A natural history of Norfolk in 100 species: Number 1

David North, Head of People and Wildlife

 This is my personal selection of the 100 species that ‘make Norfolk’ Your list might be different of course. However I guarantee that should you take up my challenge of finding these 100 species then you will end up exploring many of Norfolk’s varied landscapes, you will have visited some of Norfolk’s most special nature reserves and have discovered for yourself a huge amount about the range of wildlife habitats that make wild Norfolk simply the best county in England for wildlife. Yes, I know I’m biased, but Norfolk, with the Brecks, Broads, Fens and its varied coastline, is home to some very special wildlife. You might also end up visiting some quite odd places, from museums to city centres and from farms to forestry plantations if you do decide to track my hundred down. Follow my 100, whether virtually through these weekly posts, or by taking up the quest to track them down in the wild. Either way will hopefully take you on a fascinating journey exploring how these 100 species link in all kinds of strange ways to Norfolk’s past, its present, its places and the fascinating ways people and wildlife together have created its present.

Let us know how you get on. I would welcome your own local stories, folklore, unusual Norfolk facts or any unusual experiences of these 100 species. Did any of these species change your life? 

Many of the species on my 100 are extremely common. Indeed common species are often more important in creating our landscapes than the rarer ones. So no apologies that number 1 on my list won’t pose you too many problems to find – it’s certainly big enough, been around long enough and is common enough to be familiar. But did you know?

Species 1

English Oak (Pendunculate Oak) Quercus robur

Oak tree, David North

‘Of all the trees that grow so fair,

Old England to adorn.

Greater are none beneath the sun

Than oak, and ash and thorn.

(Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill)

Trees are our past and our future. 

I’ve no idea how many oaks there are in Norfolk but it’s said there are 200 million oaks in the UK. In the past we might have been rocked as babies in cradles made from oak and on our deaths had our bodies buried in oak coffins. While that may no longer be true there are still plenty of people in Norfolk who eat sitting at an oak table, and live in houses held together with oak beams. Oak is one of our commonest trees and in a recent study Gerry Barnes and Tom Williamson found that English oak was not only the commonest deciduous tree in Norfolk’s woodlands it was also found in more than 50% of Norfolk’s hedges.

The links between this tree species and people go back to the dawn of time. Some of the flint hand axes mined at Grimes Graves were doubtless used to fell oaks to clear land for farming and for timber for building huts. Flint hand-axes have been shown to be surprisingly effective at felling small oak trees. 

The Bronze Age timber circle found on the tidal sands at NWT Holme Dunes was constructed of oak posts with a central upturned large oak stump. Amazingly, through dendrochronology, which uses the annular rings of trees to date timber, the central stump of Sea Henge has been dated to the year: it was felled in 2049BC.

What would Norfolk look like today without Norwich Cathedral, great timber barns like Waxham, stately houses like Blickling, Felbrigg and Holkham? But of course none of these would exist without huge quantities of oak. Oak timber was crucial in the past for house building, firewood, iron working, glass making, blacksmithing, lime kilns, ship building, salt production, leather tanning, barrel making .... The list goes on. From the Romans onwards early industry demanded huge quantities of wood for brick making and metal smelting, and the best available wood was oak. A single ship, HMS Victory, of our great Norfolk Admiral, Lord Nelson, used 6,000 trees in its construction of which 90% were oak. 

At the time of the Norman Conquest the value of woods was measured in pannage for pigs – the number of pigs that the wood’s acorn crop would support. Woods were managed deliberately to favour the valuable oak. The timber ( for building ) would be valued and sold separately from the wood ( for firewood or uses such as tool handles and hurdles). Ancient woodlands were managed by coppice (rotational cutting of trees) for wood at the same time allowing other trees to grow tall and straight ( as standards ). You can still see this system of woodland management practised at NWT Foxley Wood, Norfolk‘s largest remaining ancient wood, which has been woodland for at least a 1,000 years and perhaps far, far longer. Norfolk’s great oak woodlands would have supported lost industries like charcoal burning. And at NWT Foxley Wood stripping the bark of oaks to supply the leather tanning industry in Norwich was one major use.

Acorns, David North

It’s not surprising that the oak is our national tree, that acorns and oak leaves have appeared on £1 coins in recent times, and that we still venerate our ancient veteran oaks in the landscape, even giving some of them names. Ancient Norfolk oaks include the King and Queen oaks at Fairhaven, said to be 900 years old, and Kett’s oak near Hethersett where rebels gathered before marching on Norwich in July 1549. There is even a Hitler oak in the Broads. This was given to Chris Boardman by Adolf Hitler who, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, presented all the medal winners with small oak saplings. The maturing oak now grows behind How Hill house.

The Druids are said to have worshipped in sacred groves of oaks and to have cut mistletoe with golden sickles in their ceremonies. Do we still venerate the oak? Well its said that every Cathedral in England has a carved image of oak leaves and acorns. In Norwich Cathedral it won’t take you long to find a green man peering mischievously from his garland of oak leaves. 

There are many well known saying about the oak. ‘Three centuries growing, three centuries standing and three centuries dying’ is one that attests to the longevity of this tree. Some oaks must be among the longest living inhabitants of Norfolk.

In both wildlife and landscape terms even today the oak is of prime importance. Oaks are said to support more than 500 species of invertebrates, more than any other native tree. A veteran oak is an ecosystem in its own right, its cracks, crannies and crevices providing homes for bats, owls, woodpeckers, fungi, lichens and countless small insects. Its acorns will support squirrels, once red now grey, badgers, mice, voles and of course jays, nature’s way of transporting acorns to distant places where the jay conveniently buries them!

In a recent survey by Norfolk County Council all the living trees in Norfolk thought to predate AD1450 were oaks. The largest oak having a girth of 9.7 metres. If you wish to see veteran oaks then visit NWT Thursford Wood. There are many wonderful, ancient oak pollards there.

In the Norfolk landscape oaks still dominate, both as roadside trees, sometimes stag-headed, and often ivy covered, and in woodland where they frequently form the largest part of the canopy.

For the future, long may Norfolk oaks continue to lock away carbon from the atmosphere in their timber, moderating our human folly in changing the climate. Oaks give us shade, shelter us from winter winds, clean our air, release oxygen from their leaves in spring and summer and pump water into the atmosphere freshening it. They provide branches for birds to sing on and for children to climb. Long live the oak!

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every full grown tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

(Martin Luther)

Building in the Brecks

By Paul Waterhouse,  Assistant Field Officer Breckland

Fixing fences and hanging gates are fairly common tasks for most wardens, however last year the Brecks reserve team have created some slightly more challenging constructions.

Firstly, a new hay barn had to be built at NWT East WrethamHeath to store valuable winter feed for NWT’s Flying Flock. The barn itself was kindly designed by NWT volunteer William Mason. The main structure of the barn was built using recycled telegraph pole that the Trust had been donated. It will hold several hundred bails of hay and greatly reduce the Flock’s mileage across the county collecting hay as well as saving them precious time. 

We have also finished building a cattle corral at Cranberry Rough for the resident highland cattle there. It is a fairly complicated design with a number of gates closing after each other allowing you to move the cattle around the system while the handler remains safely behind a gate. The corral is essential for carrying out general husbandry of the cattle such as worming and health checks.

NWT Honeypot Wood: Ash Dieback

Steve Collin, Senior Reserves Officer for Woods and Heaths

Walking through the coppice of Honeypot Wood at the end of last year, I found myself marvelling, yet again, at the curious looking Ash stools of this ancient woodland. Coppicing, the tradition of cutting the trees down every few years, allowing them to sprout new shoots and grow again, has over time, produced strange twisted stumps or “stools” that for some reason are extra tall in this wood. As to their unusual height, I’ve heard theories of keeping new growth above flooded ground or out of the reach of hungry rabbits but a woodman that didn’t want to bend his bad back seems more likely an explanation to me. These days we still coppice but not for harvesting materials, as in the past, but to benefit the wildlife that has come to rely on the cycle of light and shade and on the bushy habitat that it produces.

Sadly I found what I was looking for, withered black leaves and dead stems with dark stained lesions on the bark. Another one of our woods has Ash Dieback.

New dots on the Chalara fraxinea  map seem to be appearing daily, but this is more likely to be because we are looking for it rather than the rapid spread of this destructive fungus. I gathered samples and double bag them, they are destined for the laboratory for conformation by DNA testing.

I wonder what effect the disease will have on this woodland. How many trees will be infected and how many of these will be killed? What of the wildlife that relies on the Ash trees, the birds, the invertebrates and fungi? Will the lichens and moss, clinging to the branches, survive on the more acidic bark of other trees like Oak? Will less Ash allow a more diverse woodland under storey to develop? An increase in dead wood will certainly bring benefits to wildlife.

There are so many confusing and conflicting accounts of what damage has been done to the population of Ash trees on the continent it is difficult to know what it means for our woodlands.

Many are saying that the hope for the future will rely on finding strains of Ash that show some resistance to Chalara and allowing these to propagate their genes. If these genes do exist surely they will be found in ancient woodlands like this one.

Nature frequently adapts and overcomes, the old earth works and cracked concrete are  reminders of how much change this woodland has seen in its long history. The RAF stored bombs here during the second world war, and the ability of nature to claim back what was destroyed, is astonishing.

As I scrubbed any risk of contamination off my boots I thought back to all the cases of Chalara I’ve seen in our woods since first spotting it way back in mid-September. I am not surprised to find Chalara in Honeypot Wood but I am surprised at how little of it I’ve found. Is this just because the infection is only in the very early stages or dare I hope I am witnessing some level of resistance? Maybe things will be clearer in 2013. Watch this space!

SC

Natural Connections: understanding a living landscape

What don’t we see when we look at a landscape? 

Looking at a landscape for the first time is a bit like seeing a stranger – you see their appearance, their body, but until you get to know them you don’t see their personality – or know anything about what makes them tick.  Generally when we look at landscapes we see a view, or, if it’s somewhere we know well, we see places. Places which may have special meanings to us:  a personal history that colours our view.  As with people there are places we fall in love with, places we seek out when we feel sad and need cheering and places where we walk which give us perspective and literally can shape our views. Nature and wild places can be healing for both mind and body and if also for spirit too.

To understand a living landscape we need to see beneath the surface; to look just a bit deeper, and certainly working in nature conservation to try and heal a living landscape we need to really love that landscape, study it before we act and come to know process as well as place. To illustrate this concept another way, imagine if you had to go hospital for an operation, would you want your surgeon just to know about your anatomy? Or would you like a doctor with some understanding of your physiology, the processes, like blood flow and breathing, that keep you alive?

Well it’s just the same with living landscapes. As well as the anatomy of place they also have their physiology. We don’t easily see the flows of energy and materials that connect place to place, and landscape to landscape, but it is these flows that deliver the ecosystem services we rely on.  And it is through understanding these flows, these natural connections, that we can like the doctor, assess the health of a landscape. It is these flows that make a Living Landscape.

When we look at landscapes in this way it’s a revelation – the rain that falls on our nature reserves, or indeed your garden, may  perhaps only days before have been water from the Atlantic ocean, evaporated by sunshine half a world away, brought here to this Norfolk landscape in clouds carried on winds the swirl across ocean and continent. The rain falling here today, may, depending on the local soils and geology, seep down into the slow time of deep underground aquifers, remaining underground for decades or centuries, or be carried by stream and river to the distant sea in a matter of days or weeks. The hidden flows of nitrate, phosphate and carbon through a landscape determine the health of its ecology and ultimately the health of our planet. Flows of carbon and oxygen move between living creatures and the atmosphere and the balance of these flows determines our climate.  Human impact on a landscape always changes the ways energy and materials flow. For example the way rainfall flows off a ploughed field is totally different to the way it moves through a grassland, let alone a natural wetland. The impact of flows of nutrients from fertilizers used on fields many miles away will affect the ecology of habitats lower down a river catchment. The sulphur dioxide from power stations and industry in continental Europe bring subtle but significant changes to our landscapes here in Norfolk. 

Habitats and landscapes that appear isolated and fragmented in terms of their anatomy are still intimately part of an amazing and awe-inspiring network of natural connections.  The warblers and nightjars that sing on our heathlands, or the swallows that swoop over broad and fen, link our Norfolk landscapes to very different ones in sub-Saharan Africa.  The geese that fly in skeins across our winter skies connect Norfolk to their Russian and Icelandic breeding grounds. Events and actions in one place have surprising and sometimes unpredictable consequences elsewhere. As John Muir so eloquently put it, whenever you examine any one thing in nature you find it hitched to the rest of the universe! The challenge in understanding landscapes, measuring ecosystem services, or evaluating natural capital in landscapes, is one of understanding the physiology of landscape. When as conservationists we want to create A Living Landscape then our challenge is to understand the importance of what we don’t see in landscapes, rather than be beguiled by their seductive anatomies and see only the beauty of place. We need to become landscape physiologists, to reconnect the natural flows of energy and materials through our landscapes. Fully functioning ecosystems, or to put it another way, healthy living landscapes, are ones in which both energy and material flow across, through and between habitats and landscapes to deliver the ecosystem services that ultimately we depend upon. Nature conservation on a landscape scale is ultimately about restoring and delivering our own life-support systems as well as protecting the amazing wildlife these Norfolk landscapes support.

David North, Head of People and Wildlife.