Planners are out of control in the Cairngorms National Park! Eight-hundred houses on the outskirts of Aviemore - no problem, but try to get plans passed for a single house, for a family working and living in the local community and it can take you nine months to jump through all the hoops. On Abernethy we carry out deer control to keep red and roe deer numbers low so that tree seedlings get a chance to grow. The reserve has a deer larder for preparing the deer carcases for the game dealer but, with new legislation coming into play this year, the deer larder needed upgrading so that it remained legal (carcases have to be chilled within a few hours of the deer coming off the hill for instance). It took four months for the lady in charge of planning within the park to decide whether upgrading the existing soak-away would damage tree roots! A work colleague will have to pay out several extra thousand pounds to have his electricity cable laid to his house renovation so that he avoids crossing a small burn because of the "salmon interest". The burn in question is no more than two foot wide, the person involved is a mad-keen fisherman and is responsible for counting the spawning salmon and sea trout each November in the River Nethy and wouldn't do anything to harm them. In fact the temporary disturbance to the stream bed could even benefit spawning fish by providing a wee patch of gravel as a spawning site! Whatever, the next spate would alter the bed of the burn so much that you would ne
ver be able to tell a track had crossed it. Rule are rules!Would the park planners be able to save an ancient Scots pine tree close to a new house site in Tulloch? If chalet guests have been to the black grouse lek at Tulloch they are probably familiar with it - or should I say were familiar with it. In their wisdom, the planners stipulated that the house entrance, onto a minor, single track road, would have to have clear vision for seventy (yes 70) metres in both directions. The old pine tree would have to go, a landmark and a tree with one-hundred and twenty years of history would be felled so that folk living in the new house for a few weeks each year, could have clear sight-lines when driving onto the road! Madness, but then, rules are rules! Whew, glad I got that one off my chest!
A few weeks ago I showed a picture of a group of puff-balls growing by a road verge, all fresh
and gleaming white (left). At this stage it is possible to eat some of the edible puff-balls because when they are young, they are solid lumps of mushroom, and are very similar to field mushrooms when cooked. Let a few weeks pass though, and they are hell bent on reproduction. The outer 'skin' turns brown and the inner part of the puff-ball turns to 'dust' - millions of tiny spores, ready to disperse to be the new puff-balls of next year. However, they are very
different to the normal umbrella shaped mushrooms which just allow their spores to fall from the gills underneath their umbrella caps. Puff-balls, as their name implies, need a little help. As the puff-ball matures a small 'spout' starts to develop centrally, on the top of the 'ball'. The picture right, shows the same group of puff-balls as pictured above but exactly a month later. At this stage they are fully mature and the spores are keen to get out and disperse. A windy day might dislodge a few spores but what the fungus needs is a heavy rain shower, the impact of the rain droplets on the 'ball' providing the right sort of impact to allow the 
spores to 'puff' out. The same thing would happen if a bird or animal or human walked on the 'balls', so next time you see one, give it a gentle prod and watch the spores shoot out of the tiny hole. Some very good, high speed photography pictures have been taken of the spores puffing out, no doubt set up in a studio. I didn't quite have the right facilities but I did set up my camera and tripod on the puff-balls and, from a little height above them I dropped a tiny stone and the picture above tries to show what happened!What an effort! Who would have thought all those weeks ago when South Africa thumped England in the first rugby world cup match that England would get to the final. Amazingly, as they progressed match by match it began to look like they might be the first team to retain the world cup. It didn't quite work out but a great effort and thanks for keeping a UK interest in the competition right through to the end. Poor Lewis, not sure how McLaren managed to get tyres wrong one week and refueling the next, but it was entertaining until the end. I must just nip off and check how Blackburn are getting on in their match with Spurs. A 2-1 win!
It's been a week of collisions - of the bird kind that is. Coming back from the village shop
yesterday I noticed something lying inside the bus-stop. As I was on the football pitch side of the bus-stop I had to re-trace my steps, back through the wee gate to get back onto the road and to the inside of the bus-stop. Inside was a freshly dead female sparrowhawk. She had crossed the road and, thinking she could just fly through the bus-stop had come to a crashing halt as she hit the back window. A sad end but her body will go off to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology at Monks Wood so that she can be checked for levels of pesticide. CEH continue to check a sample of birds of prey each year just to keep abreast of what the background level of toxic chemicals is, and checking birds that are at the top of the food chain is a simple way of doing it. For general information about Monks Wood go to: http://www.cambridgebiologists.org/inst/monkswood.htmThe other collisions involved woodland grouse and forest fences, something that I have had a long association with and something a lot of land managers denied was happening. To paint the true picture just let me re-wind a little and take you back to the 1970s. At that time red deer populations were at an all time high and rising, native Scots pinewoods were still being felled and a lot of work had gone into visiting the scattered remnants of the old Caledonian pinewood and conservation organisations were pushing to do something to protect them. Deer, young trees, the easiest solution was to fence off the remnants and, in areas were native pinewoods were still being felled, well, fence them off as well until the planted trees or natural seedlings had grown tall enough to be out of deer browsing height. Through the 1970s an
d 80s the capercaillie and black grouse populations in Scotland (and black grouse throughout the UK) were falling and research was starting into the reasons for the decline with Drs Robert Moss and Nick Picozzi from CEH Banchory, leading the way. Within that period 20-30,000 metres of deer height fencing was installed (not by RSPB) in Abernethy Forest alone for tree protection purposes. The bombshell fell in 1990. The capercaillie population was at an all time low and a series of wet summers was causing high chick mortality so little natural recruitment into the population was taking place. 
Capercaillie chicks and adults that had been fitted with radios for tracking purposes, were found dead having flown into deer fences! The researchers suggested that so many birds were flying into fences that in a wet summer, there would be no recruitment into the population. See: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2656.2001.00473.x . By 1990, RSPB had bought two major chunks of Abernethy bringing most of the forest into conservation ownership. The last purchase had brought with it a fenced plantation area. The fence was walked each month for ten months and twenty-four capercaillie or black grouse collisions were recorded. The fence was removed immediately. At the same time I started walking fences, at weekends, on two nearby estates but without asking the estate owners permission and marking collision locations with numbered tags (above). By the mid-1990s some of the worst known fences were marked using orange barrier netting, this was a temporary measure with a 'need to do something' objective. However, the sun soon made the plastic brittle and the wind soon tore it from the fence so a longer lasting 
solution was needed. Wooden markers might work? In 1997 the Forestry Commission gave RSPB a grant to trial six different methods of wooden markers that I had considered practical, on a boundary fence that couldn't be taken down. The most expensive was a completely wooden deer fence, the cheapest adding one inch by three foot wooden 'droppers' to the top half of the fence. The number of woodland grouse collisions was reduced dramatically but, amazingly, some capercaillie and black grouse still collided with the fence! Eventually, by 1999/2000 a pre-formed, chestnut paling fence, added to the top half of the fence became the accepted method (above), and land owners were given grants to install this addition to their f
ences. In the last couple of years orange barrier netting has re-appeared, a lot more UV brittle resistant, and high enough to cover two-thirds of the deer fence. Again, despite it's obvious visibility, bird are still colliding with it, sometimes thinking that they can fly underneath the netting as this picture from a colleague shows. This is not a staged photograph and yes, the bird has hit the fence with such force that the wires have been badly bent and the bird was de-decapitated. The best system is no fence at all and encouragement to remove fences as soon as practicably possible from around young woodlands. The EU funded Capercaillie Life Project also supported this work helping to fund removal of miles of redundant fencing and paying for marking those that couldn't. http://www.capercaillie-life.info/htm/capercaillie_bap_group.php.The marked fence I walked this week had evidence of two capercaillie collisions on it, a male and a female. And my weekend fence walking? Having presented my evidence to one estate manager (anger/embarrassment) the fence was removed. I passed on what I was finding to the Forestry Commission (who usually funded the fencing costs) and this I feel, hastened the marking programme. The worst fences I encountered though marked, are still in place and still killing woodland grouse.
Whilst in Lancashire we just
had to go to the heart of black pudding production and we spent half a day at Bury Market.It really still is L. S. Lowry country with people dashing about hither and thither, smoking fags, drinking and eating, but mostly just people everywhere.
Just a couple of pictures to try and show what I mean. And yes, we did have a black pudding between us. Delicious.
We also spent a few half days out wandering the Ribble Valley, collecting sloes for sloe gin at Christmas, and crab apples for making apple jelly. Downham is a real gem of a village and is in the shadow of Lancashires 'nearly' mountain - Pendle Hill. Try the virtual tour at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/lancashire/virtual_tours/downham/downhamtour01.htm. Mark
Robinson writes: "Lord Clitheroe owns the village, and is able to exert his control over developments that may ruin the chocolate-box appearance. The houses and cottages are stone-built, and there are no road markings on the streets, no overhead cables, and no TV arials or satellite dishes to spoil the view. The village has been used as a location for many films, the most famous being 'Whistle Down the Wind' starring Alan Bates and Hayley Mills, also, according to adamant locals, the surrounding area was the inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings saga. The BBC chose it to film the series 'Born and Bred' It is also associated with Old Mother Demdike, Alice Nutter and other infamous Lancashire witches".With the leaves falling from the trees and the days getting shorter (bike lights needed last week) it has been good to catch up with birds local to Firwood. A few greylag geese have started roosting at Loch Garten and generally there are now a few hundred in the fields round about. A walk round the village, Mondhuie Wood and along a bit of the Speyside Way last weekend produced 38 species of birds, including the first brambling of the autumn, a high count of 12+ reed buntings, 140 lapwings still with us, a few whooper swans and small groups of redwings and fieldfares. Woodcock on the roads as it gets dark and 10 blackbirds feeding amongst the pine needles on the same roads on Thursday, show we have just have an arrival of continental birds. A kingfisher on the River Dulnain at Carrbridge was unusual.
Come the end of the month and the biggest surveys in the UK bird world gets underway the British Trust for Ornithology's atlas of winter birds followed in the spring by the breeding atlas. I took a sabbatical during the last breeding atlas survey in 1990 and spent a month surveying the Morvern peninsula and the Isle of Coll. The current two atlases will run from 2007 to 2011 and in this first year of survey work I have signed up for five 'tetrads' local to Nethybridge. No doubt there will be requests for surveys further afield as the years go by and some of the less populated areas need special effort to get the data. If you would like to get involved go to: http://www.bto.org/birdatlas/taking_part/index.htm, you will enjoy it and perhaps get to places you would never normally visit.That's it, enjoy the read
best wishes
Stewart & Janet
A few of the last factory chimneys in Accrington, Lancashire
All photos © Stewart Taylor
