The Ash Tree

-

 The most prominent mature trees hereabouts are ash trees.Even in winter without leaves they are obvious and familiar features of the landscape. Every old hedgerow has an ash tree that has been allowed to overtop the hedge every 30m or so. Sometimes all that remains of the hedge is a line of ash trees.


If I look at the view at the back of the house and count the mature ash trees and then look out of the front of the house and carry on counting I get up to at least 150 mature trees. The tree is so known because of its hard ash coloured buds that are arranged in opposite pairs and cannot be mistaken for anything else.


Recently, the ash tree population in the UK has been threatened by "ash die back" disease which threatens to kill off the population of ash trees over the coming years. The disease is caused by a fungus that originated in Asia ( where the local trees can tolerate it), has been known in Europe for the last 30 yrs but arrived in the UK in 2012 and is now widespread. The disease spreads by fungal spores but has probably arrived in the UK as a result of importing trees from Europe. I know of a local example where trees were planted at Edensyde near Kirkby Stephen. The people planting the trees had taken great care to specify that the trees were to come from a local genotype but hadn't realised that the seedlings were grown on in Holland before coming back to the UK. The Woodland Trust estimates that 80% of trees will eventually succumb to the disease with just a minority being genetically immune. The long term effect on the landscape in this part of Cumbria will be enormous. Enjoy the ash tree while you can!

Diary Notes
Another cold night. Minus 7 degrees C with snow cover still. I was delighted to capture two images of an otter on the camera traps last night at different locations. One camera trap was triggered 250 times by rabbits! Quite why rabbits were so active last night I have no idea! Perhaps they are very hungry having been prevented from feeding by the snow cover. I am attaching a clip of some particularly athletic rabbits.









Comments

  1. David P18 February 2021 at 15:09

    We planted 17 Ash trees in our copse about 10 years ago and most are still growing well.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Dunnock

-
Image
 When I was a boy my first bird book described "hedge sparrows" but at some time in the last 50 years this name has all but disappeared and these birds are now called dunnocks (as they are not closely related to House and Tree Sparrows) Its easy to miss a dunnock! They are little brown birds and they tend to feed on the ground and keep to the cover of vegetation if they can. The males are territorial and the birds pair up in the spring. The pair are not strictly monogamous and the female will mate with another male if she gets the chance. DNA testing reveals that a brood often has more than one father. The male dunnocks are alert to this possibility and can sometimes be seen pecking at the cloacal opening of the female in an attempt to get her to expel the sperm of the competitor. The sexes look alike and these birds are common and widespread in Britain. The males get involved in feeding young according to their breeding success so it is common to find two males and one femal...
Read more

White Clawed Crayfish

-
Image
 I went for a walk yesterday that took me along the Scandal Beck (a tributary of the River Eden). On the banks of the river was a stone that had obviously been used as a picnic table by an otter and the remains of his meal were strewn about. A recognisable part of the leftovers is shown below. It's clear that this claw comes from a white clawed crayfish. These animals are not common in the UK as they need the water to be rich in calcium. This requirement is fulfilled in the Eden valley by the limestone substrate. I think that the River Eden is as far North as theses animals get. I know that there are crayfish in this part of the system because for a number of years I have volunteered with the Eden Rivers Trust to survey them. It was not uncommon to find a couple of hundred animals in a 300m stretch of river. The following images give an indication of scale. In recent years the population of the native white clawed crayfish has been threatened by the arrival of the invasive signal (...
Read more

Otters

-
 Well another Covid lockdown! As I am confined to the local area I have been having a closer look at the local wildlife. I treated myself to a trail cam and started to see what I could find. After a couple of experimental sessions to get to know the kit I set the camera along a fence line by an old railway track. On the first night I was astonished to get footage of an otter carrying a rabbit! The site is at least 500m from a watercourse which is a drainage ditch that eventually flows into a tiny tributary of the River Eden I hadn't realised that otters eat anything other than fish but apparently they do. I wonder why the otter was carrying the rabbit rather than eating it where it was found. Perhaps it was feeding young? Apparently ottters have young throughout the year. I have only seen an otter near the house once before and that was a late night encounter in the car headlights.
Read more