View allAll Photos Tagged Rewilded
On the Greenway in east London.
The Greenway is a cycle and footpath built atop the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s to improve sanitation in central London by discharging the sewage far downstream of London.
Now, the sewage is treated in the Beckton Sewage Works in east London and the grass beside the cycle and footpath has been "rewilded" by the London Borough of Newham and has many pretty wild flowers growing atop it.
I didn’t notice I left my camera in monochrome because of the black bird and how cloudy it usually is here. It was a blue sky day XD
But I think black and white looks really good for Jackdaws.
Sulham, Berkshire - the rewilded agricultural fields have been splendid this summer and are still interesting with seedheads and a few flowers and butterflies.
Jamie Proud
Attachments
Fri, 17 Nov 2023 , 14:18 (5 days ago)
to Michael, Carolyn, Dan, Sue, Sarah, Robert
Hi all,
Thank you for all your hard work this week. On Tuesday we were at Raven’s Heath, behind Maulden wood. This ridge is being rewilded from plantation woodland to heather heathland. The trees were felled around 10 years ago, and sections were then seeded with heather over the course of a few years. Today, the heather is doing very well, but broom, gorse, and saplings are intruding, and shading out the heather. Each year we try and remove the gorse and broom from the heather plots, but the broom is proving tough to keep under control, and now invasive wood small reed is also causing a problem. The volunteers did a cracking job and cleared loads of broom and gorse. There is one heather plot that was completely covered in broom, but to avoid causing too sudden a change to the developed habitat, we remove half the broom each year, and have now been doing it for three years.
On Thursday we were back out in the woods at Sandy Smith Reserve, putting up deer fencing around a glade we’d expanded. The glade will be planted with a greater number and variety of tree species to improve the age structure and diversity of the woodland. We had around 60 posts to drive in by hand, and I’d planned on that being the task for the day. The vols dove in with great gusto and had finished driving in the posts by break time! The neighbouring wetland meadow is too wet to get vehicles into, and needed some fence posts replaced, but is currently accessible from the woodland side, so the vols finished off the task by replacing posts in that field as we had the tools with us already. Next week we hope to get the wire and netting up, and then the enclosure will be ready for planting in December.
Next Tuesday we are doing more scrub work at Maulden Heath. Meet at the picnic area for 10am (map attached). We’ll be working in the adder field.
Next Thursday we are continuing the enclosure at Sandy Smith Reserve. Meet in the carpark for 9am.
Hope to see you all on Tuesday!
Yours,
Jamie
Remember those bright days of lockdown in 2020 when the spring sun was strong but there was nowhere to go? The parks were all full of forbidding signs and taped up benches .
The narrow tow paths of the Grand Union were too crowded with cyclists and joggers. I had heard of Warren Farm on the edge of Southall. It was a matter of local controversy because the Council were going to grant a 200 year lease for QPR to bury it in tons of landfill and turn it into a training ground. It was just within reach of my "permitted daily exercise"
I ducked through a gap in a chain link fence. The sky was very blue, the trees just bursting into leaf but, above all, there were skylarks, at least half a dozen of them soaring up into that spring day, the first skylarks I had ever heard in London. I later learned that Warren Farm is home to a quarter of London's breeding population of skylarks but not just that, over 10 years before the Covid epidemic, Ealing had run out of funds to maintain Warren Farm as the sports ground it once was and it had become a successfully rewilded meadow alive with insects and wildflowers. It was just the place to take a brief pause from the anxieties of the pandemic which were beginning to overwhelm me.