Mud Dogs and Englishmen

By the Session Leader:

Miserable day.  Raining.  Forecast not good.  We are supposed to work here:

The temptation is to spend the morning here instead:

But no: Green Gymmers work whatever the weather: mid-day sun or mid-day rain.  Besides, the rain has stopped, and the pub isn’t open yet ... 

So what was the task?  Water-channel clearing, again!  “I thought we did that last time 

we were here!” called out one volunteer.  – “Yes,” came the relentless reply from the site warden: “but that was last month.  The cress has had four weeks to grow since then …” 

He was teasing, of course.  Cress does grow year-round.  (Indeed it was planted to be a winter crop for local people: when frost threatened, they would submerge the plants beneath the stream, where the water remains at a constant 11 Celsius throughout the year.)  We, however, were set to work at a slightly different spot from last time, upstream.  

A squad of apprentices from RAF Halton had made an excellent start on this sector the previous week, but channels needed to be made still wider, growth on/by the banks cut back, and further progress made upstream, even to the education centre if that was possible …  So everyone to work!

As it was not feasible to deploy wheelbarrows in this zone, the team split into three.  The ‘cutters’ cut back the cress, and piled it onto the bunds to drain off some of the water:

The ‘porters’ then carried it by the forkful, or dragged it with the muck rake, over to the bank.  Some care had to be taken not to sink or trip in the mud, which had accumulated in the middle areas:

Floating cut vegetation along the stream with a muck rake was easier for the porter, but naturally meant that the cress was waterlogged again by the time it came to be loaded on to the bank.

The ‘stackers then piled it into neat rows at the back of the bank (but away from the fence, so that the neighbouring landowner’s fence-posts do not rot prematurely), leaving a path at the front:

By tea-break we had worked our way up to the dam across the stream:

Today’s cake from our star baker was so good that the sole photographer today [aka the Session Leader – Ed.] was too busy eating to remember to take a photo of the goodies!

In the second half of the session, progress on the bank was slowed down by some heavily overgrown ‘undergrowth’:

Even so, by session end there were some impressive mounds of cress (and mud) piled up along the bank:

The photograph does not convey the smell, which was particularly pungent at this end.  “Like rotting seaweed” according to one Green-Gymmer; described more positively by another as “reminiscent of summer childhood holidays.”  To get an idea of the scale of 

the operation, mentally multiply the pictured vegetation by a factor of 3 or 4.

We did not reach the education centre, but the site warden ‘promised’ us that we could continue up to there next time.

Happy Guinea Pigs

By C

It is an autumnal phenomenon we have seen before, but one not yet fully explained.  Why should there be a fall in the number of women volunteers at WGG in the couple of months leading up to Christmas?

Over the weekend, numbers replying to say YES to the invitation to the session were slow to pick up, even though it was for one of our favourite places: the Aston Rowant National Nature Reserve.  I was beginning to wonder if this week we would be:

      The Finest Five, or
            The Scintillating Six?

                  The Splendid Seven?  (we’d been the Magnificent Seven before)

                        The Amazing Eight …

In the end, there were seven of us, gathered under a grey sky.  Still, it was remarkably mild for the time of year.  And better than it had been the day before (Mon 14 November) – which was when there was supposed to have been a ‘supermoon’, aka perigee-syzygy of the Earth-moon-sun system.  Not just any old supermoon, but the biggest and brightest and best in 70 years, the like of which will not be seen again until 25 November 2034.

The supermoon will have been there, of course.  Just not visible from South Oxfordshire, for the celestial scenery had been successively changed from ‘partly cloudy’ to plain ‘cloudy’, then to ‘overcast’.  The best view of the almost-supermoon (a ‘hunter’s moon’, it being November) was Sunday evening.  The sky was almost clear then, except for periods when the wispiest of cloud led to one of those interesting optical phenomena:

Not-quite- supermoon (you can tell my camera is hand held!)

Very-nearly-supermoon with aureole

I think that is what is known as a corona: caused by diffraction of light by tiny water droplets/ice crystals suspended high in the air.  The difference in colouration of the aureole (ice-blue shading over to orangey brown) might be due to the different wavelengths of light – like in a rainbow, where light in the visible spectrum is refracted from violet/blue on the inside to red on the outside?

Anyway, today – Tuesday – the weather was behaving in an un-Green-Gym like manner:

The task, however, was classic Green-Gym-on-Chilterns-chalk-grassland: cutting back invasive scrub, to try and maintain/extend the grass and wildflower coverage; and burning.  With the added bonus this week of meeting one of the Senior Reserve Managers, and getting to trial a new piece of kit.  This is a ‘Tree Popper’, which has come all the way from South Africa:

It may sound like one of those (now illegal) ‘legal highs’.  But actually it is like a heavy-duty staple remover – for pulling out small trees. 

“It works!” was the delighted reaction of one of the first to try out the new piece of kit.  Further trial and error revealed that it works best on saplings rather than “multi-stems”.  When it came to the regrowth of older trees, which had been cut back last season (by us), there was still plenty of scope for brute force and ignorance to finish the job:

“Proof that SRMs do occasionally get out and work on-site!”

Tackling the brambles, on the other hand, was a task for handtools + determination.  That was a return to familiar routines of attacking with a pair of shears …

or slasher (note the juniper berries in the foreground) ...

carrying away the cut stuff with a fork …

and not killing the flame:

Thus for large portions of the morning it was a question of either kneeling, or testing the back:

Which meant that tea-break – with a shiny landrover bonnet for use as a serving-table – was extra specially welcome.  Provisions included cake and ‘pumpkins’:

Conserving chalk-grassland habitat is one of those never-ending tasks.  But good exercise, and it got us outside on a dull day when it would have been very easy to moulder indoors – and we rather enjoyed being tree-popper guinea-pigs.

Every shade of autumn

“A frosty start with some brightness” was how the Met Office described this morning.  

With regard to the first part of the day, that was something of an understatement? 

The sky was crisp and clear at dawn – with a temperature of -3 Celsius to match. 

The combination of frost, autumnal foliage, and golden sunlight made almost any old field look magical:

The frost made everything beautiful, even common weeds:

By the time we got to our working spot on the far side of Wittenham Clumps, however, the frost had gone, and the sky had clouded over.  So we looked to see what work was in store for us:

It was coppicing of these trees.  Not as big as some we had tackled in the past, but plenty of them:

We spread out far apart, but with instructions to avoid demolishing these protected youngsters:

Plenty of exercise sawing trees down, and then cutting them up!  So tea, coffee, and cake were much appreciated:

Meanwhile, some had it easy:

The end result: piles of logs …

piles of stakes …

piles of brash …

and satisfied workers:

Only left for the site warden to carry off some of the stakes and fencing ties: