Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 18th August 2024
A new section of Sheaf to explore this month, and work to reopen the city centre river starts soon. And: where are our wasps?
Morning. Thanks for the kind words about last week’s personal epic piece. I’m still recovering, but thinking hard about an attempt on some (or maybe all) of the Sheffield Way, a route around the city boundary.
This will be in early autumn, a time I was always warned to avoid wasps, as they can be drunk and troublesome after eating rotting summer fruit falls. But where are they this year? I chat about the missing wasp mystery with an entomologist this week, who also answers the question that’s stung many of us: what are wasps for, anyway?
I’ve also got news of the reappearance of the River Sheaf along a new public path which you may like to explore, and more from the marvellous Sheaf and Porter Rivers Trust about their work to open up the river at the heart of the city.
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Open Sheaf
We once turned our backs on our rivers: that’s the line I was given years ago by some of our older river recovery visionaries. Meaning, we tried to ignore them, or worse, chucked our rubbish, sewage and factory effluent into them, and even built our urban toilets over them, so turning our back meant something even more basic and undesirable for the fish that used to live there.
Factory (if not human) effluent is now pretty much outlawed, and all the evidence accumulating about health, wellbeing and economic recovery shows rivers are an asset worth millions of pounds to a city built on its waterways, like Sheffield.
But the city’s planners and developers are not always up to speed on all this, so when volunteers like the Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust succeed in reopening a 100 yard stretch of the city’s namesake river, it’s worth celebrating.
Little London Road (aka the Sheaf Valley Active Travel Route) is starting to turn from a grimy industrial backstreet to a rather pleasant place to be, with new apartments and extreme sports venues along the riverside. The road is now habituated mostly by runners, pram pushers and cargo bikes, and £4 latte shacks can’t be that far away.
The new riverside path is not yet signposted, but worth finding. The south west end is an alley 30 yards north of Rydal Rd (at https://what3words.com/goad.silver.finely).
Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust (S&PRT) are now gently asking about a ramp (and removing a wall and step) to link the new route to an existing (but hidden, and currently locked) path opening up all the riverside to the Rydal Road bridge.
The wildlife on the new footpath isn’t used to human encounters yet. I meet a family of Moorhens, as a cat watches from the wall of Arnside Road. Encountering urban rivers shows how our plants and animals get on with their business of rewilding whenever our backs are turned, given the opportunity.
The Victorian walls are cascading with climbers and wildflowers, trees have rooted generations ago in the water, while the forgotten riverbank is green and growing. And where the backyard wall ends, there’s a seven year old artwork by Coloquix, now revealed for us all to see.
Then the river meanders away under overhanging branches towards Nether Edge, where S&PRT are already campaigning about the next section: if the landlords of the new leisure facility on the old Arnold Lavers site chose to remove a fence and allow access to an empty driveway, we could reclaim a little bit more of Sheffield’s river.
The north eastern entrance to the new path is just after the Worldwide building, at https://what3words.com/tent.robe.myself
I’ve opened up our previous post about the work of the Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust here, and there are plenty more riverine posts in our archive, available to all paid subscribers. And yes, that’s a hint.
Wasp Wasted
Noticed anything about your picnics this year? Especially if your kids like jam sandwiches? Throughout the country, our wasps have gone missing. The BBC and other national media have noticed, so I embark on a garden search with Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust.
You have to remember, there are thousands of wasp species in the UK, says Ben Keywood, one of the SRWT entomologists. Social wasps, solitary wasps like the Potter Wasp (which makes quaint pot-like paper nests) and not quaint at all parasitic wasps.
The wasp we generally know and hate is the Common Wasp, a social insect whose chances of picnic harassment begins with the Queen Common Wasp of the year before, the only member of the 2023 colony who hibernates over the cold winter.
If all goes well, she hides in a dry loft above our house, or hole in the ground, or outhouse, and then starts building a new nest in the spring, in a dry spot. She lays eggs to create workers, and the colony expands until it’s picnic time again.
But our winters are warmer, and wetter, and this year we had a wet spring too. Damp warm winters lead to fungal disease for insects like wasps, Ben explains, and confusion about when it’s time to fly out to start your family. And the early nests might not survive the damp either. So it seems far fewer social wasps made it to summer this year.
The SRWT garden is full of flowers, and ripe plums, and fallen apples, all of which are usually Common Wasp delicacies. Instead Ben points me to the more prolific wasp families, the Ichneumon and Braconid wasps, at which point I should warn readers of a delicate nature to skip a few paragraphs.
These parasitic wasps inspired the gut wrenching scene in Alien, where a nervous squirrelly beast bursts out of John Hurt’s chest, having eaten his less vital organs as it grew from an egg planted on his face. This is what parasitic wasps do, pretty much.
These huge families of wasps can be so tiny they prey on other insects like leaf thrips, less than a millimetre long. Or big enough to attack caterpillars. They’ve evolved usually to parasitise one type of insect, often at one stage of its existence. They have long ovipositers ready to deploy their eggs in (or on) the eggs, caterpillars, larvae, or pupae of other insects.
The growing wasp larvae then usually eat their host from within, keeping it alive as long as possible until the wasp is ready to emerge and begin its own adulthood.
We find some parasitic wasps in the SRWT garden - you can spot them because they’re usually long and thin, often quite small, with very long antennae waving around, looking for prey. (The name Ichneumon means ‘tracker’ in ancient Greek).
These creatures are wiggling around seeking prey all over our parks and gardens, but best not watch too closely, particularly if you’re fond of the Hungry Caterpillar children’s books. (Hungry Parasitic Wasp picture books are hard to find).
Wasps are generally so horrific that some legends hold that they’re a product of the devil, an anti to the cuddly and beneficial bee, designed in a similar colour. So the question humans ask, even without the detail of the parasitic members of the family, is why? What’s the point of wasps?
Remember they’re predators, says Ben. The Common Wasp is not parasitic, but it catches a host of other insects to feed to its larvae. The Natural History Museum estimate that social wasps eat thousands of millions of insects every year in the UK, often species that are pests to food growers and gardeners.
And the parasitic wasps do the same, but because there are more of them, they keep the numbers of insects down even more. Without wasps, Ben explains, we’d be overrun with caterpillars and other insects, and so would our food crops.
The cold wet spring this year led to some insects emerging later, he says. Many insects can adjust their emergence from eggs or pupae to suit current weather conditions, so arrive in our skies slightly later in the year if necessary.
But the whole natural world is linked to evolutionary linkages between species: Blue Tits need caterpillars arriving at the right time to feed their young, for example, while caterpillars need the right host plant thriving at the right time too.
If weather becomes more unpredictable year after year, as it seems to be doing, species that can adapt for one or two bad years start to really struggle, says Ben.
In the wildlife garden, we find bees, moths, spiders, and hoverflies that mimic the yellow and black stripes of the once mighty, stinging and scary Common Wasp, to try and deter predators.
And then by the garden pond, there’s a fleeting yellow and black buzz. “There’s one” he says. “One. Normally, they’d be everywhere.”
In the late summer or autumn, Ben says, Common Wasps start behaving like unruly teenagers. The species eats nectar and fruit to feed itself, and predates other insects to feed its young. But that job’s usually done by late summer, so worker social wasps have nothing to do until they die out as the colder weather starts arriving. So they get drunk on fermented fruit, and aggressive because they’re confused, says Ben.
And that’s when we really pay attention to our once-Common Wasps. This year, they may only be noticeable by their absence.
Opening The Bat Cave
Work to open up the River Sheaf in the city centre is to begin at the end of August. A concrete culvert, built over 100 years ago, will be removed in small slabs. “It’ll be like when your mum made fudge, and then took it apart for you piece by piece,” says Simon Ogden of the Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust and Castlegate Area Board.
Before the fudge / concrete removal, there’ll be a survey of water-loving Daubenton’s Bats which nest in the nearby Megatron structure (which will stay underground) but feed under the crumbling concrete of 1917. And once opened, the Sheaf will be a major part of the new Castlegate open space due to open in about 18 months.
The site was orginally concreted over as a smelly eyesore to allow twentieth century development: it had been the practice to empty the nearby slaughterhouses into the river at that point. But there’ll now be a new fish pass as well as a daylighted river, so we can watch fish, bats and dragonflies in the city centre.
What’s On Out There (from Sunday 18th August)
A tiny selection from our monthly, regularly updated, What’s On Out There post. This service takes me ages to collate, so a paid subscription to help keep you all informed would really help.
It costs £4 of pocket money every month, you get access to the whole archive and you’ll be helping pay the bills to keep all this going.
Sun 18th - Steel City Trail 10 trail run at Wincobank Hill Fort
Sun 18th - Reclaim our Moors grouse moor protest walk from Redmires
Mon 19th - Friends of Whirlow Brook Park volunteer morning
Mon 19th - Thurs 22nd - Summer at Manor Lodge - cosmic crafts week (£4.50 / child)
Tues 20th - Family Picnic Day at Sheffield General Cemetery
Tues 20th, Weds 21st - Summer of Play at Longshaw - Hobby Horse Trials
Weds 21st - Sheffield Sustainability Network Netwalk (Victoria Quays)
Thurs 22nd - Green City Action Grimesthorpe community allotment volunteer days
Fri 23rd - South Yorkshire Orienteers - Give It A Go - Rosehill, Rawmarsh
Sat 24th - CycleBoost Learn to Ride & Cycle Confidence Training - Heeley & Endcliffe, booking req’d
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Went for a walk along the new path along the Sheaf this afternoon. Bit by bit they are getting there and it's great to see a new bit of the walk open. The Sheaf looks quite rural on that stretch and I didn't see one bit of rubbish.
I’ve heard people say that - What’s the point of wasps? I don’t really understand the question. Do particular creatures have to have a point? Wasps (and many others creatures) might well be wondering what the point of humans is….
Really excited about the Sheaf being opened up! It should be a fantastic asset to the city 😀