November surprises

On a very wet afternoon a friend and I walked around the recently cleared parts of Sedlescombe Heath south of the Wood Yard Entrance.

There is now a rich assortment of fungi along the rides and a particularly attractive find was a few dotted-stemmed bolete (Boletus erythropus) along the ride through Great Brook Wood.  Kew's checklist of British basidiomycota says it is usually associated with oaks, but known with other deciduous trees such as birch, sweet chestnut and beech and occasionally with conifers such as Scot's pine.  This very much fits the bill for the place where they were found.

We walked back by the plot south of the orchard cleared in August/September of a dense stand of Norway spruce.  It was very gratifying to see many seedlings of heath groundsel (Senecio sylvestris) and sheep's sorrel (Rumex acetosella) making a good showing on the bare ground.  We wondered if the seed had been there for years, or if it had blown in since the clearance.  The former I suspect.

Symphony in yellow

The Indian summer is pervading the high woods with a shimmering golden glow.  Many trees are now starting to change colour as the prickly chestnut husks swell with shiny brown fruit inside.  Heather and dwarf gorse are still in bloom, though rapidly going over, and the June green of the male ferns has turned to soft yellow.

Today we walked the woods with a group from the Sussex Ornithological Society, here admiring a small group of crossbills.

Crossbills feed on pine seeds and, although the Woodland Trust's policy for this and other woodlands in the area is to move away from conifer plantations towards more natural broad-leaved trees, sufficient numbers of conifers will be left in the interests of those species that depend on them.

As well as birds, some late butterflies were enjoying the autumn sunshine.  We saw several whites, a speckled wood, a red admiral, a peacock and a small copper.  Best of all was a fine, fresh male (probably home-bred) clouded yellow (Colias croceus) in Holman Wood Field.

Summer treats

On sunny days there is much to be seen along the rides and glades within the woodland.

Where the grass is very short and the ground sandy there are often small colonies of lesser centaury (Centaurium pulchellum) with deep pink flowers in contrast to its larger sister, common centaury (also widespread in the woods). 

The word 'centaury' (often wrongly pronounced 'century') relates to its having been used, in Classical Greece, by Chiron, a centaur, to heal one of his wounds.

All the centauries are powerful plants.  One source says "this herbe hath a marvellous virtue, for if it be joined with the blood of a female lapwing, or black plover, and put with oile in a lamp, all that compass it about shall believe themselves to be witches, so that one shall believe of another that his head is in heaven and his feete on earth; and if the aforesaid thynge be put in the fire when the starres shine it shall appeare that the starres runne one agaynste another and fyghte."

Good job lapwings are protected birds!

Along some of the damper rides and acid grasslands the large common bog hoverfly (Sericomyia silentis) can often be seen on flowers or resting on leaves.

Opening up the rides is already delivering some excellent results.  The patches of fleabane are alive with butterflies, particularly gatekeepers but there are also plenty of meadow browns and common blues (Polyommatus icarus) like the bluish form of the female (below).

In a few places there are colonies of bell heather (Erica cinerea) out slightly in advance of ordinary heather (Calluna vulgaris).  This has been rather scarce in the woods but now seems to be increasing, again as a result of more favourable conditions and better light levels.

Summer butterflies

The woods are perhaps at their best now for summer butterflies.  On a walk yesterday we saw many different species. 

Perhaps the commonest was the hedge brown or gatekeeper (Pyronia tithonus) easily recognisable by its bright orange-brown patches and double-pupilled eye spots.  The picture above is of a male with the dark brown scent mark streaking the centre of the forewings.

There are still many painted ladies (Vanessa cardui) on the wing in the woods, but they are not so abundant as they were a week or two ago.  These butterflies are home bred examples resulting from eggs laid by the wave of immigrants earlier in the year.  Many may now have headed south again into continental Europe as none of their stages can survive a British winter.

The butterfly in the background above is a meadow brown and the powerful and aggressive painted ladies have been able, perhaps, to get the best of the nectar to the disadvantage of many of our resident species.

A highlight of our walk was the company of a silver-washed fritillary (Argynnis paphia) which sailed alongside us down a ride, settling from time to time on sunny spots of foliage.  The picture is of a rather worn female.  She will lay her eggs on the trunks of oak trees where violets grow.  The young caterpillars will hibernate over winter and start to feed up next spring so that we can look forward to a new generation of these wonderful butterflies in 2010.

Bent time

The bent grasses (Agrostis species) are coming into flower in the woods now as a fitting accompaniment to the current heatwave.

There are several species and they can be difficult to determine to species level but the one below is creeping bent, Agrostis stolonifera.

As the scientific name suggests, it spreads by stolons that root as they go whereas the common bent, Agrostis capillaris has underground rhizomes.

The ligule, the small papery flap in the fork between the leaf blades and the main stem, is quite long in creeping bent and short in common bent.

Birch sawfly (Cimbex femoratus)

While leading a group round Brede High Woods the other day a nice surprise was the discovery, by one member of the party of a birch sawfly in the grass along one of the rides.

This impressive insect is the size of a bumblebee and has bright yellow antennae and tarsi as well as an area that looks much like the filling in a mint chocolate immediately behind the thorax.

Though sometimes said to be common and widespread, the species does not seem to be well-represented in Sussex with records only from Hargate Forest in East Sussex (1995) and Rewell Wood (before 1982) in West Sussex.

The literature on this species seems curiously silent, maybe because sawflies are not a popular collecting group.

Another speedwell - brooklime (Veronica beccabunga)

Brooklime is not uncommon in wet places in Brede High Woods, often growing in marshy ruts along the rides.

Once quite popular in country medicine for supposedly curing a variety of ailments, brooklime was also eaten like watercress, with which it was sometimes mixed.  It is quite a healthy addition to the diet but not, according to the literature, very palatable.

A famous 18th century Irish herbalist, Elizabeth Pearson, apparently made a fortune with a cure for scrofula (a tuberculosis of the lymph glands in the neck area) based on brooklime.

The suffix -lime is said to derive from Anglo-Saxon hleomoce and there may well be a relationship with this word.  Lime and its cognates, however, have ancient watery roots.   W. H. F Nicolaisen (1976) in Scottish Place Names. Their study and significance (Batsford, London) proposed, for example,  a pre-Celtic British word limona from limo meaning ‘flood'. He cites the river Lyon in Perthshire as deriving from this root as well as the rivers Lyme in Devon and Dorset. To this one might add the Limene, the Roman term for the East Sussex Rother (still preserved in its tributary the river Limden at Etchingham and, perhaps, Lympne on Romney Marsh) and the river Line, the name of the upper section of the East Sussex river Brede.

Perhaps brooklime simply means 'brook brook' as the river Avon means 'river river'.