Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 3rd November 2024
Early flights: thousands of Scandinavians stream into the city. Why bats are climbing to the top of the Peak District. New trails for the country, and new apples for Whirlow.
Morning. Thousands of winter tourists are flying in just now. Last Sunday, I watched hundreds arrive above Redmires reservoir. Sheffield is one of the places where the study of ‘visible migration’ began, and I joined Sheffield Bird Study Group at dawn to find out more.
Kinder Scout, as I’ve reported before, is turning green. I heard this week about a new sign that the project is working to restore and rewild a landscape destroyed by the industrial revolution: the bats have arrived.
And we’ve a few news updates too, with good and bad news about the River Sheaf, a pioneer grassroots mountain cycling charity launching in Sheffield, another update on the cycle hub, a new local campaign for pedestrians, and more initiatives from the very busy Friends of Whirlow Brook Park. As always keep your eye on our regularly updated news, links, and listings post. And please share all this with your mates:
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Out There News in Brief
Sheaf Grief and Relief - My members-only long post on the Rivers Sheaf and Porter should be with our wonderful 240+ full paying members in the next few days (there’ll also be a sneak preview for the rest of you).
Over recent weeks, the tireless campaigners of the Sheaf and Porter Rivers Trust have won a long crusade to get a developer to finally open a section of the Sheaf Valley Trail near Troutbeck Road they should have built years ago, while downstream, high water surging alongside Broadfield Road has torn out a section of bank closing the footpath to Saxon Road. More in our forthcoming special post.
Pedestrian Friendly City - The Sheffield Green Party will use* a motion at this week’s council meeting to call for a Pedestrian Friendly City. Meanwhile, under the radar among the other budget announcements, it appears that government funding for local authorities to do just that kind of thing remains safe, and is maybe even a little more generous than expected. We’ll be keeping an eye on this. (* My ‘blame the long nights’ earlier post missed that this motion had not yet been heard. Sorry!)
The Trail Pot - A new national funding mechanism for grassroots mountain biking has been launched in Sheffield. I’m told the first stage for the new Trail Pot charity is to ask organisations, retailers and cafes involved in off road cycling of all kinds to try and raise around £6 a week to build up a national fund that can then be allocated for projects like trail repair and building.
City Centre Cycle Hub - Still not quite open, due to a last minute problem with some old doors, I gather. It’ll now be this week I’m told. See last week’s post for more.
Whirlow Brook Trail, Maze and Apples - The Friends of Whirlow Brook Park have also been busy (& I’ll have a longer post on their work soon). The new toddler maze, with durable multicoloured posts made from plastic bottles, is now open, along with the popular Blue Trail for family explorers, funded by Sheffield Town Trust.
They’ve also been working with volunteers from local companies to clear an old orchard site for a new community orchard and nature area. There’s an ongoing consultation for this, contact the Friends for more.
Bat Signal
If you visit the plateau of Kinder Scout in spring or early summer, the raw green landscape is astonishing. Older readers may remember the desolate peat landscape of just a generation ago. Now after several years of planting moss, plants and berry bushes, building dams to hold onto the rainwater, and other restoration work, the green spring on Kinder seems breathtakingly new.
It’s very early days for the modern version of the kind of wild landscape that existed up there centuries ago, long before pollution from Manchester’s mills blackened and killed the plants, and drove out the animals.
The greening of Kinder, led by the Moors for the Future Partnership (aka MFF, which includes the National Trust, RSPB, the Peak District National Park along with water companies and other landowners) is inspiring to see. But is it actually working, after such a radical change in such a short time?
This week, MFF sent out a bat signal. Yes, it said, the moors at the leading edge of the industrial revolution are now wilding themselves back to life. We know, because the bats have told us.
This summer, the Derbyshire Bat Group and MFF set up bat detectors to monitor bat calls at a restored site, and a control site still covered in bare peat. The survey recorded at least seven bat species on Kinder Scout, with twice as many bat visits recorded on the restored site than the control area, and bats spending twice as long on the vegetated stretches.
Alan Roe from the Derbyshire Bat Group explained why we should celebrate. Bats roost down in the lowlands, in places like trees or old buildings. And some are tiny. So they’re not going to waste their energy unless it’s worth it.
“They’re not going to fly all the way up there unless there are good food resources for them,” he said.
Another survey on the same sites counted 65 moths of various species caught in special moth traps on the restored moorland, compared to only four on the unrestored control site.
Insects such as moths are bat food, and flying bat food is reliant on a variety of vegetation, plants and mosses that couldn’t grow on Kinder until the rewilding began.
Alan added that the relatively high control site figures for bat calls are perhaps a bit misleading: his guess is that these bats were probably just passing through on their way to the insects in more hospitable areas.
He remembers the moonscape of Kinder from the late 1960s. You can’t compare bat figures from the blackened peat days, as there were no records then, he explained, but given there were few plants and insects, it would have been very unlikely to find bats on Kinder at that time, as insects are what all British bats eat.
He added that the Kinder Scout figures from this summer also show five out of the eleven bat species used by ecologists as a measure of good biodiversity.
“Bats are at the top of their food chain, so they’re a good indicator. Bats fly up there because of the insects, and the insects depend on a good base of vegetation.”
MFF say the bats on the 600 metre high Kinder plateau are among the highest records in the UK. I asked Alan how these tiny predators discover there are now moths on Kinder Scout (when the closest known bat roost is two miles away and 350 metres downhill).
Bats have a variety of calls, to find their way about using ultrasonic echolocation, and also social calls to communicate with each other, he explained.
“So they might be saying something like, come on chaps, there’s a good swarm of insects over there.” Maybe bat detectors carry a translation app these days.
Tom Spencer from Moors for the Future said the big changes on Kinder had happened in little more than twelve years, from an area with “vast expanses of bare peat” to a state where “nature is now looking after itself”.
The hope now is to expand that kind of restoration work so more of the local deep peat moorlands can be restored. “On Kinder Scout we’ve demonstrated what is possible, if we try.”
Alan Roe says he aims to travel up next spring after the local bats come out of hibernation, and watch some of the highest bats in the country tell each other it’s time to spin across the sky above Kinder Scout, once again.
Pigeon Post
Here they come. “Four Chaffinches. And here’s a small flock, eight Chaffinches.”
I’m standing on a small hilltop just above Redmires Reservoirs with Richard Hill of Sheffield Bird Study Group (SBSG), watching birds arrive in Sheffield. Some have crossed the North Sea on the way here, others are following the rivers and tree lines from Scotland or beyond.
The sun is rising for a glorious Sunday morning. The clocks went back last night, but these tiny finches and the city’s keener birdwatchers have spurned an extra hour of sleep. They’re governed by the sun and the weather.
It might be quiet today, Richard warns me. If it’s been miserable migrant birds wait for good weather to travel, and yesterday was a good day: he watched several thousand Woodpigeons and maybe 1,000 Starlings pass on the first bright morning after an accumulation of migrants had been hiding in days of fog on the east coast.
But there’ll be more new arrivals to come, he says. The phenomenon of visible migration continues into the middle of November, and he tells me the cold Scandinavian winter hasn’t really arrived as yet, so birds like Fieldfares are still filling up on the region’s remaining berries before the temperature drops and they head south for warmer weather in England.
SBSG were pioneers in the study of visible migration fifty years ago. Our position at the foot of the Pennines guides travelling birds along the city’s valleys, and SBSG members like Keith Clarkson found if you got up early, you could actually see migrants arrive, often in huge numbers: 35,000 Woodpigeons in one morning in 2004, for example. 650 skylarks in 1977, 8,000 Starlings in 1984, 41,600 Redwings in 2006.
You learn to log the numbers by counting a small flock, then estimating the area of sky they take up, and multiplying, says Richard Hill. You soon get the knack. And you must listen too. “You might hear a Song Thrush in a flock of Redwings.”
In the past, it was often assumed that most birds carried out their migration by night. Small birds like warblers and Chiff Chaffs feed up in late summer and then spiral upward into the night sky to be carried to Africa by tail winds, says Richard.
A Willow Warbler could take stock of the weather and wind direction, then guided by its sense of the world’s magnetic fields head into the sky one August night and arrive in Africa a week or two later.
But many birds migrate in daytime too, often after travelling hundreds of miles the night before. In the daytime they may fly lower to avoid predators, and follow their preferred habitats so they can stop to feed.
“Redwings!” says a Sheffield migration watcher. “They may have left Norway or Denmark yesterday evening.”
Many of the migrating birds in autumn are species that already live here, arriving In Sheffield when northern winter food becomes scarce. So our woods and gardens fill with Scandinavian or Russian Robins, Starlings, Blackbirds and Woodpigeons.
In late October or early November, you can watch visible migration almost anywhere in Sheffield, says Richard. The two hours from dawn are the best times, and it may help to gain a bit of height to watch birds following a valley. Good places are Redmires, Concord Park, Ramsley Moor, Rod Moor near Rivelin, or the Ox Stones above Ringinglow. But you could try your back garden too, he says.
Look for small ‘purposeful’ groups, often heading south west. (Although some birds head north east too). And watch for large flocks of geese, often high in the sky and honking like a pack of hounds. Birds like Pink-footed Geese can spend the winter crossing Sheffield as they move to and from their favoured feeding grounds in the Wash and the Dee estuaries, to take advantage of weather and food supply.
Long time SBSG member David Wood tells me the study of visible migration is a good way to monitor the decline in bird numbers. While generalist birds like Woodpigeons are doing well (they eat almost anything) specialists like Skylarks have plummeted. The 1970s figure of 600 Skylarks in one morning is unlikely to be repeated. You’d be very lucky to see six now, he suggests.
But this year’s Sunday morning birders are still enjoying small waves of spectacular travellers. “20 starlings, going west.” “2 Siskins.” “Chaffinches. Don’t know where they’re going.”
The skies of Redmires are not full of birds, as is sometimes the case, but in the morning sun there are worse places to be.
“It’s not been a classic today,” says Chris Greenwood. “But you have to put the hours in.”
Richard Hill sent me the morning’s tally: 100 Pink-footed Geese, a late Curlew, 3 Buzzards, a Great Spotted Woodpecker, and rough totals including c. 4000 Woodpigeon, 140 Redwing, 50 Chaffinch, 200 Starling, 20 Meadow Pipit, 10 Siskin, 4 Reed Bunting, and 3 Bullfinch.
See https://www.sbsg.org/sightings/recent-news for up to date sightings
What’s On Out There (from Sunday 3rd November)
A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for October & early November.
Sun 3rd - Sheffield CTC Cycle Ride - Langsett
Mon 4th Nov - Graves Park Climate Resilience project - Sheffield Swift Network talk at Lees Hall Golf Club
Tues 5th - Sheffield Ramblers Walk (public transport from Sheffield) - Stanage : 6.6m
Weds 6th - Shirebrook Valley - Bird Walk (8am start)
Thurs 7th - State of Nature talk with RSPB local group (£5)
Thurs 7th - SRWT Volunteer Session - Moss Valley
Sat 9th - Wadsley Common bird walk
Sat 9th - Parkwood Springs volunteer morning
Sun 10th - Parkwood Springs Fungi Walk
With just half a dozen new paying members to add to the 240+ wonderful folk already signed up, It’s Looking A Bit Black Over Bill’s Mother’s will be able to publish an even wider range of features. And there’ll be more posts just for the fully paid up members of our unique social enterprise. Thanks for reading.
Thanks Rebecca! Glad you enjoyed the piece. Now you have to get up at dawn to watch for hundreds of Starlings or Woodpigeons.
loved reading about the migration