Frank Lamerton, Friend of Southwick Country Park, ran the London Marathon last weekend in 4 hours 19 minutes and 14 seconds. Out of the 174 runners over the age of seventy, he came 13th. It was the hottest London Marathon on record and Frank came in somewhere around number 13,500 among 41,000 finishers.
The slow worm survey produced a young grass snake, probably one of last year’s hatchlings. It was tucked under a survey mat in Brunts Field, in the warm and dry. It vanished fairly fast after we lifted the mat, but not before DKG took its picture.
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Photograph: DKG
More reptiles:
Sunday morning, in the sunshine, Ian found and photographed this beautiful, newly emerged comma butterfly on Village Green.
“This was the scene I was greeted with in Sleepers this morning, they kindly left their carrier bag so I was able to clear up and get to a bin.” DKG
The Friends, on a wet and squelchy day last week, prepared to survey the park’s slow worm population. Here is DKG’s report:
“Mats were cut and numbered for the slow worm survey with 40 mats laid in 4 areas (10 per area). These will be monitored in the coming weeks once we have some warmth and hopefully some dry weather. Areas covered included Brunts Field, Kestrel Field and Ash copse in Sheep field. The Village Green mats will be laid out during the next work party as the area was too sodden to reach.”
Photographs: DKG
If you are a slow worm fan, you might like this:
Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) is the earliest of our native flowering trees. In late February it is very distinctive: masses of creamy white blossom on bare black branches. Now, in April, the small nondescript leaves are opening and the plant becomes just one of the many spiny and spiked elements in our hedgerows. In the autumn, blackthorn is once again easily identified by the blue-black fruits we call sloes.
Blackthorn fruits prolifically; the sloes are very bitter but become more palatable after the first frost. Neolithic peoples dried them to sweeten them and archeologists have found straw lined pits full of sloe-stones, which suggests a method of preservation we no longer understand.
The blue part of a sloe’s blue-black colour is a bloom of yeast; sloes will ferment on the tree and intoxicate the birds that eat them. While there is no proof, it is hard to believe that neolithic people didn’t make sloe wine.
The tree’s thorns, hardened in urine or in a chimney, were used as pins, skewers and awls.
Blackthorn wood is tough and resilient and takes a fine polish. It makes excellent tool handles (the earliest examples we have date from the Roman period) but has been used to make blunt instruments, cudgels, knobkerries, shillelaghs, for a lot longer than that. With judicious pruning and a little patience, blackthorn will produce a thick knobbly stick with a lump on the end.
Black Rod’s black rod is supposedly a blackthorn stick.
Pictures: Google Images
Related posts:
This is the second in our series of posts about scooping dog poop in the park; the pun in the title is intentional.
Most of the park’s fields are let to a local farmer who takes two cuts of grass from them each year. That crop is sold on, as hay or silage, mostly to feed horses and farm animals. Some of it, though, will end up in your gardens in rabbit and guinea pig cages. If the hayfields are contaminated with dog faeces, so is the hay.
Dogs are part of the life cycle of two parasitic organisms that cause diseases, neosporosis and sarcocystosis, in farm animals. In dogs, they rarely cause symptoms, are hard to diagnose and almost impossible to treat, but the parasites’ eggs will be present in the dogs’ faeces. In cattle or sheep who become infected by eating feed contaminated by faeces, these parasites can induce abortion, cause neurological problems, and even result in the death of the animal.
Sarcocystosis and neosporosis are caused by the same organisms that, in horses, can cause equine protozoal meningitis.
The prevalence of neosporosis and sarcocystosis in dogs and farm animals is unknown in the UK, but it is thought to be common and very much under-reported. As there is no effective vaccination or treatment for either, vets recommend avoidance: don’t feed your pet raw meat and don’t leave dog faeces on agricultural land.
Most of the park is agricultural land, producing animal feed; please clean up after your dog.
This is the second post of a spring campaign; let’s keep our park poop-free.
Pictures: Google Images
Related posts:
Chiffchaffs migrate to the Mediterranean and West Africa for the winter, though an increasing number over-winter here. When they return, their song is one of the first signs of spring.
Children get toxocariasis when they are infected with the eggs of roundworms (Toxocara canis) from the faeces of dogs. The infection happens when the child gets soil or sand contaminated with faeces into its mouth. Once the eggs are inside the child’s digestive tract, they move into the bowel where they hatch into larvae.
The larvae burrow through the wall of the intestine and through the soft tissues to, most commonly, the lungs, liver, eyes, and brain, where they can cause symptoms that range from a mild fever to blindness (don’t click this link if you are squeamish).
It’s hard to tell how many of these infections cause illness, but research in the USA, at the turn of the century, found that 13.9% of children aged upwards of 6 years had Toxocara canis antibodies in their blood, which showed that they had been infected at some time in their lives. Similar research in Sri Lanka found a 50% incidence.
In the park we have a combination of children and dogs that makes it particularly important that we are vigilant. Almost every dog will get roundworms at some time in its life and, at any one time, about 20% of dogs are infected.
This means that one in every five dogs that comes into the park will bring with it mature roundworms, each one of which can lay 200,000 eggs every day, for a rolling, tumbling, thumb-sucking toddler to put in his mouth.
People are very careful about picking up on the central path and we are grateful, but some are less conscientious when their dogs poop in the grass, which is, of course, where our children play. Please clean up after your dog. Toxocara eggs are not infectious for the first 10–12 days so you are in no danger as you poop-scoop, but they can live in the soil and be infectious for many, many years afterwards if you don’t scoop.
This is the first post of a spring campaign; let’s keep our park poop-free.
Pictures: Google Images
Good news: the pair of barn owls photographed by David on March 10th are still in the park. They appear to have chosen a nest site in a hollow oak tree. Both were seen early in the morning last week; the cock bird hunting, the hen near what we hope is the nest.
On Thursday, Rob Paget, Disability Sports Development Officer for Wiltshire Council, and Chris Revill, from Wheels For All in Bath, came to Southwick Country Park to carry out a trial run on disability bikes to see if the park would be a suitable venue to hold events. Rob and Chris recently developed an adapted cycling programme in Salisbury for people of all ages with disabilities to take part in cycling on adapted bikes in a safe environment.
Rob is working in partnership with Bath Wheels for All to develop an adapted cycling session in West Wiltshire and has highlighted Southwick Country Park as a potential location. The Friends came along to help; they loved it!
by Vicky
Pictures: DKG on his phone.
BY SARAH MARSH
The winter weather has not been kind to the Friends and all over the Park the ground has been very boggy and waterlogged. When it has stopped raining, we had to endure bitter icy cold winds blowing from the east. However, we are a hardy bunch and only missed one session of volunteer work and that was due to Countryside Team staff illness!
Surprisingly, once we find a sheltered spot we can work well and keep warm. Again, we have been tidying around our magnificent oak trees clearing away scrub and bramble and already the signs of Spring can be seen. Snowdrops in particular have been seen all around the Park and the daffodils are appearing and beginning to bloom.
The volunteers joined the annual Great British Spring Clean this year and we gathered on Saturday, 10th March. The weather was poor and the Friends were joined by Councillor Horace Prickett.
We managed to collect 10 bags of rubbish including a worn out rubber tyre. The depressing thing about collecting litter is that a week later it all needs doing again and it is very hard to understand why people throw litter, doggy poo bags etc. in an area they like to use for leisure. As I have mentioned before our volunteers regularly pick up litter and are very grateful to the many members of the public who also collect rubbish when they are using the Park. It is good to know there are many “FRIENDS” of the Park who feel like we do and want to keep this amenity clean for all.
This article has also been published in Southwick Village News.
Photographs: DKG
Hats and scarves was the order of the day for Wednesday’s work party, and hedges and ditches, out of the east wind, were the best places to spend the morning. The park, however, was getting on with spring to an accompaniment of birdsong.
Trish saw a weasel hunting through the hedge; it ran across the picnic place and the track and into the brambles. Low down in the brambles, beyond the reach of Dave’s camera, we found a long-tailed tits’ nest, half-built: a ball of moss, hair and lichen, lined with downy feathers. A weasel is dangerous company for breeding birds; it will take eggs and nestlings, particularly if it is feeding its own nestful of young.
While we drank coffee and ate home made cakes, a pair of blue tits were trying out nest holes in the very highest branches of the ash tree at Fiveways. In the oaks, above us, robins and great tits shouted loud territorial challenges at each other.
A great spotted woodpecker worked its way up the trunk of an oak tree in the hedge between Cornfield and Sleeper Field, and three green woodpeckers flew overhead towards the copse in Sheep Field. The blackthorn is in flower, primroses seem to be ignoring the arctic start to their growing season, and leaf buds are swelling on the trees. Ian says there is frogspawn in the little pond!
It’s such a pleasure to work in the park on a spring day.
Header image: weasel by Peter Trimming (CC BY 2.0) flickr.com
In 2016, a pair of tawny owls nested in the owl box in Sheep Field and reared these two owlets. The parent birds returned in 2017 to inspect the box, but it obviously didn’t meet their standard and they left.
This year a pair of barn owls is hunting across the park, roosting in one of the park’s oak trees and, we hope, looking for a nest site. We have asked the Countryside Team to help us clean the nesting boxes in the hope that the barn owls will stay.
Photograph: DKG
One of a pair of barn owls seen hunting over the park this weekend by DKG and Chris Seymour.
Photograph: DKG
Wiltshire Council has agreed with us that parking fees at Southwick Country Park are unworkable; the proposal has been withdrawn.
Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve 