What's The Problem?

Swine flu has obviously not yet closed down SWT's offices 7 miles away at Stafford Road. A recent post has drawn a comment helpfully identified as from "Anonymous". What's the problem? I'm asked. Well for those who haven't got the point I'll spell it out. Some people might love to walk in places liberally decorated with notices and directions and advice. They might love to be told exactly why a place is worth visiting. I don't. That's one problem and I would raise it even if I were the only one who felt that way. As it happens I'm not.

But let's go further than that. Blacka Moor is primarily a public recreation site. It is not a bird reservation. Projects undertaken to encourage Black Grouse etc would only succeed on this site if there were restrictions to public use. Anyone who knows anything about birds knows that. Blacka Moor's wildlife as it is now has developed and thrived alongside public use including dog walking over many generations. It is a robust compromise and those species that do not like the kind of disturbance that comes from public use like this simply go elsewhere and there are many suitable and less disturbed places pretty close by. I love birds but have no interest in the sometimes obsessive species counting that I classify alongside train spotting. We know where this could lead. Instead of a landscape which evolves naturally we get something that's increasingly engineered with specialist habitats for certain birds. What next after the Black Grouse and the Nightjar? The Black Tailed Godwit or the Red Necked Phalarope for goodness sake? It then becomes a very precious exercise in which people have to keep to certain areas and behave much more carefully. In short a Twitchers' Theme Park. That may be OK in a bird reservation. Not in a place designated as a public pleasure ground.

Management by Directive

"This land has to be managed", they said. The trouble is managers live in offices and fall in with the normal office mode of working. Send out a directive - a sheet of A4 covered with smallish print. The workforce may never read it but when they complain later on you can bring it out and show that they had been kept informed. This office-style nightmare is what we seem to have on Blacka Moor. Every so often a new sheet of A4 appears pinned to a post reminding you that you may have thought you had come here to escape from offices and managers and present day work culture to enjoy some wild unspoiled countryside where nature calls the shots but you couldn't be more wrong. The place revolves around office style directives and the taint of management is never far away. Enough to drive anyone to distraction.

The latest A4 paper straight from the managers desk to arrive pinned to the post at the car park is this one.

However it's dressed up it's an instruction. Is there no limit to the lengths these people will go to intrude on the quiet relaxed places of our world?

Making It Easier

Bilberry picking is hard work and anything that makes it easier should be worthwhile. At a price of £12.99 at Abbeydale Garden Centre it's certainly not cheap, but this fruit picking aid has a number of advantages. You don't need to do so much bending down and you can pick good quantities more quickly. A lot of unwanted stuff is collected at the same time of course but you can deal with that later at home away from the attentions of the midges.

Friends Meeting

Friends of Blacka Moor are meeting at Totley Public Library Baslow Road on Monday 13th July at 7.30. All interested and potential sympathisers welcome.

What They Eat

For the first time today I've seen some of the cattle eating birch leaves. This is interesting because the previous year they were on the moor I didn't see this once. Mostly when we've been close to them they have been eating grass which we all know is what cattle prefer. So should I eat my words on this? I think not just yet anyway. The point about the birch on Blacka is that it gets deep down among the leggy heather signalling that the stability of the heathland has gone and the site cannot be saved from succession to woodland with just a few cows. Those today were casually chewing leaves at about three feet high which will make no impression on the spread of birch. They had somehow got themselves into an area where there was hardly any grass so birch leaves were all they could find nearby. Sooner or later off they go to one of the many grassy areas where there's plenty of grass. The only way that the cows could be expected to make a significant impact on birch would be to have a small enclosure with an electric fence. Maintaining this would be time consuming. Otherwise such a huge number of the animals would be needed and that would cause serious erosion on many parts of the moor which would lose its appeal for visitors even more than now.

More natural exploiters of Blacka's vegetation were around today. These were the mistle thrushes and some related species who are enjoying their annual excursion season to harvest the bilberries. The mistle is much more inclined to communal action than the other native thrushes or the blackbird who also loves berries. In this they resemble the fieldfare that come in winter. Walking along the paths you should count the numbers rising from the low shrubs. My record is 30 in a period of less than half a minute.

Secret Delights

Blacka Blogger's obsessive love of bilberries tempts him to keep quiet about this. But even he cannot eat all the fruit available this year. There is a truly bumper crop. Yet many a casual passer by may not know that. The trick is to pull up the bracken and reveal the berries beneath. The surprise is because we do not expect good things to be growing under such a dense cover. But bracken is a latecomer to the peculiar vegetation on Blacka. While it is totally dormant in early Spring the bilberry is flowering and being pollinated so by the time the bracken wakes up and races ahead in July and August all the fruit producing work has been done.

Two years ago was an excellent year for bilberry. Last year's was a modest harvest. But this year is the best in my memory with berries even on the more exposed and sensitive parts. All you need to do is pull up the bracken shoots first. This is best done by a vertical snatch. Two minutes clearing of the fronds will give you ten minutes of happy bilberry harvesting. And remember that nutritionists claim purple fruits to be more full of vitamins and antioxidants than any other foodstuff. But who cares about that when the taste is so good?

What a Job!

Well the salary's pretty splendid but that aside why would anyone choose to be Chief Executive of Natural England? It can't be much fun having to make so many anodyne statements while trying to balance irreconcilable aims. Well Dr Helen Phillips whose Head Office is in Sheffield has a piece in the Guardian today responding to the editorial previously alluded to here. So many of the issues about people going into the countryside are illustrated on Blacka Moor, that Blacka Blogger has written asking her to come along and be shown round. It could be very interesting.

See here for the report published yesterday. Thanks to Mark.