30 Days Wild: My journey

Norfolk Wildlife Trust's Head of People and Wildlife, David North signed up to the challenge of 30 Days Wild and got in touch with his inner wild child this June.  Close encounters with nature and priceless memories ensued.

Star gazing, moon watching, fire making, sea swimming, bee following, poppy field wandering, opening my eyes and ears for lots of looking and listening: 30 Days Wild has been an adventure.  Too many highlights to list, but I would like to share just some of my 30 Days Wild moments with you and just a few images that hopefully capture some of my special wild June moments.

Baby muntjac with 'Mum' and Swans with cygnets by David North

Waking on June 2 to look out of the window and spot a baby muntjac, still wobbly-legged and spotty-coated, and no bigger than a puppy, accompanied by its mum was a definite ‘isn’t nature amazing moment’ and the swans on Felbrigg lake later that day with nine cygnets scored high on the ‘cute factor’.

Yellow flag, bee orchids and dandelion clock by David North

I had resolved during 30 Days Wild to pay more attention to plants. After all June is peak-flower, both in my garden, and along the lanes and byways where I walk my dog, Rohan. 

Rohan enjoying the poppies

My June started yellow; with buttercups, dandelions and yellow flag iris. The middle of the month brought those stars of the plant world, orchids, into full flower, with both common spotted and bee orchids gracing my local walks. It ended in a blaze of scarlet, with a visit, accompanied by Rohan of course, to a Norfolk speciality, poppy fields in all their mind-altering crimson glory. Like stepping, Alice in wonderland like, into a different and brighter reality.I think Rohan liked it too.

Taking advice from my 30DaysWild pack I decided on several occasions during the month to try following bees. My preferred version of this was lying on my lawn in the sunshine watching countless bumblebees visiting white clover flowers and idling an hour trying to capture that perfect image. Well, no perfection, but one or two just about in focus images resulted!

I resolved with my wife to spend more time out outdoors, so gathering sticks and several outdoor cooking attempts in the garden left me, and the food, well-smoked.  I love the smell of wood-smoke but not sure how my colleagues at work took to my new smoky perfume aroma.

A curious Roe Deer by David North

During June a roe deer adopted us, spending much of its time either in the barley field we look out on, or the grass field next to our entrance. A field of waving Yorkshire Fog I’m proud to say – you see I’ve been learning my common grasses this month helped by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s County Wildlife Action project!  I got a lot of not very good photos of this particular roe deer, which had the early morning habit of eating the roses in our garden, but how could you not forgive such a soft-eyed, elegant, beautiful and gentle creature?  This image of her on the edge of the barley field is one of the better ones. 

Swallowtail detail by David North

 30 Days Wild, and there’s still a few days left as I’m writing this, has seen me adventure out to NWT Hickling Broad where in the hot sunny weather swallowtails were dancing over reeds and fen.But dancing fast enough to blur all my photos. This image I rather liked in an arty kind of way! I hope you do too.

Gossamer threads by David North

Hot days also brought vast numbers of tiny ‘money’ spiders to our garden, tickling hair and face as we ate our evening meals outside. This made me walk at sunrise the next morning to see if a could spot ‘gossamer’ in  the local fields – one of nature’s many miracles, when the usually hidden abundance of spiders is revealed by thin silk strands shining silver across whole fields. Spiderlings release these strands of silk to catch the wind and fly, but its only when   the sun is low in the sky at early morning, or near sunset, that these gossamer strands catch the light and are revealed.

Hoverflies enjoying the nectar on thistle head

What have I liked about 30 Days Wild? 
Well just about everything!  Like most people I need a reason to look and listen just a bit more carefully and to spend a little more time each day enjoying the extraordinary diversity and beauty of nature.  

What has impressed me most?  Probably my ignorance, for as I write this inside virtually every flower in my garden is a unique small  ecosystem teeming with life that seems extraordinary but about which I know almost nothing. Pollen beetles beyond count; small, black and perfect in every way; hoverflies in shades of marmalade- orange and black, with huge eyes that take up most of their heads. They queue in perfect hovers await their turn at my garden flowers.  Hoverflies in a holding pattern waiting for the larger bumblebees to leave some landing space. 

Barley turning gold by David North

As I write this the barley in the field next door is turning gold, and tonight, most likely, I will hear the hoots of tawny owls from a nearby wood and perhaps the barking of deer already thinking of the rutting season to come.  Yesterday my 30DaysWild action was to tempt the rabbits, which live in the brambles at the end of my garden, to come out into the open. I bribed them with a carrot. Small payment for permission to photograph them and to spend a happy half hour watching and smiling at their antics.  

One thing 30 Days Wild has taught me is that if you sit quietly and watch then wildlife may soon lose its fear of coming close.  Definitely true for these young rabbits!

Young rabbits by David North

Norfolk is extraordinary. Nature is extraordinary.  And my resolution, come the end of June, is to make ‘Wildfulness’ practice - simply spending time in, and with, nature, part of my every day and to share nature moments with friends and family. After all, whether we notice or not, we are part of nature and nature is part of us.

‘We are all, bird and human, part of the earth, of its time and its matter, impelled by the mechanisms within, the ones that order our responses to days, months, years, to light and darkness, the rhythms, circadian, circannual, that regulate what we are and what we do.' From: Esther Woolfson, Corvus. A life with birds.

A tale of two poppies

 David North, Head of People and Wildlife

Poppies on edge of wheatfield, Alan Porter

Poppy show offs,
in tissue thin red party frocks.
Diaphanous dazzlers,
you wear your scarlet dress for a day only,
then cast it off at night with gay abandon.
But what a party trick,
To dance with the wind
and scatter seeds down centuries
from pepper-pot time capsules.
David North

Everyone knows poppies are red! But this is a tale of two Norfolk poppies – the much loved common or field poppy which indeed glows red, crimson or scarlet depending on the light, and its less well-known, but equally beautiful seashore cousin, the horned poppy , which is a wonderful translucent yellow.

Every year I look forward to the sight of a field of wheat or barley rippling in the wind and filled with dancing poppy heads. It’s one of Norfolk’s great wildlife spectacles. A plant light and colour show perhaps only rivalled by the very different, but equally wonderful , sight of carpets of bluebells in our Norfolk ancient woodlands. If bluebells are the great spring plant extravaganza then surely poppies, painting a whole field scarlet, are the summer show-stopper of the plant world. And get ready, in a field near you this show may well just be getting under way. Now is the time to keep your eyes peeled for showy red poppies swaying in the breeze along roadside verges, transforming the disturbed ground of building sites and even town developments into areas of ethereal beauty, adding a splash of colour amongst the green heads of barley and wheat in our Norfolk countryside or just occasionally appearing in such numbers that whole fields turn a red that can be seen from miles away. I know of few natural spectacles that can stop cars in their tracks but several times while enjoying the sight of a whole field of poppies have heard the squeal of brakes and seen cars reverse up roads to pull in next to a poppy field.

These red poppies are of course the common or field poppy, a species whose abundance gave its name to ‘poppyland’ the area of the North Norfolk coast between Cromer and Overstrand. It was more than a century ago in the 1880s that writer Clement Scott first coined the name and with his articles in the Daily Telegraph and the publication in 1886 of his book ‘Poppy Land’ helped popularise this area with tourists from London.

‘On the grass of the cliff, at the edge of the steep,
God planted a garden – a garden of sleep!
‘Neath the blue of the sky, in the green of the corn,
It is there that the regal red poppies are born!
Clement Scott

Doubtless these nineteenth century tourists arriving by steam train at Cromer and Sheringham stations would have been able to buy any number of poppy-themed souvenirs in the shops and promenade along the sandy North Norfolk cliffs where poppies grew then as they still do today.

Our affection for poppies in Norfolk remains undiminished today. When the charity PlantLife first came up with a list of County flowers that had Norfolk’s County flower as alexanders there was so much dissent that a vote was carried out and common poppy won the day so we are now the only county to share a county flower. Essex also claims the poppy as its county flower.

The poppy is a great survivor and though not as common as in the past it remains a widespread plant. Poppy seeds have the remarkable ability to remain viable in the soil for decades and in some cases for 80 years or even a century or more. This explains why when soil left unturned for years is first disturbed poppies will often germinate and flower. Flanders fields during the First World War became red with poppies where shells had cratered the ground:

‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.’
John McCrae 1915

The poppy has also been the symbol of rememberance on Armistice Day since 11 November 1921 when the Royal British Legion held its first ‘Poppy Day’. More anciently poppies were associated with the Greek goddess of fertility, Demeter and the Roman crop goddess Ceres. Not many wildflowers are so loved as to have become children’s names but both Rose and Poppy are still used in this way.

Yellow-horned poppy, photo by David North

The red corn poppy however is not the only beautiful poppy that grows wild in Norfolk. From June onwards along shingly parts of our coast the nationally scarce yellow-horned poppy grows in abundance in a few places. If you like poppies then this more localised plant is well worth a trip to enjoy. Indeed you could argue that this is our only truly native wild poppy. Many people believe that our red poppies arrived in England with our first Neolithic farmers who brought primitive strains of cereals with them, emmer and einkorn and mixed with the corn would have been seeds of red poppies. The yellow-horned poppy has probably grown in Norfolk long before the first people arrived walking from the continent across land which is now sea after the end of the last ice age. I wonder if these first hunter-gatherers marveled at the beauty of the flowers around them – certainly they would have relied on an intimate knowledge of which plants were edible and which plants could be used to treat illness. Did poppy seeds form part of their diet? I wonder.

To see yellow-horned poppies there is no better place to go than the shingle edgeland of Norfolk – the great shingle ridge that runs from Blakeney Point to Weybourne. Walk a few hundred yards east from Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s beach car park at Cley and you will find one of the best displays of yellow-horned poppy in Norfolk. They are one of our most spectacular coastal flowers. Best viewed in the morning as like their country cousin common poppies many flowers last for less than a day – the fine, translucent petals opening in the morning and sometime falling by early afternoon. They seem to glow with an inner light –shining even when the sun isn’t, their diaphanous petals having a fairly-tale like quality as if they are flowers from another time or another world. Certainly I never tire of their beauty and though I have photographed them many times never quite feel I have captured that inner light they seem to possess. The horns referred to in their name are the seed pods. Unlike common poppies with their fascinating and intricate seed capsules that work like pepper-pots shaking the tiny black ripe seeds out as they sway in the wind or are knocked by passing animals the horned poppy has an long thin pod. This is said to be the longest seed pod of any British wild flower and can be 15 to 30cms long. Like all poppies the seeds are tiny. Yellow horned poppy plants have been seen bowling along beaches in the winter winds ‘tumbleweed’ fashion and the seeds are also very resistant to sea-water. So like their farmland red relatives they are great survivors. Living on Norfolk’s shingle ‘edgeland’ and surviving the worst of winter storms, battered by salt spray and icy north-easterly gales from the Arctic each winter, baked dry in summer by desiccating wind and relentless sun, and with roots into little more than mobile shingle, flint and sands this plant still produces to my mind one of our most magical and delicate of flowers often bejeweled with dew drops and a glorious soft lemon-yellow set against silver-green and slightly downy leaves.

Red or yellow our Norfolk poppies deserve to be celebrated and protected.