West Park Local Nature Reserve - Species

Just before Christmas, I wrote about the species that I have observed in the Hempstead Meadow Nature Reserve. Now it's West Park's turn.

Amphibians and Reptiles

I've not observed any amphibians or reptiles in West Park but plenty of people have seen frog spawn near the pond.  iRecord shows two records for Common Lizard in 2015.

Birds

Goldfinch - 9 April 2017

We (The Uckfield Nature Reserves Supporter's group) have gone on a number of bird walks, led by David. I have recorded the following species but we saw and heard more.

Common name	Species
Sparrowhawk	Accipiter nisus
Swift	Apus apus
Grey Heron	Ardea cinerea
Buzzard	Buteo buteo
Goldfinch	Carduelis carduelis
Blue Tit	Cyanistes caeruleus
Great Spotted Woodpecker	Dendrocopos major
Robin	Erithacus rubecula
Pied Wagtail	Motacilla alba subsp. yarrellii
Great Tit	Parus major
House Sparrow	Passer domesticus
Chiffchaff	Phylloscopus collybita
Magpie	Pica pica
Dunnock	Prunella modularis
Bullfinch	Pyrrhula pyrrhula
Goldcrest	Regulus regulus
Nuthatch	Sitta europaea
Wren	Troglodytes troglodytes
Blackbird	Turdus merula
Song Thrush	Turdus philomelos

On one of our walks last year, David pointed out Bluetits going in and out a hole in a tree. I am so used to seeing them in nest boxes, it is strange to see them using a natural nesting place.

Flowering Plants

Bluebells and Oak - 14 May 2017

There are many flowering plants in the reserve including many blossom trees such Blackthorn, Hawthorn and Wild Roses.  I've only recorded a handful and have taken beauties such as the Oak and Bluebells, shown in the photo above, for granted. Looking at iRecord, it is clear that a much more detailed survey was done in 2015 by Ben Rainbow, which yielded over a hundred species including those two.

Mystery tree - a pear? - 9 April 2017

During the 9 April 2017 walk, we found an intriguing blossom tree.  The flowers were familiar but too big for one of the trees we expect to find flowering in April.  Scouring our books didn't really help and it was only when I found a very similar tree in Leatherhead that I began to suspect that it might be an ornamental pear. I didn't find any pears in the Autumn but I may have missed them.

Fungi

Velvet Shank - 22 October 2017

Many of the fungi that I have recorded in West Park were observed by a group that did a fungi hunt on the 22nd of October 2018

Common name	Species
Jelly Ear	Auricularia auricula-judae
Clouded Funnel	Clitocybe nebularis
Shaggy Inkcap	Coprinus comatus
Blushing Bracket	Daedaleopsis confragosa
Velvet Shank	Flammulina velutipes var. velutipes
Clustered Bonnet	Mycena inclinata
Birch Polypore	Piptoporus betulinus
Common Earthball	Scleroderma citrinum
Turkeytail	Trametes versicolor
Candlesnuff Fungus	Xylaria hypoxylon

Insects

Peacock butterfly - 25 March 2017

West Park is home to all sorts of insects, from tiny beetles to showy butterflies and dragonflies.  I found several different types of insect feeding on the glorious Blackthorn blossom in March last year.

Honeybee nest entrance - 28 Jan 2017

One of my favourite finds was a natural Honeybee nest in one of the old trees.  On one of the Autumn walks, David pointed out a Hornet's nest. Fortunately these large, wasp-like creatures are much more laid-back than their smaller, waspy, cousins.

Common name	Species	Taxon group
Cream-spot Ladybird	Calvia quattuordecimguttata	insect - beetle (Coleoptera)
Harlequin Ladybird	Harmonia axyridis	insect - beetle (Coleoptera)
Peacock	Aglais io	insect - butterfly
Small Tortoiseshell	Aglais urticae	insect - butterfly
Orange-tip	Anthocharis cardamines	insect - butterfly
Brimstone	Gonepteryx rhamni	insect - butterfly
Small Copper	Lycaena phlaeas	insect - butterfly
Comma	Polygonia c-album	insect - butterfly
Red Admiral	Vanessa atalanta	insect - butterfly
Emperor Dragonfly	Anax imperator	insect - dragonfly (Odonata)
Honey Bee	Apis mellifera	insect - hymenopteran
Large Red-tailed Bumblebee	Bombus (Melanobombus) lapidarius	insect - hymenopteran
Early Bumblebee	Bombus (Pyrobombus) pratorum	insect - hymenopteran
Common Carder Bee	Bombus (Thoracobombus) pascuorum	insect - hymenopteran
Plain Gold	Micropterix calthella	insect - moth
Cinnabar	Tyria jacobaeae	insect - moth
Meadow Grasshopper	Chorthippus parallelus	insect - orthopteran
	Panorpa communis	insect - scorpion fly (Mecoptera)
St Marks Fly	Bibionidae	insect - true fly (Diptera)
Dark-edged Bee-fly	Bombylius major	insect - true fly (Diptera)

Mammals

The only mammals that I have seen are rabbits but there is clear evidence of the presence of larger creatures.

Spiders

Crab spider - 14 May 2017

With all those insects around, we are bound to find a few spiders. I am not very good at identifying them but was able to record this colourful crab spider.

This is a very brief round up of my own observations. There are many more out there including those from formal surveys and all the people who walk through  the reserve.

Biological Recorders' Seminar 2018 - Sussex Biodiversity

After a stressful week it was good to take a pause in Oathall Community College's kitchen garden and listen to the birds singing and the cows mooing before going into the Adastra wildlife recording seminar.

Inside, there was a sale of "The natural history books of Heather Monie and Bunny Bull." with proceeds going to the Sussex Wildlife Trust. It was very poignant to see the books being sold off but I had a strong sense of lives well lived.

Heather and Bunny's books.

I gathered up a few treasures and moved on to the Sussex Botanical Recording Society's stand where the much anticipated The Flora of Sussex was arriving.  I had a quick chat with society members, one or two of whom kindly said that they liked the sketch-notes about keying plants that I had put on the Facebook page. As there were a lot of boxes of books to shift, I brought a box in from the car and then claimed my own copy.

Once again, the talks that followed were full of fascinating information so here is a quick round up.

Record Centre Update - Clare Blencowe

Clare outlined the many developments this year including how various bodies are working together to try and get the local Wildlife Site system running again. Local Wildlife Sites (previously Sites of Nature Conservation Importance - SNCIs) are non-statutory sites of nature conservation value such as Uckfield's West Park and Snatts Road Cemetery.  There is more information on their new website, which includes a recording events calendar.

The Secret Life of Flies - Erica McAlister

Erica gave a very lively talk on flies and their, quite frankly, disgusting habits.  She will definitely be worth following on Twitter @flygirlNHM.  She mentioned bee flies such as the one photographed in Uckfield's West Park Local Nature Reserve, below.

Dark-edged Bee Fly (Bombylius major) - 25 March 2017

I already knew that they flicked their eggs into bee burrows but had no idea that they wrapped them in gravel to make that possible. Also, I didn't know that the larvae then had two distinct growth phases: in the first they are very active until they find a host; then they slow right down, just feeding on it.

Pan-species Listing the Sussex Wildlife Trust Reserves - Graeme Lyons

This is about listing all the species found in the reserves. Graeme announced that the number of species recorded was now over 10,000 and that James McCulloch (known as @My_Wild_Life on Twitter) added the 10,000th species.  The 10,000 included some historic records, one of which was a Little Bustard shot in 1846!  The largest group was beetles with 1874 species.

Graeme also showed the spreadsheet used to record the species information, which now supports work in the reserves.   The format is a list of species down the left-hand side and sites across the top. The cells are completed with the year of the most recent sighting.

Flora of Sussex - Nick Sturt

This was about the book I bought earlier. It is very clearly the labour of love of a very dedicated team and I am looking forward to exploring it. The maps are based on tetrads (2km by 2km squares).

• The average number of taxa in a tetrad was 336.
• The highest number was 818 in part of Brighton.
• The next highest number was 598 in Amberley.
• The lowest was 33, near the Kent border.

There was a lovely slide showing a 1920s and 2017 group of botanists at Chailey Common. To my surprise, I was in the latter group.

Sussex Seas - Sarah Ward

Sarah outlined the two main surveys that, together, form the Living Seas project:

• Sea search - scuba diving
• Shore search - surveying the inter-tidal zone.

Knepp Wildland - Penny Green

Penny described Knepp's change from an intensively farmed estate, which was not reliably profitable, to a rewilded landscape. Part of the inspiration was the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve in the Netherlands, where a variety of large herbivores with different eating habits maintain and improve the ecosystem. Any ecosystem needs an apex predator to prevent the herbivores eating themselves out of a home. The words that echo in my mind are "We are the wolf", which is how Penny explained humans' role in removing excess herbivores (to sell as meat) from the rewilded area. .

They rely on recording to monitor what is happening. One of the big successes is the reappearance of the Purple Emperor butterfly, which needs sallows, which in turn needed the environment created by the Tamworth pigs rooting around. Others included the reappearance of Turtle Doves and Nightingales.

Fritillaries for the Future - Neil Hume

Neil described the work being done to try and revive the fortunes of the:

• Pearl-Bordered Fritillary - 3 sites in Sussex, extinct in Kent and Surrey
• Small Pearl-Bordered Fritillary - extinct in SE England East of the New Forest.

Both species need Dog Violets for their caterpillars. Ever since I found out that some of the more common Fritillary caterpillars use Dog Violets as a food plant, I've been baffled by their absence from my local area where there are plenty of Dog Violets.  Neil's talk about the rarities explained more about the butterflies' complex needs. His words wove a vivid picture of Fritillaries roosting in the canopies of Oak trees and then, as the sun warms the ground, them dropping down to visit the flowers in woodland glades and rides. He went on to explain the specific needs of the rarities.

For example, the Pearl-Bordered Fritillary also needs bare ground to enable the caterpillars to absorb warmth from the spring sunshine.  This means that they need woods to be managed in a particular way with coppicing providing a cycle of shade and sunlit ground.  Wide 'rides' enable provide corridors that enable the butterflies to move from one coppiced area to another.  The decline in these butterflies may be down to lack of such management over decades allowing woods to become too dark.

Latest on Sussex Lessers - Ken Smith

Lesser-Spotted Woodpecker

Ken described the work being done to record Lesser-spotted woodpeckers. This work is described on the website.  Recording these birds is important because there has been a big decline in numbers.  Ken explained that:

• Birds such as the Lesser-Spotted Woodpecker are helped by the type of woodland management that would help butterflies such as Fritillaries - i.e. coppicing, providing rides and glades.
• Greater Spotted Woodpeckers drum in short, hard bursts whereas Lessers drum in longer, softer bursts.

Stands

My nature watch: a super project in which a Raspberry-Pi is used to create a trail camera.
West Weald Fungi: promising because it covers the Leatherhead area as well as Sussex.

Takeaways (apart from a car-load of books!)

• That time spent studying and recording nature is part of a life well lived.
• It would be interesting to pick some Uckfield Tetrads for more thorough recording.
• I could 'borrow' some of Graeme's spreadsheet methods to make better use of iRecord information
• I now understand more about how the Woodland Trust's management of Views (Williams) Wood benefits birds and insects as well as flowers.
• We are the wolf that stops herbivores eating themselves out of a home.

I also attended and made notes about the seminar last year. This year there was more emphasis on joining volunteer sessions and less on providing the type of information that would enable people to operate independently.

Churchyard Plant Survey - End of April

This weekend, I was back in Holy Cross Churchyard. At the beginning of April, Helen of the Sussex Botanical Recording Society, got me going. This time I was back - and needed to be able to identify the plants on my own. 

Ferns and flowers by the smartly painted door.

The instructions for the Churchyard Survey recommend ...

Three visits per year in Spring, mid and late summer would be ideal for ... plant recording.

I've decided to add in another visit, four weeks after my first, to see some of the plants that Helen pointed out, before I forgot too much.  At the beginning of the month we saw bluebells just beginning to flower. Now both the English and Spanish varieties are in full bloom.

Honeybee on Spanish Bluebell (possibly hybrid) - notice the bluish pollen

English Bluebells showing creamy-coloured pollen.

There are some lovely clumps of English bluebells (‎Hyacinthoides non-scripta) alongside some touching modern-day memorials along the East Wall.

English Bluebells by touching wall memorials.

Slightly nearer the church, a gravestone from the late 1700s reminded me just how old the Holy Cross churchyard is.

E.B. 1765 and J. B. 1779.

The Caring For God's Acre website - A2 Caring for Grassland tells us:

Apart from grave digging, the grassland will have been relatively undisturbed, re-seeding naturally for hundreds if not thousands of years. ...

A benefit of this continuity of management over a very long time is a diversity of beautiful grasses and flowers and associated animals, some of which may now be uncommon or rare in Britain.

A tiny (6mm) Red-Girdled Mining Bee on Germander Speedwell.

Have you ever wondered what pollinates the tiny flowers in the grass? For this Germander Speedwell (Veronica chamaedrys), the answer is tiny bees. While I was photographing the plant, a bee landed on the sapphire-blue flowers. Thanks to Ryan Clark and Stuart Roberts of the UK Bees, Wasps and Ants Facebook group, I now know that this is a Red-Girdled Mining Bee (Andrena labiata). My Field Guide to Bees, by Steven Falk, says that  this little pollinator lives in unimproved grasslands, feeds on  Germander Speedwell and Forget-me-nots, nests in short or sparse vegetation and is "scarce".

It seems that the old turf of Holy Cross church is just the place for this little bee. It has escaped the fertilizers and weedkillers intended to "improve" grass but end up driving out wildflowers and the pollinators that depend on them.

Of course I was in the churchyard to find more plants that I could add to my list. I was able to identify about 10 more ranging from a humble Common Chickweed to Ash Trees that make up part of the hedge.

Large Red Damsel Fly - only about an inch long!

The hedge is a valuable habitat too. While looking for more plants, I found a damsel fly, who had found sanctuary from the cold wind, amongst its leaves.

Black Bryony

Black Bryony has sprung up very rapidly. On our first visit there were only old stems and one, shrivelled fruit. 4 weeks later the stems are carrying the shiny, exotic-looking, leaves up round railings and other supports. Soon, the dainty white flowers will open.

Pellitory-by-the-Wall.

A little plant growing in the wall had me stumped. Fortunately, Mum came to the rescue by telling me that it is Pellitory-by-the-Wall (Parietaria Judaica).

Pellitory-by-the-wall - tiny female flowers

Pellitory-by-the-Wall has miniature, wind-pollinated flowers. The plant that I found has female flowers. I wonder if there is a male somewhere nearby?

Blackbird - making it clear to a rival who owns this patch.

My couple of hours searching for plants had flown by. As I was completing my survey, a glossy male Blackbird was fending off another, whose presence was clearly unwelcome. The brown female, was nearby and there may well be a nest. I left and hoped that the intruding Blackbird had the good sense to do likewise.

Churchyard Plant Survey - Holy Cross, Uckfield

After the hustle and bustle of the working week, it was lovely to spend some time in "God's acre", the churchyard of Holy Cross Church, which is very much the beating heart of Uckfield.  I was recording the wild plants in the churchyard as part of the Sussex Botanical Recording Society's Churchyard survey.

Holy Cross churchyard, with established garden daffodils.

With Helen acting as a guide and mentor, we recorded 74 species of plant.  Most of these are natives but some were garden varieties that had become established in the churchyard.  We included everything from tiny Speedwells to big Yew trees.

Slender Speedwell in the grass by the East Wall.

The Slender Speedwell (Veronica filiformis) was originally from Turkey and was introduced in the early 19th Centaury as a rockery plant. However, it was prone to establish itself in the grass, much to the annoyance of Victorian gardeners.

Good Friday Grass, throughout the churchyard. 

One of the plants we found was the Field Wood Rush (Luzula campestris).  This is a tiny rush that grows in the grass. The individual plants are inconspicuous but in their hundreds they make a pretty yellow haze above the neatly-cut grass.  Pleasingly, for a plant found in a churchyard they are also called Good Friday Grass, because the flowers come out just in time for Easter.

The gravestones and hedges are habitats too.

Grassland is just one of the habitats to be found in a churchyard. The gravestones support colonies of colourful lichens and mosses, as well as perches for curious robins. There are also hedges as shown in the background of photo above.  These provide a home to hedge plants such as Hazels, Hawthorns and Yew, as well as the little plants that live in their feet.

Wall Rue fern (Asplenium ruta-muraria)

Even the walls provide a habitat for plants such as the delicate Wall Rue (Asplenium ruta-muraria), which is a tiny fern. This was my favourite find. It is such a pretty little thing, clinging to the tiny crevices in the old wall.

Primroses hiding under some roses.

There are just a few primroses (Primula vulgaris) in the churchyard, tucked away in odd corners. The photo shows one of a group nestling under a rose. Another spring favourite, the Bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta), is just starting to flower amongst the gravestones.

Thale Cress, which grows in disturbed ground.

One plant, which I have never noticed before, was Thale Cress (Arabidopsis thaliana). It is a fairly widespread weed of disturbed ground and I must have walked past it many a time without really seeing it.

A solitary bee, which is a good pollinator but does not make honey.

The churchyard supports a community of plants, insects and birds just as the Church supports the community of Uckfield. Even the humble Dandelion is providing a welcome meal for a hungry bee.

Survey done and I was off to the Farmers' Market to pick up some samosas for lunch and a jar of Sussex honey. I found myself wondering if the honeybees, who had made my honey, had visited any churchyards.