Underground, Overground (3)

.....wombling free.

The dreary turd-infested grassland of the sheep pasture has one redeeming feature best seen in an extended mild autumn such as this year’s. It becomes home to various fungi including examples of waxcaps over which mycologists have been known to get excited. Not that they are all edible, though some are. The lengthy dry spell in early autumn was not so productive on the grassland but more recently fungi have been seen in abundance. The more colourful waxcaps themselves were better last year and it could be they prefer the wet weather to arrive earlier. In the woods fungi generally were doing well some weeks ago but now the damp and mild November days have brought a flush of fungi in both woods and grassland, not always the best examples and specimens but plenty of them. There are some waxcaps ...



...and a fine ring was found on the lower slopes. Horse mushrooms are not often found as late as this ...



... but some collected yesterday made for a fine breakfast. One yellow mould type fungus is plentiful.



I've seen this before and spent much time looking it up without success. It wraps itself around blades of grass; I imagine there's a Latin name that would be forgotten when the season comes round again next year.

But the most common of all fungi on this sheep dominated land are those that the keen fungi lovers care little about.

They are the less favoured dung mushrooms. They are everywhere as is their host the dung itself which adds nothing to the appeal of the site.



This of course raises the issue of management again. Apologists for conservation grazing will claim that you must have sheep grazing or you wouldn't have the mushrooms. I've questioned this before. Sheep destroy the other potential appeal of the land - they eat all the wild flowers before they get to bloom. See the pictures from last year. I fully accept that stopping all management for good would eventually lead to many changes including more trees and less short grass. It would also lead to many other attractions and benefits - not all of them easily predictable. There are other ways to keep the waxcaps than having continuous sheep grazing every month of the year and some of them would enable a more interesting and natural vegetation to develop which would have to be an improvement on what we have now. A little focused management in certain defined parts of the site done quickly at a chosen time of year - say early September - and preferably by hand and by the keen fungi enthusiasts themselves would not have the same devastating effect on the landscape produced by the present policy of default sheep crop-and-crap management. It also would have another benefit: it would lead to a more honest association between modern man and the man-made landscapes. If certain humans want to conserve those attractive aspects of artificial landscapes then they should show their enthusiasm directly using their own labour - not by handing responsibility over to a clumsy inefficient and unfocused farm subsidy bureaucracy that brings all sorts of negative impacts both on the land and generally on the national life.



An edition of BBC Radio 4’s Open Country programme this week revealed that some of the waxcaps were nowhere near as scarce as had been thought. Once it had been put about that the Ballerina waxcap was rare and endangered lots of people went out and found them happily growing. That says something about the biodiversity and ‘saving species’ agenda – one that usually results in calls for more management. The over use of fertilisers is, of course, one feature of management shown to harm these mushrooms. It was also interesting to learn that the nutrition in the soil is not necessarily the key factor for them and that may be an association with the roots of grass.

Underground, Overground (2)

.....wombling free.



The poor old mole gets a bad name for his impact on ornamental gardens. He even gives his name to certain treacherous villains including one in a recently released film.( I doubt it’s as good as the version with Alec Guiness. )

Moles share with fungi the fact that they live under the ground and yet proclaim their presence on the surface in a unique and identifiable way. It would be stretching things though to compare a molehill with a fruiting body such as a mushroom. The mole must be one of the commonest mammals on Blacka Moor where nobody can accuse it of being a pest; molehills appearing on the wasteland created by sheep are a welcome point of wildlife interest. But I wonder if any wildlife enthusiast has ever done a population survey. Or even whether there exists a standard technique for surveying or estimating mole populations.

Underground, Overground (1)

....wombling free


...At some time unannounced and not be announced the contractors will arrive to begin the task of dismantling and removing the power line. I’ve no detail about how this will be done. Obviously the cable will go first and the reason for keeping quiet about the operation is to prevent targeting by metal thieves: once it’s known that the power has been switched off and is going through the undergrounded route along Hathersage Road it will be on its way to the scrap yards. In common with countrywide trends Sheffield has experienced a big increase in metal thefts in recent times.



It’s likely that the removal will cause considerable disruption to the site if we're to go by experience of the contractors from the same source removing trees. Vehicles may disgorge armoured operators with heavy equipment helmeted and clad in high visibility wear. Will they take each whole pole out of the ground or saw it off at ground level? Are they incapable of working at a distance from their vehicles – a characteristic of contractors everywhere these days? There would be more than irony if in the interests of beautifying the landscape it was seen to be necessary to create devastation with heavy vehicles..

Friends, Bikers, Countryside.....

……………………(Lend me your, er, gears?....ouch!)

The quiet narrow paths of Blacka and similar local places are getting more attention from minority groups of mountain bikers who are not content with keeping to bridleways. Many of these paths are of soft peaty structure and the ruts caused by bikes eventually degrade them leading to progressive widening.



The result can be seen all over the area. The effect of biking is apparent at some points on bridleways where mountain biking is of course permitted. The spread of the problem to ordinary footpaths and public rights of way should be stopped. Mountain biking is growing and the numbers of renegade "I'm riding where I want to" characters is increasing in proportion. In time this will lead to more examples of the appalling mess we’ve seen on some bridleways such as the Devil's Elbow route.

There's no problem with those who keep to bridleways and ride within the bounds of the track as is this biker below.



On Blacka alone there are bridleway routes where biking is permitted amounting to more than 5 kilometres and within a very short distance and easily linked to there is more than double that. Unfortunately a minority have developed an attitude akin to warped ideology similar to that of the off-roading 4X4 drivers whose aim is to demonstrate they have an inalienable human right to go wherever they want (and take whatever machine they want with them!). As they see it the more they do it the more they establish their 'right' to do it. And it's true that it gets harder to deal with habitual activities than those that are occasional. Which is why things need to be dealt with early and nipped in the bud. In this case that’s not happening and there’s a reason.


The trouble here is that the land is under the control of Sheffield Wildlife Trust who have no interest whatsoever in doing anything to stop this and are quite relaxed about the impact on the paths and walkers. This is not news of course because readers of this blog will know that Sheffield Wildlife Trust, more an agency than anything else, is hard to shift from their position unless it’s shown to be in their own interest. The problem has been raised at RAG meetings for several years and nothing has been done, not even a single notice being put up to remind bikers where they can and cannot go. Two years ago Sheffield Wildlife Trust came under serious pressure to stop recreational downhillers who had started a route on the east side of Blacka. That needed a concerted effort by local people to get action and eventually something was done. Another similar route elsewhere remains and has not been stopped yet. These ‘downhill’ routes are of a different order to the problem on the meandering narrow paths. But the paths will eventually become so wide and unpleasant to walk on that downhill biking routes is all they’re fit for. That is when SWT will come up with some action which will amount to what we’ve seen with them elsewhere: they will take several years getting round to it even after it’s got to be intolerable and then they will look round for grants from any provider such as the Forestry Commission leading to the dumping of sandy gritstone on the paths. This will look unsightly.



The character of the paths as it has been for many generations will be gone for good and there will still be cycling on walkers routes.

One of the major reasons that SWT don’t like acting on this is because they identify themselves as the bikers’ friends. SWT need friends and supporters and don’t find them in Friends of Blacka Moor so set out to find them elsewhere. Doubtless they would have liked to be on good terms with local users of Blacka who were already in situ but having alienated many of them they have cast wider for support. You could say that promoting themselves and getting supporters and members is their core business. It matters a lot to them to be able to show they have support and this usually means it’s an essential if you want to apply for grants these days. After Icarus in 2006 this was one of their key targets – I remember telling them this during the consultation. “You should reconnect with the community” I said, trying to be helpful after they had alienated people; that was then built into the key recommendations that came out of the Icarus consultation. They took this message away and reinterpreted it not as listening to the community but as getting their message across – telling local people that they, SWT, know best. We should have predicted it but were hardly surprised. Another part of the strategy was to add to their supporters by getting them from elsewhere, preferably those who knew nothing of their performance to date. Hence they spent a lot of time approaching potential volunteers in various workplaces about the city encouraging these people who had never been to Blacka Moor to come along and ‘have fun’ cutting down bracken or birch on a jolly morning complete with hot drinks provided by their managers who have special responsibility for volunteering. A jolly social thing really and a hope that some at least would come again and become a regular supporter and act as a counter to play off against the determined opposition of those who knew what they had been doing before. They probably have organization targets for volunteers and at a recent RAG meeting were showing satisfaction, claiming large numbers. Questioned about this they admitted a lot of them were from the new intake at university who of course did not know what they were coming into.

One source of local support they targeted was the growing mountain bike community in Sheffield. This was helped by the fact that one or two of their staff were already keen bikers. It was an advantage that the bikers, like SWT themselves, incur quite a lot of opposition especially from walkers and walkers groups. The message was then that ‘We, SWT are a mountain biking friendly outfit. We want to see more mountain biking and we’ll help you.’ That’s OK of course if they’re encouraging responsible biking and they would say they are. But the distinctions are blurred and SWT are not the most subtle of people. They fear that any serious attempt to restrict even a small minority of bikers would impair their relations with bikers groups generally. Since acquiring Greno Woods in the north of Sheffield they have been wooing MTBers by developing a network of downhill biking routes there, not something one would think was the normal job of a wildlife trust but we live in strange times.

All in all there seems little likelihood that SWT will tackle the bikes on paths issue. My guess would be that the call for action at the last RAG meeting will lead to nothing being done before the next one (not until March). An artful dodge will then be set up by getting lots of MTBers to attend, a trick they have used before. That will then lead to the kind of semi-orchestrated confusion that managers use to justify doing nothing because "there are many different views".

Desert Life

It's appropriate that Bedouin tents should appear across the desert of Totley Moor whose conservation managed monoculture is about as alien a prospect as you could find in a temperate country.

I imagine the land manager meddlers are harvesting seed and brash and baling it to aid a restoration project on some other unfortunate moor (Kinder?)where similar land management exploitation has contributed to erosion - just what's happening on Blacka now in fact.

Payback

In time even the unpopular bracken settles its account.

The Beauty and the Squalor

The contrast is striking. They are out there on the natural land rarely going on the paths. Meanwhile the paths are wretchedly strewn with the waste of cattle, who always prefer the paths, leaving their mark first by weight and size of hooves eroding the soft peat, then putting the finishing touches in the way they know best.












What else can you expect from animals that have been specially bred to do just that? They are machines designed by man to convert free growing plants into huge piles of excrement and put on weight as a by-product in the form of meat for the mass market. The two go together. When you tuck into steak think for a bit of the other.

Then spare a bit more time to consider that this demonstrates the respect for land and nature that is promoted through DEFRA's and "Natural" England's approach to managing our countryside. Nowhere must be free from farm management, nowhere must be there for nature alone. And if anyone dares to disagree tempt them with farm subsidies whatever the cost to the EU budget (40% seeing as you asked) and whatever the cost to natural landscapes.

See below a picture of land in Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition.
Those who knew this land from the days before it started to attract subsidies find that very interesting.