The talk advertised by The Woodland, Flora & Fauna Group to be given by Clare Blencowe on April 3rd has been cancelled to conform to the advice received from the Government to combat Coronavirus. It is regret that this has to happen but we hope to restore it to our events calendar once the virus outbreak has been contained.

Personal invitations had been prepared for our supporters but fortunately not issued. All local and social media advertising has been withdrawn. If you are aware of anyone else who was intending to come could you please advise them of the cancellation? Thank you.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

The Woodland, Flora & Fauna Group is holding an illustrated public talk given by Clare Blencowe on Friday 3rd April at 7.30pm. It is to be held in the Club Suite of the Village Centre, Trinity Road Hurstpierpoint, BN6 9UY.

It will follow immediately after a brief introduction by The Woodland, Flora & Fauna Group.

Clare is the manager of the Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre and her talk is entitled ‘Making Nature Count’ in which she will describe how her team meticulously record wildlife and flora species that have been identified in the Sussex countryside and how this benefits their welfare. She will illustrate some of the species discovered and recorded.

 

 

Clare was the Record Centre Manager who was instrumental in ensuring that all the data collected in our group’s countryside biodiversity study was included in the Sussex records.

She is a very busy person so we are privileged that she has found time to speak to us. If you want to learn more about our local countryside and wildlife and how the collected data helps with their protection, this opportunity should not be missed.

Entry is free and all are welcome.

The Woodland, Flora & Fauna Group began championing the welfare of our local bat populations in 2008/9 when we recognised their need for assistance. A grant was obtained and scores of roosting and hibernation boxes were installed in a wide area of local woodlands by our volunteers. They have provided safe havens for roosting bat species continuously since then. Each year they are all checked by a licenced team and the results recorded in our local data-base and copied to Natural England and the Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre.

 

One of the bat hibernation boxes mounted on a woodland tree.

 

Each box is visited annually.

The latest checks undertaken reveal that they are continuing to support our bat populations. Teams of volunteers accompanied by a licenced person visited every location with 3 section ladders to inspect the boxes. It requires a high degree of fitness from each person to carry, assemble and raise the ladder to the required high elevation the boxes are mounted at.

 

Ladders are positioned to be at the right height and standing on stable ground for safe working.

 

Team members carry ladders sections to each box location.

 

One person foots the ladder while another examines the box.

 

Some boxes are found to contain hornets each year and have to be avoided when their presence is detected.

 

This one was sufficiently late in the season when the hornets had become drowsy.

The work also is undertaken within a short time scale to enable all locations to be visited, so several days each week are necessary to complete the activity. Our progress with these checks was complicated by the long period of continuous wet weather that limited the number of dry days available to undertake them. Ladder work to these high levels can be extremely hazardous in wet conditions as well as very uncomfortable to the volunteers. With no advance accuracy in the predictions of the weather forecasters, project days to carry out these visits had to be organised at very short notice when a ‘dry window’ suddenly appeared. Trying to match that with the differing availability of volunteers at short notice proved very difficult but the task was achieved eventually.

With weather conditions so unfavourable to bats we braced ourselves for lower levels of occupation than usual, however we were pleasantly surprised by the number found, probably due to the dry sanctuary and stable environment the boxes provided.

 

Fortunately many boxes contained bats like the one above and were duly recorded.

 

This shows one of the many common pipistrelle bats found roosting peacefully within a box.

 

They are often found in huddled groups either hanging from the roof or clasping the walls.

 

This box like many others showed evidence of frequent use by the number of bat droppings found within.

We continue to expand our conservation effort with an increasing number of boxes and by covering new locations at every opportunity when funding becomes available. Our ambition is to make a significant lasting improvement to their survival prospects despite the shrinking areas of natural habitat they require to sustain them.

 

Having rescued the meadow at Pond Lye SNCI from the blackthorn and bramble growth that had virtually destroyed it, we now have the on-going responsibility to maintain it in good condition to encourage back the previous distinctive flora species that earned the site status it holds. This is a massive task for our volunteers with a site so large and takes us a long time to complete. The cut took place in August initially by volunteers with scythes and brush cutters as the anthill punctuated terrain made other methods of cutting difficult.

 

Volunteers tackle meadow edges and anthill terrain with scythes & brush cutters.

 

All cut areas are raked and the hay stacked in piles.

 

Scything between anthills is extremely difficult.

The volunteers worked extremely hard in the large area they covered and we eventually reached a point where we were able to request help from one of our volunteers with a tractor and cutter to tackle the flatter main area of the  meadow which was less affected by the anthills.

 

The arrival of our volunteer tractor driver with his cutter was really welcome.

 

The amount of ground he was able to cover in a short time relieved us of months of work to complete the task by hand.

The progress he made with this was phenomenal and within two weeks the work was completed leaving only the raking up and disposal of the hay and the cutting of the tree lined borders the tractor was unable to reach.

 

The raking of the resulting hay is tackled as quickly as possible to ensure it doesn’t decompose and enrich the meadow soil to the detriment of current flora species.

 

It is a task that is often hard work but is made easier with many hands to help.

 

 Cuttings are heaped into piles and then disposed of on completion.

The borders have now been completed by our brush cutting and scythe operators but the final tidying of the site and hay collection is proving a tediously long job for the volunteers as we are being frustrated by the continuous wet weather over this recent period. We are having to grab every brief dry opportunity and try to marry it with the differing availability days of our volunteers. We are desperately trying to recruit more help to allow us to complete it and move on to the seasonal demands of our many other activities. If anyone is able to help please contact us on our website contact link. Any additional help will be extremely welcome.

In our capacity as a Sussex nature conservation group some members of The Woodland, Flora & Fauna Group support other similar environmental initiatives. One of these is the River Ouse Project. The organisers of the project need a volunteer to fill a special role and have asked if we can assist them by advertising the vacancy which is described below:-

Volunteer Oral Historian wanted for local project in the River Ouse area.

The River Ouse Project is looking for a volunteer to carry out oral history interviews with local farmers. We have appropriate recording equipment. We will provide a series of leading questions to ask the farmer, but we are looking for someone able to draw the conversation out and get the farmer talking. Useful information often arises outside the set questions. We have a small amount of money to cover travel costs, but no on-going funding.

We don’t require a verbatim transcription of the conversation, but would require a summary of the key points and the whole interview would need to be archived. The oral historian would attend Project Team meetings: currently 10am-12noon four mornings a year in Lindfield.

The River Ouse Project combines botanical surveys of meadows in the upper reaches of the River Ouse with historical land-use research. Documents such as the Tithe Award and Dudley Stamp’s Land Use Survey tell us how the meadow was managed in the mid 1800s and 1930s. By interviewing appropriate farmers we can trace the history into the post war period as well as learning more about how the meadow is currently being managed. Please see our website for more information:

<http://www.sussex.ac.uk/riverouse >  If you are interested please email Margaret Pilkington: m.c.pilkington@sussex.ac.uk