A week of Firsts'....and lots of photo's!

With the warm sunshine of the last few days, this last week has been a week of glorious firsts for the year.  The other morning I was wandering around Foxbury, our heathland restoration site, when suddenly a distant call came to me, carried on the dew fresh breeze: ‘cuckoo…cuckoo…cuckoo…’

Cuckoo!  Like a far off echo of childhood, the cry of the cuckoo always takes me back through the years and almost brings a tear to my eye as the arrival of these birds is a true indicator that we are hurtling headlong through Spring and towards the lively months.  Surrounded by coconut smelling bright yellow Gorse flowers, I stood on the top of Foxbury Hill and looked down at the landscape which was finally starting to revive after Winter and listened to the backing track of bird song and cuckoo call and decided that this was not a bad way to start the day at all.

A Foxbury Common Lizard I spotted enjoying the morning sun.

April Fool’s Day also saw the beginning of butterfly season, that long awaited annual scientific survey of these colourful invertebrates which runs from April until September every year.  Across our countryside department at Mottisfont we have several transects; One on Stockbridge Down, three across different woodlands on the estate and a new one that I have just set up in the parks, wetlands and gardens of Mottisfont.  This latter one is new this year and whilst I created the route I have enlisted the help of the Outdoor Guides who roam the pay zone, to carry out the weekly surveys.  This hardy band of volunteers all came and had a training session with me about transect walking and butterfly ID and armed with this they have gone forth willingly to see what results flutter by on their weekly walks.  And it was whilst doing our Cadbury Wood transect this last week that I spotted my first Orange Tip of the year – a handsome male, his orange coloured wing tips glowing like embers in the sun as he emerged, brand shiny new, into the world.  Orange Tips are the first species to emerge in Spring that do not overwinter as adults – so they come out later than the Brimstones and Peacocks who are already adult formed over the winter months – but when they do finally finish their transformation and emerge, you know that winter is gone for good.

Warm weather also marks the start of another invertebrate related task: Fly strike prevention of our sheep flock.  As you will have read from last year’s blog posts, fly strike can be a messy and potentially fatal business.  Flies that are attracted to the soiled fleece or wounds on a sheep will lay their eggs in the fleece, which will then hatch into maggots.  The maggots then eat through the soiled fleece or flesh wound and just keep eating and eating and eating, burrowing into the healthy flesh and causing horrific wounds and death by toxic shock within days if not caught.

To help reduce this happening, we treat our sheep flock with a preventative spray called Clik.  You spray the dosage along their backs and around their back end and it infuses into the wool and spreads across the whole animal.  Being Wiltshire Horn, our flock are naturally less prone to fly strike anyway as they shed their fleeces themselves (so they don’t have to sweat it out waiting to be sheared) and they have a naturally very short wool which doesn’t tend to get too soiled.  Still, I don’t like to leave it to chance – especially after the Nasal Botfly horror I suffered last year as a result of cleaning a fly strike wound – so I enlisted the help of a couple of volunteers and we went and rounded up the flock and began the treatment; the first of the year.  It all went swimmingly and I noticed that the wool was already beginning to rise and come loose from their necks and legs, ready for shedding. 

 

You can see the way the wool is rising off the neck like a fluffy ridge, as it begins to shed.

 I also noticed a few tick’s on some of the sheep which I plucked off – some of them were so disgustingly bloated and full that they fell off into my hand without any effort at all.  I looked at this hideously obese creature with distaste.  Whilst I appreciate invertebrates have a huge and pivotal role to play in the world’s ecosystem – indeed they are the basis for food chains and habitats and without them everything would perish – yet I cannot disguise my hatred of ticks.  The way they crawl their fat, blood swollen bodies along, having sucked their fill out of a creature makes my skin creep.  Add to that their habit of spreading Lyme's disease to humans, a rather nasty illness that can lead to all sorts of debilitating and you will be hard pressed to find a countryside worker who doesn’t loathe the sight of them.  

Having worked the Easter weekend at our Foxbury Easter trail – which was a huge success – I took a day off in the week and chose to go for a New Forest ramble.  It may be perceived as a bit of a busman’s holiday but when your workplace is a stunning as the countryside of Mottisfont and the New Forest; this is one bus that is a pleasure to ride.  I wandered up through plantation woodland and onto Ibsley, one of our Commons, which stretched out vast and empty before me. 

 

Wandering across empty plains...

...and through hidden valleys.

 

Ambling along quietly, a mere speck on the landscape, I was rewarded during the day by getting a good look at Stonechats, Lapwings and the first Swallow I had seen return to us.  I also roamed onto Rockford and got a good 5 minute viewing of a Dartford Warbler, that sweet, spiky haired heathland specialist of a bird.  Red deer herds wandered through the bogs and i could see the heads of Fallow deer popping up from where they lay in the heather.

 

Male Stonechat

Lapwing in the Bog - not a very good photo but the nearest i could get without risking death in the Mire!

 

Whilst I was enjoying spotting all these mammal and avian aspects there was one thing in particular I was hoping to spot.  I trod slowly and quietly along the track on Ibsley, keeping my eyes peeled at the edge of the heather I walked alongside, on which the sun shone directly.  Within 20 minutes, a synapse pinged in my brain, a tiny signal that made me stop and re-look at the patch I had just walked past.  And there, basking on the moss in amongst the heather was my reward and what I had hoped to find; a beautiful Adder, a large male in this case, his zigzag dorsal pattern a deep shiny black and his lidless eyes a burnished dark red.  

 

What a beaut!

 

My first Adder of the season!  I was thrilled as they can be difficult to find as they often slip away when they hear you coming and more often are so well camouflaged and tucked away that you don’t see them at all.  For this reason I was immodestly pleased with myself for spotting him.  Whilst my eyes had not visually recognised the pattern of the Adder, something in my brain had: a tiny signal that made me look twice.  It was good to know that after a winter’s dormancy, this signal still triggered itself when something in the undergrowth sparked it; the glint of sunlight off shiny scales which marked itself a different texture to the heather around it.  It so happened that I passed that way again 2 days later and once more I managed to spot him – and to my joy he had just finished his first post hibernation slough and was now dressed in his fine silver breeding colours.  As he slithered off through the moss I saw his fresh slough, in near perfect condition as it was so freshly shed, hanging in the heather.  I picked it out carefully and examined it – it was a good size, over 50cm long although they can stretch a bit as the snake wriggles out of them.  As I listened to this male slip away, almost silent apart from the odd rustle of leaves under-belly, I wished him a good breeding season, and hoped there was a healthy female somewhere nearby for him to woo.

 

His fresh slough - in such good condition even the eye lenses are intact.

 

Meanwhile, back at Mottisfont there is another creature that can be elusive and hard to spot; the Water Vole.  This small, plump, furry little mammal thrives along our river banks at Mottisfont and we have them on all our sections of river, along with Otter.  Recently two Sparsholt College students - Phil (with us on work experience) and Sue (of sheep looker fame) undertook a Water Vole presence survey along the top of the Oakley beat and I was fortunate enough to join them and observe how it works.  Phil donned a hilarious – I mean professional – looking yellow and black dry suit that ballooned around him in the water and made him resemble a large bee.  In this suit he plunged into the river and began the detailed task of looking through the bankside vegetation for signs of Water Vole presence.  

 

Bumble Man!

Examining the bank side

 

Sue stood on the bank with me recording down everything he found onto a map.  On a regular basis Phil was shouting ‘latrine!’, ‘burrow!’ and ‘a run!’ as well as finding feeding sites all of which were mapped, and all of which demonstrated a very healthy population of Water Vole here.  

 

A burrow

The tell tale 45 degree angle of a chewed reed - Water Voles cut them off at this angle.

So if you are ever walking along the banks of the river at Mottisfont, or at Stockbridge Marsh for that matter, keep quiet and keep your eyes keen; you may be lucky enough to spot a fat little furry figure swimming through the rushes, or hear the ‘plop!’ as one emerges out a burrow and into the water and out of view.

 

Four hours of river walking later!

I took ten minutes myself before work the other day to wander along our stretch of the main River Test, just beyond the Duck Grounds.  Although it was still early, the sky was azure blue with a faint wisp of Cirrus cloud way up high.  The sun shone bright as it began its daily climb and it glittered and sparkled off the river water like precious stones.  

The River.  Crystal clear, its timeless currents eddying and flowing, always flowing, onwards towards the end of the world.  Sitting on the bank and gazing into its clear depths, I felt myself being mentally tugged by those currents and began to lose myself in it.  The river Test is, and always has been the heart of Mottisfont; the font which springs up within the grounds gave the place its name and Saxon monks used the river to transport the stone for which they built the Abbey, and the foundations of its history.  And yet it goes back beyond that, beyond all human endeavours, on geological timescales we can only just fathom.  Carving out its path through the rock and peat of the valley, through ancient wooded lands all the way from source to sea, from prehistory to the modern day.   The same sun that warmed my back as I sat there now, once shone upon this river when it was brand new, when the water first began to flow and both elements had continued on ever since.  In comparison to such agelessness we were such a small, tiny part of the whole, a brief flicker that is there one minute, gone the next, whilst the river flows on and life endlessly endures, dies and is reborn.

 

Sunlit waters...

glitter like a cascade of diamonds

The sudden call of a Little Grebe startled me out of my reverie and I blinked and pulled my thoughts out of the river’s whisperings and out of Time.  Feeling refreshed and thinking now of the day’s work ahead and of making my miniscule mark on the history of this landscape, I stood up and meandered back into the Abbey grounds and to the present day.