Ash Dieback Update + Sheffield Litter Pickers: Sun 5th February
Hello everyone, and yes, I’ve dropped the ‘..Morning At..” in the title because last week most of you didn’t turn up until lunchtime.
Welcome to all subscribers, whether you’re reading for free or you’re among the first paid supporters of what I hope might become a regular read for folk in The Outdoor City interested in this kind of thing.
As usual, we have a very brief round up of news, and this week two contrasting feature stories: one covering the bleak forecast that this region will lose hundreds of thousands of ash trees over the next few years, and what that’ll mean for the city and the White Peak area of the Peak District.
The second is a little more positive: a look at one of the city’s largest volunteer groups, who chip away at our litter mountains every day with a smile on their face, determination in their hearts and a binbag of other people’s rubbish in their hands.
Brief News
Firstly, shipping containers are not necessarily a bad thing. Look at the very succesful Kafe Stannington high up and far away at Stannington Park, for example, opened before anyone hatched any ideas about transplanting the same idea to Fargate. Metal shipping containers can work quite well as park cafes, but as Martin McGrail, who with wife Carrie launched the Stannington venue five years ago put it: “When you’re using shipping containers, you have to do it right.”
Make it look nice with wooden cladding, for example, like Kafe Stannington, and, I gather, ‘The Shelter’ to open by Easter at Whirlowbrook Park. The long awaited cafe at Parkwood Springs will also arrive this year, and I hear that will probably follow the wood-covered containers model too. At least that way, no-one will know if the containers used ever sat forlornly on Fargate in an earlier life.
Secondly, an update on the mysterious weirdness coming to Sheffield City Centre mentioned last week. We’re still sort of embargoed until 10am on Tuesday, when you can expect to see pictures of various councillors and Californians embodying #LookUpSheff near four prominent city centre buildings.
Arriving this week, we now know, is an ‘augmented reality art trail’, dependent on an app you can download on Tuesday at 10 (but not before) from https://www.welcometosheffield.co.uk/lookup.
What will you see? I can’t yet say, but if you’re walking through Tudor Square next week, try not to bump into excited ailurophiles taking selfies.
Thirdly, active travel news, and I hear there was a somewhat angry meeting of local traders and businesses at Marmadukes on Ecclesall Road last week about the proposed red lined bus lanes. The all day red lines, not everyone knows, mean that the council’s new powers to enforce the no-parking laws by using cameras can be deployed to make sure no-one breaks the law and slows down buses.
The new Active Travel Commissioner will be revealed on Tuesday (and I may even get an update on Monday, so do subscribe, then you’ll hopefully be one of the first to know).
Businesses rarely actually suffer from measures to make life easier for walkers, and the new ATC will hopefully take up the strong business case for active travel. I saw The Mayor of South Yorkshire yesterday, and he assures me the ATC will be someone of note. Roll (and walk) on, Tuesday.
Finally - half term is coming, and there’ll be plenty of outdoor events for the youngsters (and you).
I’m planning to run a week- ahead selection of stuff to do in future Sunday editions, when I’m more organised. (If you know anything happening for now, please mention it in the comments below). Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust have got in touch already with next week’s events.
Friday 10 and Saturday 11th - Tree Planting at Greno Woods (11th family friendly with Kids Plant Trees) - see above for essential booking.
Friday 10th also sees the final community tree planting session at Rough Standhills - meet at the top car park in Whirlowbrook Park at 9.30 a.m.
Losing The Ash Tree
We now know that 200,000 or more of Sheffield’s ash trees will succumb to ash dieback disease over the next few years, with 70-80% of the nation’s ash trees likely to be wiped out by a fungus originally imported by chance from Asia (where it only causes leaf blight to the native ash species).
If you visit local parks and river valleys, you’ll see the standing poles of trunks left after the council’s teams have removed a crown of dangerous branches. The spread of the fungus makes the affected parts of the tree brittle, so trees near roads, paths or busy areas have to come down for safety reasons, says Sheffield Council tree manager Jerry Gunton.
Surveys are taken when the trees are in summer leaf, and ash trees with a 50% or more loss of leaf cover are marked for removal the following winter. The trunks are left standing for birds and insects, and we can see them now, like tall ridged monuments in the western river valleys, where the ash population appears to be most affected. Trees away from public areas and paths, in the centre of woodlands, for example, are left to take their course.
This winter, 520 ash trees were cut down on land owned by Sheffield Council, a steady increase in affected trees, with a growth from 229 in the winter of 2020, and 372 in 2021. The Porter Valley seems especially blighted, with around 30% of the felled ash trees in that valley alone. Fungal dieback spores are deposited in a season’s leaves, and spread more easily in humid conditions. The steep, damp and still valleys of the Porter and Rivelin are ideal hosts for the disease, says Jerry Gunton.
But ash are only about 6% of Sheffield’s tree cover, and he maintains that many of our woodlands will simply see gaps appearing when ash once were, with other species colonising the space, boosted by the new sunlight.
“Many people won’t notice the ash have gone, because something else will come back in their places. In Sheffield our woods will remain,” he says.
In the White Peak, however, the story is much worse. Luke Barley, the National Trust’s Senior National Consultant for Trees and Woodland, has been monitoring the disease spreading across the country from its early home in the south east.
Woods in Dovedale, Taddington, Cressbrook and Lathkill dales are very ash dominated and will be devastated to the extent that the whole ecology will change.
“The long term picture is that the country will lose most of its ash trees, and it’s going to be very dramatic in the White Peak,” Luke says. Safety felling has already been taking place for several years in many White Peak woodlands.
Ash regenerates very quickly - spinning ash keys drop from their parent tree and spring up as new saplings in their dozens. If you see bunches of spindly trees alongside pathways, they’re probably ash. This is why ash dominate some of the Derbyshire dales, says Luke.
Clearing woods for quarrying and heavy sheep grazing many years ago meant when the land was allowed to regrow, ash were the first to recolonise and outcompeted most other trees. “Human modification of the landscape has led to the dominance of ash in the White Peak,” he says.
In the distant past, before that human intervention, these woodlands would naturally have a mixture of ash and other species like lime, yew, field maple and cherries, and projects being carried out by the National Trust and others in the Peak District will try to encourage these species to recolonise woodlands as the ash die off, in an attempt to maintain some kind of woodland environment. But this will all happen in ‘tree time’ says Luke, meaning change will take place over several human generations.
It’s early days in the science of the disease, he says, but there are signs that trees on thin soil (like the limestone of the White Peak) are already stressed, particularly in extreme weather, and may be declining quicker. It also looks as if non-woodland trees - like the huge ‘standards’ in many field corners and parks - may be more resilient, possibly because there’s more air around to whisk away fungal spores.
Young trees tend to fare worse, says Luke, perhaps because the fungus often only kills off a year’s growth at a time, so older trees can fight back to some extent. And don’t forget that 10-20% of ash are projected to be resilient or at least tolerant to the disease, he says, and work is ongoing to try and identify these trees, clone them and then plant them out to foster a population more resistant to ash dieback. Which will again take many decades.
One silver lining in Sheffield is that we have so many other tree species, says Jerry, but big much-loved individual ash trees in places like Hillsborough Park and the Porter and Rivelin Valleys have already been lost.
And then there are garden trees - Jerry Gunton urges the Sheffield public to look at their own trees in the summer, and if they are ash, get a professional in to check the extent of the disease. If much of the leaf cover has been lost, he says, the tree may well be dangerous and if so, it’s the landowner’s responsibility to cut it down.
We’re learning more about the disease and how to deal with it all the time, says Luke Barley, and the public are taking notice and welcoming ideas to plant a wider range of native trees so our woodlands are more resilient. Another silver lining might be that we’re relearning basic woodland management knowledge, he says, that most people were aware of as a matter of course up to the 1940s.
But these are small silver linings, Luke says. That 70-80% loss figure is an average. Some places, like Sheffield, where there are fewer trees to spread the spores, might do better. But some, like Lathkill Dale and Dovedale, might lose close to 100% of their ash woodlands.
We’ve been able to see the dappled woods of Dovedale, and all the wildflowers that live there growing up into the airy green light. The White Peak for the coming generations is likely to be very different.
Tek It ‘Ome
At the last count, Sheffield Litter Pickers claimed to have 4,300 members of their social media group. They’re not all out there every day with their gloves and litter grabbers and bin bags. But founder member Linda Ball says there’s at least one group of 6-10 civic minded folk out in our streets and parks and woodlands collecting other people’s rubbish pretty much every day.
The pandemic was terrible for litter, in some ways, but good in others. More people were out and about dropping coffee cups and food bags (and worse, when the public toilets were closed), but more people were also wanting to get out of the house and do something, so the increased litter was met by increased numbers of Sheffield Litter Pickers, Linda says.
I meet Linda with the Granville Road team, and she wades into a small triangle of woodland just off the main road, notorious as a cast off site for rubbish from takeaways down the hill.
“You can feel it crunching under your feet, thinking there’s maybe three feet of rubbish here,” Linda says. The labels of packaging change as she digs deeper: plastic cutlery, drink cans with labels from 5-10 years ago, sauce sachets, and plastic food containers.
“It’s actually alarmingly great fun,” says Liz Wade, after clambering out of the ivy and brambles with her bin bag. “I like tidying up, I’m dismayed about the amount of litter about and want to do something about it.”
This is the surprising point about litter picking: it’s a great social event for people who want to improve their local area, and you feel a real sense of satisfaction after you see the seven or eight bin liners you’ve filled with your mates, and the litter-free environment you’ll leave behind for local people (and local wildlife).
Runners get busy too: the Runners against Rubbish group have members in Sheffield who combine litter picking (with gloves and bags) with a local run.
“We work on the broken windows theory,” explains Stuart Walker, a Runner against Rubbish. “If there’s already litter, people are more inclined to drop more, and you see it build up into a pile. So by clearing rubbish you stop it being dropped in future, and we hope we can also move people from those who’d never drop it to those who might pick up other litter when they’re out and about.”
Linda says drive-through fast food drop offs are one of the biggest issues, but she and her colleagues also find fly tipped office equipment, cast off clothes and she says abandoned sex toys are also an increasing problem.
January is known to those in the litter collection business as fly tipping season. Linda says: “After Christmas there’s so much junk and packaging flying about the streets, and we’ve been really busy doing post-Christmas picking. We’re always busy at this time of year, with cardboard, paper, overflowing bins and old toys usurped by new toys.”
There’s also been an increase in woodland flytipping she says, with tyres, more old toys and mattresses dumped for others to clear up.
Linda is pleased she and colleagues have finally arranged for the Council to arrange for litter picking equipment to be available at their libraries to collect for anyone who wants to get a group together to tidy up their local area.
You can call in for grabbers, bags and labels: after making your collections, you bag up the rubbish and either leave a relatively small number of bags tied up and labelled next to a public litter bin, or for a big litter pick, you can ask online for your piles of bags to be collected later.
It’s a long game, but Linda and colleagues say as their membership grows, maybe there’ll eventually be more litter pickers than litter droppers.
“There’s an enormous sense of satisfaction when you see a problem, and then go out and do something about it, particularly if you’re with a group of like-minded friends,” Linda says.
“It’s good for your spirit. You feel buoyed up afterwards. It’s not a grim task at all.”
Catch Up: Local Substack Reads You May Have Missed
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Who are the anti-CAZ FB group in Sheffield?
Hot housing tips for warm homes in cold winters
The beginning of the end for local radio?
What to Look for In February - our wildlife guide for this month
And Finally
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