The unenclosed hill slopes or ffridd are a mosaic of bracken, scrub, heather, grass and wet flushes that lie between the pasture fields and the mountain plateaus. Around the Elenydd mountains in mid-Wales, ffridd is rich with small birds including redstarts, yellowhammers, tree pipits, whinchats and stonechats. Redpolls, siskins and mistle thrushes are common in…
Tag: climate change
First Flowering Dates
February brings out the cherry plum Prunus cerasifera; and as its the first to blossom in the hedgerows on the North Downs it always gets a mention. But it’s not a native species but introduced from Central Asia and the Balkans and cultivated from the 16th century; hence its other more exotic name of myrobalan plum….
Nightjars and a little night music
Throughout the clear-felled forests of Wales, nightjars are regularly dispersed; monitoring of the breeding population has demonstrated that their numbers appear to be steadily increasing, probably due to the changing climate. Whilst this summer has been, in large part, a cold and wet exception, the warming world provides better feeding conditions as the nightjars hunt…
The River Eden
Christmas Day The walk from Penshurst to Hever runs just to the south of the village of Chiddingstone but the afternoon light quickly fades and we turn a mile before we reach the end. The ground is waterlogged and the trees bare; the moon rises early in the cold sky. The redwings and fieldfares feed…
Adders on the meadow
There are just a handful of traditional lowland hay meadows left in Southern England. On a land use map of Kent, Marden Meadow looks like a short line of postage stamps stuck on a large, white envelope; a remnant from a time when the only implements to work the land were scythes, carts and barrows…