The Woodlander Sydenham Hill Wood’s seasonal newsletter
Spring/Summer 2013
Female orange tip butterfly on cuckoo flower, April 2013 by T. Garriock
In this issue: Ghosts of the Great North Wood Workday update Stand up for badgers Solitary bees And…all the latest news from the Wood Want to receive this newsletter? Email ‘subscribe me’ to dgreenwood@wildlondon.org.uk
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Sydenham Hill Wood News New fencing to protect aquatic wildlife £600 of SITA Trust funding was spent on chestnut paling and posts to replace the dilapidated fencing around the small pond in Sydenham Hill Wood. Volunteers installed the fencing over two days which has an attractive palisade gate and will protect the wild residents of the pond – newts, pond skaters, freshwater shrimp, bathing birds and, recently, mallards, from disturbance. Trees have also been coppiced around the pond meaning much more sunlight reaches the banks giving a boost to invertebrates and plants. A small tortoiseshell has been witnessed feeding with bumblebees and solitary bees this spring. Far left: Volunteers Tom and Richard discuss the palisade gate (DG); left: a common carder bee feeding on a dandelion inside the fence (T. Garriock)
Looking for birds at Dog Kennel Hill On Saturday 20th April 2013 Sydenham Hill Wood Project Officer Daniel Greenwood and resident ornithologist (to be) Dave Clark led a spring walk at Dog Kennel Hill Wood and Open Space as well as the Greendale in support of the Friends of Dog Kennel Hill Wood. On the day we recorded house sparrow, dunnock, chiffchaff, song and mistle thrush, blackcap, robin, wren and green woodpecker amongst others. This was urban wildlife at its best. Left: the Greendale (Jonathan Coe)
BBC Nature visits the Wood London Wildlife Trust joined forces with The Tree Council to record an audio slideshow to celebrate Walk in the Woods Month. Jeremy Coles of BBC Bristol visited Sydenham Hill Wood to produce this atmospheric feature with commentary from Site Manager Daniel Greenwood and Tree Council Director General Pauline Buchanan-Black. The photographs of the Wood were taken by Hannah Storey for the Tree Council. Watch the slideshow in full on the BBC Nature website.
Rain no dampener for dawn chorus crowd On Friday 26th April at 4:45am 25 members of the public attended a wet and gloomy dawn chorus walk led by Dave Clark. Visitors encountered singing blackcaps (female, pictured left, in the Wood by Krisztina Fekete), a solitary chiffchaff and a teasing glimpse of a tawny owl. Our evening bird walk on Thursday 9th May drew a crowd of 30 to hear the sound of a male song thrush amongst others. Equally successful was a walk as part of the Dulwich Festival on Saturday 18th May which sold out, and an evening tree ID walk on Thursday 16th May as part of London Tree Week.
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Stand up and be counted against the badger cull The Government has confirmed that two pilot culls of badgers, originally due to start in 2012, are due to go ahead from 1st June 2013 onwards. London Wildlife Trust, along with the Wildlife Trusts, is firmly opposed to this course of action - and we urge our supporters to stand up and be counted against the cull. Culls are designed to test the 'controlled shooting' method of culling badgers, even though free shooting of badgers will be also permitted. The pilot culls will not measure the impact on bovine TB. They are due to take place in Gloucestershire and Somerset, and a reserve area has also been identified in Dorset. NO Wildlife Trust would allow culling of badgers on its land. London Wildlife Trust believes there are alternative methods which should be used to tackle the bovine TB problem. You can find out more about this issue, and what The Wildlife Trusts are doing, here: www.wildlifetrusts.org/badgers-and-bovineTB. Mathew Frith, Deputy CEO for London Wildlife Trust, says: "While not immediately a ‘London issue’, we also fear that the official sanction of culling - ostensibly to address bovine TB - will legitimise efforts to kill badgers elsewhere for other reasons. "It wasn’t long ago that we and others campaigned for legislation to prevent baiting for sport - the Protection of Badgers Act 1991 - which is now in danger of being undermined by a cull not supported by the evidence."
Take action now We need all our supporters to stand up against the cull. Please take action: Email your MP to say that you value nature and badgers, and that you want the cull halted. Sign the Stop the Badger Cull e-petition, and share it as much as possible. It now has over 250,000 signatures, and you could help get thousands more. You can find the full London Wildlife Trust Badger and Bovine TB Policy on this page of the site.
Ghosts of the Great North Wood Sydenham Hill Wood volunteer and author Chris Schuler recounts the Wood’s changing state over the past millenium
One of the many ways in which woodland was put to economic use in the Middle Ages was for pannage – releasing pigs there in the autumn to feed on acorns and beech mast. The Great North Wood, of which Sydenham Hill and Dulwich Woods are a surviving fragment, was no exception. In the Domesday Book (1086), the extent of woodland was measured not by acreage but by the number of pigs it would feed. It has been calculated that one acre of wood would feed one pig, but this can only be the roughest of estimates, as the number of pigs a forest could support would vary. However, it does show the relative amount of woodland in each manor.
The woods fell within the possessions of four manors. At the end of the Saxon period, Croydon was owned by Harold Godwinson, and following his death at the Battle of Hastings, it passed to the victor, William I. The conqueror subsequently bestowed it, along with the forest that extended over its northern part, on Lanfranc, the new Archbishop of Canterbury. The Domesday Book states that ‘Archiepiscopus Lanfrancus tenet in dominio Croindene’ (Archbishop Lanfranc holds in demesne Croydon) with “Silua de CC. porcis” (wood for two hundred pigs).
The manor of South Lambeth, which extended as far as West Norwood, was held by the monks of Waltham Abbey from the time of Harold I (1035–40), and was regranted to them, ‘with all belonging to it; commons, arable lands, meadows, woods and waters’, by Edward the Confessor (1042–66). After the Conquest it was held by Robert of Mortain, and from 1190 by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Camberwell was originally one large manor, with woodland for 60 swine. Under Edward the Confessor its lord was Northmann of Mereworth, one of the great Saxon landowners, but after the Conquest William granted the manor to his sheriff Haimo. In the century that followed, Camberwell was split into several smaller manors. The area around Camberwell itself became the manor of Camberwell Buckingham, sometimes called Camberwell and Peckham, which was held as a direct tenancy of the king. Among the sub-manors that included or adjoined parts of the woods was Dulwich, first mentioned in a charter of 1127 when it was granted by Henry I to Bermondsey Abbey. To the east of Lordship Lane lay the manor of Friern in what is now East Dulwich.
On the eastern flanks of the ridge, the manor of Lewisham belonged to the Abbey of St Pierre in Ghent, to whom it was granted by King Edgar I in 964. The Domesday Book records that it had woodland for 50 swine. Like Camberwell, Lewisham was subdivided into several subsidiary manors by 1290. One of these was Sydenham – the old spelling was Cypenham or Sippenham. The name Westwood, referring to the woods to the west of Lewisham, first appears in the 13th century. In 1414, when Henry V expelled all foreign monks from England, the manor was granted to the Priory of Shene, and much of Sydenham’s woodland was cleared for farming.
The case of the fallen oak
Broken roots by Thomas Glen The highlight of our workdays in the past few months has to be the aftermath of a great sessile oak’s collapse. The oak is likely to be 150 years or more in age and is a fine example of its species. One stormy night in May the wind tore through from Sydenham Hill and rendered this beast supine. Early signs are that the drought may have played a part in the tree’s fall with the roots snapping away and looking rather dry. Honey fungus has also brought down trees in this area of the wood – the old Victorian tennis courts – and so that could also be a suspect in the investigation. However, it would be wrong to treat this purely as a loss. A mighty tree hath fallen but the many wild creatures will benefit. Sydenham Hill Wood & Dulwich Woods are one of the top forty most important sites for invertebrates in England, being home to a variety of red-listed species. This deadwood habitat will be an opportunity for bugs to find a home for the long term, until the next mature tree falls in a storm. The Sydenham Hill Wood volunteers answered a battle cry email and came to clear the way for visitors walking through the wood. One visitor was rather put out that the forester had felled the tree and others had found their own way around it before we cleared the way.
Path maintenance needed (T. Glen)
Making a start (T. Glen)
Axe work (Daniel Greenwood)
Richard, Celia and Sarah after a good day’s work (DG)
Oh, lonesome bee
Ashy mining bee in the Wood, May 2013 (TG)
When looking at the overall health of Sydenham Hill Wood, one of our main concerns is the Dulwich Wood borders. Here the soil is severely eroded which means that there is no new layer of woodland coming through beneath the sessile oak trees that make up this part of the Wood’s canopy cover. We have recently discovered what appears to be an orchid, possibly common twayblade, which is unable to leaf properly due to the solid nature of the soil. But there are winners from this situation, and they easily go unnoticed. We’re talking about mining bees, not bumblebees or honey bees, but bees which cut a small peephole into the hardened earth to make their homes. Volunteers surveyed the nest sites for two afternoons in April, with curious passers-by asking what our interest was. We watched as an early mining bee entered its nest hole with fluorescent pollen sacks, what will have been from a willow, one of which can be found a good five minute walk away in the upper reaches of the Wood. It remains to be seen just how far they travelled to collect pollen. Further to this we discovered a beautiful rufous red tawny mining bee which can be often found in the early spring drinking the nectar of wayside weeds like green alkanet and comfrey.
These insects were charming creatures. One sat with its head in the entrance to its nest watching us with equal interest and another took one look at us and closed the door in our faces – a door in the guise of a small clay ball. The ashy mining bee pictured above was a very busy bee indeed, but loitering outside a nest hole and evading our attempts to pot it for purposes of identification.
In the case of the female tawny mining bee, the sight of a simple little hole in the ground is misleading. There can be as many as half a dozen tunnels beyond the entrance hole. She is also thought never to see the offspring when it hatches and, after her job is done, she shows very little interest in her nest site. Unlike bumblebees or honey bees, mining bees are solitary rather than social. Mining bees often make nests in the same area and so seeing a number of different cavities can be misleading. Each nest is solitary. There should be more broods to come in the late summer and we’ll be keeping an eye out for these beautiful and somewhat unnoticed insects.
An early mining bee keeping an eye on the volunteers, May 2013 (DG)
Great North Wood walk Walk the old ways of the Great North Wood with the Friends of One Tree Hill and London Wildlife Trust to discover the woodland heritage of Honor Oak, Forest Hill, Sydenham and Crystal Palace
Starting point: One Tree Hill notice board, Honor Oak Park Finishing point: Crystal Palace Park via Brenchley Gardens, Cox’s Walk & Sydenham Hill Wood, Dulwich Wood & Dulwich Upper Wood
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Sunday 4 August 2013 at 12:00 Contact Daniel Greenwood for more information: dgreenwood@wildlondon.org.uk This is a long distance walk and so requires suitable footwear, clothing fit for the conditions, drinking water and reasonable fitness. Approx. duration: 4 hours
London Wildlife Trust: www.wildlondon.org.uk FrOTH: www.friendsofonetreehill.wordpress.com