The call of the Wild

Following on from our discovery of the Boar tracks in the wood, Fizz and I have been out hunting. We left the camera out for three nights and it returned one hundred and ninety videos. The pesky Fox above made around a hundred and sixty of those. At least it was good enough to show up in the daytime.

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You may have noticed that I have been neglecting the blog in recent weeks. I am coming to a time when I have to think about my future and maybe leaving the farm. It kinda stifles my creativity but everything is fine.

I came here with the intention of taking a year off, following my divorce. Just to give me time to think and get rid of any negative thoughts that may have been bothering me. That worked pretty well, I feel happy in myself but my year off has stretched to sixteen months now.

You know that if I leave the farm, what else I will have to leave, don’t you? It stifles my creativity.

I haven’t spoken to her about this yet. I am working on a plan that will give me another year here and if all goes well, I will leave next April.

Nothing is forever.

When I came here my plan was to take my year off and then seek to rehabilitate myself. Go down to the job centre and start a new life.

There isn’t any work around here, I would have to move into one of the local towns and then with luck find myself a job stacking shelves in a supermarket, something like that. It just isn’t ticking all the boxes for me. I am an adventurer and I am not that afraid of life. There must be something better than that, so I will go and find it.

It all stifles my creativity. But…

and it is a big BUT….

Today life is beautiful and we need to enjoy every moment of it, don’t think that we haven’t been doing just that.

How to track and capture Wild Boar

Hmmmm…

Ah ha!

This ought to work…Watch closely….

The two adult animals in that video are mature sows and I believe they are the mothers of all the little hoglets that you are going to see running around.

There are two other large animals in this sounder, one male and one female. They are last years litter. The female will probably stay with this sounder but the male will leave in the summer. Males are solitary animals.

You can see the two juveniles in this next clip and in case you can’t tell the male is the stroppy one. He is a magnificent looking animal.

Normally we think of a sounder being composed of females and their offspring but the young males will stay with the sounder until they are about sixteen months old and they don’t start growing tusks until they are two years old.

He looks impressive but he is still a lot smaller than his mum as you will see in this next video.

These beautiful animals were kind to me and I got quite a few videos but that will do for now. I don’t want to bore you 🙂

I brought the camera in for the weekend, I might stick it back up there next week. I would quite like to have one more look at them.

I have to be very careful. The local rag printed a single letter condemning last weeks headlines as I expected and that was of course buried on the letters page. It also ran this little story.

What has been reported as an arrow is almost certainly a crossbow bolt, around here that is the favoured tool of poachers, it is powerful enough to kill and you don’t need a firearms licence.

The bottom line is  that you can get £6.50 a kilo for wild boar meat unbutchered. An adult female weighs around 100-120 kilos and 70% of that is meat. At that rate that’s about £450 for one of those mothers, say it’s less, a little one £200. There is an element here that see the Boar as fair game, in fact you would be daft not to take one (regardless of whether or not it is suckling young). Have you seen that film “Whiskey Galore?” Well the Boar are our local bounty. That is why there is so much hatred stirred up against them. When somebody kills one he is almost doing a public service (They eat children, remember)

I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked, “Aye Lad, seen any Boar yet?”

“No mate. Not a one, the old FC must have shot them all.” 🙂

Wild flowers:

We went up to photograph the Early Dog Violets and they were very nice…

On the way up there we found these….

They are the first buds of what will soon become the beautiful and multi-faceted Town Hall Clock (Adoxa moschatellina)

But today they are just buds.

I know that some of you are still up to your necks in snow but here, everything is beautiful.

Let’s skip the Sweet Violets…

“Woke up one morning half asleep,”

“With all my blankets in a heap,”

“And yellow roses gathered all around me.” (Lesser Celandine)

I’m just sitting watching flowers in the rain.

“Feel the power of the rain,”

In amongst the Lent Lilies I found my first Wood Anemones.

They don’t really like the rain.

Suddenly there isn’t any shortage of flowers. I don’t have enough time to post all off the species that I photographed.

The Elm trees flowered, I have been watching them closely and waiting for this.

A lot of the stuff that I do is technical, it is because I want to have pictures of a particular stage in a plants development for my “Easy Wildflowers” blog and it isn’t always easy to understand why I get so excited.

I enjoyed seeing the sepal development on the Tussilago farfara (Coltsfoot)

So my future is riding on a Horse. I have put my entire fortune on a magnificent mare called, “Bendy Peg Leg,” if anyone can do it then she can.

Assuming that she wins, this is what will happen.:

I will stay at the farm for one more year because I want to write Easy Wildflowers. There are not enough local wildflowers to keep me interested beyond a year. I will go homeless next April. I will put my belongings on my back and go into the wild. How long that I will stay in the wild?,  Ha!

I will take a tablet and a solar charger and I will blog from the wilderness and it will be great.

If the Horse loses? She is a sure thing. Bendy Peg Leg, I got it on good authority.

Umm…. Trust me, I know something about animals.

Smell Fox and The Sky in his Pyjamas

Smell Fox is another name for the Wood Anemone and we will have more of them later, also a smelly Fox. First let me show you Fizz’s latest masterpiece.

She called this, “The Sky in his Pyjamas” and it was taken at dawn yesterday.

This is a video of a smelly Fox.

We have finished our Wild Boar hunt having got what we went after.

We picked up the camera yesterday with seventy five videos on the card and I really expected seventy five videos of a Fox eating until it popped but no…

We had about fifteen videos of the Fallow Deer.

Then we got this.

Let me just tell you what you are going to see, it is not very clear. If you are very quick you may see two Deer running in front of the Boar and triggering the camera, they are only in shot for about a second, then three female Boar walk through the wood in front of the camera. They don’t come into the light unfortunately but it is clear to me that they are Boar.

Why stop there? Well we haven’t exactly stopped, there is good reason to go back and I will tell you about that in a minute, we are just taking a break.

These animals are not safe!

I won’t endanger an animal for the sake of a photograph. There are not a lot of Wild Boar around here, they are being shot and that shooting is causing them to disperse and try and find safe places to live but it is a precarious existence.

Boar meat fetches about £6.50 a kilo (unbutchered) and about 70% of a Boar is meat. The average weight of a female is between 80 -120 kilos. To a shooter a little one (50 kg) is worth about £200. Some people are very, very keen to learn the locations of these animals.

There are no laws to protect these animals. With the landowners permission and the relevant gun licence anyone can shoot any boar at any time with anything they can lay their hands on. They are not safe.

We will go back because these animals will give birth in the spring, between them they could have twenty hoglets. They will live in a group called a sounder and the mothers can suckle each others young. If anything happens to one mother the others will take care of her hoglets. Infant mortality is about 50% in the first month so many of the little ones won’t make it but those that do will stay with the group for at least four months maybe the whole year. Despite any garbage that you may read to the contrary, Wild Boar have just one litter a year.

It would be nice to see some of this, don’t you think?

Enough Boar hunting for now, what about the pesky Sheep.

The Sheep are back in the fields but I don’t know for how long. We found two stuck in the hedge this morning.

Fizz found herself stuck in the hedge while I went to free the sheep…

and the sheep took off carrying half of the hedge with them.

We are going to have to go and catch this Sheep and clean it up a bit, it looks camouflaged.

After a couple of hours of chasing Sheep around the field, I remembered that I had stuck Fizz in the hedge and I went back and got her. She was none the worse for it.

So, Smell Fox, the Wood Anemone flower doesn’t have any noticeable scent but the leaves smell musty, like a Fox.

Anemone nemorosa, The Wood Anemone

Greek legend has it that Anemos (The God of Wind) sent Anemones in the springtime to tell of his coming. An old name for this flower is Windflower, Pliny the Elder (Roman author of Naturalis Historia) wrote that “The flowers do not open unless the wind blows.” He was wrong. The flowers do not open unless the sun shines.

        The Wood Anemone is an early spring flower. It usually flowers in March and lasts until the Bluebells are ready to flower in April.

The little wood that I used to own was both a Bluebell wood and an Anemone wood. The flowers grew through each other and in March the forest floor was white with little to show of the Bluebell display that was soon to follow.

The Wood Anemone is an animated flower, it closes at night.

It opens in the morning when it feels the warmth and then it twists and turns throughout the day to follow the sun. It is a wonderful thing to spend a day in such a wood watching the movement of the flowers.

The flower has no petals, it generally has six or seven, white sepals but sometimes as many as ten. It has multiple stamens.

The leaves are divided into three deeply lobed and toothed leaflets.

Nectar: You will read on a lot of web sites that the Wood Anemone does not produce nectar when in fact it does. The reason for this confusion is simply because it was only proven in 2013 when scientists published a paper in the Journal, “Organisms Diversity and Evolution” (September 2013) They observed the Large Bee Fly (Bombylius major) nectaring on Anemone nemorosa and discovered that the flower does indeed have nectaries deep within the corolla. The large Bee Fly has a very long tongue.

Many websites will not have updated that information and so confusion reigns on the internet, as always. Anyway nothing has changed if you have a short tongue.

Pollination and seed production are not essential to the Wood Anemone, in fact, I read that most of the seed produced is sterile. The plant spreads from it’s roots (rhizomes). Unlike the Bluebell it can spread very rapidly to colonise a wood.

        Taxonomy:

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Ranunculales

Family: Ranunculaceae

Genus: Anemone

Species: Anemone nemorosa

Wildflowers in winter.

Wild Animals and Wild Flowers

…and oh, so many Veronicas.

Animals first.

Fizz and I went out to look for signs of spring, it’s a bit early but what else are we going to do? It was nice yesterday and about time too, I had almost given up on 2015.

These are Elm Trees. We missed them flowering last year, they flower in early spring and then go on to develop these winged seeds called samaras.

This was the state of these trees when we discovered them in April so there is probably a month or two to go before we see any flowers but you can’t be too careful.

In the corner beneath these trees there is a Badger Sett. This is where our three Badgers spent most of the summer and I am hoping that they are here now. Badgers spend most of December and January under ground. This doesn’t look very active today.

I am hoping that our Badgers will raise cubs this year and this sett would be a pretty private and easy location to film them.

Why cubs? Patch turned up in these fields in March, that is the peak breeding season for Badgers. He was badly wounded and I am pretty sure that he had been fighting with another Badger over a female.

This video from late June shows the bite marks to his rump healing now but that is a sign of Badger on Badger aggression. He had been kicked out of the main sett for being too interested in the opposite sex..

This video is from the beginning of June and this was the first time that I realised that there were three of them. I don’t know the sexes Patch is almost certainly male because he has had his head kicked in. Generally males are more likely to get kicked out than females for obvious reasons but one of these animals could be female.

and Patch is ready to have a go at making Badger Cubs for me.

That would be nice.

So leaving our Badgers we headed out to the woods.

We are looking for shoots, Bluebells, this is where we found the Early Crocus and also this one.

Narcissus pseudonarcissus, I haven’t shown you this one before. This is a Lent Lily or Wild Daffodil. It is our only native daffodil and beautiful and special.

No sign of them today though, so we were just messing about..

Fizz wanted a go on the tree that I was sitting on.

It is like wanting to get on the furniture if she sees a tree she has to get on it.

Suddenly there was loud grunting from just behind Fizz. We were annoying a Boar. I slipped a lead on her and stood silent waiting for the animal to move but it didn’t.

I waited quite a while but it obviously didn’t have any intention of stirring, it was just telling us to clear off.

I wondered if it could be a female with a litter who couldn’t move. It is really too early in the year for that but,,,, Global warming and all that. Anyway I wasn’t going to stress her. She could stay put and Fizz and I would retreat.

The next day….

The next day was horrible and wet.

We headed back to the woods with a trail camera and bait.

I have had several reports of people seeing Boar in these woods but haven’t seen any evidence myself, that noise yesterday was definitely a pig or more exactly a Boar so it is worth a try.

I have filmed a few times in these woods without success so I am not holding my breath. Still, nothing adventured, nothing gained.

Flowers now, I have been holding back from doing this one. It is not difficult in itself but…..

Supposing that you had a sweetheart called Veronica and that she was very lovely. Okay now supposing Veronica had a whole bunch of sisters and they were all called Veronica and looked just as lovely. We have to be very careful how we approach this problem.

Which one are you going to kiss?

No! That’s a sister.

No Stop! That’s another sister.

EEEK! Sister!

I am going to have to be very clear when I describe these flowers.

Veronica persica, The Common Field-speedwell

Veronica persica, also called the Bird’s-eye Speedwell or Persian Speedwell is one of our earliest spring flowers.

This flower is also sometimes known as Winter Speedwell and given as flowering all year round but locally it was absent until the beginning of March. I took my first picture of 2014 on March 6th.

The Flower has two stamens and one style, it is self fertile. It has four petals, the topmost one being the most intensely coloured and the bottom one being smaller and paler.

Of course the flower doesn’t always align itself the right way up.

This flower shape is typical of Speedwells. Worldwide there are about 500 different species but in the UK there are only about two dozen and half of them are quite rare.

Veronica persica has a single flower (8-12 mm) to a stem. Many of the other species have more. The length of the stem is significant, It will be longer than the leaves but not more than twice as long, there is another species that carries single flowers on much longer stems (four times as long)

The leaves are pale green, oval to triangular and not more than about 2 cm long, coarsely toothed, they have a short stalk and they are arranged alternately at the top of the plant and in pairs at the base.

        The plant often sprawls along the ground before rising to flower.

Common Field-speedwell is not native to the UK, it was first recorded here around 1825 and it came from South East Asia. It is commonly regarded as a weed in the UK with no horticultural value.

        Taxonomy:

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Lamiales

Family: Plantaginaceae

Genus: Veronica

Species: Veronica persica

Wildflowers in winter.

Sus scrofa, a sober passion

There are Wild Boar in The Forest of Dean. That may have been part of the reason why I came here. I know the boar.

About twelve years ago my then wife and I bought a small plot of woodland in East Sussex. We looked at lots of woodland and we chose that one because there were Wild Boar on the land. East Sussex has a thriving boar population.

So this post is about me and the Wild Boar.

My first encounter:

Not long after we had bought the wood we were down there having a look at our new property, it was a blistering hot summer day and I was loving it so much that I decided to stay there and sleep the night and so my wife went home without me.

I wasn’t prepared, I didn’t have any camping gear or anything like that, I just wanted to experience the night. I made myself a little nest in the leaf litter and lay down to sleep.

I woke up just after midnight. I could hear this pattering sound on the leaf litter and I thought it was rain and as I lay there on the floor I could hear it getting closer. Eventually I realised that it wasn’t rain, it was wild animals coming through the wood toward me. I lay as quiet as a mouse.

The boar surrounded me. I couldn’t see them but I could hear them just in front of me, on my left and on my right. It was  fantastic lying there and listening to these big animals rustling about and grunting at each other and then something changed.

It was nothing to do with the boar, I have known them for a long time now and they have never, ever shown me any kind of aggression, it was just me. I could hear them down behind my feet and they were still in front of me. I was lying on the floor and I didn’t feel comfortable any more. I decided to get up and drive them away.

I stood up and shouted, “Hey, Hey!” and I was met with a cacophony of grunts and squeals from all around but that was all, they didn’t run. They just carried on with their foraging and ignored me.

My thought was, “Don’t make them mad”

My nerve cracked and I was scared. There were no suitable trees to climb but there was an old coppice stool. When a tree is coppiced enough times it grows into a ring of small trunks and I got inside this circle of trees. The only weapon I had to defend myself with was my camera and so I started firing off the flash to try and drive them away.

They didn’t bother about the crazy man. They just carried on about their business and slowly  ambled past my camp and off into the distance and eventually my courage started to return and I began to think, “What a wonderful experience, I am all right, no bones broken and I haven’t been ate.” I did check the time, an hour had passed since I first heard them. I was wondering how long till dawn.

I didn’t know the boar at all back then, now I know that it was a sounder, composed of females and given the time of year, their almost full grown young. I wasn’t ever in any danger.

The next weekend I returned to the same spot and I built a platform in that coppice stool that I could sleep on. I desperately wanted to repeat that experience but I didn’t really want to be on the floor next time.

For the next nine years this was going to be my second home. I slept here most weekends, summer and winter. I fed the animals, that is to say that I baited my camp and the animals in the wood came to know this. I hung bird feeders in the trees. Squirrels were the ones that took most advantage and I became adopted by them.

I would often wake up with a Squirrel right in front of my face, watching me and waiting for it’s breakfast.

There was a Badger sett and they would come into my camp. They don’t mind camera flash, it doesn’t seem to bother them.

There were all kinds of animals, it was my little wild life paradise but this is a post about the boar.

When we first bought the wood encounters with boar were very rare. Over the next few years I became an expert boar tracker and encounters became much more frequent and my expertise just grew and grew. Then I realised that it wasn’t expertise at all, there were just a lot more boar.

When I say that I know the boar, I really do, I spent years with them and I can see a problem. They are big animals and they eat a lot and at some point that is going to have a detrimental effect on other species but I don’t believe that shooting guns at them is an effective means of control. That is because I know them.

So on with the stories.

Max:

I had a dog. I didn’t normally take him to the wood with me because wild life and dogs don’t mix well but every so often and especially if I was going to be away for more than one night, I would take him.

With Max along I couldn’t sleep up my tree, I had to take a tent so that I could confine him at night. That was for his own safety, a dog is no match for a boar, not even Max.

So this was a few years in and there were getting to be quite a few boar about. Max and I were down for two nights of male bonding and love.

I had only taken bedding for one, I thought that he could sleep on the floor and on the first night we had a bit of a dispute about ownership of the bed. I found myself sitting outside of the tent in the middle of the night listening to him snore.

I heard the boar coming through the wood towards us and that was okay, Max was fast asleep.

I stood up and lit a cigarette and I walked about a bit. Much as I loved seeing them this wasn’t a good night for an encounter so I was just letting them know that I was here.

I walked around a bit and cleared my throat, “Hey stupido boar, big man in the wood, go the other way.”

They didn’t pay me any attention, they just kept on coming. They came too close and I began to get concerned for the dog. I got into the tent, zipped the door up and took a good hold of his collar and then I turned on all the lights I had.

As soon as I put the lights on there were loud squeals and the boar ran. They had only just realised that I was there. So much for their super senses, sometimes they can be really dumb.

Max jumped up with a start, looked about, then lay back down and went back to sleep. Good Dog, nothing to worry about.

On the second night when I heard the boar I banged pots and pans together. (Sorry neighbours, that was me) sometimes subtle doesn’t work.

Comedy:

One night I was sleeping up my tree and I awoke. It was about two o’clock in the morning and it was a still and beautiful night.

I love being in the forest at night, it is so calm. I really think that it does something for your soul and I feel a great attachment to the forest, any forest.

I made myself a cigarette and smoked it and I just listened to the Tawny Owls and looked at the moon. I thought that I might go for a walk and see if there was anything about. My army boots were hanging in the tree beside me so I shuffled about getting them on, checked all my gear and then I jumped down out of my tree.

The moment my boots hit the ground the wood exploded. There were boar running everywhere. They were going from right to left and from left to right and squealing and kicking up all sorts of racket.

It took them quite a while to compose themselves and wander off and it took me a while to stop laughing.

I know what had happened. The boar were in my camp when I awoke. Not knowing where I was they froze. Animals will do that when they sense danger and just hope that it goes away. Boar can’t look up, they can’t lift their necks, it is just the way that they are built. As soon as I hit the floor they panicked and broke cover. They had stayed frozen for quite a long time while I got myself ready.

I have had so many encounters with boar. I have come face to face with large males in the middle of the day and I have often surprised and startled them accidentally. I have also had many night time encounters. I have seen them running through the wood and they are fast and graceful. I think of them as being more like deer than domestic pigs.

There is a wild life park in Kent with a celebrity Wild Boar called Boris. I went to see him once and felt really sorry for him. He did look more like a domestic pig than the wild animals that ran through my woods.

Well maybe not that different he just needs to lose a bit of weight.

The present day:

I came to the Forest of Dean with my eyes wide open. I knew that there was a Badger cull and a Deer cull and I knew that they were culling the Boar.

In East Sussex nobody had minded the boar, people didn’t really see them and there was no fuss. Here everybody has an opinion and it divides communities. Local papers keep the topic alive and boar are in the paper almost every week.

I couldn’t figure it out at first but I understand now.

Culling the boar isn’t an option in East Sussex because local people would have to fund it. In the last Badger cull they estimated that it had cost £4000 for each animal shot. In East Sussex if somebody were to knock on a door and ask for a few thousand pounds to help cull the boar they would be told, “They don’t really bother me, sorry.”

Here the Forestry Commission are paying and they want to cull the boar so it is an option.

It is an issue that causes great upset to some local people and I really understand and feel their hurt.

Last year the FC said that there were 535 boar in the forest and they wanted to kill 135 to bring them to a manageable number.

This year they want to kill a further 600. They are trying to kill all of them.

It is not all right. There is a lot of deception. The local paper recently printed a story saying that there should be no closed season because boar have four litters a year and there is no particular time of year when there should be a closed season. That isn’t true. It is possible to force intensively reared pigs to have four litters a year but you have to force feed them. Boar have one litter a year, I have watched them raise them many times.

I don’t think that there is anything that I can do about it. I am very sorry that so many animals are going to be killed but that is what the FC do, they are not conservationists or wild life managers they are foresters.

Anyway they are doing me a kind of favour. Shooting guns at the boar won’t work and they are dispersing the animals.

Boar are not like Badgers, tied to a sett, they run away from loud noises. The FC are just driving them out of the forest. I was recently warned to be careful going into the woods behind the farm because Boar have been seen there. I have seen boar tracks down by the Badger sett, they are all around us, I don’t need to go into the forest to see them.

The damage has already been done.

The real problem with the boar is not how quickly they multiply it is how good they are at evading people. By the time people realise that there may be wild boar around they are already well established.

The FC were the only people with the resources and the organisation to mount proper control of the boar and they should have been contained in the forest and managed with contraception. They have been driven out into areas where their numbers can not be managed.

Just like in my wood in East Sussex years ago, when I became “more expert” at seeing Wild Boar, local people are going to become much more expert at seeing Wild Boar

That is good, I like seeing wild animals but I think that in the future conservationists are going to realise that you can have too much of a good thing.

Then perhaps we can re-introduce Wolves. That will be great and it is the only thing that will work now.

I hope that they eat the Forestry Commission first.

Animal Magic

“Just like that”

It’s your destiny

The Swallows have fledged, or at least they are fledging. They are still in the nest today but they have been out and they can fly.

It has taken me a few days watching and all that you get are a couple of short video’s but for me, my understanding and the pleasure that I got from watching them makes a few days just a drop in the ocean. It was time well spent.

Anyway you should be glad that you don’t have to watch the whole twenty hours of video, that I now have to sort and delete from my machine to free up space.

Here are the best bits.

Yesterday morning there were five birds on the nest, there were five birds on the nest and then there were four birds on the nest. I had missed the very first flight and only realised when number five returned to the nest.

This first video starts with the mother calling for them to leave the nest, there is a little comic interlude of the way that they follow flies, their little heads bobbing in unison and in the last bit the second bird to approach the nest is the returning chick. Does he bring food back or do the others just think that he has?

This next video shows them leaving the nest and returning. They spent most of the day fluttering around inside the little alley way that has become their home and by the end of the day they were all settled back on the nest but this is fledging. Today I think that they have ventured outside and seen the blue sky but they still return to the nest.

These birds have made me think a lot about nature as a whole thing and about life and death in the wild. The caterpillars that I am trying to raise are falling to the parasitoid flies that these Swallows depend on for food and survival. The parents have done a really good job of raising them given the wet weather we have been having. I have often looked out in the pouring rain and wondered how they are managing to raise a brood and now this, flight.

I am so in in love and in awe of them and so damned jealous.

I am jealous because they get to eat those delicious crunchy flies, or perhaps because they can raise offspring in a matter of weeks and not the 26 years it usually takes us. Maybe I am jealous of something else altogether…..