Grasslands and Grass Lands

Grasslands is a small area of Horsell Common and the subject of a heathland restoration programme and whilst there is a little way to go with that project, my walk today across the site produced five or six woodlark. These are birds largely restricted to lowland heath and in particular, they need very short habitat in which to breed and feed. My woodlark therefore were most likely a family party (and this pair fledged four young last year), not long out of the nest and what a brilliant endorsement of the still young management programme. A dip into my Birds of the Western Palearctic (volume 5 Tyrant Flycatchers to Thrushes, anybody else still have this?), reveals that they can have a second brood and as autumn begins, the parents add both sets of fledglings together to form an extended family party, bouncing around the heath (their flight is very undulating in the same way as a woodpecker).

My Grasslands walk turned into a full Horsell Common walk, seven miles from home and back again in a wide loop taking in the common itself, McLarens Park and Heather Farm. Having bumped into my wife’s hairdresser (not a line I ever saw myself writing in a blog), I cut off the main path and found myself being assailed by the clicking stone call of a stonechat. This proved to be a female but as always with this less than shy heathland jewel, the male was close by and whilst a bit more relaxed, it dawned me on that I might be near a nest so I moved on………

….and almost immediately bumped into, almost not quite literally, a female dartford warbler as it zipped across the pathway in front of me, heading for a nest. This would be disappointing except that the male stopped in a low lying bush just to one side of the path. These, even more than stonechat, are true lowland heath specialists, famously vulnerable to hard winters (that we don’t have any more) and at the northern end of their range. They really are stunning to behold; red/brown underside, smart grey uppers setting off the amazing red eye ring.

It is not however, just heathland that remains under threat in our county and elsewhere. What about, ironically, grass lands (actually lands of grass as opposed to the now misnamed end of Horsell Common). Mclarens Park, overlooking the hi tech site of hi tech world polluters, McLaren Racing (to be fair, I have an interest in F1 handed down to me by my father who watched Moss, Fangio and Hawthorn at Silverstone and the Nurburgring) is a sea of grass and flower and meadow and on this May morning, alive with meadow pipits (including one signing from a tree which had me thinking about tree pipit for way too long) and the aerially delivered song of the skylark, which still has the power has stop me in my tracks and just listen.

Too many of our remaining heaths and meadows are threatened with destruction and decay but today did remind me that local actions, and partnerships with organisations that are anything but local, can preserve and allied to projects looking to connect these places, make a real difference.