You know it is your nature, Nature Boy
Looking through the site progress in the blog, it’s all starting to look like a typical building site where the area is turned into some kind of muddy hell, all in the name of progress. Maybe it’s time for a brief update on the good things that are happening on the site.
A lot of the problem with getting the message across is my limited skill with a camera so everything probably looks worse than it is and I am lacking the skill or equipment to capture those glorious shots of birds and bees that others seem to achieve. I have managed to shoot a bowl of acorns, but they’re slow to move and more compliant when you ask them to say ‘cheese’!
As mentioned elsewhere, the high dense canopy of the original site was so stifling that there was no wildlife at all beneath – not even spiders and flies ventured in. Within a few days of clearing a small area of bushes so some shards of light penetrated to the ground and we had a wood pigeon come down and a small butterfly came in for a brief visit. As this cleared area expanded, so did the wildlife with hedgerow birds especially taking to the reduced foliage and the increase in ground-based insects. With the works going on hold before nesting season we got to see families of robins and wrens moving around the site and these have been joined by blackbirds, blue tits. Great tits, long-tailed tits, gold crests, chif-chafs and Nuthatches.
Along with the birdlife the bunnies made a bit of an appearance so we’ve had to put protective collars on our your hedging but there is also a fox so I think that’s natures way of keeping a balance. The fox dug-up and left us an old golf ball one night, which was nice. We’ll definitely need to build a water feature (apart from the fact that it’s a boat we’re building!) as we’ve had frogs in our new hedgerow and a good number of dragonflies hanging around so the demand is there!
On the plantlife side of things, most of the blackthorn has been cut back hard this year but the ones that remain have produced an abundance of sloes so the gin is being prepared this autumn! Our remaining oak has been producing acorns by the bucket load so we’re sharing these with the local squirrel and birds and taking ours to plant-up and help grow lots of baby oaks (oaklings? Oaklets??). Quite a few have got crazy ‘oak-apples’ on and it looks like they are ‘Knopper Galls’ caused by the tiny gall wasp Andricus quercuscalicis but we’re not going to get bent out of shape by it as the vast majority of acorns seem fine.
Even the dead oak at the other end of the site has been joining in the party, presenting us with some stunning bracket fungi in the form of Trametes versicolor. This is living on the dead cuttings from the branches we had to make, to get the tree safe, and will be forming our wildlife wood pile for all those reptiles and invertebrates to live in.
So, all-in-all, not too bad as things stand and should get a lot better once we get the site finished and the planting underway.
