Today dawned foggy and cool, but the sun soon burnt its way through and it became a hot spring day. I spent most of it reroofing the tool shed at the Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve. It was in tatters after at least one hard winter, and it was an interesting exercise peeling off the layers hopefully tacked one on top of the leaky other. I then removed three full boards from the roof, complete with what I’m sure any mycologist would have found a fascinating colony of wet rot fungus, together with several wriggly centipedes and a lot of woodlice.
As it grew hotter on the roof, I was joined by at least two species of hoverfly, one large, dark, and almost unstriped. A brimstone butterfly chased around with a smaller white, perhaps a green-veined or an orange tip. A comma butterfly wandered about. Down below, the stinging nettles, hops, and garlic mustard (ideal for orange tips) are coming up nicely, but there’s too much cow parsley and some volunteers are pulling a lot of it out.
Newly-Hatched Tadpoles
At lunchtime I walked down to the pond. Chiffchaffs were singing all over; the pond was suddenly covered in pond skaters (Gerris) with one or two whirligig beetles. The tadpoles have hatched out into a wriggling mass.
Spring has sprung.
On this lovely spring day I drove around the backstreets of Ickenham until I found my way to Austin’s Lane (there’s The Old Fox pub marking its start) and so to Ickenham Marsh nature reserve (London Wildlife Trust). It’s tucked away behind Northolt airfield: the second world war Spitfires have been replaced by transport planes and executive jets, but the result has been to keep development at bay. The marsh is bordered with great drifts of blackthorn, the soft white blossom lovely in the broad hedges. Chiffchaffs were singing all over, and a mistle thrush rasped out its harsh flight call. Even the dunnocks looked splendid, their grey and brown plumage catching the sun as they chased low around the bushes. The breeze brought the occasional whiff of aviation fuel, but still there were some small patches of common orange lichen, Xanthoria parietina, and the grey lichen of bare twigs, Parmelia.
Midland Hawthorn, Crataegus laevigata
A complete surprise was the Midland Hawthorn by the Hillingdon Trail which crosses the reserve. The bush is the same size and shape as the common Hawthorn, but the leaves are only very slightly notched rather than deeply divided, and the flowers have two styles, not one (easy to remember as the common Hawthorn is C. monogyna ‘one-female’). An uncommon or perhaps just an easily-overlooked plant, something old and special on the edge of London.
Lesser Celandine on Yeading Brook
Also crossing the reserve, roughly northeast-southwest, is the Yeading Brook. I was just taking a photo of the first buttercups of spring, the lesser celandine, which likes wet muddy places, on the steep bank of the brook, when a kingfisher shot down the middle of the little stream, blue and turquoise. I turned to take my photo, and the kingfisher, or its mate, raced back past me again.
Even as I arrived the weather looked threatening. The sun sparkled dramatically off the water, under a magnificently dark cloud, making the marsh marigolds gleam golden against the almost-black water.
From the hide, redshanks could be seen scurrying about; some lapwings energetically chased off a few carrion crows, and a few snipe wandered about, right out in the open, ceaselessly probing the mud for food. Even better, the first little ringed plover of the year came out on to the marsh, flying off suddenly, its narrow wings flashing. The lapwings’ territoriality is valuable to other nesting birds, like the little ringed plover, as it protects their nests from predators of eggs and young like the crows. Lose the lapwings, as we have done across most of England – there are hardly any wet meadows left – and you lose much more. Drain and fertilise the meadows, and coarse grasses outgrow all the delicate flowers: you lose both the beauty and the bees, and the bees matter as they pollinate crops. The farmers hardly noticed they had done anything: after all, they only did a few sensible things to the land. That’s how delicate the ecological balance is.
The rain arrived, sweeping in on a cold wind that whistled through the hide windows, spattered camera lenses and binoculars with fat raindrops. In a minute, every window was closed, everyone happy to be in a warm dry place. I focused the telescope on a snipe and watched it while the rain threw up splashes all around it. Every minute or two it shook itself, keeping its feathers dry and fluffed up to maintain its insulation – clearly its plumage is nowhere near as oily and waterproof as a duck’s. But it went on feeding, its legs in the chilly water, its long beak in the mud, or retracted and rapidly opening and closing as it swallowed its catch. Living and feeding on a marsh means being cold and wet most of the year, really.
In the distance on the open water, three or four newly arrived sand martins swooped to catch insects from the surface, dashing about like the tiny brown tailless swallows that they are – I was watching them through the telescope (not something that often works well with fast birds like swallows), gently swinging from side to side to follow them as those watching with binoculars tried to count how many there were, little fastmoving specks against the water. We were all enjoying some wildlife, small as matchboxes, over a hundred metres away, flying in the rain. It was a very light, happy atmosphere in the hide, with nobody in a hurry, all the talk on the birds we could just about see. Really, it was perfect.
I arrived at Huckerby’s Meadows in the crisp early morning. No, I hadn’t heard of it either: it was round the back of the industrial estate at Cranford, squeezed in between the edge of London and the perimeter of Heathrow airport. The puddles were interestingly frozen, the looping pattern suggesting successive stages of freezing.
Wheels down: right under the flight path at the end of Heathrow’s north runway
The meadows have miraculously survived untouched by the rushing development all around them. In fact, it protected them – nobody wants to live exactly under the end of the flight path, just before the planes drop over the airport fence and shriek to a halt on the runway; and the airport itself may well have had designs on the land, buying it up just in case, but not sure what to do with it. Huckerby’s meadows are now leased by the airport authority to London Wildlife Trust. It discovered a hidden corner of England, taken over by wildlife: I saw muntjac deer prints, jays, a green woodpecker, mallard ducks, a singing song thrush, and fieldfares chattering in the hedges.
A carpet of crab apples – surely there for a reason
The meadows had become seriously overgrown with brambles, creeping across the grass from the hedges. Volunteers have now cleared most of them, revealing a curious sight: the meadows contain a large number of big, old crab apple trees in their midst, nowhere near the hedgerows, so they must have been there for a purpose. A possible clue is in the carpet of fallen crab apples: perhaps old Huckerby found them useful fodder for his pigs? The crab is so sour that it is barely suitable as human food – crab apple jelly about covers it – but pigs will eat them as a change from the swill they were presumably fed on, in those days.
We volunteers had been lucky enough to get a place on a fruit tree pruning course, run jointly by London Wildlife Trust and the London Orchard Project. The course tutor, Bob, had come down from Norfolk to get us up to speed. The pole saws we had to use were remarkable, extending to 12 foot long, with a viciously sharp curved saw at the far end – think of the scythe in the hands of the black-cowled figure of Death, and you have the general idea. Bob effortlessly lopped off an offending branch ten feet above his head. We wore awkward goggles and hard hats; fresh, sharp-edged sawdust falling in your eyes means an instant visit to casualty, and of course as you saw something and look up, that’s just where the stuff is going to fall.
Er, how do I hold this? LWT volunteers trying out pole saws for the very first time
Bob explained remedial pruning; you don’t want ‘a tree on top of a tree’, a new vertical shoot rising from the end of an exposed branch, or the tree will get topheavy and split. You can’t just hack away: the tree will go into emergency overgrowth mode if you cut away more than 20% of the branches in a year. If an individual branch is heavy, just slicing away from the top means it will split when you are halfway through, letting wet and fungi into the wound, so it is best to cut in stages, reducing the weight by cutting smaller branches further out. Then you can cut the main branch part-way through from the bottom, finishing off from the top for a neat job, a cut surface that will shed rainwater cleanly. And you want to shape the tree neatly, with no crossing branches: they should radiate out tidily, giving each other space. Suddenly there was a lot to think about, and we looked at trees with newly informed interest. Then it was time to try it for ourselves. It was a lot harder than watching Bob do it; the poles were tricky to manoeuvre through the tangle of branches, the sun was in our eyes, and sawing at a distance felt nothing like holding a handsaw. But with supervision and encouragement we got the hang of it, and were soon bringing sizeable lumps of wood safely down to earth.
Bob also answered our questions about fruit trees – I needed something to pollinate my Cox’s Orange Pippin apple as it wasn’t bearing much fruit. The pollinator needs to be a suitable variety, so the flowers are open at the same time and the pollen is not rejected as being the same – Coxes do not self-pollinate. Lord Lambourn, for instance, is a good choice, as it is a useful cooking apple to complement the sweet eating Cox, and the two varieties pollinate each other as the bees fly about the garden visiting flowers.
By the end of the day, I had learnt a great deal, realising that I was only just beginning to grasp the rudiments of a fascinating subject. Maybe I’ll try grafting next year.
Kings Cross Development looms over Camley Street’s new Viewpoint
Everyone in the packed council chamber turned to look at the chairman of the planning committee. The members had voted 6-6: a tie. “As chair with the casting vote, I am voting for the development.” There was stunned silence. The developers said nothing. We objectors took a deep breath and said nothing. Gunnersbury Triangle Nature Reserve would never be the same again.
London Wildlife Trust’s other central London reserve at Camley Street is also changing. A 10 storey block has cut off the view. Were all our reserves being trashed? Were we fighting for nothing? 30 years ago a passionate campaign saved the Gunnersbury Triangle from becoming four industrial units. Miraculously, with a huge input of volunteer effort, it became a wet woodland with little meadows, grassy banks, leafy paths, a handy pond for school pond-dipping. Now it’s surrounded by 4, 6, 8-storey buildings. The latest one at Colonial Drive is right up against the reserve boundary — at the top of a ten-foot bank. The quiet meadow and scrubby corner where the whitethroats nested will be illuminated 24 hours a day by stray lamps from a wall of flats. “I’m desperately saddened at the insensitive nature of the development — it robs local people of the sense of countryside,” says long- time campaigner and Gunnersbury Triangle committee member Jan Hewlett.
Certainly, the reserves will feel different. But Camley Street has a new ‘Viewpoint’, an architect-designed floating open-air classroom. It will be beautiful to sit and learn on the canal, in the little watery oasis in the midst of the busy city. At Gunnersbury Triangle, too, the blackcaps and thrushes will delight our hearts in springtime. School groups will still lie down on the boardwalk we built and enjoy catching newts, dragonfly larvae and ramshorn pond snails.
Our reserves must change with our great city. They do not feel like forgotten corners of countryside any more. They are little oases, islands in a sea of noise and pollution and traffic. They are special exactly because they are right in the heart of our vibrant capital city.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
