An afternoon at Wicken Fen

I found myself with an unexpected free afternoon one day last week, and as the sun was shining I decided to head out to a favourite place of mine - Wicken Fen National Nature Reserve, one of Britain's oldest nature reserves. The first of the land was purchased in 1899 by the National Trust, who still manage the reserve today. It is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and a designated Ramsar Wetland.

It's a stunning place at any time of the year, and there's always something to see and plenty of footpaths to explore. I walked along Wicken Lode and found a place to sit and sketch. I saw a kingfisher, a little grebe, a buzzard and a kestrel and, a little surprisingly as we are at the end of November, a Red Admiral butterfly.

 
I walked and walked and ended up at Baker's Fen, where there is a nice new hide. I sat and watched lapwings, snipe and teal, and did a little bit more sketching. There was a peregrine falcon somewhere in the vicinity, and every so often the whole flock of waders would take panicky flight.

The sky was a glorious blue and the fen was in autumnal mode, which made for a very photogenic combination!

I also found some of the Konik ponies that are used to keep scrub regrowth under control.

Over the winter months the fen is a noted raptor roost - I saw my first hen harrier here last winter. The adjacent Burwell Fen is also a great place to see Short-eared Owls, another winter visitor. I'm planning another visit soon to try to get some owl sketching and photography done!

The bird nerd and the rowan tree

Being the bird nerd that I am, I keep a list of all the birds I see or hear from the house or garden each year, and that list usually reaches the mid-fifties (my best was 58 species, last year). There are birds I see every day (house sparrow, blue tit, chaffinch, dunnock, woodpigeon, blackbird, robin etc), birds that I see regularly but less frequently (great spotted woodpecker, goldfinch, jackdaw, stock dove), birds I know I'll see in the summer (swallow, house martin, chiffchaff etc) and in the winter (redwing etc). Some I might only see once or twice in the year (red kite, grey heron etc). Sometimes something much more unusual turns up (yellow-browed warbler), you just never know...

One thing I do know, however, is that having a rowan tree at the end of the drive mightily increases the chance of me seeing lots of birds! It attracts warblers, finches and tits in the spring and summer (searching for insects/caterpillars and the like), but it really comes into its own in the autumn and winter. This year it is absolutely loaded with berries (check out the photo of the redwing, below, which I took in November 2015 - no leaves and far fewer berries than this year). The birds are making the most of the feast.

So far this winter I've seen: blackbird, song thrush, starling, redwing, mistle thrush, fieldfare, chaffinch, greenfinch, goldfinch, bullfinch, blackcap, woodpigeon and robin (eating fallen berries from the ground).

I've noticed different feeding patterns - bullfinches, often in a group, will sit and feed for long periods (all morning it seems, if they aren't disturbed!), whereas starlings are 'smash and grab' artists, descending, grabbing a few berries, then flying off within a few seconds.

 

 

Rowan trees (aka Mountain Ash and Witch wiggin tree, among other names) were once planted near houses as protection against witches, but these days you are at least as likely to find them in supermarket car parks or lining the suburban streets. The rowan tree at the end of our driveway was planted by my partner's mum, when the family first moved here back in the 1970s. I'm not sure if she was mindful of witches when she planted the tree, but it's certainly a big draw for birdlife, so it keeps me happy!

Peaches in the woodpile

A year or so ago my other half helped a friend remove some dead and dying trees from his garden, and we got to keep the wood for our fire. I noticed a few weeks ago that there were some fungi growing on some of the logs, so naturally I kept an eye on things, sketched some sketches, took some photos and tried to find out what they were (images are clickable to embiggen).

It became apparent that my little mushroom book wasn't up to the job, and searching the internet was a never-ending task when I didn't really know what I was looking for. I had a rather lovely and comprehensive guide to fungi on my wish list for Christmas (Mushrooms by Roger Phillips). This was elevated to 'To Buy: URGENT' status, and eureka! - there was my mushroom! I double-checked the ID with a facebook group (British & Irish Fungi - thanks!), who confirmed that what I had in my woodpile was the charmingly named Wrinkled Peach (Rhodotus palmatus).

Now the interesting thing about this mushroom, apart from its beautiful pink-orange colour, is the fact that it grows on elm logs; evidently our friend's trees were elms. This surprised me. I am not old enough to remember the British landscape before a virulent strain of Dutch Elm Disease struck in the late 1960s and devastated elms everywhere, and I thought that elms were largely absent these days. Not quite so...

Turns out that the reason that elms haven't been wiped out lies in the diversity of the elm family, which has evolved many races and hybrids. The tree reproduces by both seed and sucker; most kinds today in Britain produce suckers from their roots, forming clusters of genetically identical clones. Apparently many of the suckering types of elm can, for a time, survive the disease (which is caused by a fungus and spread by a beetle), even though they don't grow to the extent of the great, mature elms of old before succumbing and eventually regenerating through suckers once more. A very few (including the Boxworth elm, which grows in the village of Boxworth, just a few miles away from me here in Cambridgeshire) even reach maturity and seem to have some disease resistance.

A bit more delving led me to an interesting project: the Conservation Foundation's Great British Elm Experiment, which has been cultivating cuttings taken from resistant mature trees, including Boxworth elm. The planting phase of the project is drawing to a close, and the young trees will be monitored to see how they fare. Maybe one day we will see something like the elm-filled landscape of old again.

In the meantime, I have been marvellously diverted and educated by way of a small crop of Wrinkled Peaches!