The change from the lukewarm cosiness of Autumn to the first days of ‘Christ it’s cold’ statements upon the fall of Winter are well

Mirkwood from ‘The Hobbit’, as depicted by Alan Lee.

documented, and this blog has been no exception.

Cornwall gets to linger in slightly milder climes than the rest of the country for longer, but those icy winds can only be bayed for so long. A quick trip to see the spoonbills and massive wigeon flock at Hayle estuary today (successful on both counts – with a goosander appearance for bonus points) was slightly overwhelmed by blasts of Atlantic gale Jack Frost seemed to have left his signature upon.

Driving down to my ‘secret’ wood near Gweek, the hedgerow-guarded country lanes bore dwarfed and gnarled oaks now stripped to skeletal form. Rather than dead leaves, it was a flock of several dozen fieldfares that scattered from their branches in the wind – one of the few songbirds that only comes here in cooler times to the live out the season of not-so-plenty.

Setting up my camera trap at a busy badger latrine, I was suddenly struck by how quickly the woods had changed character to it’s winter self. Bloody hell, it barely felt like a month had past since I was admiring the blooms of bluebells and wild garlic.

And so the wait begins.

Snag and crack! How Winters chill grasps the hazel roots,
And through the oak leaf, ivy and bramble, they tangle round my boots.
But while it may hide sweet scents and shades, to dance upon a distant Spring’s breath,
It is now under the grey sky, coppice brown and bloated stream,
The wood becomes a living death.

“So you go to university in Falmouth? You must spend all your time on the beach then!” and variations thereof is a frequent response from others when I tell them about my university hometown. Sometimes I reply with an exaggerated ‘yes’, as if non-sunny days and other activities that can also fill your time during the Summer don’t exist, which probably leads to the image of me turning into a dreadlocked surfer tanned as a sweet potato for two thirds of the year (which to be honest a lot of students do tend to become). Or probably not, but either way, it makes it clear we’re not your average university.

In reality there aren’t quite so many beach days for the aforementioned reasons. Yet the ones you do have fix in the memory through sheer good-times value, and looking back on each year, it can seem like whole weeks were subsequently spent on the sand. But moments like sunset barbeques, playing a slightly out-of-tune ukulele and burying your mate up to their neck are just one element of what makes our local beach, Gyllyngvase, such a fantastic student retreat. What really made me fall in love with of it was the fact it contains the best rockpooling known to man.

It’s ecstatic enough just turning over rocks, uncovering biological treasure in a game that never fails to excite with age. It was always rockpooling that struck me as the main reason humans would want to get sunburnt, sand stuck in their clothing, beaten up by waves and the various other niggling hazards that come with a trip to the beach, and it was certainly mine. But today’s game was enhanced. One of the first sausages to christen our disposable barbeque that late lunchtime made a post-abattoir bid for freedom, and ended up coated in sand. So, heading off towards the barnacle-crusted swathe of rockpool with this greasy prize in my hand, the typical beach day of a student ended, and that of the naturalist begun. Continue reading →

If a traditional English oak woodland in Spring is nature inviting you to a party, hosted in a well lavished and bright house adorned with flowery buntings of bluebells and stitchworts, with a calming background of melodious birdsong as she casually asks you how you’ve fared over winter, Summer is very much the lingering trailing end when most are too drunk to function. It’s already peaked, and a mess of bracken has sprung up in place of the flowers, greedy to snatch up what little sunlight is left now the leaves are fully immersed out and darkening the canopy. Until the break of Autumn (which I suppose in this metaphor is the DJ playing ‘Closing Time’ by Semisonic as the lights come on and people clear out in search of kebabs), this will remain the status quo in my local woodland back ‘home-home’ in Hampshire.

I’ve not been here since the Easter break, when the party first got going, and since no one else seems to walk in these woods anymore – even the local kids in the street don’t bother playing here, a stark contrast to my upbringing here only ten years ago – the paths have been swamped by bracken. In the open gap between the newer, sweet chestnut coppice and alder/birch woodland dominated half of the wood, and the much more ancient hazel and oak side to the South, there is barely a patch of the ground spared by the plant. I don’t have anything against it per se, but since we wiped out Britain’s only animal capable of consuming it in enough quantity to make an impact (the wild boar), it invades our shrub layer with no survivors.

Picking up a sturdy old hazel branch from the ground, I turn it into an improvised machete and begin hacking away a fresh trail between the two portions of woodland. The smell that emanates from the cut bracken is one that instantly transports your mind back to halcyon Summer days of childhood in this very place. We could be doing the same practice as I was today, beating new paths to explore new depths of the wood, which seemed gargantuan in scale in those days (in reality it’s a rather petite 17 acres); or pulling out the leaves in great bunches, our hands green and sticky from ‘bracken juice’ and that brilliant scent, like cut grass but mingled with the Earthy, forest-floor aromas of the wood itself to remind you of its wildness, would stick around well until we’d gone back home for dinner to remind us where we really belonged.

Within 15 minutes or so, this year’s path through the middle has been sculpted. The bumblebees and speckled woods already flitter in to bask themselves on the newly created sun bed, while I dust myself down for ticks (as hindsight has told me, I wasn’t successful in clearing all of them off). These ‘rides’, even if this one is small in scale, are frequently utilised by the former, while larger animals such as deer and badgers will be likely to utilise this newly created open space to save the effort of pushing through vegetation, in turn playing victim to the aforementioned ticks. Yet I suspect I’ll be the only human they’ll snack on reguarly this Summer, or at all – I doubt whether anyone else will be utilising the new path. Nice in a way; but I think I’d be happier knowing the new generation growing up in this wonderful setting for my childhood were out getting bracken juice all over their hands as well.