts – I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to do soundbites before, but perhaps it will come in handy when anyone asks what I think about nature and politics, or for that matter to put into a few words what my book is about. (It’s about how crazy the English are about nature, and why.)
We talked about why nature matters and the benefits it brings (votes, of course; human wellbeing in an age of e-gadgets; education; mental health; knowledge of climate change; the value of the wild gene pool… ), and I suggested some topics that it would be nice to have as party policy.
We walked around the reserve, saying a little about its history, its current uses (school visits, corporate bonding days, volunteering, talks, picnics, family visits, bug-hunting and pond-dipping, days out for the mentally handicapped). We saw the variety of habitats, enjoyed hearing the Robins singing even on a chilly day in January, and looked under a mat at the tiny frogs sheltering there. Rupa certainly left with a deeper understanding of what nature can do for people and why it matters; and of the possibilities that the Gunnersbury Triangle reserve, at least, has to offer for her constituents.
Down at the reserve, it was time to strim the meadow, which meant a frog hunt. A conservation frog hunt, to dislodge any frogs that might otherwise get permanently strimmed. I walked up and down, sweeping through the cow parsley – it’s a major reason why cutting is now necessary, it needs to be held back to allow more delicate flowers like garlic mustard through – but no frogs hopped out. I looked under the mats placed there for amphibia – there were no frogs, just three small toads sheltering in the cool darkness.
On the woodland edge of the meadow, brambles have been spreading in their looping way, bending down to the ground, striking root and springing off another few feet into the grass. I pulled up some dozens of them, cutting roots where necessary to leave nothing that could regrow. Some people just quickly clip them off above the ground, which slows them down for a little while: pulling, digging or root-clipping is far more effective.
Down at the pond, the heron was waiting silently, watching for frogs to eat. Since it has arrived, frogs have been much harder to find. I wonder how many of the dozen large frogs I saw mating a few weeks ago have finished up in that enormous dagger-shaped beak.
Today dawned foggy and cool, but the sun soon burnt its way through and it became a hot spring day. I spent most of it reroofing the tool shed at the Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve. It was in tatters after at least one hard winter, and it was an interesting exercise peeling off the layers hopefully tacked one on top of the leaky other. I then removed three full boards from the roof, complete with what I’m sure any mycologist would have found a fascinating colony of wet rot fungus, together with several wriggly centipedes and a lot of woodlice.
As it grew hotter on the roof, I was joined by at least two species of hoverfly, one large, dark, and almost unstriped. A brimstone butterfly chased around with a smaller white, perhaps a green-veined or an orange tip. A comma butterfly wandered about. Down below, the stinging nettles, hops, and garlic mustard (ideal for orange tips) are coming up nicely, but there’s too much cow parsley and some volunteers are pulling a lot of it out.
At lunchtime I walked down to the pond. Chiffchaffs were singing all over; the pond was suddenly covered in pond skaters (Gerris) with one or two whirligig beetles. The tadpoles have hatched out into a wriggling mass.
Spring has sprung.
Last year my pond was full of frogs, with at least four spawning females, followed by hundreds of tadpoles. It was the first time: normally there had been one large resident frog, apparently determined to live a solitary Jeremy Fisher existence.
Two weeks ago, the Gunnersbury Triangle pond contained over 12 exceptionally large, plump frogs, clearly in breeding condition. The light was a bit tricky for photography, but if you peer through the surface of the water you’ll see a pair of frogs near the top, with one of many spawning females that day.
It’s hard to be sure from the mass of frogspawn, but I’d say there were more than six loads of eggs: the females seem to have preferred to spawn close to each other in one small area of the quite sizable pond. Perhaps there is safety in numbers. Certainly when there are several ponds close to each other, as there are in our block of gardens, all the spawn goes in one pond. I heard that a heron has been seen at the Triangle pond at dawn every morning lately, and the frogs are definitely hard to see now, so the predator has probably eaten several of them. So perhaps there is not so much safety in numbers, as extreme danger in being alone: at least in the crowd, you are just one target among many.
This morning I saw one moderately large frog in my pond. I couldn’t be sure, but I think he had a raincoat, fishing rod and galoshes with him. It looks like a solitary year down at the pond.
After the brief heatwave it feels like March again. In the Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve, willow buds are starting to open but only the evergreen trees like the native yew and holly, and the invasive holm oak (from the Mediterranean) are in leaf. Not much to see, then? Not a bit of it.
In the leaf litter under the forest canopy, a large and handsome white slime mould was spread out, draped over some twigs in a fine shiny film. In detail its surface seems almost fractal, full of rounded holes at different scales like a Sierpinski Triangle if you know what one of those is. The individual cells – I’d almost call them animals – of the slime mould signal to each other with a chemical (AMP), which causes them to aggregate; they slowly ooze along like amoebae, eventually forming fruiting bodies rather like small fungi. It’s an extraordinary process, and in an odd way quite beautiful.
Meanwhile, the large holm oak by the picnic meadow looks utterly extraordinary, something like the horse chestnuts that have been attacked by plagues of leaf miner moths. Almost every leaf of the holm oak is scarred yellow and brown with the wandering trails of the moth caterpillars, making the tree look multicoloured and very badly battered. This is probably the work of Ectoedemia heringiella, according to the RHS.
Many of the leaves also have squarish brown furry patches (a filzgall or erineum ) on the underside; the leaves are naturally fluffy, with a tiny gall mite, Aceria ilicis, causing overgrowth; the thickened, darker hairs are too tough for the insect to eat, so the plant’s reaction works as a defence.
And that is not all; there are also a fair number of much larger pupae, probably of another moth species, wrapped in partly-rolled leaves, tied up with silk threads. We used to think of the holm oak as a useless non-native species with no pests or predators: not any longer, it seems, though at least the leaf-miner is a recent arrival itself.
Down at the pond, there are masses of frogspawn; at least a dozen large frogs, with at least four mating pairs, were responsible. When we came over the mound they must have seen us as there was a remarkable amount of splashing; even in amplexus they are capable of emergency diving: this is just as well, as much of the weed and reed has been cut during the winter.