Blean Woods

The latest update from Michael Walter:

Nature’s cycles are largely bound up with daylength, so come late January or February life that has been on hold in the fastness of winter begins to stir, even if conditions remain Arctic.  However, temperature is very definitely a facilitator in this process of preparing for another growing or breeding season, and the warm weather in the second half of March (I recorded 21…

The latest report from Michael Walter:

I was away in Lyme Regis for five days in mid-February, but increasingly dire reports about Storm Eunice, forecast to make landfall the day we came home, prompted us to return a day early, on the eve of the storm, which duly arrived on 18^th February.  Storm Eunice and, to a lesser extent, Franklin three days later, were certainly whoppers, but bore no comparison with the 1987 storm…

The latest update from Michael Walter:

I recently read about dead men’s fingers being washed up on a Cumbrian beach.  This isn’t actually quite as gruesome as it sounds, the fingers being the fleshy, parsnip-like roots of hemlock water dropwort – a member of the carrot family (Umbelliferae).  Hemlock, another umbellifer, is renowned as being the poison of choice taken by Socrates in 399BC, but hemlock…

Michael Walters latest update:

We have two relatively common small raptors – the kestrel and sparrowhawk – but with different fortunes and lifestyles.  While the sparrowhawk has made a welcome comeback from near-extinction following the grim decades of persistent pesticide application to our farmland, the kestrel, formerly easily our commonest bird of prey, has declined by around 30% in the past 25 years.  

The latest report from Michael Walter:

The garden gnome’s fisherman’s stool, or fly agaric toadstool, has not been much in evidence, but one species that was quite abundant this autumn was Lycoperdon perlatum (sorry, no English name), which is a type of puffball – not the football-sized monstrosity that garners all the photographic attention, but much more restrained, and none the worse for that.  Its…

The latest report from Michael Walter:

This month I’m writing mainly about the advent of autumn, which can seem like rather a sorrowful time, with the emphasis on death rather than rebirth, so I thought I’d cheer myself up by starting this piece with a reminder of warmer days when butterflies were on the wing, although not a great deal of cheer is involved, as I can now confirm that this has been the second worst season…

The latest update from Michael Walter:

Memories can be very short and extremely fickle.  A bumper season for heath fritillary in June and a good number of red admirals in people’s gardens in August and September was enough to convince most observers that it had been a good butterfly year.  Far from it:  certainly, in Blean Woods, it was undoubtedly one of the worst ever, with a dearth of whites, few spring brimstones…

Michael Walter's latest update:

It’s the time of year when graphs get brought out of the cupboard, dusted down and re-examined.  The bird survey data has all been analysed, with the result that for some species emerging trends look even stronger than a year ago.  Two examples are given below, and the good news is that jackdaws are enjoying a bit of a renaissance.  The first thing I should say about this graph…

An update from Michael Walter:

This year’s heath fritillary season was messed about by the weather, and the peak probably occurred during a fairly prolonged sunless period.  This butterfly is a particularly fussy creature, being reluctant to fly if there is no sun and, to misquote Naomi Campbell, they don’t get out of bed unless it’s 20°.  Despite these problems, it is safe to say that this has been…

The latest update from Michael Walter:

On 22^nd May a friend heard, and possibly saw, a golden oriole close to the access track leading into the wood from Blean village.  The gorgeous male with yellow and black plumage, red bill and eye ring, has the loveliest, fluty song imaginable (one of its old country names is gypsy whistler), and the species has a somewhat chequered history in England.  In the second half of the …

Early morning bird surveys have been memorable mainly for the frostbite and hypothermia and – oh yes, the lack of birdsong!  Of interest, though, was a firecrest singing in a holly bush in late April;  about 300yd further on another firecrest was singing, also in a holly thicket, with a possible third bird lurking in the dense foliage.  Less tied to conifers than its cousin, the goldcrest, it nevertheless does enjoy…

If you drive up to the car park now, you’re in for a mix of a smooth and bumpy trip;  smooth, because the whole of the access track up to the car park has just been tarmacked, but bumpy because there are now no fewer than eleven speed humps – possibly one of the highest concentrations of sleeping policemen in the country (other than at the end of a long shift at Scotland Yard).  The track is now also lined with…

The arrival of milder weather suddenly made February’s eight days of snow and ice seem like a distant memory, to the extent that a flock of 17 fieldfares loafing in oak trees appeared anachronistic, despite the fact that winter thrushes may be with us for some weeks yet.

Still on the subject of winter thrushes, three times in the past ten days I’ve been cheered enormously by a redwing chorus.  In early spring…

It takes quite a major event to push ‘The Virus’ off the front pages and demote it to second or third topic of conversation, but the recent snow, no longer customary in winter, has done a pretty good job of doing just that.  Initially looking rather grim and forbidding in the deep gloom, the landscape was sparklingly transformed with the return to long-awaited sunny weather.  Eight nights of hard frosts were…

The RSPB, Kent Wildlife Trust and Canterbury City Council have just announced the creation of a £1.9 million project, funded by the Green Recovery Challenge Fund, to enable major habitat improvement work to be carried out at Blean Woods and Seasalter Levels (RSPB), West, East and South Blean and Thornden Woods (KWT) and Wraik Hill (CCC).  A project manager and three other staff will shortly be appointed to oversee…

This month’s number is 40 – wood pigeons and fieldfares.  In November it struck me as slightly odd that I was considering a flock of forty wood pigeons to be noteworthy as, in the past, counts of a hundred were not so unusual, and in the winter of 1985-6 I twice counted a thousand erupting as a dark cloud over the oakwood where they had been gorging on acorns.  I hesitate to say that they darkened the skies…

Back in the early 1980s it was extremely rare to see a magpie in the wood, not surprisingly, given that it is essentially a bird of open habitats.  However, in the later 1980s there was a fairly sudden rise in the number of sightings, reflecting a steep national increase, and coupled with the creation of more open spaces within the wood, and in the 1990s and 2000s magpies were regularly recorded, occasionally up to eight…

The latest report from Michael Walter:

Russet, orange and red are rapidly becoming the order of the day, now that summer has very definitely lost its grip.  One of my favourite shrubs is the guelder rose;  not very frequent at Blean Woods, it is providing some fiery colour now, but is interesting for much of the year.  In early summer it produces exuberant plates of white flowers, rather like the flattened parasols of cow…

The latest report from Michael Walter:

This spring’s bird populations have now been calculated and, of the 18 monitored species, four have increased (green woodpecker, stock dove, blackcap and jackdaw), three have declined (mistle thrush, tree creeper and bullfinch), while the remaining eleven have been about average.  I didn’t start monitoring stock dove and jackdaw until 2004, so have a much shorter run of figures…

This spring’s bird populations have now been calculated and, of the 18 monitored species, four have increased (green woodpecker, stock dove, blackcap and jackdaw), three have declined (mistle thrush, tree creeper and bullfinch), while the remaining eleven have been about average.  I didn’t start monitoring stock dove and jackdaw until 2004, so have a much shorter run of figures than for the other species.  For…

The latest update from Michael Walter:

The world seems to be divided into those who luxuriate in this summer’s heat and those who find it unbearably debilitating.  In the natural world there are also bound to be winners and losers:  woodcock, which rely on probing soft ground for invertebrates, are probably suffering, but many young birds may have benefitted from the warm and dry conditions during the critical fledging…

The world seems to be divided into those who luxuriate in this summer’s heat and those who find it unbearably debilitating.  In the natural world there are also bound to be winners and losers:  woodcock, which rely on probing soft ground for invertebrates, are probably suffering, but many young birds may have benefitted from the warm and dry conditions during the critical fledging period.  We’ll have a better idea…

The holy grail for butterfly enthusiasts is undoubtedly the purple emperor, our largest butterfly, scarce but probably massively overlooked due to its habit of spending much of its life wheeling above the tree canopy.  So determined were the Victorian collectors to bag their specimens that some took to wielding nets on 30-foot poles in a bid to snare them on high.  There are some known sites in west and north Kent for this…

The good news is that the heath fritillary has enjoyed another splendid season, marginally better than last year’s excellent total.  The graph below shows how numbers have built up rapidly over the past three years from a nadir in 2016-7.  Although populations collapsed at several normally reliable colonies, these losses were more than made up for by healthy numbers at other sites, and by strong colonisations of several…

Roll out the good news!  After last year’s poor showing of just thirty nightingale territories, the provisional figure for this spring is a far healthier 42.  Interestingly, several of the sites are in what I would normally consider sub-optimal habitat – narrow strips of scrub, and coppice that is at least ten years old (the normal age range of chosen coppice is around three to eight years old).  Nationally…