June 2008 - Posts
I hope you enjoyed last week’s column, its always a pleasure to uncover new talent and it looks like Exmouth has a healthy future with local journalism!
This week I want to continue in a similar schools-related vein, but this time it’s all my own words I’m afraid. As this week I’d like to invite you to join me on a virtual visit to Woodbury common, a retelling of the trip Woodbury Salterton Primary School and I made last week, in glorious sunshine.
The school met me in the Castle car park, and while I was waiting for them to walk up from school I must admit a knot had formed in my stomach. Woodbury Common isn’t an area we manage at the District Council, as it is in the safe hands of Bungy Williams and the Pebblebed Heaths Trust, so its not an area I feel as intimate with as say Fire Beacon Hill or Trinity Hill, and yet in a few moments 30 students and their class teacher were going to join me for an entire day on the heath – would I be able to find enough to keep their attention for the next four hours? I needn’t have worried.
After a brief breather to allow the group to catch their breath after a very smart march up from the village we got underway.
I used the castle to illustrate how heathland, for all its wilderness feelings, are in fact of human construction. The castle at Woodbury is thought to have been in use between 500 and 300 BC, with a brief reprieve in the Napolionic Wars at the beginning of the 1800s. In its first incarnation, the wooden-walled palisades would have protected the local population and stood guard over the surrounding lowlands. Perched high on the hill this would have been a splendid place to spot your enemy approaching, giving you a day or two to prepare for his arrival. The point of time we were speaking on is really important, as this is an Iron Age fort and it wasn’t until the discovery of iron, that heathland was created in any serious scale.
Before the invention of iron tools, people couldn’t physically chop down very many trees from what was an almost completely wooded landscape. When iron axes were available larger tracts could be felled, on which domesticated animals could graze and so a rough ericaceous habitat was created, we call heathland.
So, enough of the history, we were there to study natural history, so it was off for a nature walk for the rest of the day and see what we could find. In total, 54 animal species were spotted and discussed, and quite a few of the plants too…
We looked at the three different types of heather that grow in Devon, and nestled below the heather we found countless common lizards, some of which were obliging enough to allow themselves to be caught by me and studied in closer detail. Green tiger beetles flew off with every footfall and small heath butterflies swarmed.
There were birds galore overhead with stonechat putting in a late appearance and yellowhammer feeding on the paths ahead of the group. One of the students noted that for a bright yellow bird, yellowhammer are very difficult to spot on the ground! Swifts blasted overhead and buzzards wheeled lazily in the blue skies. After a shady lunch taken under the pine trees we set off again in search of carnivorous plants, and headed over towards the boggy parts of the reserve.
Amazing sundew glittered on the wet flashes, their tempting red-tipped leaves ready to entice flies to their doom and subsidise their meagre nutrition from their roots. The idea of meat-eating plants is a wild and wonderful one and the kids really took a keen interest in them.
We climbed a steep hill out of the gully and one eagle-eyed student spotted the brilliant glimmer of a velvet ant, a beastie I was really hoping to see. Velvet ants are in fact members of the wasp family, with the females being wingless and therefore look rather ant-like. They are about two centimetres long, with a vivid turquoise abdomen, crimson thorax and black head, they are simply stunning. The child bent to pick it up as it was so colourful, but luckily it disappeared between the pebbles before he could grab it. I say luckily, as the females have a really serious sting and it would have been a nasty lesson for both of us!
By the time we marches back up the hill to Woodbury Castle a few of the kids were beginning to tire, and I must say I was getting a bit thirsty too! They had a trek back to school to contend with, while I jumped in the ranger-mobile and headed for the cool of the office – you can have too much of a good thing you know?
Finally, a quick post-script as promised to class three from St Josephs school earlier today. I was out with them on the estuary and one of the class – an East Devon Junior Ranger, naturally – found the rarest animal on the estuary, Ophelia bicornis, while digging in the clean sand. He was very proud, and I was extremely pleased to see one as I don’t think I found a single specimen last summer. These little worms are only found on the Exe and one other location in the country, so we were justifiably happy to see it! After showing he rest of the class, everyone fell to their knees in the bright yellow sand and wouldn’t stop digging until each of the 32 children had found one! Well done class 3!
Last week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Exeter Road Primary School’s after school journalist club – the Newshounds. Ten students from the school visited the Exmouth Local Nature Reserve and gave me a grilling about everything under the sun, especially birds! I was so impressed with their inquisition I offered them space in this column if they could get their article to me three days later. I was to be impressed again, when two days later I received a phone call from the Newshounds cheerfully telling me that the article was ready, a day early and spot on the word count – if only I could be that disciplined with the weekly copy!
Here’s their story, I hope you enjoy it; I certainly did.
Ten curious Newshounds from Exeter Road Primary School went to the Exe Estuary on Monday, 2nd June to find out about the birds that live and feed there. While eating lunch, the Newshounds talked about what they already knew about birds. We wondered whether birds hibernate. James Chubb is an expert on birds. He answered our questions carefully. Mammals hibernate but only one group of birds do (they freeze themselves to save energy) the hummingbirds, but they don’t appear on the Exe.
James told us that there are 27,000 birds on the estuary in the winter, arriving from late September to October. We find the winter really cold but birds find it warm – warmer than Siberia where it’s freezing cold. Birds travel to their favourite places to eat and breed. This is called migration.
Have you ever seen a flock of geese in a v-shape? Some of us have. The Brent Geese travel in a v-shape and take it in turns to be the leader. This saves energy. They fly to Siberia in April, about the same time as the swallows arrive here. The young birds get back to Exmouth before the adults in September. They follow their instinct instead of a map and a compass.
James took us across the sandbank. He dug a hole and there was lots of black sand. The sand was anoxic, which means free of oxygen. Then he showed us two types of worm: the ragworm and the lugworm (which he accidentally cut the head off!) The lugworm was dark red and wrinkly. The ragworm was smaller, skinnier and paler.
Next, James took us to the water opposite the mussel bed. It was literally covered with blue mussels that seagulls pick up, fly six metres into the air with and drop onto something really hard, like a rock. Only the cleverest herring gulls do this because otherwise they will wear their beak out scratching at the blue mussel shell continuously.
James then picked up in his net about a dozen shrimps, a crab, shells, pebbles, sand, mud and a tiny flatfish called a plaice, but no chips! He told us that birds eat flatfish, shrimps, crabs, blue mussels, lugworms and ragworms. And here’s a brilliant fact: some birds eat other birds. The Brent Geese eat eel grass which is their favourite food. It grows under water and there are two types. Exmouth is special because both types grow here.
One of the Newshounds found lots of pottery on the shore. There were also lots of bricks and litter like glass and beer cans. The birds mistake the litter for food and it can get stuck in their throats or they can get their legs caught up. If the tide comes in they will drown. James said that it is laziness that some people do not put their rubbish in the bin.
He loves his job as a ranger. He said ‘it’s the most brilliant job anyone could ever have’
I must admit to blushing a little while reading, but it’s nice to be appreciated!
As much as I enjoy leading adult groups on nature walks, there is something particularly satisfying in working with children; something which I think is illustrated by this article.
Children are inherently interested in the world in which they find themselves, they love to explore, and soak up information like sponges. It is my privilege that the District Council employs me to help them do this – I’m the lucky one, not them!
Marvellous, at long last another countryside column from me, prompted by a muffled “What the ????” from beneath the duvet.
This morning I was quietly putting off the inevitable getting out of bed moment, snoozing gently to the dulcet tones of Messers Davis and Stourton on the Today programme. Then came a story about putting an economic value to the global loss of biodiversity and my ears pricked!
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Review has followed on from the, aptly titled, Stern Review of climate change, and looks to put a global financial cost on loss of ecosystems and biodiversity. Good start, I thought, but sadly I think this report may have missed the fundamental point of the issue as all others seemed to have before it. The report claims that if current ecological deterioration continues unchecked, global GDP, global Gross Domestic Product, will reduce by 7% by 2050. Well, that’s a fine how-do-you-do, but is totally meaningless to me.
I thoroughly agree with the need to put environmental truths into fiscal language of economists, but nothing drafted really gets to the nub, the fundament; we’re not merely destroying the planet – we’re killing our only means of existence.
The problem is that ecological issues, so frequently trivialised by trotting out a ukulele player at the Haye Literary Festival, I’m not joking, go further than our modern flim-flammery of over-elaborate bean trading we like to call Economics can comprehend. And then there’s the moral argument, which maintains that because we are a species on this planet with the ability to completely remove another, we have a fundamental duty to ensure we do not. However, that discourse leads to some very, very tricky questions…
I prefer to focus on the positive, and the life-enriching, life-affirming reasons why sharing the planet with other life is a good thing. With so much British natural history on telly at the moment with the return of Springwatch, I’m going to go out on a limb here and talk about some of the global facts from the natural world that keep my head shaking in wonderment and my mouth permanently a-gasp in awe! So for the next few hundred words, here are a few of my favourite wildlife facts, about species you may, or may not find in your back garden. Starting with the small, lets work our way up to the big stuff…
The social amoeba Dictyostelium normally lives as single-celled microscopic organisms, however in times of food shortage as many as 100,000 of these cells will fuse together to create a single living entity with differentiated tissues and the capability of self-reproduction.
Hermit crabs recreate our property ladder by congregating in areas where there is a high level of mollusc predation. The dominant crab will get first dibs on a new shell and the second down will move into the shell vacated by the first, and so on down the ladder until even the smallest hermit is accommodated.
Hummingbirds have the capability to shut down kidney function. These tiny birds feed on nectar, which has such a high water content they need to excrete a great deal of water while they fly. If they continued to do this during the night, while they rest, they would dehydrate.
The teeth of sea urchins are self-sharpening and as the tooth wears away through use, it becomes progressively harder.
Worm-like amphibians called caecilians provide their offspring with a hearty meal at birth, of themselves. The female’s skin grows extra thick while brooding and when the eggs hatch, the young feast on this thickened dermis.
Naked mole rats navigate underground by seismic echolocation – in a world of no sight, hearing or smell, these animals have developed the ability to sense echoes in the soil through their feet. The echoes are created by the animal itself, banging its head on the ground.
Marine iguanas of the Galapagos islands are the only species of lizard to regularly shrink and grow again. When storms force the lizards to stop feeding for long periods, they can shrink by as much as 15% of their bodyweight. The lizards will get even bigger than they were the following year when they can feed well again.
For many years, American and Russian navies thought the opposition was attaching listening devices to its fleet of submarines, as they found perfectly round chunks of rubber missing from the sub’s sonar domes. It was then discovered that these missing pieces had been chewed off by the wired cookie-cutter shark, an animal with a mouth adapted for boring into large fish.
Albatrosses are able to pinpoint the exact location of their nests even after foraging trips of many thousands of miles over featureless oceans, often lasting many months. They do not rely on magnetic sensitivity to achieve this feat, and no one knows exactly how they do it!
Female hippopotamuses are officially the greediest animals on the planet, with the stomach contents making up as much as 25% of the animal’s body weight!
The largest animal to have ever lived on earth is the blue whale, with a heart the size of a mini (the old one, not the new massive one) and blood vessels an adult could swim through, this is a true giant, which feeds on some of the smallest animals on earth, zooplankton.
The past few weeks have seen house sparrows descend upon the marshes in search of a seasonal treat. Hemlock water dropwort, growing along the edges of ditches around Seaton Marshes, is full of house sparrows chirping and bickering over a feast of newly emerged damselflies.
Sparrows love damselflies and dragonflies, but the only time they are capable of catching these masters of the sky is while they are weak fliers, newly emerged and sub adult. The grizzly end of being guzzled by a hungry sparrow is the ultimate insult, coming, as it does, at the end of one of the most incredible processes in natural history.
For the last year or two, damselflies on the wing this year have been living a sub-aquatic life, breathing through gills and walking across the bottom of ponds, ditches and streams. After several larval stages, called instars, the adult damselfly is about ready to emerge both from within the larval skin and from the water too. A double whammy of emergence!
This means the damselfly not only has to peel itself out of the old skin and inflate crinkled wings, it also has to transform from a gill-breathing underwater creature to an air-breathing flying insect.
After all this stress, the weak-flying, dull-coloured young damselfly hangs from a reed stem while its wings stiffen and its flight muscles warm. While it is in this vulnerable position, down swoops a sparrow and all that struggle was for nothing! Terrible for the damselfly, good for the sparrow and fascinating to watch.
Down on the estuary…
I’ve just finished the first week of school visits to the Exmouth Local Nature Reserve with schools from the local area. This year there are three weeks in the summer term when the tides are right (well, right-ish) during the day and I’ve teamed up with Jenny Lockett, the Exe Estuary Officer, to host the sessions. It has been a welcome return to estuary educational visits, and having Jenny along too has been a real boon – for me and the students!
It’s interesting how different schools use the service differently, all the while I keep what I do relatively consistent. For example, Clyst Heath primary school came on the train from Exeter, popped on a boat at Topsham for a short cruise down the river before exploring the beach with me and returning to school on the train – what a fantastic day! I wished that I could have been with them the whole day!
This morning, Clyst St Mary primary visited in the morning, while the tide was still very high, so we wandered over to the docks area to watch the tidal race, and then popped in to Exmouth Shellfish and looked at the mussels being processed and the fantastic aquarium Myles has running there. By the time we got back tot eh nature reserve there was enough sand to venture out and the children got their own chance to catch specimens, although we didn’t find a lobster as big as Myles’!
Jenny has been such a superstar this week with the schools visit, providing a huge amount of information for the schools about wider estuary issues that I agreed to put a little plug in this article for the up coming Exe Estuary Forum, on Saturday 11th June, from 11am until 4, I’m sure it will be a really interesting event and anyone wanting to know a bit more about our fantastic Exe, should definitely make every effort to attend email Jenny for more information or to book places on jenny.lockett@devon.gov.uk.
Finally, this weekend is the Exmouth Kite festival, and Jenny and I will be teaming up again to promote ecology on the estuary at this wonderful event. Jenny’s taking the reins on Saturday while I play cricket, a terrible vice which afflicts me at this time of year, and I am going to be down on the Estuary on the Sunday. Do come along and say hello, and get an extra big smile if you tell me you read this article!
This is the start of my silly season. Schools want to get out of the classroom and with the pressure of the modern education system on their shoulders, I can see why!
Working as a nature reserve Education Ranger, it’s kind of my thing to bang on about the relevance of outdoor spaces for learning. However I have been somewhat hamstrung by modern educational policy, which is about as flexible as our beloved red sandstone – you try and twist it slightly and its crumbles into dust.
Its not just the fact that there’s a generation of teachers who, like me, didn’t do much outdoor education at school themselves; as reported in last week’s press, its down to the dreaded SATs and the fact that to run a “successful” school, you need to constantly think results. What a tragic, and all too politicised nonsense.
All the inspirational teachers I remember in my life were grounded in one common aspect – they taught from the heart and were passionate about their subject. They were able to make their subject (or subjects in the case of my Year 4 teacher Miss Robson) come alive and seem personal to me as a pupil. I wasn’t just force-fed examination answers in an attempt to top meaningless poles.
This is, definitely, not a dig at teachers, we are really fortunate that here in East Devon there are lots of fabulous teachers, many of whom I am lucky enough to work with regularly and all of whom keep me jolly busy! I just really do not envy the framework in which they have to teach.
The fact that it is a soulless quest for momentary results, proven to be quickly forgotten (as all cramming information is), reflects that this is a system for the statistically hungry politicians, and not for our young people. I can stomach it at GCSE and Advanced Levels, but now we are compiling tables of the under sevens and my heart sinks.
Wowzers, get me?
So what’s reason for this little tirade in my otherwise uncontentious countryside column? Well, as kids are being allowed to be children less and less at school, it is becoming increasingly important to allow them this indulgence in their own time.
I know, I know, “But what about homework?” I hear you cry. And I agree – there isn’t enough information in the world that justifies a person under the age of ten to take work home from school, really there isn’t. If there isn’t time in the school day to learn something, then don’t test the little guys on it!
The good news is there’s plenty going on to get your little ones involved with, which takes the pressure off you as a parent to know all there is to know about bug hunting, pond dipping or rockpooling – for example.
I’m not championing these old fashioned and rather eccentrically English pastimes because I think it imperative that all East Devon’s children know the difference between a pond skater and a water boatman (although I also happen to think this is important) but because such activities simply immerse children (and their parents) in the real world – the natural world, which isn’t obsessed about MP3 players and other man-made tut. It’s a case of making things less sophisticated, less touch-screen-interactive-windows-based-operating-system. What could be more interactive than getting bitten by a water beetle, or nipped by a crab?
So next week is half term. Your offspring’s teachers are taking a well earned rest with a bottle of pinot grigio or two, and it’s your turn to step in. So, bring them on an educational experience they wont even realise is self-improving – join me on an LNR event. There’s three to choose from, and all are free of charge.
Wednesday 28th May, get up early for an 8am woodland walk at Knapp Copse, near Honiton, for a bird song spectacular. We’ll be finished by 9ish, so why not combine it with a visit to a Honiton deli for breakfast – you’ll have earned it on those hills!
Thursday 29th is another chance to come reptile rambling with me, this was so popular last half term 67 people turned up, so prepare yourself for crowds if the weather if fine! We start these events from the Bowd Inn, so there’s an easy early lunch option at the end of this event too.
Finally an Exmouth event to wrap up the week, as we’ll be getting up close and personal with the busy bees of The Maer LNR, on the seafront, on the 30th.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen The Maer recently, but it is looking wonderful and I would like to say a big “Thank you” to Andy Harris and his Exmouth StreetScene team for keeping it spick and span in the litter department and wild and interesting in the vegetative department. Join me for an introduction to the weird and wonderful bees of the dunes.
We’ll be starting at two, so there’s plenty of time for a good lunch first, and low water is in the morning, so you can even fit in some rockpooling at Maer rocks beforehand – go on, make a day of it!