North Ormesby Nature - Wilkie's Field

I was talking last week to a guy who grew up in North Ormesby (or Doggy, as it is called by local people) and he was telling me about some of the places he used to go and play when he was a kid.

One of these, Wilkie's Field (I'm not sure about the spelling), is about 200 metres from my house. The chap I was talking to, who was a similar age to me, told me that the name came from a Mr Wilkie who gave it to the people of North Ormesby. I have not been able to find anything out about who Mr Wilkie was or when and why he made this generous gift, so if anyone reading this knows more, please leave a comment below.

On the first sunny day after this I went to have a look at Mr Wilkie's legacy. It is a small (slightly over 1 hectare (1ha=100m x 100m)) area of mown grass with trees around three sides and a nice patch of fairly recently planted woodland in the southern half. The Ormesby Beck flows northwards on the western side and there is an old-looking stone wall (very overgrown with brambles) separating it from the beck. A beck, by the way, is a small to medium-sized stream in many parts of the north of England - including Middlesbrough which has several of them.

Although Wilkie's field is no Maasai Mara, and is unlikely to have any rare species of plant or animal, it is a nice little patch of green which, I suspect, is not visited by all that many people. This is probably mainly because of where it is - hidden away, behind a pub and a bingo hall, with the only access points being down a small road of fairly posh houses, or through two car parks.

Wilkie's Field from above. The blue line is the Ormesby Beck 

View from the north-west corner looking east towards the bingo hall

View from same place looking south-east

It got me thinking of my own childhood and of Lewis's Field. This was a similar area of grass and trees behind the house that I grew up in in Liverpool. I used to play there with my friend Gavin, as did countless other kids of my generation and before. It was where I saw my first Tawny Owl. It was also where my brother Simon and I met the lady who led the local Cub Scouts pack (4th Allerton, Drake Pack) which led to many happy (mostly) years for both of us in the Cubs and then the Sea Scouts, which I believe has been an important part of making me who I am now. I have lovely memories of hiding in the long grass (which at that time wasn't being mown by a cash-strapped Liverpool City Council), walking along the top of the high brick wall which ran along one side and playing in what remained of a burned-out sports pavilion (from when it was a sports field owned by Lewis's department store).

It seemed enormous to me when I was in primary school, but in fact, using the amazing free-to access technology that we all have at our fingertips now, I can see that  it was actually pretty small and only slightly larger than Wilkie's Field (13,923 sq. metres compared with 12,150 sq metres for Wilkie's Field).

You may have noticed that I am talking about Lewis's Field in the past tense. This is not just because it was forty years ago that I used to play there, but because Lewis's Field is now covered in houses. Sometime around 1980 or '81, when I was starting in secondary school, the council sold it off to a developer and with surprising rapidity, it disappeared.

Reminiscing about my childhood haunts has made me realise that we need to value what we have got, and to fight for it if we want to be sure of keeping it. By the time I was playing there, Lewis's Field was probably already doomed - it hadn't been maintained for some years, the tennis courts were long gone,  the former pavilion was a hazardous eye-sore full of broken glass and goodness knows what else, the wall I walked along was old and crumbling, and fewer and fewer children were actually using it. The campaign to save it (during which our teachers encouraged us to go there to play (on the day when councillors were coming to assess how well used it was)) was too little, too late and its demise was inevitable.

Last week, at a series of meetings over three days, about how we can make North Ormesby better, several people said that we needed more green places for children to play in. I went home on the first night and after looking at Google Earth for a while, I came to the realisation that there is actually quite a lot of greenery, from mown parks to more wild semi-natural spaces, within a few minutes walk of every house in Doggy. The problem is that people don't know about them, or they do know but in their heads those places are far away and 'unsafe' and not places they would think of taking their children or encouraging them to go on their own.

When I was making dens in the undergrowth on the edge of Lewis's Field it was still normal for kids to play out in any patch of rough ground, climb trees and cycle for miles. I know the world has changed, that roads are busier, people are much more aware of dangers that were in fact always there and kids have many more things to occupy them at home than when I was young. In many ways, the world (at least for children growing up in urban Britain) is a much, much better and safer place than it was forty years ago, but I think there is a real danger that if we insulate our children, and ourselves, from the natural world, and don't allow them to get their hands dirty, to pick blackberries, climb trees and make dens in the undergrowth they will grow up immeasurably poorer (while seeming richer, perhaps) than they might have done and they won't even know what they have lost.

                                           Some more pictures from Wilkie's Field

The planted woodland in the middle of the field - it contains several
native tree species including Ash, Silver Birch and Hazel

Hazel (Corylus avellana) coppice 'stools'. There have been many traditional uses for Hazel
including fencing, basket making and boat-building (plus the nuts which are
nice to eat, of course). Maybe we'll see some of those crafts being practiced again in
North Ormesby one day.
The tree in the middle is an Ash tree (Fraxinus excelsior), by the way 

A clump of Hard Rush (Juncus inflexus). Its presence on the southern edge of the
field might indicate that it gets a bit boggy at certain times of year

Although much of the field is very species-poor municipal grassland, there are some patches, such as this one, with a few common wildflower species. In spring and summer this spot will be white, yellow, purple and yellow-brown with the flowers of White Clover (Trifolium repens), Daisies (Bellis perennis), Creeping Buttercup (Ranunculus repens), Self-heal (Prunella vulgaris) and Ribwort Plantain (Plantago lanceolata). To some gardeners these would all be considered weeds but to me, especially in the absence of rarer or more interesting wildflowers, they are a welcome sight and will provide nectar for the insects that pollinate them.

If humans disappeared overnight

On my way home from dropping Sue at work this morning I was looking at all the houses, streets and factories and thinking about how different the place must look compared to what it had been like before humans came along. Then I got to thinking about what would happen if humans disappeared overnight - how long would it take before a hypothetical alien visitor couldn't tell that we had ever existed? At first I looked at the buildings and thought, "they're pretty solid. The shapes of those will surely be around for ages". And similarly with roads - the flat tarmac surface looks pretty impenetrable. But then I looked at the weeds growing in the cracks in the pavement and in the tarmac of poorly maintained roads, and also remembered what I had read and seen on telly about Roman cities in the UK (and this is true for ancient ruins everywhere) - all over the south of England there were sturdy villas, temples and civic buildings made by the Romans but by our times many of them had completely disappeared and we wouldn't know about them if archaeologists hadn't discovered them, often covered by quite deep layers of soil which must have accrued since the Romans left in 410AD.

I started thinking then about what the world, or just this little bit of it, would look like after 10 years, 100 years, a million years etc. I imagined forest taking over again, natural ecosystems re-establishing themselves in our cities, houses collapsing quite quickly once the roofs fell in and maybe after a few hundred years our towns and cities, our fields and our roads would be, on a quick inspection anyway, as if we had never existed. And after a million years? How hard would a visiting archaeologist have to look to see any trace of human civilisation?

When I got home I did a search on the internet and quickly discovered (unsurprisingly) that I am not the first person to do this 'thought experiment'. One of the first things that came up when I put in the search terms "If humans disappeared from earth" was this very interesting little video with the title "What would happen if humans suddenly disappeared?" Watching it I realised that I had not thought about what would happen to factories, nuclear power plants, sewage treatment works and garbage facilities if the power went off - the short-term impacts could be quite severe for the plants and animals that we left behind. Or maybe they wouldn't, we just don't know. I also hadn't thought about what would happen in the space around our planet - apparently all our man-made satellites would fairly quickly start to fall back to earth and burn up on re-entry to the atmosphere. After only three years, without humans to maintain it and nudge it back into a stable orbit every now and then,  this would happen to the International Space Station.

So here's the link for the film - it's less than ten minutes long but it's very thought provoking.

What would happen if humans suddenly disappeared?

So, have you watched it? What did you think of it? 

Although it did mention potentially lasting human impacts such as nuclear waste, the Pacific Garbage Patch and the possibility of a chemical nuclear winter, there was no reference to the effect we have had on the atmosphere by the amount of CO2 we have put into it over the last 200 years. I suppose that if a chemical nuclear winter and/or a new ice age happened the current climate chaos that we have unleashed would pale into insignificance.

Another thing that wasn't talked about was the evolution of new species, not only to fill the gaps left by all the species that we have driven into extinction, but also to occupy the new niches that our existence has created - such as the cities, of course but also nuclear waste dumps, garbage-filled seas and (maybe) an ice-free Arctic. 

Birding on a Blustery Day - and a Bonus

I was at South Gare at first light this morning, hoping to find newly arrived migrants (birds, not people, that is) that might have been driven to seek shelter from the strong southerly winds and rain.

I spent a good four hours looking in all the main places where birds are seen at the gare (the Bomb Hole, the Tea Bushes, Cabin Rocks, Shrike Bushes, the Quarries etc)  - most of which are picturesquely but inaccurately named and many of which I have only just learned the precise locations of. It was so windy that in many cases my first fleeting view of a bird was also my last one, but I still managed to identify several, including at least one (possibly two or three) Ring Ouzels, several Bramblings in flight and a constant trickle of Redwings coming off the sea and flying inland.

The Ring Ouzel is a bird in the thrush family and looks very like our common Blackbird, except that the males have a large white crescent on their chests. They breed in mountains and upland moors in Britain and Scandinavia, as well as high mountains further south, and spend the winter in various places around the Mediterranean. The one I saw today, as well many others that have been seen along the east coast in the last couple of days, are likely to be birds that bred in Scandinavia and have just flown across the North Sea. It's a similar picture for Redwings (another member of the thrush family) and Bramblings (a finch closely related to the Chaffinch but with orangey colouration and a different call) - both these species breed in northern Europe and spend the winter further south.

As well as meeting some nice birds I also met some nice birders and got to know couple of the South Gare regulars, including one who has been birding there for 20 years, and another who grew up locally, used to go there as a child and has recently moved back to Redcar after many years away. I have found it hard up to this point to get to know the local birders much (except for the bird-ringers) and particularly at South Gare, so it felt like a bit of a breakthrough today. They were both very informative about the best places to look for birds, and the exact locations of the different spots. I've now got them all marked on Google Earth on my computer (the spots, not the birders).

And the bonus...

When I got home, around lunchtime, having thought that my birding was over for the day, I looked on the local bird club website and saw that a Spotted Sandpiper, normally only found in the Americas, had been seen on the beach at Marske, about five miles along the coast from where I had been all morning. By now it was pouring rain and so I decided to have lunch first and then headed out again to try and get a new bird for my British list (I've seen them in the USA and Canada before). On getting out of the car at Marske I was almost blown off my feet by the wind but I persevered and headed to the group of people and telescopes that I could see down on the beach. It was a refreshing change to be able to 'get onto' the bird almost as soon as I arrived (as you will know if you've read my previous blog about twitching a Franklin's Gull, it doesn't always happen like that) and I watched it through my scope at close range for about twenty minutes, battling with the wind to stay on my feet the whole time - as was the bird which  was feeding among the pebbles at the edge of the beach and it was really something, the way it was being blown around but just carrying on catching small insects. After I'd really studied it for a while I decided to risk getting my camera wet (it was still raining moderately) and managed to get a few photos - I wasn't expecting to be able to, given the wind, but the bird being so close made it possible.

The Spotted Sandpiper (Actitis macularia - the second bit means 'spotted') is closely related to, and very similar to, the Common Sandpiper (Actitis hypoleuca) which is found in many watery habitats around Britain and is a familiar sight to most British birders. It gets its name from the big bold spots all over the breast of the adults in breeding plumage. However, this one was a juvenile, hatched this year, and so didn't have the spots and in fact looked very like a juvenile Common Sandpiper, but with a slightly shorter tail relative to the length of the wings.

The Spotted Sandpiper I saw today is the 333rd species of bird that I have seen in the UK or Ireland.

Spotted Sandpiper - as well as the shorter tail, the smudge on the side of the breast
is greyer and more uniform in Spotted than it is in Common Sandpiper

The pale barring on the edge of the wing - just about visible in this photo -
shows that this  is a juvenile and not a winter plumage adult