Popping Corks in Padley Gorge

Springwatch at Longshaw: more background from Bill's Mother's.

Checking the cork size for a Padley Gorge nest box

One of this year’s Springwatch stories covered the climate-related problems of Pied Flycatchers arriving in Derbyshire, only to find their nest holes from last year full of aggressive Great Tits.

A few years earlier, those over wintering Great Tits would have fledged their brood and gone by late April.

Nine years ago, I covered the ingenious method discovered by rangers at Longshaw to provide a welcome home for the migrant flycatchers as they flew in for the summer. Here’s that story below, for our wonderful full subscribers.

Great Tit - Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

---

It’s great news that the work by rangers, volunteers and other conservationists and rewilders on the edge of the Outdoor City is getting national attention.

But local writers, newspapers and newsgatherers have been reporting on this work for years, and will continue long after the BBC have packed up their cardboard diagrams and nest cameras.

The It’s Looking A Bit Black Over Bill’s Mother’s archive of Longshaw and Sheffield Moors stories is here (and growing), and to provide a little more background for Springwatchers, over the next few days I’ll post a handful of my archive stories about the moors and woodlands covered by this year’s Springwatch.

Please help us carry on doing what we do, week after week, spring, summer, autumn and winter. It costs less than a pint of beer a month to keep us reporting, and to read our growing archive of over 230 fairly interesting features. And now and then, there are special features like this just for our 300+ full supporters. Thanks.

---