Where has the time gone? Where has the year gone!? I haven’t been able to sit and write for
months, the work keeps piling up and Father Time seems to be stealing away the
days just for fun. The leaves have
fallen and the carpets of gold and bronze have turned to a muddy slush; devoid
of the chestnuts and conkers that lay hidden beneath them a couple of months
ago – the squirrels and myself have seen to that, harvesting what we could find
for roasting (not the conkers and obviously not for roasting by the squirrels,
just me). Fungi has emerged up through
the leaf litter in all its weird and wonderful glory, from the tasty treats of
hedgehog fungi, to the positively rude appearance of the Stinkhorns whose
stench always let you know they are nearby.
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| A Stinkhorn i found in the New Forest in all its phallic like glory! |
The days have gotten shorter and darker as we turn inexorably towards
Midwinter and the Solstice and the deepest point of the season. As ever I keep
my eyes on the eastern horizon, waiting and knowing that we are almost at the
point where we can begin to creep oh so slowly back out into the light
again.
Orion stalks the winter night sky once more; with Sirius at
his heels and it are these signs which symbolise to me the passing of the weeks
and months. And what a few months it has
been!
On a personal level I have
completed a charity trek in the Sahara desert, walking over 100km to raise
money for Water Aid and witnessing some truly vast landscapes that were all the
more stunning for their apparent sterility.
From huge sand dunes to flat endless salt pans, across dry lake beds and
rocky cliffs, we trekked, with the desert sun burning bright on our heads and
the distances to the evening camp unfathomable; you’d see the camp from a cliff
top and think you would make it there within the hour – but it would take much
longer. Distances were very hard to
gauge in such a huge, barren landscape.
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| NT Ranger a long way from home.... |
Night time gave us an unforgettable display of the Milky Way; with no
city lights to dim them, the stars and galaxies shone and twinkled and burned
hot against the inky blue and you felt like the tiniest piece of the most
complex puzzle of them all. Later on in
the night the moon rose, fully waxing whilst we were out there and the desert
would be lit up like daylight by the glow of the full moon, a silvery carpet laden
across the landscape. There were
hardships in blisters, sand chafing, heat and the toilet holes (especially
after a night’s camping with the whole group…shudder) and high points included
the sheer thrill of the challenge, making some new lifelong friends and finding
me some snakes! (I was very pleased one evening to find a sand viper tucked up
in the sand dunes near camp, only his eyes sticking out the ground. We also had a cobra slither across our path
one day as we walked which was a sight to see).
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| Sand viper i spotted, tucked under the sand waiting for rodents or small birds...see his little eyes poking out? |
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| Even in the bleakest places...a desert flower. |
Talking of snakes, back in September time I assisted
Catherine Supple, our Area Ranger in the New Forest, with a Smooth Snake survey
on one of our sites. We spent a warm
five hours hiking around the site checking all the reptile refugia that was
laid out and admiring the heathland in late summer. Naturally it was only right at the very end,
on the very last refugia mat, that treasure lay beneath; under the mat was a
beautiful female smooth snake, basking in the warmth. I picked her up so we could get photos of the
head markings and record her (and generally admire her) and she proved to have
a great temperament, leaning her little chin on my hand as she flicked her
tongue at the air to sense what was happening.
Reptile surveys are a good way of ascertaining the health of a
population on a site, the impact of any management work upon them as well as a
way of finding reptiles were none may have been previously recorded. We knew we had Smooth Snakes on our site but
as they are such an underground creature it is very hard to find them – as this
little lady proved, taking five hours to be found!
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| Beaut! See the round pupil in the red eye that helps distinguish it from an adder, which has a slit pupil in a red eye. |
It has also been cider making season since I last wrote and
once again, a willing gang of friends were happy to come round to my house and
chop, scrat and press apples and make our summer supply of drinks for next
year. The juice has since been racked
off twice and bottled into 60 odd bottles of soon to be glorious cider (I went
for half the amount to last year as have also just moved house and wasn’t sure I
could move 14 demi johns to my new place!).
The sheep flock have spent a few months on the Leckford area
of the slope, where they also received their annual vaccinations (and my annual
beating up). As always, Ryan was on hand
to help me vaccinate them and as we began the process we realised that our
little flock had all grown into fully fledged plumpers! Normally when we pen them up for vaccinating
we take them one by one to the needle and sometimes you get a smaller one, sometimes
you get a larger older one that required more strength and effort. However this year, apart from the 5 newbies
we brought in in June, the whole flock were all equally large and fat and
therefore equally exhausting to manhandle into the ‘medicine bay’. It also meant that trying to do injections
under the skin sometimes meant that they were so plump that there was no skin
to pinch! I was afraid they would pop
like balloons if we pricked them with the needle as they had the circumference
of one. Still, it was good to see them
all in such good shape, if a little obese, to stand them in good stead for the
winter. As usual, each time we
vaccinated one, we sprayed a tattoo on them so we could see which sheep had
been done in case they all broke out before we finished. My favourite works of art this time were the
tank and the Christmas pudding, both of which I was very pleased with, even if I
do say so myself! I also gave a tribute
to the late, great Bowie with a Ziggy Stardust lightning bolt on one of them – I’m
sure the man himself would have been flattered.
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| Who you calling a fat pudding!? |
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| Built like tanks these sheep... |
Today marked their movement through to the NT public slope
and also proved to be a record of easiest move ever – 29 followed me through
the gate in two groups and having seen Boadicea was missing, I went off
searching with the nut bucket and a whistle.
Just as I stood by the Leckford corral thinking perhaps I had
miscounted, she emerged silently from the yew trees and proceeded to trot down
to me and follow me back all the way to the NT land and join the rest of the
gang – first time I’ve ever moved them without having to either wrestle some
through or capture odd ones up in the sheep trailer- may it be the first of
many such moves as this.
Meanwhile, also on the Good Ship Countryside, we have been
sailing our way through autumn and into winter, getting on with all our busy
winter works. In one respect, we
literally set sail, as, one fine crisp cold day the other week, Dylan and I finally
succeeded in doing something we had always wanted to do but had never got
around to/sorted out; we dug out our flat bottomed boat from one of the barns,
got the engine working and took it to the Hamble estuary where we tentatively
put it in the water at the public hard, got in and were afloat! We puttered our way through the marina of
million pound boats and made our way up river towards our Hamble site.
Once we were far enough up, we took up the
oars which were far quieter than the engine, and rowed our way in turns up the
estuary, glorying in the sight of our land, our Curbridge Nature Reserve, from
the water. We have always wanted to see
our site from the water and finally we were doing so – and what a sight it
was. The sky was pure and blue and this
reflected into the estuary water so it felt like gliding on blue glass. The banks were lines with titanic oaks, some
of which still held a few autumnal coloured leaves and the reed beds stretched
out into the estuary and glowed frozen gold and everything had an exact double
in the reflection on the water. I sat in
the front (prow?) of the boat and dipped my hand in the water in glee, and
resisted the urge to do a titanic style Kate Winslet pose (‘I’m flying!). It was truly stunning and seeing our site
from such a different perspective gave it a whole new spirit of place than the
one you got on the land. It also allowed
us to monitor the continued tree erosion and decline and see which ones were
likely to be lost to the estuary next.
We also took fixed point photos of the reed beds so we can see if they
are increasing or decreasing in areas. We rowed our way all the way up to the
top of the estuary and the beginning of our site before turning round with the
tide and heading back round the meanders with their fallen titans of trees, the
reed beds and the rapidly appearing salt marsh flats before bursting once more
out into the wider, open waters of the estuary.
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| Bluuuuuuuue |
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| Mirror image - see the fallen giants of the eroded trees, the golden reed beds that stretch out into the water as the estuary narrows. |
As the sun lowered in the winter sky, we kicked up the engine and
chuffed our way back down river, following in the footsteps of history as the
Saxons used this same route, as did the romans who built their villa site
here. How many people from how many Ages
had made their way up this river? How
many tides had flowed in and out since the estuary was first formed? It was easy, that golden winter’s day, to
feel the timelessness of that place, the magic of it. Drifting on the water I felt we were at the
beating heart of this place, feeling the elemental purity of it as we sat
surrounded by blue and gold, as so many others must have felt in years long
past. We were one more footstep on the
memory of the Hamble estuary.
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| At the heart of Hamble |
