Those of you who have visited the reserve recently will have seen the hedgerows are laden with sloes, bright red haws and rosehips, with a few damsons and crab apples thrown in for good measure. All this fruit should provide a good source of food for those birds brave enough to spend the winter on the moor. Flocks of redwings and fieldfares roam the Otmoor hedgelines in winter and so there will be plenty of tasty, high energy treats available for them when they return again later this year. Sloes are the fruit of blackthorn and are an ancient ancestor of cultivated plums, I’ll warn you though that they taste no where near as nice! On top of this they can act as laxatives and diuretics and with Otmoor having no toilets it’s probably best not to be tempted into eating too many as you explore the moor.
Wrynecks are very small woodpeckers, about the size of sparrows and are very very well camouflaged. Their name comes from their ability to twist and writhe their neck around by up to 180 degrees, and their latin name Jynx torquilla gave rise to the word ‘jinx’ as in a curse. It used to be thought that wrynecks would lie down on ant nests with their tongues lolling out pretending to be dead, waiting for the tasty insects to wander into their mouths. Because of their alleged ant charming abilities, it used to be thought that they could also charm back wayward lovers, it sounds horrendous but the unfortunate wrynecks used to be nailed, spread-eagled to four spokes of a wheel, which was spun around whilst incantations instructing the lost lover to return were read. Thankfully, there were no superstitious, lovelorn, wryneck wheel carrying visitors on the reserve when the wryneck was here and so it was able to continue its journey southwards back down towards Africa unhindered.