Looking at flies

I’ve been thinking about my blog title, taking a closer look, and why I’m writing it.  On a practical level it’s helped me take more note of what I’m doing.  By writing about it and recording it in a semi-public way I’ve made myself a record, which is becoming useful for the projects I’ve been writing about. 

And taking a close look at the natural world is something that is always worthwhile, which takes me to my nasty fly photo.  I took this picture in the summer, having found these dead flies and thinking there was something odd about them but not sure what.   Then I bought Peter Marren’s new book, Mushrooms, published by the wonderful British Wildlife Publishing (who take looking at the natural world as seriously as it deserves).  Flicking through and looking at the photos I found one like mine of a dead fly.  The text told me it was infected by a fungus, Entomophora muscae¸ which invades the fly’s system and affects its behaviour so its dying act is to climb to the top of long grass, where the fungus bursts out of the fly and throws its spores into the wind so it can infect some other unlucky insect.  Not a pretty way to live, but effective and, to my mind anyway, wonderful.  But to discover wonders like fly killing fungus you need to look.  I can’t congratulate myself on knowing what it was when I first saw it, but I can credit myself for seeing it and recognising it as something out of the ordinary.  That’s what looking is all about.

Ash

I was in Treswell yesterday, on a golden autumn day with the Notts Wildlife Trust volunteers, who were coppicing hazel. I left them at it and went for a walk around the wood and had a good look at the trees.  Treswell is typical in many ways of woods in this part of England because it is dominated by ash.  When NWT bought it forty years ago it wasn’t so long since the war and the mass felling that had gone on then to support the war effort.  A huge number of woods were clear-felled, including Treswell, and left to do their own thing in the years afterwards.  Traditional woodland management was dead then, certainly in Nottinghamshire, and it wasn’t going to revive at all until the 1990s, and even then only in a few lucky woods like Treswell.  So all those abandoned woods, that were probably fairly diverse with oak, field maple and other broadleaves, as well as ash, became almost entirely ash because ash can set lots of seed and establish very quickly on disturbed sites and nothing was done to thin them out.  If you wanted to set the scene for a disaster to attack those woodlands then you couldn’t do much better than that.  All that was needed to finish it off was a disease that kills ash.  And what do we have to do the job?  Chalara fraxinea.  It could have been avoided, or come slow enough to allow time to get those devastated woods back into good heart, if we didn’t have this insane system of transporting live plants around the globe and if we really valued and understood our natural resources.  But cash is king, if we knew then we ignored and Chalara is here to do what it will do. 

But Treswell Wood is in good heart, thanks largely to the revival of coppice management over the last twenty years.  Thanks also to good luck.  It belongs to the Wildlife Trust who have allowed it to be managed sensitively using old, tested ways, it’s fairly big and there are other trees than ash here.  In fact it has a very diverse range of trees and shrubs including oak, elm (they didn’t all die in that other much-cited tree disaster), field maple, wild cherry, apple, dogwood, midland hawthorn and lots and lots of hazel.  It’s probably the hazel that has rescued Treswell.  It’s a valuable and entirely renewable resource.  And many of those masses of ash trees have been thinned out over the years for firewood and timber.  Now there’s space and light for all those other species to flourish and keep the wood alive, whatever our mad society throws at it.  I hope.

I’m writing more about this in my forthcoming book, Treswell, a working wood.  I’m not sure when it’ll come out but ash dieback is concentrating my mind.