The Silly Season

The silly season is well and truly up and running already I’ve had to return a baby tawny owl and a leveret to whence they came from. When I was a boy growing up it was always the case, there was rarely a year went by that I didn’t have some unfortunate wild creature dependant on me, after someone had ‘thought’ it needed ‘rescuing’ and left them on my doorstep.

Leave me alone

I would leave signs up at the door ‘no baby animals wanted’ and posters in the Post Office window ‘leave baby birds alone etc.’ and yet still a shoe box would miraculously appear, with some creature inside pleading to be left alone and returned to its wild place, on my doorstep.

Rarely was there any real need for the said creature to be there, baby blackbirds with notes attached to them “found this under my bush thought you would no what to do with it”, or “the cat brought this in”.

George or was it Mildred

I was of course the source of my own cross, having rescued and raised two fox cubs (George and Mildred) in the past and several corvids that would accompany me to school over the years. My long suffering parents must have dreaded the various containers and boxes dotted around the sheds as much as they dreaded entering the domain of Percy, the owl who lived in our dog kennels feeding on our never scarce, small mammal population. He always hated being disturbed during the day when he roosted and would swoop at any intruder before a cold winter got him and we found him frozen to his perch but he had led a relatively free existence despite him being so cantankerous thanks to the person who deposited him with us when he was chick when he should have been left alone, I don’t think he ever forgave us.

Poor Percy

The moral of these anecdotes is still the same as it was yesterday leave wild animals alone whether you think they are in trouble or not, let Mother Nature take care of its own. All of the above could and should have been left alone and nature would have seen the best result for them all. This is a never ending concern that happens year after year despite the many posters and articles telling everyone to leave baby birds and other so called ‘orphans’ alone they still turn up on either mine or other establishment doorsteps needing ‘rescuing’.

I have been at pains to keep quiet some tawny owl chicks in my local park for fear of the inevitable and yet two weeks ago one was brought to my home. They lady looked horrified when I told her in no uncertain terms to take it straight back to where it had come from. But she said, “it needs rescuing”, I said, “from what”, she said “from the wild things”. I couldn’t help myself I burst into laughter and told her “he only thing it needed rescuing from was her”! I took it back and put it back up in its bush where it promptly climbed out, however the parents and siblings were all still in the area so I left it to its own devices and scared of heights.

Unlike Percy this one will fly free

I noted last night when I was out with the dogs that all were nearly fully fledged now including the one with a fear of heights, which he appears to have overcome. As he peered down at me from his holly bush, he reminded me of Percy who although free and never restricted would never leave the kennels, this one would be able to fly free soon.




The product of a 'do gooders' not letting nature take its course. Despite vetinary treatment this little otter
died within days, the reason why it was abandoned in the first place possibly?

 
There really should be little place for ‘animal rescuers’ and i generally have little time for them, save for dire emergencies, as in the vast majority of cases we just need to leave them alone and let nature take its course. The Animal Hospital, irrrr Rolf Harris, 'poor little mite' and Spring Watch mentalities have a lot to answer for over the years. We view our wildlife through anthropogenic rose tinted spectacles, it is all best left well alone and watched from a distance and interferred with as little as possible.

OTD - Obsessive Tidiness Disorders

What is it with our society in the UK that makes most of it so unbearably obsessive about tidiness? I mean don’t get me wrong there are times and places where it is the done thing, such as the uniform rings on a Wembley turf or topiary in Blenheim Palace or even just uin general as i hate as much as anyone litter or fly-tipping. But in the main do we really need to be so obsessive about things that really don’t matter such as cutting the grass verges so often or so short, flailing hedgerows maintaining a fenceline in a straight and orderly fashion with no 'weeds'?

Neat, tidy, square, straight and completely wildlife unfriendly

Many of these form my annual gripes with LA's and private landownerss. All demonstrate various facets of tidiness in society that have impacts on the natural environment that far outweigh actual real cost benefits of these actions.

We have a beautiful park opposite my house, the former garden of an old manor house long since gone; it is surrounded on most sides by a lovely old stone wall which in some parts forms a road boundary with a sloping grass verge, in days gone by it was rich in wild flowers and having the sun most of the day great for butterflies. However, once upon a time somebody said they were weeds and untidy and now each year a nice little man from the council comes out with his back pack of herbicide and proceeds to kill everything that is growing along the base of the wall, not only does he spray there he sprays everywhere, around the bases of the big trees, the signs that say don’t damage the trees, along the base of the post and rail livestock fence when the beasts are in the field (two sick cows this year I am told will be ok), around the bins all around the benches in fact anywhere that looks like it needs spraying with herbicide. the areas that can be reached by a strimmers are then shawn close to the ground so not even a dandylion grows

Agent Orange strikes again

The end result is a very visually unpleasing strip or patch of dead brown vegetation followed by bare dead earth for the remainder of the year. The main reason for this they say is, ‘they can’t get the lawn mowers up close to such structures’ nor is it safe to strim on a bank, we've had complaints about the weeds and we need to make everything neat and tidy.

Why, I ask myself is it so important that they have to resort to poisons when in such places where particularly in the spring is an abundance of spring flowers and associated insects and why, in this particular location, do they have to cut the grass so frequently and so close to these structures, it is not as if it is is Blenheim Palace after all its Herrington bloody park for god's sake.


This leads me to the other and more serious consequence of these operations; after years of poisoning the verges and base of the wall nothing grows along it now, which because of its fine soil mix, has led to a massive amounts of erosion and inevitably the instability in the wall.


Queue the inevitable council overreaction of closing half the road off whilst they stabilised the wall. Will the penny finally drop as to the reasons and solutions to this conundrum? We will have to wait and see if the little man from the council comes out with his back pack next year, I will not hold my breath.

Just as I thought I had got over this rant on my tidy neightbours I had to witness another episode last week too and that really got my blood boiling.

This year has been a good year so far for migrant birds such as martins and despite the dry conditions everyone has moaned on about (I for one have not). They have been busy building nests on some of the local houses as always, all of which bar one have been happy with their African visitors. They provide endless hours of enjoyment twittering to each other on the telephone lines and aerobatic displays in the park dispatching thousands of pesky flies to boot, so most people see them as a good addition.

However, one has not been so fortunate and its attempts at nesting were always ending in disaster because the house owner kept poking the nests down. His reason they were ‘making a mess’ and “they were not neat and tidy nesters like the blackbirds” what absolute cacbabble a total croc of shite.

Well Im afraid that was a criminal act so he was formally warned by the police for interfering with nesting birds. It is an all to common event, if not always a deliberate act, as we keep our gardens and leylandii hedges ‘neat and tidy’. Ignorance is no defence in this case, I personally would have prosecuted him as it is such a selfish act and so small minded and as i say far to common an event.

House martin nests - leave them alone

Wildlife has enough hardships without these many unnecessary acts just for the sake of a bit ‘neat and tidiness’.

Breaking the law

Birds were my first great love (both varieties feathered and the other lot) but also exploring, which was to get me; and probably still does, into so much trouble. It was however where I learnt some of the basics of nature watching or finding as I prefer to think of it. I was considering this as I watched some new additions in Druridge Bay last week.

Beautiful Avocets

 Avocets in my youth were an evocative emblem of the RSPB that all aspiring naturalists wanted to tick off. I didn’t see my first avocet for many years and had to travel to see it but now I was watching the most northerly hatched Avocets in the Country. A fitting tribute to the management of Northumberland Wildlife Trusts reserves in Druridge Bay but also to the birds exploratory instincts to bring it this far north.



I was considering this attribute further at the weekend as I took a camping trip with my son to Cumbria. Everything has to be planned now and scheduled; where are you going, what are you doing, when will you be back etc. We have lost that spontaneity of our youth, the mischief that drives you to explore and find out those hidden treasures we are so forbidden from finding in our closeted modern legislated world or at least I thought we had.



The site we stay on is near Appleby but it could be any corner of the UK and it isn’t really camping anymore. My wife calls it ‘glamping’, as this is what her friends call it after years of luxury camping trips. The benefits are there to see especially as the weather was very inclement and the warmth of an electric heater and a stable tent the size of York minster were very much appreciated.

Off the beaten track into a hidden world

However, the land around is quite beautiful and very explorable with many almost sunken lanes and wooded valleys and crystal clear becks with buttery yellow trout, but with a young boy and inclement weather not really a lot to do in his realms of interest. But these are places I explored as a youth, surely that basic urge must still be there, it just needs to be persuaded there is more to life than an Xbox.



So off we went, drearily at first but I still just couldn’t resist, mischief coursing threw my blood, getting off the path to see what was around the corner or over that hedge. Kids today just never get the chances to do this anymore, they are either stuck on a computer or worse still, immediately branded a delinquent and told to ‘get off my land’, and chased for doing what we did naturally only a few years back.

As we slipped off the trail we entered a small valley full of flowers, shrouded trees and  singing birds. Who was more excited me or my son is debateable as he plodged in the mud. We hid from some passing walkers so know one else would know our discovery. This really was a blast from the past as I found the hidden nest of a redstart and showed a half a dozen glossy blue pearls to him to admire, placing one against his cheek to feel its warmth before carefully replacing the egg and surrounding cover then watching the bird return totally unconcerned minutes later. 



Blue pearls of beauty and wonder - redstart nest and eggs

 We watched a red squirrel run along a branch and as the sun came out the light illuminated some shadowy figures on the bed of the stream. Wild brown trout as sweet as a nut and something for another day with a line, hook and worm, we also turned a few boulders and found plenty of crayfish hiding beneath and I encouraged him to pick them up discovering them first hand.

Wild brown trout sweet as a nut

The moral of this tale if there is one, is that apart from watching the squirrel all the things we were doing were technically illegal even though I do myself possess a licence to handle native crayfish, I don not possess one to peer into the nest of a bird or fish for those trout or even be on that land. Was I wrong in doing this for encouraging such wanton law breaking, in short I don’t think I was, the look in my sons eye at such delicate marvels as those redstart eggs said it all.

We are so obsessed with laws and regulations these days we have forgotten just how important the art of discovery is without it where are the naturalists of the future ever going to come from if they are not allowed to find.

Where the poppies still grow

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow” an inspirational line from an inspirational poem by John Mc Crae, I often corrupt the words to ‘in farmers fields the poppies grow’ as at this time of the year the corn poppy starts to flower its ephemeral bloom.

Just as the blazing yellow of the oilseed rape dies away and the first heads appear on the corn the first poppies push through to bring what can sometime be the most striking blaze of colour the countryside will ever see. All too often however this and many other wild flowers are just token gestures where we allow them to flower as we strive still for uniformity and higher production.



Where margins around fields are left and hedgerows are not flailed this simple and easily achieved action makes a massive difference to the overall wealth of biodiversity in any area, from insects to wild flowers to the increased survival of young birds and mammals. It gives us a hint of what we have lost in these post world war years of production, production, production.



To me the poppy is more than a weed its brief and fragile appearance in the fields and hedgerows of summer remind me of days when fields and hedges were not treated like factory floors, well at least until that too reached my childhood haunts and the hedges were grubbed out and livestock and rotation was replaced by year on year cereal production and a 'Business Park'.



I found a place the other day where I could walk through tall grasses and flick the poppies with my fingers, cow parsley's swayed and skylarks sang. I sat in my car and was treated to a great feast of wildlife, three hares chased themselves around oblivious to my presence, literally crashing into the parked wheels of my vehicle and all around the insects danced about the mayflowers bloom and martins dashed to make the feast. It was a magnificent place as the smells of damp grass triggered childhood memories and more evocative than ever a curlew rose from damp meadows, was I in heaven? Well not quite I was actually in Cramlington!



A magical carpet of poppies

 Am I looking through rose coloured glasses, are my memories clouded by an environmental doctrine, ‘it was never like this when I was lad’ many say. Well I'm not to sure anymore, near my home the poppies are filling the fields of ripening rape and are bursting with the song of nesting sedge warblers, over head, larks sing and swifts scream and the hedges are full of life. To be fair these fields all have wide margins, are punctuated by decent hedgerows and a sympathetically managed country park with lots of mixed habitats within and around.



Nearby though the same crops grow mile on mile but with no margins and and are surrounded by gappy, flailed hedges, it’s like a different world populated by nothing but crows, pigeons and pheasants. This is what some people call our ‘managed’ landscape and it is what many people except as the norm not realising what should be there. Well it’s not for me, nor should it be for most, especially when there are choices and alternatives out there.

Looks awfully familiar

As the hare’s finished there impromptu display of lust and vigour I moved off down the lane where a roe deer stood in the shade of a huge sign, proudly proclaiming ‘Land for Development’ coming to a field near you. Like the poppy it will all be gone in a flash under another underused, over priced and more importantly un-needed office development or housing project, is it a price we can hardly afford to pay both economically and environmentally?

Just type 'new business park' into Google, there are 430 million entries!!! Look through the windows of many of these developments dotted around, not just the region but the whole country, they are empty!! Dont let the 'lights on' fool you there is someone home.

For me now while the poppies still grow I will be well... watching the poppies grow.

Stoats and weasels

One of the highlights of this past winter has been the apparently high number of stoats in ermine on show around the region. The onset of an early winter and the huge amount of snow we had during November and December obviously triggered their annual moult to a larger degree than normal as stoats in ermine were being seen almost everywhere. This prompted some to say there was a plague of these smart little beasts but in reality it was just that they stood out like a sore thumb especially when the snow left us and they were just being seen more easily.

Ermine

So common were the reports that we put a request for sightings out and the response was excellent with over seventy records from as far as the river Tweed in the north to Teesdale in the south such was the extent of the reports. A big thank you to all that contributed their records we have added them to the regional record centre and it this that has prompted this article on our two, well lets say ‘lesser known’ members of the mustelid clan.



We often over look these two smart little gentlemen in their chestnut livery in favour of their more charismatic family members the otter, pine marten or badger. They also suffer a truly unfair image of skulduggery and slyness or as a wanton killer of poultry and game. None of these are really true in general terms but give a critter a bad name and it sticks.



The stoat occurs throughout Britain and Ireland, living in a wide variety of habitats and at any altitude with sufficient ground cover and food. A stoat does not like to be out in the open and as such they hunt along ditches, hedgerows, walls and through meadows and marshes. They are systematic hunters quartering the ground and all but the largest of prey is summarily dispatched by a single bite to the back of the neck.

Weasel by the road

The weasel on the other hand is much more widespread throughout Britain but absent from Ireland and many off shore islands. It is probably our most numerous carnivore. They found over wide range of habitats like the stoat but including urban areas, where they are very handy to have around if you have a mouse problem like I have had over the winter.



The weasel specialises in hunting small tunnel living prey such as voles and mice, the weasels small size means it can hunt them both above and below ground and hunt in both day and night. They do not hibernate and hunt under the snow. Like its cousin the stoat it will often take over the dens of its prey and they will have several with their range. I’ve had a weasel take up residence for the last two winters in my compost heaps for which I am very grateful as the numbers of small brown rodents increase exponentially with the winter months around my chicken’s dinner. When the weasel turns up they rapidly decline. I removed one of my compost heap recently and revealed the said den complete with mummified food reserves stored by the now absent mustelid.



Although they look similar cosmetically (I will refrain from the weasely similar jokes), their ecology is quite different especially in the breeding stakes. Both sexes live separate lives only coming together to mate. Stoat and weasel home ranges vary a lot depending on the distribution and density of prey. Resident animals may defend their territories when numbers are high and neighbours numerous but in the spring these systems break down as males of both species prospect widely for females.



Baby weasels grapple in the grit


Weasels only produce one litter a year sometime two if there are plenty of field voles about. 4-6 youngsters are born and are weaned at 3-4 weeks; they can kill efficiently at 8 weeks and split from the family group between 9-12 weeks. In a good vole year females can be pregnant at 2-3 months old.



Stoats on the other hand use a completely different breeding strategy than mass reproduction. Males mate with females, including this years kits, which may be only 2-3 weeks old, in the early summer. They do not give birth however until the following spring because implantation is delayed for 9-10 months by that time females may have dispersed a considerable distance from where they were actually born.



Stoats also have quite large litters, like weasels to compensate for high mortality rates, between 6-12 young are born, blind, deaf and bald. The female feeds them for up to 12 weeks by which time they are efficient hunters able to take out a half grown rabbit.

How cute can anything be, a baby stoat well on the way to being a stone wall killer

Food shortages is the main killer of young stoats and weasels, the trap is barely effective in control and both species occasional fall prey to hawks, owls, foxes, mink and even cats. There is little competition between the two as the stoat is larger and much more aggressive it takes larger prey like rabbits whilst its smaller cousin is an out an out ‘tunnel hunter’ reaching small rodents the stoat cannot.



They are both remarkable creatures both in looks and habits I never tire of seeing them, that fleeting glimpse as a weasel scurries across the road in front of your or watch a stoat chase and run down a rabbit like a cheetah on a gazelle is astounding to witness. The loss of a few game birds and or chickens is nothing compared to the overall good these animals do in the environment. The pleasure they give is uncountable, if encounter one try ‘squeaking’ through pursed lips like a mouse or rabbit, and you may be treated to an encounter you will never forget especially if it is a family party dancing around your feet, truly remarkable creature that deserve more respect than they get.