Nature Notes with Peter Gay

Whatever views we may have on climate change, the drive to use more renewables is having one positive effect on the landscape – the opening up of once overgrown woodlands to provide logs and wood chips as an alternative to coal for heating and generating electricity.

Regular coppicing on 12, 15 or 20-year cycles was once common in east Kent. Swathes of wild flowers followed the axe within a couple of years – bluebells, foxgloves, red and white campion, lily of the valley and rosebay willowherb – before being swallowed up by brambles and regrowth.

Much of the coppice wood was used to make garden and snow fencing, hurdles and hop-poles and the tradition left a mosaic of woodland which suited nightingales and other birds that favour thick young scrub.

Coppicing continued in some private woods despite a fall in demand and it was in well-managed woods near Ileden to the east of Barham a few weeks ago, that I heard both nightingales and turtle doves.

The RSPB and Woodland Trust have also helped maintain traditional coppicing cycles in Blean and Denge Woods for both birds and butterflies such as the heath fritillary. With the increase in demand for native timber the future is looking brighter for many woodland species.

Sadly, another year has passed without the call of the cuckoo in my hearing. Their decline is a mystery. A reader told me that she had heard one at Sandwich but I have heard no other reports.

On a brighter note, Plantlife and the wildlife trusts have called for a moratorium on cutting verges when many of our wild flowers are at their best. Good examples are the roadside verges from Barham to Wingham, which are often spectacular at this time of the year. Lady, man, common spotted, pyramid and bee orchids have all been be found among the swathes of Michaelmas daisies.

Adders have been basking in the sun on the few sunny days we have enjoyed this summer. They will usually slither away at the approach of footsteps, but if disturbed may strike. Their venom is rarely fatal to healthy humans but it is very unpleasant and can kill dogs.

Over the past month I have seen 10 badgers dead on the roads. Their population is huge and I fear they are searching further and further for food – they have certainly been breaking into a neighbour’s garden to such an extent that he has had to install an electrified fence and gates!

One of the problems has been people feeding them in their back gardens, quite a sight until they turn the lawn into a latrine with a dozen or so carefully excavated little holes – they are very clean animals. But to get to many gardens they have to cross roads and it is now badgers not hedgehogs that are usually the victims of road kill. Hedgehogs themselves have been in decline for a number of years, partly I suspect, because they share a similar diet to the protected badgers and are being starved of natural food.

The theft of a lady orchid from the Kent Wildlife Trust Reserve at Yocklette Bank near Petham was not the first time the wood has been targeted. Several were dug up a few years ago. On this occasion it was an uncommon white and green-flowered variant, no doubt coveted by a dishonest collector.

It was a disappointing end to a spectacular year for lady orchids with over 3,000 flowering at one site. Last month we showed a photograph of a bee orchid, a small equivalent of any tropical beauty. July is usually the month when the late spider orchid is often at is best – a larger version of the bee orchid with an exotic broad brown lip. It is a local speciality, confined in Britain to south east Kent.