Morning. Rivers, ponds, paintings and planning this week. We have features on pond life and this weekend’s Day of Action for Nature, along with the latest Bill’s Mother’s Book Club column from Dr Jo Maher, and a heads up about the wonderful Open Up Sheffield art exhibition coming in May, featuring Outdoor City artists and crafts folk.

We’ve asked participating landscape artists to tell us more about their work, and will feature those who’ve got back to us over the next few weeks. Initially, thanks to Karen Sherwood, Martin Jones and Mo Laycock OBE.

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Pond Life

I recently squelched around with ecologists in the marshes of eastern Sheffield for a Sheffield Tribune subscribers story about Great Crested Newts.

We began to explore Holbrook Marsh at dusk, when nocturnal newts are busiest. Looking at ponds at nighttime reveals how weird and wonderful they are: lit only by the moon and the torchlight of urban swamp explorers, these ponds just a few years old were jungles of seething weed with scuttling water insects on the surface and the shadows of predatory amphibians swishing their tail stripes below.

The Great Crested Newt is hanging on in a stretch of over forty ponds and swamps between Holbrook industrial estate and Woodhouse Washlands, many of them recently created thanks to fundraising and lobbying from the city council ecology department and organisations including Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust, the Environment Agency, National Grid, Network Rail, and the Froglife conservation charity.

Joe Todd from the Wildscapes arm of Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust told me how these wet jungles are often temporary, and creatures like Great Crested Newts have evolved to move from one pond to another as surface water comes and goes.

Big old established ponds are full of biodiversity, so ideally need protecting from development. But in Sheffield, we can see the story of how typical ponds really work, across the catchment of the River Rother.

Long before we built shopping centres and industrial estates on the Rother flood plain, huge browsing beasts like Aurochs, Woolly Mammoths and Woolly Rhinoceroses would wallow around making big dips in the ground, which then filled with water and left ponds for newts and other creatures to find. Landslips and wandering rivers bring new ponds to life too.

Water plants soon arrive, via windblown seed, on the feet of birds or carried by drinking animals. Insects, amphibians and other animals then set up home in or around the pond as soon as water plants begin oxygenating it in a couple of years.

Then over the next twenty to thirty years, trees like willows and bullying bulrushes might turn up to suck up water and slowly change the pond into a marsh or wet woodland.

The new woodland might gradually dry out enough for more trees to arrive, close the canopy and leave a wood for a while, until more blundering rhinoceroses crash and wallow through and start the process again.

Pond creation in modern Sheffield follows the example of big pond building beasts, using spades and excavators. The Wildscapes staff make a pond using local clay, then leave it for water plants to arrive, usually followed by all the other creatures in two to three years, Joe says. It might be thirty years before a new pond reaches the late succession stage where it’s turning into a damp bullrush marsh or willow woodland.

In the meantime, ecologists check for who’s moving in and watch for non-native invasives like crassula, or Australian Swamp Stonecrop, brought to the UK last century to oxygenate garden ponds. The villainous water plant escaped into the wild where it now smothers ponds and is almost impossible to remove, as it spreads so easily. (Moral: don’t use non-native water plants and wash your boots after exploring any pond or swamp.)

If you wander around the wetlands of Sheffield, you see the natural rise and fall of pond empires. Every pond is different, some are just sandy water waiting for seeds to arrive, others are seething jungles of newts and flies and beetles, others are growing up into damp willow woods. The landscape itself is a living and growing thing, just as spectacular as the Great Crested Newts that live there.

Bill’s Mother’s Book Club with Dr Jo Maher - There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

We’re back quickly, to share a very exciting event for book lovers down in Kelham on 25th–26th April: Sheffield Indie Book Fest, featuring local authors including poet and nature lover Helen Mort and writers from further afield, including Kavitha Rao, a fellow doctor. The festival covers fiction, poetry, children’s books and more, and is well worth checking out.

I’ve torn myself away from the fabulous bluebells in Woolley Woods to move to a different kind of blue spectacle: both, as it happens, have been shown to benefit our mental health. From the land to water, and from non-fiction to fiction: this time I’m writing about the Turkish-born British-based author Elif Shafak.

Shafak has written over 20 books. I’ve read a few, including The Island of Missing Trees available free to Sheffield Library card holders through the Libby app- as is There Are Rivers In the Sky as an audiobook.

Transporting us to the Cypriot war of the 1970s, the story is told from the perspective of a fig tree, observing the love story unfold for two people caught on either side of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot divide.

There Are Rivers In the Sky interweaves three main narratives, all with a river at their heart: Arthur, a brilliant child born into poverty on the banks of the Victorian Thames; Zaleekhah, a contemporary hydrologist living on a London houseboat; and Narin, a young Yazidi girl beside the River Tigris in 2014, as ISIS closes in. All are connected by a single raindrop moving through time, and by the question of who controls water, and who is denied it.

As well as being a novelist, Shafak is a committed activist on human rights, gender equality and freedom of expression. In There Are Rivers in the Sky that activism flows into the climate crisis and water scarcity. She asks uncomfortable questions through her storytelling: if we have buried and diverted rivers, what else have we hidden? Whose voices have we silenced along with the water?

Sheffield answers those questions rather literally. The city is named after the Sheaf, a river hidden for over 100 years, disappearing into a culvert under Castlegate before joining the Don.

Work began in early 2024 to bring the city centre Sheaf back into daylight, and Sheaf Field park is due to open later this year. Shafak (sadly) doesn’t mention Sheffield directly, but she has spoken publicly about the daylighting movement (the global effort to bring buried urban rivers back into view) as one of the most powerful metaphors of our time: what else have we buried that deserves to breathe again?

Last Book Club I mentioned the brilliant The Flow by Dr Amy Jane Beer, which is a personal story about relationships with rivers. I’d also strongly recommend Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?, which I bought as a hard copy from our much-missed bookshop Novel last year.

Where Shafak works through fiction and mythology, Macfarlane travels in person to communities around the world fighting for their rivers to be recognised as living beings with legal rights, not just as resources for human use. It’s a very different kind of storytelling, but the two books sit beautifully together. You can get another title by Macfarlane, Underland, free on Libby.

Access to water comes up less in the consulting room but the evidence for health benefits of blue space is compelling. Being near water has been shown to calm the autonomic nervous system, reducing the stress response in ways that green space alone doesn’t always achieve.

I’ve known many people over the years who’ve found real benefit from fishing, or walking the riverbank, alone or with a companion - human or hound. I’ve used the canal towpath myself, cycling from Meadowhall to Rotherham before teaching at the hospital. Spotting a Kingfisher before a morning ward round is, I can confirm, a calm and joyful way to start the day.

Back to Shafak: There Are Rivers in the Sky is a complex but richly rewarding read, and the intertwining stories work particularly well as an audiobook. (I found the same with Zadie Smith’s The Fraud). Shafak is herself a passionate champion of oral storytelling across both Eastern and Western traditions; there’s something fitting about receiving a book so rooted in ancient narrative through the spoken word.

Action For Nature

With a theoretical 1.5 million new UK houses to be built by 2029, including 38,000 in Sheffield, it’s easy to imagine a tension between the homes people need and the wild creatures that can’t tell us their views of the Homes England strategic plan.

This weekend the Day of Action for Nature, Parks and Green Spaces aimed to bring together local groups speaking up for our wild spaces. The aim, said organisers, was: “To demonstrate, collectively, that people everywhere care deeply about nature, parks and green spaces and want to see them protected and restored.”

Locally we’ve seen protests over building on green belt land, and worries about losing sections of local parks and woodland. I asked Dr Nicola Dempsey from the Sheffield Green Spaces Forum and Sheffield University School of Architecture & Landscape what she made of the day’s aims.

She suggested thinking differently about the dilemma characterised as a battle between the conflicting needs of domesticated humans and the wild things trying to survive around us.

“Homes and housing isn’t just the bricks and mortar that you live inside,” she says. “It’s actually what goes on outside that too. So if you’re lucky enough to have a garden, great, but if you’re not, then you have to have some form of open space, which is of a good enough quality and where you feel safe to use it.”

Reports about the physical and mental health benefits of humans getting out into their local wildness are now common knowledge, and our politicians should know how valuable our wild spaces are. Ideal homes and housing need to be places where you’re going to get those health and well-being benefits, Nicola says.

“These places should have biodiversity buzzing and flying around, so I think sometimes it’s that interpretation of what home and housing is that can help try and tie all of these things together.”

She mentions the 3-30-300 rule: the ‘North Star’ of planning for modern cities is to make sure every citizen can see three mature trees from their home, that every neighbourhood has 30% tree canopy cover, and that everyone lives no more than 300 metres from a decent green space.

Much of Sheffield comes close to this, with over 20% canopy cover in urban areas, hundreds of blue and green spaces, and arguably seven trees per person. But not everywhere in the Outdoor City is 3-30-300 lucky.

Nicola reckons the huge population growth in the city centre is missing out, for example - Pounds Park and the Grey to Green active travel routes add greenish spaces where there weren’t any before, and riverside activists are doing their best to persuade the council and landowners to rewild our urban rivers.

But Nicola thinks we could do better, particularly if every development sign off included buzzing wild spaces as the raw material of a housing development, as well as bricks and kerbstones.

The national Day of Action for Nature targeted politicians in the run up to the May local elections.

Locally, the Friends of Ecclesall Woods organised a tree walk for the day of action, along with urban tree activist and landscape architect Fran Halsall. Marilyn Small from the Friends says local councillors try their best under very difficult financial constraints.

She supported the aims of the day, partly because she’s seen the erosion of investment in Sheffield’s green spaces over many years.

“We’re just at the bottom of the list, aren’t we? Because it’s something that can be cut, whereas the government has ring-fenced money for all the other agencies, really, ” she says.

She notes the agreement by the council some years ago that safer crossings were needed over the 40mph Abbey Lane between the Ecclesall Woods woodland pathways, to help people cross, especially families or older or disabled people who were saying they were giving up on their local woodland because the busy road was impossible to cross safely. (We’ve reported on these delays several times).

A plan for crossings (and allocated funding) was agreed with the council in the early years of Covid, including refuges in the middle of Abbey Lane and at the junction of Abbey Lane and Whirlowdale Road.

A Pegasus crossing is also planned (for horses, bikes, wheeling and walking) on the bridleway at the bottom of the woods near Abbey Croft. But Marilyn says this work may not start until late summer, close to six years after the plan was first agreed.

“It’s very disappointing it’s taking so long,” Marilyn says. “I think it just means that they’re not really taking the issue very seriously.” And maybe that’s the point. The Outdoor City has more wild spaces than most cities in Europe, but not everyone can easily get to them.

Unless our local development juggernaut recognises and does something about this, are we really building the right homes for the new Sheffield?

More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 19th April)

A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for the late winter. (Full version for full members, preview for all).

Sun 19th - Greener Greenhill bird walk with Pete Brown at Chancet Wood

Tues 21st - Sheffield Ramblers Walk - Steel Cotton Trail (7m)

Weds 22nd - Shire Brook Valley - Volunteer Session

Fri 24th - SRWT Guided Walk - Shire Brook Valley insects, moths and bird spotting

Sat 25th - Parkwood Springs conservation morning

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Morning. Seasonal stories today, with the Outdoor City joining San Francisco, St Petersburg and Stoke on Trent in a global springtime wildlife challenge. There’s stark news for seed feeders from local and national bird groups. And Muddy Mother shares her new season clothing advice.

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Safari City

In two weeks time, Sheffield will join Los Angeles, San Francisco, Manchester, Birmingham and 700 other towns and cities across the world to record as many of our wild things as possible.

The City Nature Challenge was launched ten years ago following friendly wildlife spotting rivalry between staff at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. It has now spread worldwide with Sheffield taking part for the first time this year, led by Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust (SRWT).

Between 24th and 27th April SRWT is asking us to sign up at their website, where you’ll also find a series of guides and resources to help. Organiser Elesha Searles says individuals or groups can join in, but should register their interest as soon as possible.

Elesha calls the event Sheffield’s first ever city-wide bioblitz. We’ve covered bioblitzes in this magazine before: usually they’re based at a particular green space or riverside, and aim to enthuse the local population about the nature on their doorstep, and capture citizen science ecological data for future research while they do it.

In these days of nature depletion and weird weather, regular counts of everything that grows or moves can inform decisions by politicians and landscape planners. But getting local people to just learn what’s living next to them is equally important, says Elesha.

“We hope this challenge will help more people to get out and notice all the wonderful wildlife we have around the city, and help us to build a picture of the state of nature in Sheffield,” she says.

“You could sit in your garden, visit your local park or just notice what plants or animals you see on your walk to the local shop. All we ask is that you record wild plants, animals, fungi, slime mould, or any other evidence of life found in Sheffield.”

(Slime mould?? Yes, anything and everything growing wild in Sheffield, including slimy clumps of single celled organisms, but not pets, domestic animals or imported garden plants).

“I think it’s really important for people to notice the little things in their local environment. So they could just notice a centipede or a butterfly or anything in their back garden that just makes them stop and think about the natural world and their connection with it. And the more that they’re connected with it, the more they’ll want to look after it.”

The collection of data helps protect wild spaces from uninformed planning decisions, and help cities plan better for improving landscapes to increase the chances for wild beasts to spread and multiply. (I hope to have a story for our big sister local online media outlet the Sheffield Tribune this coming week about how political pond building helps Great Crested Newts, for example).

In Sheffield, successful data gathering campaigns by SRWT, Sorby Natural History Society, the council’s ecologists and local groups like the Friends of Owlthorpe Fields and Wardsend Cemetery have all helped change the city for the better in recent years.

With the Sheffield City Nature Challenge this year, SRWT ask us to use their own Nature Counts recording system, so their staff can directly access the data for years to come. (The global nature challenge links to the vast iNaturalist data collection app, which local enthusiasts can also use if they prefer.)

I’m told all the data captured (by both methods) will end up in the UK’s National Biodiversity Network NBN Atlas, used by ecologists and planners across the country. But the primary aim this year is to garner enthusiasm and excitement, says Elesha.

She sends me reports and scientific studies adding to the growing confidence among wildlife folk that the public likes what they’re doing to protect wildlife in towns and cities, not least because the science shows that protecting the nature on our doorstep is good for us as well as our newts and slime moulds.

The data collected citywide this year won’t necessarily show trends or declines as yet, but you have to start somewhere, Elesha says. Meanwhile, local conservation group data that goes back donkey’s years will continue to inform local landscape decisions, with the new citywide challenge adding to the evidence in time.

The competitive element, (propounded by the global City Nature Challenge, pitching LA against San Francisco, and Tel Aviv against Tehran, for example) is not the focus for the Wildlife Trust, says Elesha.

“For us it would just be amazing if anybody goes out and just has a go and notices what they can see. We’re winning if we get 50 records. But I’m sure we can do better than that.” But yes, she concedes, it would be nice to see records that show more wild things in Sheffield than Manchester.

• Take part at https://www.wildsheffield.com/sheffield-city-nature-challenge/

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Are We Coming Or Going? - by Muddy Mother

In the last week, we’ve all had to swap our kids’ woolly hats for their sunhats, and back again two or three times. We’re at that time of year where we’re all celebrating the sun in beer gardens, while the next moment we’re back at home watching the rain lash against the windows.

It’s when we must be prepared for all weather at all times. You mustn’t leave the house unless you have sandals, wellies, hats (both varieties), coats, sunglasses, spare jumpers, and probably sun cream too.

I found myself in a weather predicament this week when I gleefully stepped outside my car, casting all our coats aside due to the glorious sunshine. We bid farewell to winter wear and set off on an adventure through Ecclesall Woods, meeting a friend along the way.

I recommend a woodland walk rather than a playground meetup if you want to actually have a conversation with your fellow parent pal. I spoke to this friend more during this adventure than any playground meetings of the last three years.

I had foolishly placed my small child in the pushchair, as previous experience told me the paths were manageable with him travelling and admiring nature this way. I had apparently forgotten the two adventurous three year olds, who of course would have no interest in sticking to the paths.

The pushchair was subsequently carried almost as much as the small child, because of course, he also had little interest in being tethered down during a woodland adventure.

Our first pitstop was a fallen tree which quickly transformed into a pirate ship, as the two bigger children started their search for treasure. Small child is of an age where he wants to join in with the big kids, but is not yet safe out of my arms’ reach (particularly aboard pirate ships). And so I too joined the voyage.

We all made it to shore, but I had barely made it down to ground level with the small child to begin the next escapade before I realised the two bigs had crossed a boggy stream, the first leading the way in raincoat and wellies, mine following in tee shirt and canvas pumps.

They made it triumphantly to the other side, leaving two adults and a toddler to navigate their way across whilst carrying the pointless pushchair. The news from my big child once we reached the other side was that he now had an (unsurprisingly) muddy and distressing shoe. I channelled my inner explorer in search of a natural solution: wipe it on some moss until the child deemed it acceptable, and agreed to carry on having fun.

We soon found a welcome distraction in the form of an abandoned wheelbarrow, in which one big child was delighted to be ferried around, whilst the other was horrified at the prospect of sitting in such a thing. The small child liked the idea too, but was disconcerted by the reality, and soon asked to vacate.

We considered using it to collect woodland treasures, but nobody wanted to move the wheelbarrow any further, and so there it stayed as we continued on our merry way.

We found a stream, and as the bigs fished, I allowed the pushchair its time to shine, strapping in the small to prevent him bathing in the muddy stream, whilst the anglers caught everything they needed. They then mixed a potion to fend off witches, with grass, leaves, sticks, and stones, and it worked, because I didn’t see a single witch.

Then the rain began to pour, and my children began to shiver, looking to their mother to solve their problems. I forlornly broke the news that their items of dryness and warmth were safely tucked away under shelter, something neither of them could currently relate to.

The silver lining is that the business of being pirates and potion makers meant we had not made it very far, so it was only a short, wet walk to leg it back to the woodland centre, where we all agreed to warm up with teas, coffees, and babyccinos for the bigs in the handy shelter that sits alongside the café.

Five minutes later I relented and ordered a babyccino for the small, who was making his opinion known quite loudly that he is now old enough to have everything that his big brother has, thank you very much.

As dinner time drew near, we headed home in bright sunshine again, shedding mud from our soggy shoes as we went. Back at the car, our wellies, coats, and hats mocked us with their cleanliness as I made a mental note to definitely, absolutely take them all with us the next time we go on an April walk. Unless, of course, the sun is shining as I look out the window.

• Muddy Mother would love you to subscribe to her own Our Storeys substack, about her chaotic house renovation amongst toddlers, and how to make your home homely, no matter what.

Seeds of Doubt

The bird table is history. We covered the risks of flat bird feeders last year, and this month the national bird charity the RSPB has taken a deep breath and asked us to banish our seed and peanut feeders too, from the 1st May until the end of October.

The reason is a parasite, Trichomonas gallinae, which causes the disease trichomonosis that afflicts a bird’s throat and gullet, preventing it from feeding. The disease has decimated the once common Greenfinch, in Sheffield and around the country, and has spread to the once even more common Chaffinch, which is now declining too.

The RSPB says that Greenfinch numbers have dropped by 65% over the last 30 years, which sounds bad, but perhaps needs some perspective: it seems trichomonosis may have killed up to 3 million birds over that time, just from the Greenfinch population.

Richard Hill from the Sheffield Bird Study Group says there were Greenfinches in 83% of the group’s South Yorkshire survey squares 25 years ago, but then they “just melted away.”

He reckons there are signs the decline is now levelling off, with a few more sightings than previous years, maybe because the population is becoming more resistant. But Chaffinches are now declining rapidly too, and may be some years away from their lowest point.

The disease spreads most easily when birds feed each other, or amongst old food on flat surfaces. The reasons (sorry if you’re breakfasting right now) are that afflicted birds regurgitate their food, along with the parasite, which is then eaten by untainted birds. It also spreads in droppings, particularly in damp conditions. So bird tables are unfortunately a seed bed for a disease that is killing millions of our birds.

Seed feeders are also singled out by the RSPB because they attract the finches most affected by trichomonosis, and even though they’re safer than tables, the diseased birds will still vomit and defecate on and around the feeder, among spilled seeds that other birds then eat.

We’re advised that fat balls and mealworm blocks can still be hung out over summer months, mainly because they’re not so attractive to finches, but Richard Hill points out that in summer there should be natural food available, particularly if you’re trying to make your garden wildlife-friendly.

Many birds prefer insects to feed themselves and their young during spring and summer, so having weeds and wildflowers to harbour native insects in your garden, and letting the grass grow to boost moths and other invertebrates, is a win win for all kinds of beasts.

Wild garden ponds (and other natural ponds) are safer for finches than small bird baths too, but if you do want a bird bath in your garden, the RSPB ask that you change the water every day, again to prevent spread of disease.

One local finch is doing well, Richard Hill says: the flashy Goldfinch has actually increased by over 100% over recent years, possibly because of a huge growth in hanging nyjer seed feeders, where disease may be less likely to spread.

Over recent years, I’ve seen all these birds happily getting on with life in urban meadows, wildlife reserves and parks where we’re letting the grass grow.

Maybe if we have more wild spaces in our urban gardens and fewer fast food outlets, our finches might have a future.

• This Wednesday (15th) Sheffield Bird Study Group are holding a lunchtime talk at Weston Park Museum about their fabulous New Birds of the Sheffield Area atlas, on sale at the event. All welcome, but book your place at the link above.

More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 12th April)

A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for the late winter. (Full version for full members, preview for all).

Sun 12th - Steel City Trail 10 trail race - Wincobank Hill

Mon 13th - Wardsend Cemetery - bird survey

Tues 14th - SRWT Volunteering - Carbrook Ravine

Weds 15th - Shire Brook Valley - Volunteer Session

Thurs 16th - Green City Action Grimesthorpe community allotment

Fri 17th - CycleBoost cycle training (Women only - Endcliffe Park)

Sat 18th - Tree Walk at Ecclesall Woods (Local Action for Nature & Green Spaces - led by Fran Halsall)

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Morning. A few weeks ago, I was alerted to a cute looking creature I barely knew existed. Ecologist Paul Richards likes delving around in the soil, and while he’s there he takes photos like the one above.

These are springtails, and there are lots and lots of them virtually everywhere. Today’s post has an introduction to these fabulous beasts, and this week we also have our latest Wild Weekend Supplement for full subscribers, including a more detailed look at springtails with local expert Dr Paul Ardron.

In today’s main edition, we have a reminder about Sheffield snakes, and a first feature from our new Bill’s Mother’s Book Club columnist, Jo Maher, with a look at Lie of the Land by Guy Shrubsole, and reading without feeding digital billionaires.

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Tiny Beasts

If they were a hundred times bigger, they’d be a lot more popular, says Paul Richards, as we stalk springtails around Walkley Cemetery.

“Many of them have two eye spots, like a face, which appeal to humans,” he says.

Paul’s photos on a social media site drew me to springtaiis. They’re almost cute, with their spots and antenna and big black eyes, which Paul qualifies as being ocelli, really, light sensitive organs, not eyes. Those ocelli happen to be collected together on many springtails, so these tiny beasts seem to be looking curiously up at us as we look down at them through our hand lens.

Cemeteries are quiet places, and so they’re good for wildlife, says Paul. (Walkley Cemetery also has a busy Friends group, who look after the hilly site for heritage and wildlife, if you’d care to join them on one of their monthly workdays.)

Paul selects a gravestone on row C of the cemetery and peers at a carved indentation. Springtails are everywhere, he says. You’re just looking for something that moves. Sure enough, we pick out several dozen minuscule flecks crawling about in the spring sunlight.

Springtails have been around for several hundred millions years, eating algae and fungi and decaying vegetation, and like the millipedes Paul extolled in our earlier post, they’re one of the unassuming creatures that help make the soil we all depend on.

There are more than 200 springtail species in Britain, most of which like damp humid places, Paul says.

“Some are really distinctive and pretty,” he adds, kneeling by a crumbling patch of bark. “As soon as you turn over a log or stone, there’s a wonderful forest of wildlife.”

We catch a couple of tiny flashes of movement in the corners of our eyes. These are springtails doing their thing. Most surface dwelling springtails have a tiny structure called a furka, a bit like a medieval catapult held under tension, says Paul. As soon as it’s disturbed, it releases the catapult catch, and it’s gone, no doubt embarrassed at what we’ve called its magnificent personal catapult.

Fellow springtail enthusiast Paul Ardron tells me about the complex hydraulics that allow springtails to spring. (We have a lot more from Dr Ardron about springtails in our Wild Weekend supplement for full subscribers).

The most evolved of the springtails, the globular species, are very sophisticated, he says, with superheroic spring mechanisms poised to leap away from predators, strange tubes like tiny elephant trunks used for cleaning, and incredible claws that let them walk like ballerinas.

There have been attempts to classify the many springtails since Victorian times, and over recent years Paul Ardron has identified over a dozen species new to the country in places like the Botanical Gardens, where they may well have arrived as eggs in the soil of exotic Australasian plantings.

In Walkley, Paul Richards sieves through soil to reveal woodlice, spiders and several pinging springtails. Like he says, they’re everywhere, and it’s handy for us and the world’s foodchains they are.

“They’re a really important ecological decomposer,” Paul says. And everything is their predator, as other tiny bugs eat them, while birds and spiders then eat the tiny bugs.

“There’s an enormous number of them doing a really useful job. You know when you’re a kid, and you say, Daddy what am I going to be when I grow up? Well if Daddy were a springtail, he’d say: ‘Son, you’re going to be a food source.’”

And we watch another colourful troop of orange ballerinas trip across a gravestone towards a hungry ladybird.

Remember our catchy slogan, readers: F.F.S! Forward to Friends and Subscribe!

The wonderful 300+ of you who pay a meagre pocket money subscription to make this publication happen are quite literally our only way to pay the bills and keep going. We have no wealthy benefactors or sneaky algorithms to cover our costs, just you.

Bill’s Mother’s Book Club with Jo Maher: Lie of the Land by Guy Shrubsole

Welcome to the new book review column for this erudite and cultured readership.

I’m Jo, a local GP and lover of the outdoors, and I wanted to share books in all forms (audio, online, and the irreplaceable joy of an actual paper book) with a focus on subjects I love and think about: the natural world, Sheffield, walking and wheeling, and my political urges to make sure as many people as possible have access to these good things.

I’ll try to leave my day job as a GP in Wincobank, along with my folk music and morris dancing for other forums, although I know BBoBM came to see us welcome in the May at Parkwood Springs last year. (To ensure a good summer and harvest, make sure to join us - same time, same place, at dawn this year!)

Lie of the Land is a clever title for a well-researched book — short but thorough and dense with revelations that might make you quite cross. It had me marching to the kitchen to harrumph to my partner Chris Jones, poet and author of Swift diaries

Such facts as only 8% of land in England is accessible to the general public, despite the CROW Act 2000 The lie in question is this: the small number of people who own England’s land and rivers are far more interested in private gain than in the environmental stewardship they claim to provide. At present, only 80% of land ownership is even recorded at the Land Registry, and each individual search costs £7 — making a full picture of 32 million acres both financially and practically impossible.

Guy’s thorough blog shows the working of his research & how this book and its predecessor Who Owns England? came about. The Lie of the Land audiobook is entertaining & well read by the author himself with playful parodies of certain characters, including the Queen and Churchill.

Why this book now? It’s super-topical, after the announcement last month that the government’s Land Use Framework will remove the paywall on the Land Registry, effectively making large landowners accountable for both how they support natural environments to thrive (or not) & what access people have to enjoy (with respect & care) green spaces.

Guy is a founder member of the modern Right to Roam campaign, alongside the author and artist Nick Hayes, whose books (including the Book of Trespass) I’ve read and would recommend. The current Right to Roam team includes the Yorkshire-based author, Dr Amy Jane Beer. Her prize winning book The Flow is factual & lyrical- I loved it.

There is no doubt that Right to Roam is an impressive and talented collective. Some people might be put off by their direct action approaches, including the Kinder mass swim trespass last year.

I’ve met Guy, Amy & Nick and personally I find their campaigning is intelligent, well-organised and thoughtful. Their central argument resonates with me: how can people care for nature if they’re denied access to know it?

Closer to home, Firth Park resident Robin Grey has an entertaining joyful show on land access — Three Acres and a Cow that I would also highly recommend - so much for not talking about folk music!

Just down the road from Firth Park, in my consulting room in Wincobank, I see every working day how local access to nature matters to people. The evidence for nature’s benefit to health and wellbeing is established in scientific research.

After nearly 30 years as an NHS doctor I know just prescribing medication should only be part of providing good holistic primary care - it’s common sense, and much more rewarding work for me and much more beneficial for patients and their families too.

Back to the book - Lie of the Land was the last Audible audiobook I listened to before cancelling my subscription. (Last year I read and listened to around 40 books, and I’ve been finding ways to continue being an avid reader without the big corporates).

When BBoBM first approached me, the wonderful indie bookshop Novel -within walking distance of where me and Chris live, had just been forced to close under shocking circumstances. In the short time it had been open we had grown so fond of the shop & the community around it Kate & Joe created. I can’t imagine the effect on them, from the trauma they have experienced. Losing Novel is really sad - it was a treasure and we have lost it, probably forever.

There are many enjoyable ways to be an ethical reader, leaving out the big commercial actors and supporting non-corporate business when we can. I know this takes mental work, hence my desire to help navigate & share with you what’s working for me.

Such as supporting local publishers like the fabulous Longbarrow Press and Vertebrate Publishing, and foraging and borrowing physical books. Finding alternatives to the subscription giants doesn’t have to cost more: I highly recommend Sheffield’s still excellent library services

At home, the Libby App for e-books, audiobooks and press reader is a no-brainer. It’s free & has loads of books on it (including Book of Trespass, both as audio and e-book)

I’ll leave you with this fantastic paean to libraries, written by Sheffield-based songwriter Piers Cawley & sung by the fabulous Arbrevyn who are now all based in Sheffield too.

Til next time — happy reading!

Snakes and Dogs

The Eastern Moors partnership remind us that we’re now well into bird nesting and snake sunning season, so please keep your dogs on a short lead, for their own sake as well as to help the local wildlife survive into summer.

Dogs themselves can’t be blamed for sniffing out the nests of ground-nesting birds, many were bred to do just that, but they can eat chicks or frighten off parent birds without owners ever knowing, so conservationists plead with us to keep dogs on leads on the moors throughout spring and summer.

The moors around western Sheffield are also a stronghold for Adders, say the Eastern Moors staff, and although the nation’s only venomous snake will usually slither away as soon as it hears you or senses your thundering vibrations on a nearby footpath, it might still feel threatened enough by an inquisitive dog to bite it on its nose, leading to an expensive vet’s bill, or worse.

Adders like to catch the sun on rocks or even footpaths at quiet times of day, so take care out there, and if you see one, don’t hang around too long, so our local snakes can get on with their sunbathing.

• Thanks to Colin Dixon for the brilliant photo of a local Adder sniffing the air near Sheffield this spring.

More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 5th April)

A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for the late winter. (Full version for full members, preview for all).

Sun 5th - Yorkshire Rose women’s cycle rides

Tues 7th - SRWT Volunteering - Wyming Brook

Weds 8th - Sheffield RSPB Bird Walk - Welbeck & Cresswell Crags

Thurs 9th - Green City Action Grimesthorpe community allotment

Fri 10th - SRWT Volunteering - Wildlife Gardening

Sat 11th - CycleBoost cycle training (Greenhill Park)

Thanks for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this post, could you run to a mere £4 a month (or less) for a full member’s subscription, to help us pay the bills to keep all this coming to the inboxes of the Outdoor City?

Welcome to today’s supporter’s supplement, with many thanks to Dr Paul Ardron, a soft spoken source of local knowledge in many fields, woodlands, moors and as he describes here, inner space.

Across the world, there’s a huge volume of tiny gaps between stones, leaves, rocks and soil particles that we lumbering humans rarely notice.

But Paul does, and in this article that he’s kindly shared with us (along with his amazing photos), he gives us what he jokingly calls his Ode to Springtails, one of the most prolific creature to inhabit the world’s inner space. (We also have a shorter piece about these fabulous beasts in our main Sunday post coming soon for all readers this morning).

By some estimates there are over 100,000 tiny springtails in every square metre of dampish land. My circumspect contacts shake their heads and put it at probably just tens of thousands at a good (for springtails) square metre, particularly if you dig down a bit. But don’t forget they can live on water too.

So a little inexpert maths on my part says there could then be at least 7,447,000,000,000,000,000 of them out there. Something like that, give or take a few noughts. That’s what we mean by prolific. And had you even heard of them before today, never mind knew about their superheroic powers?

We aim to have special editions like this for our full paying members at least every month or so, to thank you for your support to keep this publication going. We’re still slowly growing towards our target of 380 full paying supporters, when we’ll be able to properly cover our costs and help a few local freelances make their mark in local out there journalism too. You can join us below, and get full access to everything we ever publish.

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Morning. Hopeful news for the rewilding Porter Brook this morning, and a bit more on the people’s tram and footstep network. We also have another look at the Pine Marten: is it really returning, or did it never disappear?

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Brookside

Take the trouble to find the Matilda Street pocket park, and you can watch the Porter Brook gurgle through the city centre. Your next thought is inevitably, where does it gurgle on to now, along with the birds, fish and butterflies it’s brought into urban Sheffield? And where does it come from to get here?

If you’ve been on the city’s now famous Culvert Tours, you’ll know the brook gushes on past gnarled Victorian walls and wildflowers, until it disappears into the gothic catacombs under the railway station.

(The tours start again this summer, with all profits helping the Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust [SPRT] restore those rivers to accessible wildness).

Heading upstream, the brook is tantalisingly visible, but a little lost. Hopefully, not for much longer.

Our post of 18 months ago covered an attempted stroll along the inner city Porter Brook with Simon Ogden from SPRT. We wondered when the gates would be opened upstream from Matillda Street, and when the temporary car park off Sylvester Gardens (launched without planning permission) would be expunged, in order to open up a linking section of the long-planned riverside path?

The car park has finally gone, and Simon is hopeful the site’s new developers, Skyhouse Homes, will include a suitably fabulous path, and maybe assist with renaturalising the river too, so Dippers and Herons and Brown Trout can enjoy the Porter here as much as they do in the brook beyond Matilda Street.

I happened across semi-aquatic Simon near Sylvester Gardens this week, chatting to staff from the Don Catchment Rivers and Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trusts about a fish pass, to help trout and aquatic colleagues navigate the stark Cinder Hill Weir in this stretch of the Porter.

With a little minor engineering work, the new path will link to the existing Porter Brook Trail to Mary Street, Decathlon and beyond, and to the existing trail already built (albeit currently fenced and gated) behind Sidney Street. So we can expect, pretty soon, a riverside trail from the inner ring road right into the city centre.

Meanwhile, there’s equally cautious excitement that after nearly seven years, the long awaited lightwell on Platform 5 of Sheffield station should be installed very soon.

After SPRT raised over £20,000 and ran a celebratory haiku competition several years ago, the railway authorities have finally agreed to the installation of a grille and seating perches, so we can all look down to the confluence of the Sheaf and Porter below the station’s platform five.

It might happen this week, says Simon, only slightly incredulously, bearing in mind we’ve had a pandemic and four prime minsters since the project was originally agreed and funded.

The installation will bring a little light back to the rivers, to help fish, river plants and other wildlife thrive, and just as importantly, celebrate the rivers that helped make Sheffield the city it is.

“After six years of planning, navigating railway bureaucracy and a great deal of patience, the Sheaf and Porter Rivers Trust have been granted permission to install their pilot Lightwell project above the confluence of the two rivers on platform five at Sheffield station. Watch this space for news about installation, which will hopefully be completed within the next few weeks,” the trust say, cautiously.

Six years ago Martha Sooklall qualified for and won the 12-17 year old category in the haiku competition, and wrote:

Hidden underneath,

There are two rivers flowing,

Secret from our eyes.

Hopefully they’ll not be a secret from our eyes much longer, Martha.

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Orange Bus And Lemons

It’s possibly Margaret Thatcher never actually said: “Anybody seen on a bus over the age of 25 has been a failure in life,” a quote attributed to her during bus privatisation, but more likely to have come a bit earlier from a former Duchess of Westminster.

Such archaic notions were soundly dismissed by South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard, as he bathed in the orange glory of our new South Yorkshire People’s Network of buses, trams, bikes and walking routes earlier this month.

“What a great day!” he said. “This is the end of the failed privatisation of our network, which brought South Yorkshire to life, when it worked.”

We covered some of the main takeaways in our earlier posts about the launch of the People’s Network. The day’s excitement was full of confidence the plan would work, and that everyone supported public buses, bikes, trains and trams, and a walking and wheeling network, running for us rather than shareholders miles or countries away.

New York, Tokyo, and Paris were mentioned in comparison to the new South Yorkshire. It was a new dawn, and the network was set to be the envy of the world, speakers enthused. Let’s hope so.

Former Olympic cyclist Chris Boardman joined our own Olympian, Ed Clancy, at the launch, and Boardman, National Active Travel Commissioner at Active Travel England, talked of not seeing your commute as an annoying waste of time, but enjoying and making use of the journey, when you’re getting somewhere on a bike or walking or wheeling yourself there.

After his speech, he was steaming away on foot back to the railway station, so I tagged along and made use of our journey up the stairs of the City Hall to welcome all the positive news. and to try and ask two questions.

Will the People’s Network and all the walking, wheeling and cycling funding continue, whatever the nature of forthcoming governments? It’s about making places safe for families and children, he said, and everyone seems to support that.

So what about the thousands of existing public footpaths, quiet lanes and bridleways that don’t seem to get looked at much by modern transport planning? He didn’t properly answer this, but told me to watch for an announcement in May, before striding away for his train.

There are many people who can’t see why the old ways people got around their towns, villages and neighbourhoods can’t be kept clean and tidy and useable (for many of us) for years to come, even if some of those old public footpaths and rights of way don’t always meet modern design standards.

We have a new numbered walking and wheeling network for Sheffield coming soon, with lemon coloured signage, to match our tourism branding, and complement our citrus buses.

Planners do like to build shiny new stuff rather than repair the old ways, I often hear. Veteran walkers and wheelers tell me of crumbling bridleways, fenced off footpaths and overgrown public rights of way, and wonder why this centuries old active travel people’s network is so often forgotten.

• This week the Ramblers launched a new “Access Denied” campaign you might like to join, while we wait for further public rights of way network news from the government.

The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine Marten

We’ve been on the trail of lonesome Pine Martens since our feature a couple of weeks ago. They may still be here, says Professor Ian Rotherham after I’d maybe overplayed the reintroduction angle, in my excitement about acrobatic predators chasing Grey Squirrels out of our woodlands.

He tells me there could be what’s known as a relict population, a very small number of Pine Martens surviving in an isolated part of a region where they were once all over the place.

There was a possible sighting near Bradfield in the 1990s, he says, among other maybe, possibly encounters in South Yorkshire and Derbyshire, so it’s very unlikely the animal shot by gamekeepers and stuffed for Sheffield Museum in 1926 was actually the last ever Sheffield Pine Marten after they’d been shot and trapped out of existence.

Ruth Pilbeam from Derbyshire Wildlife Trust confirms a 2002 record of a Derbyshire Pine Marten shot in Baslow (old habits die hard, for some).

“We’re aware there have been very occasional sightings of Pine Marten around Sheffield,” says Ruth. “These animals have likely covered large areas of the country to end up around Sheffield and Derbyshire, given that the closest known populations now exist in North Yorkshire or Shropshire.”

Ruth adds that these nearly neighbouring populations have only been growing to good numbers in recent years, so odd arrivals a decade or more ago around Sheffield would have either travelled even further, or could even have been part of an unlikely tiny relict population hanging on here for generations.

The ability of Pine Martens to travel through less than ideal habitats to new forest homes means the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust will be carrying out habitat feasibility studies along with nearby WIldlife Trusts and others, she says.

This should help model speedier progress through new Derbyshire woodland habitats by bold Pine Marten explorers from North Yorkshire or Shropshire, or help reintroduced animals find their way around.

Val Clinging is a mammal recorder for Sorby Natural History Society, and she agrees it’s unlikely the 1926 Sheffield Museums Pine Marten of Broomhead Moor was Sheffield’s last.

There are a handful of possible local records from over 15 years ago, she says. “But it’s things like: ‘Glimpsed at dark among the trees, but not positively identified.’”

The (generally) secretive dusk and dawn habits of these predators mean there are fewer people around to watch wild Pine Martens scampering away into the murky woods, she says, so the lack of clear sightings doesn’t mean that a relict population here is impossible.

Reader Roger Butterfield sent his photos from 1990 (above), of a Pine Marten taking advantage of Scotland’s early eco-tourist trade by visiting Roger in a holiday cottage on Strontian in the Highlands. Despite offering it scraps of meat, it had “a strong preference for dried fruit and bits of toast spread with raspberry jam,” Roger says.

Val Clinging says Pine Martens evolved alongside Red Squirrels, and remembers talking to elderly neighbours who recalled Red Squirrels in most of Sheffield’s parks until the invasive Grey Squirrel arrived.

The retreat of Red Squirrels was due to many factors, Val says, including loss of habitat, competition from other animals, and disease. But eventually, the remaining Red Squirrels retreated from the city into the forests around the Derwent and Ladybower reservoirs, she says, where it seems the last few Pine Martens may have been waiting to finish them off.

Those same forests are on the possible shortlist to provide a home by 2030 for new chocolate-furred families, who’ll have the chance to join any remaining lonesome Pine Martens.

Maybe they’ll pair up and hunt for jam sandwiches together, and one day, chase after scurries of squirrels the same colour as our bus network.

More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 29th March)

A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for the late winter. (Full version for full members, preview for all).

Sun 29th - Yorkshire Rose women’s cycle rides

Mon 30th - Fri 3rd April - Daily health walks in parks and green spaces from Step Out Sheffield, 10 am start

Tues 31st - SRWT Wild Play - Ecclesall Woods (£8.50)

Weds 1st - Longshaw Social Walk

Weds 1st - Shire Brook Valley - Volunteer Session

Thurs 2nd - Green City Action Grimesthorpe community allotment

Sat 4th - Parkwood Springs conservation morning

Thanks for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this post, and like the idea of regular out there journalism for everyone in Sheffield and the northern Peak District, can you run to a mere £4 a month (or less) for a full member’s subscription, to help keep all this coming for our thousands of readers across the Outdoor City?

Morning. Local wildlife photographer Paul Hobson has just won the overall prize in the British Wildlife Photography Awards. His wonderful photo (above) depicts a Common Toad swimming across a woodland pond in the Rivelin Valley - taken via a glass box built by Paul, allowing his camera to look up from the depths, ready to capture a toad swimming above. He’s agreed to share the photo with us, and I hope to have more of his work in future.

Today we have more surprising rewilding, this time on the east side of Sheffield in the Shire Brook Valley, with inspiring news of spectacular water predators returning to the site. And a new piece from birder and writer Pete Brown to celebrate the best time to visit a noisy heronry.

And today we also have a post-industrial Sunday supplement with, more on the wild creatures making homes on the former sewage works, coal workings and landfill sites of the Shire Brook Valley.

Valley Highs

The Forgotten Valley is no longer forgotten. I’m tramping through meadow and wet woodland trails with publicists, civil servants, council officers, the chair of the council’s Communities, Parks and Leisure Policy Committee, and several rangers and other staff who think nothing of wading into a pond to see how the caddis-fly larvae are doing.

We’re celebrating the finale of the Shire Brook Valley Species Survival Fund project, which the canny fund raisers involved have stretched out to this summer after the £1.1million project launched in 2024.

I’m handed a list: 35 leaky dams created, 1,149 metres of footpath improved, 2.5km of new hedges planted, 650 metres of ditches, 40 hectares or heathland and grassland improved or created, 3,126 people attending nature events. The list goes on and on.

The Riverside Stewardship Company tell us how they’ve dredged out the silt and overwhelming bullrushes in the old Carr Forge dam, enabling all kinds of wildlife to gain a foothold again. A Little Egret flies past to punctuate the achievement.

The Environment Agency show us a series of damp rivulets and dams, which they reckon have already helped reduce the risk of flooding downriver. A project officer shows me the neck of an ancient Temperance Movement non-alcohol beer bottle dredged from a dam.

There are new sculpture trails, where engagement officer (and contributor to this publication) Meghan Tipping explains how putting two explanatory sentences and a size guide to Shire Brook wildlife like dragonflies and Buzzards on a durable metal sculpture inspires people to look out for their local creatures.

Equally important are the fences, which in many cases are slowly morphing into living hedges. Ground nesting birds like Skylarks, and vulnerable mammals like Harvest Mice, can only thrive if people and dogs are absent from their nests, so community ecologists know there’s a balance between keeping humans and their pets away from some places, and welcoming them with open arms and family trails to others.

We’ve covered this once industrial valley several times over the last few years, mainly because the place is so inspiring.

Like many parts of Sheffield, industry and nature have co-existed on these hills and brooks for generations. The valley had coal and tanning yards, railway lines, sewage works and landfill tips. But the brook survived, along with a few of the older trees and hedges, before a planting project last century started to make the place look green again, and the Shire Brook Valley Nature Reserve was founded in the late 1990s.

A team of hard working volunteers have helped look after the 100 acre site ever since, and we saw some of them hard at work with their work gloves and spades as we passed with our clipboards and notebooks.

In general, the local volunteers are delighted by the project’s achievements: visits from local people have rocketed, and their volunteer team has more than doubled. (If you’d like to join in contact the project at https://shirebrookvalley.wordpress.com/volunteering/)

Helen Twigg from the Shire Brook Valley Conservation Group is on the site virtually every day. She welcomes the Species Survival work, but advises patience. “It could be five, ten, twenty years before you see the results of some of the stuff that’s been done over the last two years.”

The site will need ongoing care and maintenance, she says, and that’s the immediate challenge. The council and Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust are trying hard to find continuing funding, and there’s an air of confidence about this as we walk round listening to Wrens and Bullfinches.

There are Roe Deer on site in large numbers now, and egrets and Kingfishers, and the big news I discover is the official arrival of European Otters to Shire Brook, after a footprint was identified at a mystery location.

Otters are still hunted illegally around the UK, by flushing them out from riverbanks and killing them with packs of dogs, so sadly the staff and volunteers can’t shout out too specifically about the valley’s otter population until the thuggery of the otter hunt becomes locally extinct.

One conservationist pointed out that Water Voles were at Shire Brook twenty years ago: the resident otters should help Water Voles return, as they evolved alongside them as well as the unmentioned water mammal of the day, the Eurasian Beaver. Otters kill and frighten off invasive American Mink, which itself deters both Water Voles and Eurasian Beavers - Shire Brook may be on the list for local beaver reintroductions, but there’s no official word yet.

The other big small news is the discovery of 215 Harvest Mouse nests at the adjacent Woodhouse Washlands site by staff from Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust - a huge increase for a threatened-status rodent the weight of a teabag.

The Species Survival Fund project covered Woodhouse Washlands as well as the Shire Brook Valley and one or two other local green and blue spaces, including Richmond Park, where the parks Friends group has also been brought back to life.

Nineteen years ago, Christine Handley from the Shire Brook Valley Heritage Group helped publish “Shire Brook: The Forgotten Valley.” The book details all those coal mines, tanning yards and sewage works, along with the gradual return and recovery of the valley wildlife.

Like Helen Twigg, Christine is encouraged by the last two funded years, and hopes the outcomes for wildlife will be sustainable. (The grant jugglers have allocated a small five year stash of maintenance funding to help manage all those fences and hedges and ponds, at least).

A lot more people, especially local people, now know about the once-forgotten valley, she says, along with local organisations, politicians and potential backers.

Unpromising former industrial sites across the city can get wild again: Parkwood Springs and the Shire Brook Valley are being collonsied by wild beasts and botany thanks to a combination of voluntary work on the ground, sporadic funding grants, and the ability of wildlife like native scrub, Sparrowhawks, Otters and Harvest Mice to take advantage.

“You’ve got to have that vision that you can make a difference” says Christine Handley. “There’s a lot of value for birds and insects and native plants etcetera in a place like this. You’ve got Foxes and Badgers and Roe Deer coming through now, and they don’t care that it’s post industrial.”

It’s a long term process, says parks committee chair Councillor Kurtis Crossthorn, as we wander along the brook. The first thing you need is community involvement, and you build on that to gather in all the value that politicians now appreciate wild spaces bring to the city, for health and community and biodiversity and everything else.

But you also need money and staff. The daily ranger on site over the last two years is being reduced to one day a week for now, but Christine says the continuation of a ranger service is needed at every wild space in Sheffield (although there’s no sign of public funding to make that happen anytime soon).

“It’s all very positive now,” Christine says. “But ask me again in a year’s time, and I hope I’m still as positive.”

• We’ll have more detail on this project and its future soon. And see today’s Post Industrial Sunday Supplement for more personal views.

Occasional contributor Pete Brown believes in using your out there time wisely. If you’re strolling to work, or taking your youngsters for a stroll, why not look out for local wildlife at the same time? Equally, if you can spare a few minutes to simply sit (or stand) and watch, you won’t regret it.

He’ll be contributing occasional pieces on these themes this year. Today, it’s nesting season for Grey Herons, and the local heronries (in Ecclesall Woods and Rother Valley Park) are often noisy, spectacular, and a little later in the year, (when the baby herons arrive) quite smelly.

Pete, a member of the RSPB and Sheffield Bird Study Group, is currently working on his second book about local birdwatching. (His first, The Northumbrian Garden Parrot, is available for £10 from Pete at brownpl38@gmail.com with all profits going to Sheffield Swift Network).

Children seem to particularly like Grey Herons, because they’re so big and easy to see, maybe, or perhaps because in flight they look like Pterodactyls.

“They do look prehistoric, and they give off these loud crawks too, which helps,” says Pete, “although no-one really knows what a Pterodactyl sounded like.” But herons help us imagine.

Taking the Time - by Pete Brown

Friends sometimes enquire if I’ve been bird watching recently. The answer of course is “yes”. If birds are there, and they usually are, then I’m bird watching. Finding birds during the course of a walk to town, the gym or further afield, that’s bird watching.

The longer the walk, the greater the likelihood of finding a significant number of birds. But equally valid from a bird watching point of view is simply taking some time to stand or sit beside a particular habitat, and to watch what happens in the vicinity.

The British Trust for Ornithology’s Heronries Census, dating back to 1928, is the longest-running annual monitoring dataset for any bird in the world. Accurate and regular counts showed an increase in the UK’s Grey Heron breeding population throughout the twentieth century, although there has been a decline nationally in the last two decades for reasons as yet unknown.

In the Sheffield area the situation is more encouraging with an increase in the number of colonies and occupied nests in recent years.

Wood Three is the largest of the three divisions that together comprise Ecclesall Woods. Within it is the fenced 17-acre bird sanctuary created in 1926 to safeguard breeding birds. Just inside the south-western boundary of the sanctuary is a small heronry.

Grey Herons have bred there, nesting in larch trees since the start of the current millennium, and probably well before. In some years only one or two occupied nests have been reported, but in recent years numbers have increased, with one report from 2019 indicating an exceptional nine nests, the largest count there so far.

The site is safe from persecution or disturbance and perhaps herons have benefitted from a combination of continuing mild winters, less polluted water courses, and possibly local well-stocked garden ponds.

A prolonged watch at the heronry is a rewarding, though challenging, experience. February and March are the optimum months to visit, when the birds are at their most active and the nest trees are largely devoid of foliage, so nests and herons are at their most visible. Yet despite the size of birds and nests, it takes time to get a fairly accurate impression of the number of birds and occupied nests.

Grey Herons are early nesters. This March, there have been birds around the site since late January, but earnest breeding behaviour begins in February. It takes time and more than a little patience to register what’s going on.

In the first few minutes of a visit there seems little to see. Some of the nest platforms are fairly obvious, though one or two are concealed behind a tangle of branches high in the canopy, and some are older structures from previous years. Even without new spring foliage, it takes a little while to detect the couple of one metre-tall herons present, standing motionless at a nest.

In time, life becomes more apparent. Individual birds fly in looking incongruously large as they weave swiftly through the branches. There are harsh, loud squawks, gargles and growls between the new arrivals and birds already present. If the incomer is from an established pair there can be a quieter bill rattling between the two birds at the nest. During a watch one or two herons will arrive with twigs to add to a nest structure, and occasionally birds will snap nest-bound twigs from the lower branches of nearby trees.

Establishing how many birds and active nests are in the heronry isn’t straightforward. An individual or pair standing at a nest is a fair indication of occupancy, but some structures look lifeless until after 25 minutes of watching, a bird flies in and alights on the nest. Incubating birds on nests 50 metres into the sanctuary and 30 metres up in a tree are hard to detect until a protruding head appears.

In one recent observation, an apparently empty platform revealed its occupant when the unseen bird defecated spectacularly over the side of the nest.

But a prolonged watch at the heronry is more than just an exercise in establishing how many birds and occupied nests are present. Equally rewarding is the opportunity to appreciate just how spectacular herons are. The incoming and outgoing flights of very large birds weaving through the trees is well worth seeing, and herons in full breeding plumage are very attractive birds.

But it’s a birdwatching experience that is confined to just a couple of months. By mid-April, nests and their occupants will usually be concealed by foliage, and a few weeks later, the sounds from the heronry will be the chattering notes of young birds calling out to be fed, rather than February’s raucous territorial utterances.

And one more birding bonus. Standing still you hear more and see more.

A quiet half-hour watch in a tract of ancient woodland is a great opportunity to listen to and closely observe a host of birds that don’t always register during the course of a walk.

A couple of hours after completing this morning’s heron shift, my notebook is beside me. In 30 minutes I heard or saw two Great Spotted Woodpeckers, two singing Goldcrests, a daylight-calling Tawny Owl, two Song Thrushes, three Nuthatches, a pair of Mandarins prospecting for a nest hole, the first singing Chiffchaff of the spring and numerous Blue, Coal and Great Tits, along with a couple of Robins and a fly-over Ring-necked Parakeet.

This is ‘Taking the Time’ birding at its very best.

More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 22nd March)

A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for the late winter. (Full version for full members, preview for all).

Sun 22nd - Wadsley & Loxley Commoners Muck in Morning

Mon 23rd - Fri 27th - Daily health walks in parks and green spaces from Step Out Sheffield, 10 am start

Tues 24th - Sheffield Ramblers Walk - Stocksbridge (6m)

Weds 25th - Longshaw Social Walk

Thurs 26th - Green City Action Grimesthorpe community allotment

Fri 27th - SRWT Volunteering - Greno Woods

Sat 28th - Parkwood Springs conservation morning

Sat 28th - Sheffield RSPB Bird Walk - Wadsley Common

Sat 28th - Wardsend Cemetery conservation session

Don’t forget this week we also have our post-industrial Sunday supplement on Sheffield’s blossom festival and spring birds:

If you’ve enjoyed this post, please forward it to all your mates, and as you know, the best way to help us is to take out a pocket money subscription to keep all this coming for our thousands of readers across the Outdoor City. Thanks for reading.

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A Sunday supplement for all readers this week, because photographers, writers, conservationists, historians, bird ringers and frog lovers want all of Sheffield to know about the burgeoning nature reserve on our doorstep.

For the next few weeks, Shire Brook is one of the best places to catch the start of Sheffield’s native blossom festival. Blackthorn is already starting to sparkle in the sun, then the Mayflower (Hawthorn) will bounce in the hedges, these days often a few weeks early, in April. And there are cherry blossoms too.

This week’s Sunday at Bill’s Mother’s covers the prospects for the reserve and the creatures that now live there, while here in today’s post industrial supplement, we have a look to the future from ecologist and artist Ziggy Senkans, written in 2022 when the prospects of wild cattle and Eurasian Beavers in these parts were fanciful.

And we have a catch up on birds and blossom from our Beginner Birder columnist Meghan Tipping, noting the links of a post-industrial Sheffield river valley to Japan.

Thanks for reading. We now have well over 300 paid-up supporters of this publication, thanks to whom all this arrives for you all every week. But we still need around 45 more of you regular readers to say: I like this stuff enough to contribute a mere £4 a month to keep it coming. We have no millionaire backers or scary algorithms to pay our bills, just our lovely readers.

Future Days - by Ziggy Senkans

(In 2022 Sheffield ecologist and musician Ziggy Senkans was asked to write a short piece about the Shire Brook Valley for an art project of the time. He came up with the below - to be read while listening to Future Days by Can, he says.)

Since then, the valley has seen the investment of thousands of hours of work, often by volunteers from the Shire Brook Valley Heritage and Conservation Groups, along with a £1,112,155 investment from the government’s Species Survival Fund, for Species Stacking. (Which seems to mean improving the chances for all levels of the local ecology on top of each other, and getting lots of local people to watch.)

One of the key aspects of the project was to improve the wettishness of the reserve, which will bring happiness to everything from Otters to algae to flood resilience managers. (And maybe other waterborne mammals soon - watch this damp patch.)

So read Ziggy’s hopeful piece with all this, and his projected date of 2032, in mind.

Shire Brook Valley 2032 - By Ziggy Senkans

One day, fingers crossed, the calamitous A57 will be broken up by the forcing of green shoots, the powerful pushing of fungi, the tunnelling of the Mole and Badger, the under cutting of the Shire Brook as it wanders down to meet the sparkling River Rother (alive with fish and hunting birds).

Maybe we’ll see the Beaver back in the valley, and with it we’ll have a vibrant wetland seething with all manner of life.

Species, long thought extinct or unreachable, even exotic are back, the Stork, the Crane, the Osprey, the Bittern (I can keep adding here, try Wild Boar, Lynx, Wild Cattle, Wolf, dare to dream. Don’t forget Hippopotamus, Cresswell Crags had hippos, so can the Shire Brook Valley?)

And the purring song of the Turtle Dove can be heard in the valley, after many years absence, mixed in with the songs of warblers and that old symbol of ‘spring moving in to summer’, the Cuckoo! Back, with a vengeance, lots of parasitic potential (biodiversity in action).

Deafened, by the constant ‘plop’ of the Water Vole as you move through the landscape. Blinded, by the metallic sheen and flicker of damsel and dragonflies, what more do you need? Where do we the wetlanders fit in to this reverie? I’m already there, care to join me?

Sunshine, Skylarks, Signs of Spring - by Meghan Tipping

Wednesday 18^th March, was (currently) the hottest day of 2026. I made sure to take a stroll through Shire Brook Valley Nature Reserve. After being lucky enough to explore Japan for two weeks, Karuizawa being the most magical place, I have been keen to get back on the reserve and listen to spring come alive.

The walk did not disappoint. Armed with my litter pickers, binoculars and a clipboard, I set off with a few purposes. I enjoy walking with litter pickers (the extendable grabber tool for collecting litter at arm’s length), as I’m so keen to protect the habitat of the many species that thrive here. Although nature is quite marvellous in how it works around the litter and rubbish, I don’t think it should be that way.

I headed up to Linleybank Meadows in search of my first sighting of a Skylark. It was this time last year that I first began birding, and heard a Skylark for the first time. I find it fascinating now that I’m attuned to looking for tiny movements or vague blobs, in the chance that it might be a bird or other creature.

It was a little brown blob that caught my eye in the field, near a brown tuft of grass and as I raised my binoculars to take a closer look, there it was. My first Shire Brook Valley Skylark. I stayed for a while, and it wasn’t long until I was graced with that magnificent display of flight and song. The sky was such a brilliant blue and it was amazing to watch. I had an ear to ear smile plastered across my face.

The impacts of the Species Survival Project here are already being seen.

With the reintroduction of grazing cattle and the new fencing, the Skylark habitat is being enriched and protected. We hope to hear and see plenty of them this year.

During bird nesting season (March – September), it’s important for dogs to be kept on leads in these wildlife sensitive areas, to ensure all of nature has the opportunity to thrive.

As I headed back to the visitor centre, I looked into the field where the cows munched away at the grass. In amongst them: Magpies, crows and a Pied Wagtail. Butterflies, Peacock and Brimstone, passed me on my journey alongside the meandering brook. The sound of Chiffchaff already becoming familiar again. Such wonderful signs of spring bursting through and brightening the mood of all.

• Visit Shire Brook Valley for the Easter Trail event on Tuesday 7^th April - What’s On – Shire Brook Valley Nature Reserve

From Japan to Shire Brook Valley - By Meghan Tipping

Being in Japan from mid February to early March, we were unsure if we would get to experience the much-talked-about blossom.

Fortunately, much of the plum blossom was emerging and it was beautiful to experience - I think because of the early timing, we were able to explore without the super busy crowds.

One day we visited Osaka Castle and there was a blossom garden with all different kinds - I had not known that there were so many different varieties. I particularly enjoyed the white one with a pink back (not the technical description) and perhaps that was because hiding amongst the flowers was a White-eyed Warbler feeding on nectar from blossoms.

Such a striking bird and it stood out against the white flowers. I had never seen one before so I was keen to watch them for a while, and encouraged my husband to try and capture the memory on camera.

My first day back at Shire Brook Valley was a sunny one and I was very pleasantly surprised to see the blossom in full bloom opposite the visitor centre.

I think this is a cherry blossom. It’s funny that we travel to far flung places in the hope of seeing something, when actually we are lucky enough to have it on our doorstep, if we look.

I must admit, now I am back, I am noticing the blossom all across Sheffield as Blackthorn blooms a dense, snowy white.

Shire Brook Valley is a fantastic place to come and explore different varieties of blossom, and every Wednesday and on some of our event days we will have the Cherry Blossom Coffee kart parked outside the visitor centre for people to enjoy.

I am now going to task myself with trying to identify the blossom types we have on the reserve so I can go and enjoy them fully.

As promised in yesterday’s Sunday at Bill’s Mother’s, a brief post with a first look at the new public transport network for South Yorkshire, for readers of the Outdoor City’s out there social enterprise publication. Yes, our new publicly owned buses and trams will be the colour of Henderson’s Relish.

And for new and regular readers, please remember that the new journalism only exists thanks to readers who support it. In our case, our subs are set at pocket money prices so most readers can chip in to help.

Next year, we’ll have the start of our new Public Transport system. For those of us who grew up with 2p bus fares in the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, the name on our new buses and trams strikes a certain defiant tone: we’ll be riding on the South Yorkshire People’s Network, or just The People’s Network for short, said South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard at the press launch on Friday.

We’ll be finding out more for Sunday’s edition (and probably future posts too) but here are just a few things worth knowing:

Franchising will actually begin in September 2027, so the network is still 18 months away.

The intention seems to be that trams, buses, walking, wheeling and cycling trips will all be part of the People’s Network. But the new e-bike hire schemes for Sheffield and South Yorkshire will now be launched next year, not this.

(Unfortunately that’s the nature of local authority purchasing, decision making and procurement, but hopefully worth the wait - the existing CycleBoost e-bike subscription scheme is available now, however).

There’s £7.5million from the government to investigate new tram routes, likely to include possible lines to Stocksbridge and along the Barrow Hill line to Chesterfield, as we reported in October last year.

There’ll be much more on road safety with new crossings, an aim to ban pavement parking and reduce speeding (the term is “improved speed management”).

The network will not be run for shareholder profits, so the Mayor explained there will be the chance to improve and increase currently quiet or non-existent rural and Peak District routes, thanks to income from popular routes in the towns and cities.

30% of new buses will be electric, with more to come in future.

The name Supertram will be history.

I could give you lots more facts and figures, but for now the name, and the commitment to make getting around easy again, seem to me the main points to be revealed in a blaze of orange today. And that it’s taken forty years to get here, after deregulation in 1986.

Finally: the colours of the new trams and buses (and probably e-bikes) are officially “molten orange, grey and asphalt black: which speak to the region’s history of industry, Northern grit, and resilience,” says the press release. And they just happen to match a bottle of Hendos too.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to share this post with your mates.

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Morning. We visit a city hillside today to learn how surprising spring birds are taking urban rewilding under their wings. As the first fire season of the year begins, we have a request for us all to help record dangerous moorland fires, and some big not quite out there yet news for city explorers.

If you’ve been reading for a while, can you help us publish all this? It’ll set you back less than a pint of beer a month, as you probably know by now.

Not Yet Out There News

Bringing Back Our Buses - Publishing on a Sunday is bad news for stories embargoed until Monday. A few of you may have noticed the glitzy countdown page from the South Yorkshire Combined Authority about a big local travel announcement at 11.30 am tomorrow (Monday 16th March).

We know what they’re announcing, but can’t tell you yet, even though it’s pretty good news for those of us who once paid 2p to get into town on a Saturday morning.

I’ll try and get a short post out about the main details on Monday, but for now, here’s a little background about what brought us here, very tortuously, like a privatised bus.

In the 1980s, the Republic of South Yorkshire’s marvellous bus service was taken away from us by a government bent on making us pay private companies for everything. Bus fares more than doubled straight away, and over the next few years, cycle use increased (because people who liked buses couldn’t afford them every day), and then car use and ownership increased hugely too.

Bus travel by pensioners and the unemployed more than halved, while bus use by people in work went down by over a third. And over the following decades, services were cut and lost, and as cars filled our streets, increase in cycle use slowed.

Over the years, transport officials have told me how many of the ills of congestion, air pollution, parking problems, rural isolation, and much more can be dated back to the day in 1986 when our buses were deregulated.

And they also told me how the process of reregulation was nigh on impossible, or would take many many years at least.

Well, the news I can tell you is that after forty years our buses really are coming back, or rather at some point in 2027 (41 years). There’s a lot more, of course, not least the colours of the new buses and trams, and the catchy name they’ll have. But not until Monday, and then not really until 2027. I’ll have my 2p ready.

The Parkwood Spring

Some of us remember the festering grey hillside above Penistone Road. I was told estate agents preferred scheduling nighttime visits for prospective buyers of overlooking houses to avoid the view, and perfume sprays were installed on keep out fences to mask the smell of Sheffield’s rubbish.

The huge landfill site below Shirecliffe was finally capped off 15 years ago, and in 2024 I spoke to the late great Sheffield ecologist Angus Hunter about the prospects for the site for a Sheffield Tribune piece about Skylarks.

As the hillside of Parkwood Springs was recolonised by enterprising wildlife, Angus told me he desperately hoped the political impulse to plant trees everywhere could be avoided. Keeping dogs and too many people away from at least some of the developing urban meadow would be beneficial too, he added.

And then, all being well, as reported in the article, the unearthly song of Skylarks might be heard above the industry of Neepsend and the cafes of Kelham island.

Last year, most of the land over the old tip was quietly opened up. Sport-related grants and a tiny fraction of the government £20m Levelling Up funding for the hillside has helped improve some of the trails, and developed a serious array of mountain bike tracks. But former tip owners Valencia have been working with the council and the local Friends groups to slowly open up the vast hillside above the city.

For many years, I’ve been covering the plan to make the Shirecliffe hillside into what everyone involved wants to call a Country Park for the City. Last week I took a stroll with ecologist Ziggy Senkans to see how in many ways, it’s already here.

Buddleia and birch are colonising the top of the old ski slope very effectively, although the metal and plastic snow substitute is hanging on in there, despite attempts to burn or rip it off by unofficial metal recyclers.

The site was significantly wooded 150 or so years ago, and still holds two or three patches of ancient woodland, in places like Rawson Springs and Scraith Woods, Ziggy tells me. But generations of odd trees have taken root too, after surplus stock of species like non-native oaks and alder were planted here by past council parks staff.

As well as several old rubbish dumps, there were ganister mines on the hillside between Wardsend Cemetery and the Parkwood Springs playing fields, and wartime gun emplacements before the ski slope arrived, along with a sprinkling of pine trees to provide a unique urban Alpine setting above the gas cylinders of Neepsend.

“We’ll go down here to see how the frogs are doing,” says Ziggy, veering off down one of the hundreds of unofficial paths. The track here was probably originally carved out by motorbikes he says, back when the hillside was dotted with burned out cars and even ecologists approached a visit with some trepidation.

He and his colleagues noticed a hollow here was always wet, so with the aid of the Froglife charity, a large pond was created, hidden from dogs and public view. The frogs are doing well: using his own amphibian embryology metrics, Ziggy estimates the pond currently holds between two and three wheelbarrow-loads of frogspawn

This, it turns out, is probably one of the actual Parkwood Springs - it seems the motorbikers of the late twentieth century carved a rupture into a spring running down into the River Don, and the pond has remained ever since.

Further on there are signs of old heathland, with heather and Crowberry hanging on below the colonising birch trees.

We follow the path of the new Skyline trail, and then find a rough path branching down into a wide trail that should (according to the agreed plans) provide a route for walkers and cyclists up from Neepsend to Shirecliffe, past flowery meadows and lakes.

A lake is already here: or rather an attenuation pond for run off into the River Don. Ecologists and the local Friends of Parkwood Springs and Friends of Wardsend Cemetery groups hope the lake can be landscaped and rewilded so it attracts ducks and waders as well as the unimpressed crows calling in at present.

We hear Linnets and Greenfinches, and down below, Ziggy is pleased to see a swathe of Japanese Knotweed has been dug out from the site of the old ski village.

The Friends of Parkwood Springs seem quietly optimistic about the slow progress. They echo the concerns of Angus (who tragically died last year) about fencing off at least some of the emerging meadow to keep ground nesting birds safe from ravenous dogs and curious people, and curbing tree planting to enable the wildlife of an urban meadow to thrive.

They’re also optimistic that prospective developer Skyline (who seem poised to take over the plans for a ‘Gravity Park’ on the old Ski Village site) have said all the right things about open access and providing for nature and biodiversity.

And running readers may remember the proposal a few years ago for a new parkrun at Parkwood Springs: the Friends tell me there’s a new team of volunteers liaising with national parkrun staff, with the fervent hope the spectacular run here will start some time this year. (We’ll keep you posted).

Back at the hillside, we stroll out to look at the view from the top of the old landfill tip, and the breathtaking landscape is too wide to take in. From the higher viewpoint, at the old viewing platform, you find a spectacular 180 degree view of Sheffield, from the humble skyscrapers of the city centre to the hills of the Peak District.

Here, the new viewpoint is even wider. All around us, there are patches of yellow Gorse, Teasel, vetches and Mugwort, and soon there’ll be Michaelmas Daisies and probably orchids, says Ziggy.

The poor topsoil is open to the elements and full of life. We pass an incongruous blue methane vent from the landfill every few minutes, but they’re gradually getting curtained by scrub. The flocks of crows rising and falling around us are here for a reason, says Ziggy: there’ll be plenty for them to eat. A Kestrel sweeps over.

“There are always Kestrels here,” he says. “Looking for all the small mammals. There are Roe Deer, and Linnets and birds of prey. It’s just nature doing its thing, in a place that’s both primeval and artificial.”

And then, as the Kestrel glides and hovers, we hear the song we’ve been waiting for. “Skylarks,” says Ziggy. “Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.”

Over a pile of old rubbish settling down under thousands of wild weeds and flowers, two, then three scalding Skylarks are singing out, rising higher and higher in the cold March sky.

Out There News - Fire Watching

All moorland fires cause pollution, however they start, and a new web-based app will help work out the links between Peak District fires and pollution events. Devised by researchers from Sheffield Hallam and Manchester Universities, Peak Fire Reporter allows visitors to the moors to log any moorland fire in around two minutes.

The project launched earlier this month, and researcher Dr Joe Glentworth is asking visitors, residents and workers in the northern Peak District and South Pennines to help build a better picture of moorland fires.

The app links on the ground reports (and photos) to satellite images and a network of research-grade PM2.5 monitoring stations that measure the dangerous tiny particles given off by fires.

(PM 2.5s are microscopic particles of soot, dust, or chemical compounds so fine - the diameter of a human hair is around 30 times larger than the biggest PM2.5 particle - that they can penetrate into our lungs and bloodstream. These particles are already linked to heart, lung and cardiovascular diseases and infant mortality, with research ongoing into other serious health effects).

Earlier research by Joe and colleagues showed significant spikes in local PM2.5s after the deliberate grouse moor fires that sent smoke across North Western Sheffield two years ago.

Joe stresses the reports can be about any fire, from a campfire out of control to an abandoned barbecue to a theoretically controlled burn on a grouse moor.

The researchers (also including staff from Sheffield and Nottingham universities) want to hear about people’s experience of Peak District fires too - how does it feel to see the moors in flames, or to make your way through the smoke?

The risks of burning moors are increasing, and this year the British Mountaineering Council are funding the first dedicated Wildfire Ranger for the Peak District’s Eastern Moors on the moorland around Sheffield.

As the wildfire season begins in the Peak District, and the debate continues about deliberate burning by the shooting industry, the more information gathered about burning moors the better. We’ll have more about all this work in future posts.

Peak Fire Reporter is here.

Outdoor Films (But No Festival) - Sheffield Adventure Film Festival starts this coming weekend. It’s usually part of the city’s Outdoor Festival too, but for reasons unclear, this event has disappeared from the Outdoor City’s calendar this year, after the recent inspirational #SheffieldInspires branding arrived.

More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 15th March)

A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for the late winter. (Full version for full members, preview for all).

Mon 16th - Wardsend Cemetery - bird survey

Mon 16th - National Folklore Survey talk by David Clarke at Lees Hall Golf Club

Tues 17th - Urban Nights gritty running events - City Orienteering

Thurs 19th - SRWT Volunteering - Blacka Moor

Fri 20th - SRWT Volunteering - Woodhouse Washlands

Sorry we’re a bit late this morning. But if you’ve enjoyed this post, please forward it to all your mates, and as you know, the best way to help us is to take out a pocket money subscription to keep all this coming for our thousands of readers across the Outdoor City. Thanks for reading.

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Morning. We’re pleased to report that rewilding is really happening around the Outdoor City. After our hopeful post three years ago about the possible creatures on their way back to Sheffield and the Peak District, we now know that Pine Martens should be in our forests by 2030 or before, Elk and European Bison might be in the Peak District in the near future, and although the interminable paperwork continues in South Yorkshire, Eurasian Beavers are already living in an enclosure in Derbyshire, with wild families likely to arrive soon.

So today we have a longer feature on the Pine Marten, and how its imminent return might help bring back Red Squirrels too.

We also have some out there news wondering why it takes months or years to repair key routes for walkers and cyclists, while roads seem to get fixed in weeks.

And a reminder that all our archive, and special posts (like last week’s Wild Weekend) are available only to our wonderful supporters who’ve reckoned up it’s worth a mere £4 a month to help us get all this into your inbox.

Out There News

Water Waits - A section of Sheffield canal towpath has collapsed, reported the Canal and Rivers Trust on 4th November last year. “A plan to repair will follow,” they added. Vandalism followed, in fact. Their last update on 4th February continued: “A plan for long term repair continues to be formulated.”

Reader Gareth told me how fed up he was about the delay: “This is a major active travel route, closed for three months, no diversion signs and no information about when it will reopen. It is one of the few extended flat traffic free routes in Sheffield.”

Why is there no urgency in the local authorities for this kind of repair, cyclists and walkers have asked, for years. In 2019, a section of the highly popular Five Weirs Walk collapsed after a storm.

Last month, the Friends of The Blue Loop politely posted that, seven years later: “We are still without access to what was this beautiful section of the Five Weirs Walk. Plans, costings, funding and the logistics of the rebuild are in hand but not in place yet - as far as we know. We are missing this section, as are many Five Weirs Walk users. Let’s not allow it to be forgotten forever.” We’ll keep you posted.

Heath and Mud: White Peak - The latest issue of the fabulous Heath and Mud zine about the Peak District is nearly here, this time exploring the national park’s limestone landscape and its folklore through local art, walking routes and stories. I hope to have a word with editor Sarah Calcutt about it all soon.

Return of the Woodland Assasin

A long-lost woodland predator is on its way home to the Peak District. Within four years, Derbyshire Wildlife Trust hope to have Pine Martens back in local forests.

With cute ears, brown eyes and pink and chocolate fur, the cat-sized relative of otters and badgers is called the “baby-faced assassin” by some enthusiasts.

Pine Martens eat whatever they can find: mice, squirrels, eggs, baby birds, berries, for example, and when Britain was more densely wooded thousands of years ago, their adaptability made them one of our commonest predators, second only to their much tinier and equally ferocious relative, the Common Weasel.

But take a look at that fur. Across Europe, Pine Martens were skinned to provide exotic linings for the cloaks and gowns of the medieval nobility, and their fur value was so high and stable that it became a form of currency in some countries. Whole Pine Martens were used as fur stoles.

And game-shooting landowners decided Pine Martens were a threat to their income, so they were finally hounded out of existence in England, Wales and most of Scotland.

The last Sheffield Pine Marten was stuffed and presented a hundred years ago to Weston Park Museum, where you can still see its sad faded fur after its demise in a trap near Broomhead Moor.

But, as reported last week, rewilding is accelerating, not least because the government has realised the voting public is in favour. (Between 70% and 89% of the surveyed public said they wanted Pine Marten reintroductions in proposed sites in north west England, Wales and the Forest of Dean, for example.)

Conservationists tell me the government are currently asking Natural England to speed up reintroductions of Eurasian Beavers and Pine Martens, and Derbyshire Wildlife Trust say they’re now working through an exercise of mapping and consultation to help Pine Martens return in numbers to the county by 2030.

It’s a landscape story, really, about asking the creatures that once lived there to help us bring back our wild woodlands.

Pine Martens are quick and mysterious and seldom seen, even when they get established in a forest. They’re also largely nocturnal, and so gained the reputation long ago as the familiars of witches, scuttling through the trees at night on demonic errands.

John Clare called them “long-shagged marten cats” in his nineteenth century poem Marten:

Small head and running on the stoop

Snuffing the ground and hind parts shouldered up

He keeps one track and hides in lonely shade

Where print of human foot is scarcely made

Derbyshire Wildlife Trust run the Derwent Living Forest project, which aims to increase and look after native woodland along the course of the River Derwent from north of Howden Reservoir to the south of Derby.

Programme Manager Ruth Pilbeam sent over an impressive map showing how the Derwent forest will link a new Northern Forest (stretching from Liverpool to Hull) with a patch of the new government’s National Forest above Birmingham.

She tells me the return of the Pine Marten as a missing woodland predator will in itself improve the health of forests across the Midlands and north of England. She adds there are already growing Pine Marten populations in Shropshire and North Yorkshire, so the reintroductions planned for Derbyshire will just be hurrying along a process that wandering Pine Martens will take care of themselves, in time.

And they do wander. The most recent Derbyshire record was roadkill in South Derbyshire in 2018, traced by DNA back to its original home in Wales. (Although younger Pine Martens looking for new territory can travel many miles, there are suspicions an impatient guerrilla rewilder may have been involved in this instance).

“We’re aware that over time, Pine Martens are coming,” says Ruth. “So this is about whether we can support that process through a reintroduction ourselves.”

So there’ll be lots of research, and chats with other groups across the country in various stages of the Pine Marten reintroduction process, including Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust, who say they’re also looking at possible Pine Marten reintroductions in future.

Many in the wildlife world think returning Pine Martens is a big enough story in itself. But the public are generally warmer towards furry red tree dwellers with fewer teeth and a better media profile, which in the past, the Pine Marten used to eat.

The strange hunter and hunted point about Pine Martens and Red Squirrels is that they seem to be good for each other. Red Squirrels evolved alongside Pine Martens for thousands of years, and they can often get away from their old enemy by squirrelling up to distant branches, and being ever twitchy and vigilant about tree-based predators.

The loss of Red Squirrels in England was caused by competition and disease from the larger Grey Squirrels, imported from America over a hundred years ago to decorate the estates of Victorian landowners.

But Pine Martens find it easy to catch Grey Squirrels, who evolved to escape ground-based predators, and alongside new sterilisation and contraceptive programmes being developed to reduce Grey Squirrel numbers, the reintroduction of Pine Martens to English forests should help Red Squirrels to return too.

Because they spread out into large territories, and take advantage of any small mammal or other food they find, if there are loads of Grey Squirrels sat around looking fat and puzzled, a Pine Marten will helpfully pick them off until the native Red Squirrel can get established again.

Ruth adds that foresters love Pine Martens too, because an overabundance of gnawing Grey Squirrels causes big damage to tree crops.

“Pine Martens are a native species, and so they can be part of a balanced trophic cascade,” she says, meaning the mechanism by which top predators help smooth out the human-induced holes in an environment, such as a native English woodland.

“They are part of the ecosystem, so we think a woodland with Pine Martens would be a more diverse and healthy woodland,” she says. “It wouldn’t necessarily get the overpopulation of a single species, because those species would be controlled by predation.”

Some years ago I spoke to former railway signalman Austin Brackenbury, who filled his time at his Oughtibridge signalbox in Wharncliffe Woods by watching and recording the wildlife around him to help Sorby Natural History Society and other ecologists. He told me he saw the gradual decline of Red Squirrels as Greys advanced into the woodlands of Sheffield in the 1970s.

Now, it seems, there may be a chance, finally, for the Red Squirrel to return to northern Sheffield. One of the most likely local places for Pine Martens to be reintroduced under the Derbyshire scheme is in the forests growing around the reservoirs of the Upper Derwent, where new native tree planting has supplemented the conifers around the dams.

As the woodlands grow, and the Pine Martens spread, a reintroduction of Red Squirrels to the woods of north western Sheffield might be possible by the time today’s readers of Squirrel Nutkin are in their twenties, Ruth suggests. They might even get back to the trees around Austin’s old signal box.

In the meantime, with its glowing fur, claws and sharp teeth, the Pine Marten is just as impressive as a Sheffield Red Squirrel, to my eyes. But given its wraithlike reputation, will we ever actually see one?

“On one side, they are very elusive,” says Ruth. “But then you could book into a little holiday cottage where they know to come for peanut butter.”

In Scotland, rewilders soon learned that Pine Martens like peanut butter even more than mice and Grey Squirrels. So there’s the eco tourism angle, as well as the trophic cascade and pest control. Peanut feeders for Pine Martens might sound unnatural, but Ruth is in favour.

“It’s helping people see that sort of wildlife, and that it should be there, as our natural heritage.”

More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 8th March)

A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for the late winter. (Full version for full members, preview for all).

Sun 8th - Yorkshire Rose women’s cycle rides

Mon 9th - Whirlow Brook Park volunteer morning

Tues 10th - South Yorks Orienteers - Kelham Island (£6)

Weds 11th - Sheffield RSPB Bird Walk - Blacka Moor

Thurs 12th - Green City Action Grimesthorpe community allotment

Fri 13th - SRWT Winter Wild Wellbeing - Shirecliffe

Sat 14th - CycleBoost cycle confidence & Learn to Ride cycle training at Greenhill

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Morning. Watch out for traditionally mad March hares (as above, captured by ace local wildlife photographer John Scholey). The madness of hare boxing around this time of year is just female hares lashing out with their front paws, to deter any lusty males who they don’t fancy so much.

In today’s Sunday at Bill’s Mother’s we have out there news, our first extract from the already much-lauded Ancient by Sheffield author Luke Barley, and inspiring tree planting from South Yorkshire’s new woodland creation programme. We have a first glance at a very native meadow planted last year, along with some surprising cricket pictures from local wildlife photographer Zafar Ali.

Today we also have an extra edition for our wonderful full paying subscribers. Our growing readership means we’re pulling in more stories, so we’re hoping to post a full subscriber’s edition every month or so from now on, often, like this one, including longer versions of stories from our regular edition. (Our Wild Weekend Sunday supplement is online now, and will also be emailed out to paying supporters a little later today).

Out There News

Snakes In The Grass (& Heather) - The Eastern Moors Partnership tell me Adders are emerging for the spring sunshine. If respected, Adders are unlikely to bite, but conservationists ask that you keep your distance, and if you spot one, don’t spend ages sizing it up for a photograph - the advice is to watch a snake for no more than 10 minutes, then move on and leave it to sunbathe in peace.

Rewilding Rethink - There are reports our government has finally realised the public is keen on rewilding our nature-depleted country, and may be speeding up reintroductions of Eurasian Beavers, Pine Martens and White-tailed Eagles in time to make a noise about it before the national council elections in May. No word from Sheffield as yet, but I hear Derbyshire hopes to have Pine Martens back by 2030, and might even have herds of Elk or Bison too. We’ll keep you posted.

Deer Mid Wicket

Nature photography forces you to live in the moment, says Zafar Ali. Always looking, and then carefully focusing in on a subject you’ve only just spotted is “the perfect way to mindfulness,” Zaf says.

A few weeks ago, he was following the river Derwent through Chatsworth, and noticed the old thatched cricket pavilion might make a nice shot, but was some distance away, so he took out the zoom lens he uses for wildlife and pressed the shutter.

He checked the picture on the back of the camera and says he only then noticed: “a fine pair of antlers, on the lower right hand side of the building.” He stalked closer and took more photos to confirm a Fallow Deer stag basking in the winter sun.

“He was using the gable end to stay out of the wind, presumably to pick up residual heat, and looked so calm and contented, like he was waiting for his turn to go into bat,” Zaf says. “You never know what you’ll spot if you keep your eyes open.”

(Fallow Deer have lived on the Chatsworth estate for centuries, brought in by aristocratic residents for their venison, and to add a semi-wild spectacle to complement the landscape created by Capability Brown. Imported to the UK for their prettiness by the Normans, and possibly by a few wealthy Romans centuries earlier, they’re originally native to the non-cricketing nations of southern Europe.)

• See more of Zaf’s amazing nature pictures here.

Ancient Woodlanding

Luke Barley’s first book, Ancient, is published this week. A ranger working in London, the Lake District and the Peak District, and now tree consultant for the National Trust, Ancient is an attempt to help us understand the past, present and hopeful future for our ancient woodlands.

But it’s also very personal: Luke writes about how living and working in a woodland, as our ancestors did for thousands of years, makes you recognise and feel the life in these still-mysterious landscapes.

The Small-leaved Lime tree features often, but up until recently this ancient English tree has been a rarity in Sheffield, because it prefers to live over limestone - nearest here in the White Peak and in a strip running between Rotherham and Doncaster.

But many of our older streets are lined with ageing Common Limes, manufactured hybrids of our native lime trees. Common Limes sprout like mad from the base of their trunk, and require quite some maintenance budget to stop them blocking our pavements. So over recent years, varieties of more convenient Small-leaved Limes have started to arrive here as alternative street trees.

Luke will be adapting extracts from Ancient for us this year, where he’ll tell us more about his beloved very very ancient lime trees. We’ll have shorter extracts in our regular edition, with longer versions for our wonderful full subscribers, starting this week in our supporter’s Sunday supplement.

So, if you like calling in here every weekend, you know what to do: after three years, it’s still a very affordable £4 a month (or less) to know you’ll be able to read all of everything we ever publish, while supporting local journalism too.

Extract from Ancient - By Luke Barley

We huddle under a tarpaulin for lunch, stopping only for as long as it takes to wash down our sandwiches with tea from dented flasks.

Our camp is in our favourite corner of the worksite, beneath a sprawling Small-leaved Lime that is almost a little wood in itself, a complex grove of interconnected life. At its heart is the tallest tree in this part of the wood, towering above us from its perch on a low crag with pendulous limbs arcing away from the straight trunk to create a flowing, narrow crown.

The lime is surrounded by a chaotic tangle formed by its own collapse and regeneration. One of the swooping branches has embedded itself in the loose earth, and set root to spark a younger sister, while fallen stems – its former companions – remain connected at the base and have erupted along their length into rows of new trees, shooting for the light.

A ragged stump has produced a dense mass of soft, orange-green twigs.

The tree – or grove, or thicket, whatever you want to call it – has a particular energy: it’s not the solid, stoic presence of an old oak but something more supple and lithe, a victory of adaptation rather than resistance.

The lime is irrepressible and every feature seems designed to survive, to persist and overcome. When it thrives, vigorous branches touch down and create a ring of offspring. Fall: the branches become trees. Fail, like that broken old stump, and dormant buds, visible in bumps and swellings up the stem, spring to life.

This particular lime could have been clinging on here since soon after the last Ice Age, roaming slowly around the steep slope with each new failure and reiteration.

The bears and wolves whose bones have been found in the caves of the White Peak might have laid up in its shade, and we speculate, on more leisurely lunch breaks, which of our ancestors might have sat beneath it and enjoyed its welcoming sense of enclosure as they took a rest from their own work.

We won’t touch it with our saws, but its presence roots our brief time here in a story of constant change from the deep past and into the distant future of this ancient wood.

• Ancient: Reviving the Woods That Made Britain by Luke Barley is published by Profile Books (RRP £25)

Modern Woodlanding

The country wants more trees. After centuries of clearance and commercial timber planting, England now has a statutory government tree target: 16.5% canopy cover across the country by 2050. That’s a combination of woodlands and trees outside woodland, the local agency who are digging into farmers fields, city parks and fundraising spreadsheets tell me. And they say they’re pretty confident the government, of whatever party, won’t be changing their minds.

The South Yorkshire Woodland Partnership (SYWP) have been trying to haul our region towards these sorts of figures for five years now. They don’t have this season’s tree totals yet, but up to March 2025 they’d enabled the planting of well over half a million trees and shrubs across South Yorkshire, including 162 hectares (1.62 square kilometres) of woodland, and seven and half kilometres of new hedges.

Alex Evans from the partnership wants to hear from landowners if they fancy planting some trees or hedges to help reach those targets. There are plenty of grants for planting and maintenance available, so quite often the process is pretty much cost free, but can be complicated: you can’t just plant anywhere. Archaeology, soil type and wildlife all need to be considered and surveyed.

“If people want to plant trees, we just say: What help do you need to do that?” says the SYWP manager Matt North. “We sort out the green tape for them.”

Alex adds that new woodland in these days of weird weather and invasive tree pathogens has to be climate and disease resilient. So the planting plans don’t just include old native trees, wildlife and connections to existing woodland, they have to forecast the future too.

Right now, the woodland cover of South Yorkshire (10.5%) is marginally ahead of England as a whole (10.3%) but that’s still paltry compared to the rest of Europe’s average of 44% woodland cover. And only about 2% of England is ancient woodland, Alex adds, with all the biodiversity and mental health benefits old woodland brings.

To get South Yorkshire in line with that 16.5% target, we’re going to need 1,552 hectares of new trees and woodland by 2050, says Alex. That’s over 15 square kilometres, or six square miles. We have some way to go.

• I’ll have more about the county’s new trees and woodlands soon. In the meantime, contact South Yorkshire Woodland Partnership at woodlandenquiries@wildsheffield.com or 07739 516228

Spring Greens

After dozens of excited children scattered Sheffield-friendly seeds across a 90 square metre bank at the edge of Endcliffe Park last November, it was time to inspect the results with our expert botanist, Gerry Firkins.

“It’s a bit patchy,” he says, in the drizzle. “But I’m pleased with the germination.”

Gerry and local councillor Peter Gilbert came up with the idea of extending a native flower meadow across the park edge by Rustlings Road. The test bed was a 3 x 30 metre bank near the park entrance, where Gerry’s special seed mix of two dozen different native Sheffield flowers was planted last autumn. A quick estimate of the site reveals around 9,000 of those seeds have germinated so far, but there’ll be plenty more as the soil and weather warm up.

Among the historical glass and ring pulls in the soil tilled for the new meadow are hundreds of cotyledons, or seed leaves. Scientist that he is, Gerry is reluctant to name exact species until more of the proper leaves and stems appear, but he gives me a few possible names for the early risers.

Two are very talented plants he says - so talented they weren’t included in the Sheffield Seed Mix as he knew they’d find their way to the meadow anyway.

He mentions the hard evolutionary work of the dandelion family to make their seeds fly up, and then burrow down into the soil, and the knack of Annual Meadow Grass to colonise over 90% of the world’s capital cities. As an ancient cross of alpine and lowland grasses, it’s able to make a living in cold, warm, high and low urban environments. (I’ll have more on these talented Sheffielders in another post).

There are no flowers visible yet among the green shoots, but it’s only a matter of time. Gerry reckons poppies will arrive first: if you pass the park over the next few weeks, do let us know. (An extended version of this feature is in our Wild Weekend post for full subscribers.)

More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 1st March)

A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for the late winter. (Full version for full members, preview for all).

Sun 1st March - Yorkshire Rose women’s cycle rides

Mon 2nd - Fri 6th - Daily health walks in parks and green spaces from Step Out Sheffield, 10 am start

Tues 3rd - SRWT Volunteering - Wyming Brook

Weds 4th - Shire Brook Valley - Volunteer Session

Weds 4th - Sheffield Ramblers Walk - Linacre Reservoir (12m)

Thurs 5th - Green City Action Grimesthorpe community allotment

Fri 6th - SRWT Volunteering - Wildlife Gardening

Sat 7th - Parkwood Springs conservation morning

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Welcome to our first supporter’s supplement. We now hope to have special editions like this for our full paying members a little more often, partly because your support means our readership is growing, so we can get hold of more stories.

We aim to have an edition just for our paying subscribers every month or so, as well as the full version of our What’s On Out There guide, and access to our full archive.

This week we have the full extract from Luke Barley’s Ancient, and the longer version of our first examination of the Sheffield seed meadow planted last year. Plus a tiny artichoke.

To read the rest of the post, you’ll need to upgrade to a full paid membership to help us cover the costs of all this work, for the meagre sum of £4 a month.

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Morning. The long wait is over: spring is coming (soon) and our trams will carry bicycles (not quite so soon). We have news of a migrant American welcomed in to a Sheffield reservoir, and two books by local authors: on the challenges of ancient woodland, and the identification and history of the Sheffield area’s 300 bird spe…

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Morning. Yesterday, the sun came back. After weeks of gloom, there are finally some yellow patches in next week’s weather forecast. We learn today how Europe was behind our miserable greyness.

We have news about the reappearance of the River Sheaf after being covered by Sheffield station 150 years ago, and a new trail along the inner city Porter Brook. …

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What’s On Out There is part of the It’s Looking A Bit Black Over Bill’s Mother’s social enterprise publication, read by thousands of discerning people from Sheffield and all over the world. We have readers in Brazil, Finland, Vietnam and 29 other countries. Even Rotherham.

There’ll be regular updates to this post with incoming events, links & news, so save and refresh when you get chance, or download the free Substack App to keep up.

This year, It’s Looking A Bit Black Over Bill’s Mother’s will be launching a new section to celebrate our hundreds of voluntary wild space groups, what they do, where they are and how you can help. Please spread the word:

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In this magazine we’re fighting back against the anti-social media supervillains. If you like our posts, all we ask is if you can spare a meagre £4 a month to help cover our costs, please think about signing up as a full supporter (below). Paying readers, not evil algorithms, are quite simply our only source of income.

Full subscribing heroes can read the full version of What’s On Out There? with around 6 weeks of listings, special features and lots more. You’ll also get full access to every post we ever publish, including our vast and fairly interesting archive, and the warm glow of supporting local journalism, and the hundreds of out there local organisations listed in these posts.

What’s On Out There? (This week or so)

Weds 15th - The New Birds of the Sheffield Area - lunchtime talk by editors of the Sheffield Bird Study Group book at Weston Park Museum (suggested £5 donation)

Weds 15th - Longshaw Social Walk

Weds 15th - Shire Brook Valley - Volunteer Session

Weds 15th - Sheffield Ramblers Walk - Cresswell (11m)

Thurs 16th - Green City Action Grimesthorpe community allotment

Thurs 16th - SRWT Volunteering - Blacka Moor

Fri 17th - SRWT Volunteering - Woodhouse Washlands

Fri 17th - CycleBoost cycle training (Women only - Endcliffe Park)

Sat 18th - CTC Cycle Ride

Sat 18th - CycleBoost cycle training (Greenhill Park)

Sat 18th - Tree Walk at Ecclesall Woods (Local Action for Nature & Green Spaces - led by Fran Halsall)

Sat 18th - Sheffield RSPB Bird Walk - Poolsbrook Country Park

Promoters & Organisers: Email us at bbobillsmothers@gmail.com as follows: Subject line - WOOT Event, with an email containing a one line description, day & date, and an online link so readers can find out more. And I’d really appreciate you taking out a full paid subscription or two (as many local organisations have) to keep this service running.

Artists, Illustrators or Photographers: If you’d your work here, seen by thousands of folk in every edition, please email us at: bbobillsmothers@gmail.com

Also Out There (Links in headline, usually)

⛔️Bikes on Trams: Not yet - South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard has posted on FB that his team have demonstrated how our current trams can’t accommodate standard bicycles. But he says bikes will be carried on the new tram fleet (arriving from 2030). “These will be designed with space for bikes because I know a bigger, better tram network has to be accessible to dogs, cyclists, and anyone else who wants to use it, right across South Yorkshire,” he posted. We’ll be chasing this up.

New Bird Book for Sheffield - Sheffield Bird Study Group are about to publish their spectacular New Birds of the Sheffield Area compendium of all 300 birds seen around here. (We’ll have more on this soon).

Nature’s Calendar - The Woodland Trust run a citizen science phenology project to try and map our climate-changed seasons. They’re asking us to record early flowers, bird song and frogspawn, for example, and you can view previous years’ results. Full subscribers can read our phenological interview with author Joe Shute here.

E-Bike Loans - We covered the approaching unofficial Sheffield Year of the E-Bike for full Sheffield Tribune subscribers here. One undersung e-bike hire scheme is here already: CycleBoost, supported by the council, offer you a free month’s trial of an e-bike and secure cycle parking hubs at the city centre and Meadowhall, with a per-month charge thereafter (£75 + £5 for parking access) to keep the scheme sustainable.

Sheffield Storeys - Our own Muddy Mother’s new Substack is very much worth a look too, not just because she’s my daughter. Our Storeys is about homes and home renovations, and how to cope with trying to build an extension while avoiding tripping over your dog, rendering your baby and losing your toddler in the wall cavity.

Between 6 & 16 Miles - The next issue of the beautiful “fell-running, nature, art, philosophy and psychogeography” zine by local artist & writer F. Thomas Green is out now. Our feature on winter running by the author is here.

Winter Wellbeing - Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust are offering free monthly nature-based sessions to help us feel better in the cold dark months with the help of some of the wilder urban spaces of South Yorkshire (thanks to South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority’s ‘Health and Growth Accelerator’ Fund).

Our full listings for the next month or so (below) are for full subscribers only, who’ll be able to reload in their browser and get a bigger and prettier edition later today. (We can’t fit all the full member’s post into one free email).

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Morning. Today we say hello to Woodseats Community Garden, a tiny urban hub of well-being and wildlife with a plan. We have Muddy Mother singing praises of the rain, and some cosmopolitan surprises in the wet leaves of S11. And Out There News.

All this and more every Sunday: what do you reckon, could you pitch in …

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Morning. And hello to the dozens of new subscribers who’ve arrived after yesterday’s inspiring post from our friends at the Sheffield Tribune, following our own stories about the colossal value of wild space volunteering to the Outdoor City.

I’m hoping to have more about how to support (or join) the hundreds …

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Morning. It’s a turning of the year. The dark days are passing, and last week lots of merry people in green sang to our apples to celebrate. And a reminder that today you have every excuse to do nothing for an hour but sit by the window with a cup of tea and a notebook, and watch the world go by, as…

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Morning. A news edition today, including £25 million for local landscape restoration and rewilding, and the announcement that a peloton of international cycling stars will sweep into Sheffield in 2027. We also have a new column from our Birder in the Secret Valley, and more on l…

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Morning. News of wealthy landowners sending smoke into Sheffield this week, to produce an unnatural burned landscape to feed their shooting targets. We also have a warning from 37 types of flowering plant in the city centre, and a visit to a clattering winter wonderland.

As most of you know by now,…

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