WILD FLOWER WALK
In April Caroline Beattie led a wild flower walk.
Caroline explained that woodlands have three main storeys: the overstorey, represented in Queen's Wood by hornbeams and oaks, the understorey of wildflowers and grasses, etc, and small trees such as hazel, hawthorn and field maple between the two.
At this time of year, the days are longer and it is warming up, so the ground flora have to race to leaf, flower and set seed before the trees above them are fully in leaf, drastically cutting the amount of light reaching the ground. (The leaves on the branches of a tree have a remarkable ability not to overlap, allowing each one of get as much light as possible.) Everything is late this year, so we mainly saw wood anemones, celandines, and cherry blossom, along with some hawthorn and one female holly flower (with a tiny green berry in the centre.
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Holly leaves often have a dark patch, which indicates the presence of a grub, the holly leaf miner. If the patch has a round hole, the grub matured into a fly and exited through that hole. If the patch has a V-shaped notch, the grub was eaten by a blue tit.
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Holly leaf miner site
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We also saw two clumps of bluebells that were very nearly English bluebells (narrow leaves and flowers with curled-back petals), rather than the English-Spanish hybrid, which has wider leaves and straighter petals).
Caroline also shared a handy way to identify hornbeam: the leaves have serrated edges and the trunks sometimes look muscular, recalling the saws and muscles of the woodsmen who cut them down to make charcoal for so many centuries in Queen's Wood.
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English bluebells photo Mike Hacker
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Hornbeam
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BIRD WALK
Also in April, Laura Dekker went on a bird walk.
Our Dawn Chorus Walk began at 5am. Twenty or so of us 'early birds' gathered at the Lodge in the wood for our walk with ornithologist David Darrell-Lambert. The robin is almost always the first to sing in the morning, and so it was today.
As the sky was beginning to lighten, David described how to listen for birds. If your ears are keen enough, you can make small changes in the tilt and rotation of your head, using the stereo variation to locate the bird and estimate its elevation - high up in the canopy or lower down in some dense undergrowth.
The blackbird came next. Wren, great tit, jackdaw, great-spotted woodpecker, chiffchaff. Few birds actually to be seen, but a growing chatter indicating the rich avian life waking up. Blue tit, magpie and jay. David's infectious delight at hearing even some of the more commonplace birds is truly inspiring. Never ever take any birds for granted! Coal tit, green woodpecker, rook, nuthatch, carrion crow, blackcap. Once you become familiar with some of the songs and calls, it's interesting how frequent are some of the smaller, less visible birds, especially the subtle warblers like the chiffchaff and blackcap.
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Greater spotted woodpecker
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European green woodpecker
Photo Ron Knight, Wikimedia Commons
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Nearing the end of our walk, we were treated to the sight of a buzzard sweeping by, very low near the woodland floor. At close range, its wingspan was truly impressive. A wonderful sighting to end our magical dawn chorus walk.
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GEOLOGY WALK
An account by John Dorken.
In mid-March Diana Clements, who works at the Natural History Museum and is a leading authority on the geology of London, together with long-standing Friend, Mike Hacker, led a fascinating and well attended walk in the Wood. Although it was billed as a geology walk they managed to integrate the geological story of the Wood with a whole load of facts and figures about its archaeology and history. In a couple of hours we covered a huge distance in chronological terms, from 50 million years ago up to the present day.
On the northern perimeter of the Wood we could see what had been happening some 50 million years ago. At that time South East England was covered by a warm tropical sea, with large rivers of mud discharged into the sea to form, in our area, London clay. At the edge of the sea, where we were, on the upper slopes of the wood, the clay had become silty and sandy and had accumulated as what is known as the Claygate Member. Where the permeable Claygate Member interfaces with the London Clay, water seeps less easily downwards and bubbles to the surface, and we could see the results of this in a number of springs along the route that form the source of the Moselle river. We walked down to the valley floor passing across the Witches Coven – essentially an area of terrain where the underlying clay had been exposed by heavy footfall.
By then we were fast forwarding to some 10,000 years ago, through the 50 million years. Towards the end of the ice ages, the melting of the ice sheets around and about, combined with ongoing precipitation, had led to the formation of fast running streams that had created the gullies and steep slopes in the Wood with which we are familiar. Then, moving into the realm of history, we reached the Frog Pool. This had been a natural pool, which was first turned into an ornamental pond when the Wood was taken over by the Council, followed by its transformation into a children’s paddling pool and its eventual restoration as a natural pond a few years ago. Analysis of soil samples going back 1000 years showed that typically there had not been dense woodland in the vicinity but a mixture of trees, pasture and arable land. The walk ended when we stopped by the remnants of the mediaeval embankment and learned how this had led to the creation of denser coppiced woodland, an important source of the wood needed to power the economy of the times. Also important was the abundance of materials - clay, sand and ashes used for making bricks for which this area of North London was renowned.
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River Moselle near its source
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Frog pond
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If anyone wants to know more there is an impressive display of the geology of the area at the information hut close to the café in Highgate Wood.
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