Winter at Cleaver Heath

Winter arrives

Winter in all its forms has visited Cleaver – gales, downpours, fogs, sharp frosts, hail and yes, real snow just before Christmas.

The number of regular visitors to the reserve has kept up. On the clear days, the views have been spectacular and enjoyed by those lucky enough to know about the Reserve. Even when the weather is dodgy the doggies still need to be walked so a constant footfall and ‘pawfall ‘ has been maintained. This means that the main path has suffered as it becomes increasingly waterlogged and muddy. This makes our plan to protect it with suitable stone a high priority - more on this below.

Monthly work parties

Birch control (yes, birch not birth) on the heathland panels has been a high priority.

As promised in the Autumn Newsletter, we have continued to apply immediate herbicide stump treatment whenever birch or European gorse is cut in an unwanted area. Occasionally, and where possible, we have used the Tree Popper technique to pull the whole (single stem) sapling out together with its root system. This latter method guarantees no regrowth. We will find out next year how successful the herbicide (glyphosate) treatment is. The photograph shows (the bottoms at least of) experienced volunteers carrying out the delicate task of cutting birch and gorse otherwise threatening to crowd out the heather. No machine has yet been invented which can carry out this task.

The volunteers have also had the chance to do other work. In the January session we installed 10 ‘Woodcrete’ nest boxes.

Opening the boxes can be quite fiddly. The temperature was 2 degrees and the fingers were not cooperating. The net result was very satisfying however. We took some care over the sighting, height and orientation. We took GPS coordinates so we can find them all again! Actually they are positioned so they are not too obvious from the paths but can be checked easily if you know where to look.

We had also obtained a Tawny Owl box from the Cheshire Wildlife Natural Futures grant. We put this up some time ago as these birds start to locate nesting sites quite early. We had been hearing them calling in November.

Recent sightings

The resident woodland birds such as Blue, Great and Long-tailed Tits, Bullfinches, Dunnocks, Blackbirds and so on have been busy surviving what winter has thrown at them. Being in a semi-rural residential area, these birds take advantage of garden feeders. Even ‘summer’ warblers such as Blackcap hang around these days in the UK because of garden feeding. Apparently, many of these winter visitors were bred in southern Germany. More traditional winter visitors from the north have been through the reserve. Fieldfare and Redwing have been quite common in the Oldfield Farm fields and trees.

The sun in this picture has helpfully picked out the red wing on the Red Wing as well as the yellow eye stripe. There have been many skeins of Pink-footed Geese passing over the reserve on their way to and from the Dee Estuary marshes. What a melodious sound. I much prefer it to the cackle of Greylag geese and the two-tone horn of Canada Geese. This January I was excited to spot a ‘new species’ for the reserve – a pair of Common Snipe. These are indeed very common down on the estuary but brought my Cleaver Heath Species list from 44 to 45. It was high tide on the Dee and a fierce gale blowing, so presumably they were finding refuge in the heather and grassy area. I have recently inadvertently flushed a Woodcock in the lower reserve next to the woodland fringe. These look a bit like Snipe in general shape with long bills. Looking for mammals, I recently left out a camera trap which has picked up only night-time foxes.

While cutting and treating regrowth on heathland path edging we came across, and left, this Oak multi-stem system sporting a huge number of Oak Galls. These result from Gall Wasp larvae deposited on the Oak.

Soil sampling

The Lead Adviser for Natural England North West has followed her Autumn Visit with another to take soil samples so she could give us options on further heathland regeneration in the reserve.

These pictures show core samples from the woodland edge of the lower reserve (left) and, for reference, from the upper heather panel (right). Note how shallow the soil is on the protected heather panel and how much deeper it is on the lower sample where the vegetation has accumulated over the years following scrub and then woodland development. However, you can still see the same structure in each with the bottom of the sample showing the same (grey) mineral soil topped with (brown) enriched soil. The chemical analysis of the samples shows that the right acidity and other chemical attributes are all still there throughout the reserve allowing us to contemplate further heathland regeneration.

There has been both good news and bad news over the last few months. You want the bad news first?

Garden waste dumping

There have a couple of minor incidents of garden waste dumping by residents. In one case I was able to ‘have a word’ with the Oldfield Road resident who had been caught red-handed by another local resident. In December we had a much more serious dumping incident where a neighbour had paid a considerable amount of cash to a tree services company based in the Chester area. This was to deal with heavily overgrown scrub and small trees in his garden on Oldfield Road. The company drove off having dumped what looks like the entire lot of cuttings across the road in the reserve. The Natural England Enforcement Officer is leading the follow-up this up. We have all the contact details and evidence.

Good news

Cheshire Wildlife Trust has been successful in wining first prize (£4000) in the September/October Bags of Help scheme run by Tesco. So, many thanks to all you Tesco Shoppers for putting your blue tokens in the correct bin! The Heswall main store showed us having an impressive lead over the competition. We had bid for funds to improve the signage/interpretation, and access (including the Northern ‘bent railing’ one), and special stone to stabilise the main path through the heather. This gets very wet and tempts the casual visitor to take to the heather and grass so as to avoid the mud.

Alan Irving, January 2018