“Ten go to Dorset”

A commentary on Earthworks visit to Arne RSPB Reserve, January 2006

By Judy Cross

“You won’t have done much yet for your birthday”, my youngest brother said around 11.00 o’clock on a crisp Sunday morning in January. I had to shout my reply above the pulsing whine of four clearing saws. If I had had a mobile phone transmitting pictures of the scene, he would have realised I was celebrating my birthday in a splendid fashion. Crisp white frost on the ground, clear blue skies, majestic herds of sika deer, views across the water of Wareham Channel, fourteen people attacking pines with gusto, drifting in and out of plumes of smoke from a huge fire. Modern telecommunications have yet to find a way to transmit scent from one place to another so he could not enjoy the fragrance of pine burning, feel the acrid heat catching in his throat and the aromatic fumes of diesel. Warm from the work already begun, I had shed my coat and was gathering cut trunks as well as pulling the younger pine scrub up by the roots – so satisfying.

 

The Author (right) ready for action                              Fragrant pine smoke (cough!)

Earthworks Conservation Volunteers were on their seventh annual trip to Arne RSPB reserve in Dorset. Ten of us had driven down on the Friday and gone into “holiday mode”. For Ian, Jean and me, it was essential to begin the weekend with visits to certain places – not least the bakery at Corfe Castle to purchase birthday cakes. Others walked around the reserve at Arne, seeking views of avocets and waders, another fitted in a few business appointments – all part of winding down before the putsch the next day. We had lunch in Wareham after calling at the warden’s office at Arne then dropped our bags in at the B&B and off to Corfe Castle. Each time I am amazed by the thickness of the walls of the castle they could not fully demolish with gunpowder once the siege had ended. Lady Bankes and her daughters held out as long as they could and she is buried in St Martin’s Church in Ruislip. Views through the ruins were splendid as the sunlight moved between clouds and cast shadows across gentle slopes. It was unusually sunny with little wind with calls of jackdaws and the gentle bobbing of pied wagtails to draw the eye – until, from nowhere, came a small hail storm, over before it had begun. Silence can be disconcerting – no motorways.

Next stop was Durlston Country Park at Swanage and time for some easy bird watching in a lovely warm hide. All the usual suspects for a feeding area were there – rabbits, great-, long-tailed and blue-tits, dunnocks, robins, jays and crows but no squirrels. Outside and to the lighthouse at Anvil Point where we watched graceful cormorants and gulls - the sea was actually blue-green and not the angry grey of previous visits when waves had crashed against the cliff edges and drenched us. We looked down on great black-backed gulls and at herring gulls as they settled for the night. Markings such as orange spots on beaks, pink legs and yellow legs were clear to see. Pink and blue stripes of the setting sun were restful and then the eerie mewing cries came up from the sea below as two peregrine falcons rose up to eye level and then a third joined them. We were able to look down on them as they dropped back down and had seen their barred undersides too. From above their wings and tails seemed darker than their bodies as though they were wearing moleskin waistcoats.

Before returning for dinner in Stoborough we had to visit the chain ferry where we gazed across at the lighted windows of mansions at Sandbanks and then up at the star-filled sky. Ten of us gazed up at the stars later and vowed to bring binoculars to the pub the next night so we could have a better view of nebulae and Mars the next night. A bit more bird watching over breakfast as watched a collared dove chasing a magpie through the branches of an evergreen- a doomed romance. Sparrows, chaffinches and many male blackbirds plus the usual suspects were there too. Two days of hard work followed and it was rewarding to leave both worksites relatively pine free with mental images of before and after. No birds came near us other than a buzzard atop a dead tree. Certain larger trees have been left, not for their beauty, but for nightjars to lounge in – they are not built for perching so the more twisted the branches the better. Each evening we gazed up at the stars, seemingly held in suspension. It was a new moon – or rather no moon – so shooting stars and the constellations I thought I knew were even more spectacular. Mars was orange and Sirius blue and binary stars could be viewed through binoculars as well as the Pleiades, Pegasus, the nebula by Orion’s sword and so many more.

In the car park at Arne we had visitors – and I don’t mean the deer. Pete and Nicky had brought their two small children to see us after an afternoon on the beach at Bournemouth. Overhead a song thrush rehearsed its song incessantly. The only jarring sight was that of members of the public teasing a deer, eating in front of it then stretching out their sometimes empty hands. Others took photographs of the animal next to the sign instructing “Do not feed the deer” and then being surprised when the deer kicked out at the taunting family. Mary will be glad to know that rangers know the female deer who assaulted her and her cards are already marked. The tragedy is that man has changed the behaviour of otherwise shy animals. There are too many deer for a sustainable population but that is no reason to either feed the animals nor to approach males in the rutting season.

Arne is heathland, an unfamiliar habitat, sand under foot rather than clay. We were aiming for living room carpet, not the Martian landscape of clear fell and flail. It is not a monoculture as it first appears. Dwarf gorse and four types of heath which Jack, the warden, pointed out to me. When not in flower, they are hard to identify until you get your eye in and I did my best. The easiest to spot is heather, calluna vulgaris, with linear leaves in opposite rows. Somehow its leaves are denser and the dead flower heads are the right size. Then two quite similar ones, bell heather and cross-leaved heath, erica cinerea and erica tetralix respectively. Leaves on the former are darker and finer than the heather, in whorls of three with bell-shaped flowers – obviously! The name of the latter helps identify the leaves and it has larger berry shaped flowers. Finally there is Dorset heath, erica ciliaris, Jack says the flowers are a richer pink/purple and it prefers the damper hollows. The flowers are in a spike and the stamens stick out, they are also on three sides of the stem. The leaves seemed a bit more lush too. The dead flower heads are appeared the largest of all four. Once I had my eye in, Jack informed me it was one to form many hybrids. On stumps of pine felled in previous years, colonies of lichen provided different colours and forms, from the pale filigree of cladonia to the red of devil’s matchsticks and elfin cups (I’m told).

 

Glorious weather all weekend                           Lichen colonise old pine stumps

I took it as an immense compliment when Jack said that we could achieve more in a weekend than the 150 people ‘picking trees for Christmas’. No wonder he fed us well at lunchtime! So by Sunday morning, I think I’d seen, learned and done plenty for my birthday and could not ask for more.