Today was a second go at working on Adel Bog, after we were rained off last Sunday.
As with last Sunday, six of us turned up today despite reasonably heavy rain and a dire forecast of rain all day. The difference was that today, we all agreed that we would go for it.
Adel Bog 29 September 2019
In the last two or three years, we have left Adel Bog to itself while we have concentrated on Adel Moor – and there has been a lot of incursion of brambles and saplings in that time. The area to the right of the picture above was all clear a few years ago.
Sure enough, it rained all morning, but the rain is manna from heaven for the bog which has been rather dry over the last couple of years. There were plenty of pools of water to be seen today.
Bog Asphodel, Adel Bog, September 2019
And there were plenty of beautiful plants to be seen – like Bog Asphodel and Scabious.
Scabious (the blue flowers) and Bog Asphodel, Adel Bog, September 2019
Our main objective today was to clear brambles – which were extremely prolific and tangled – but we worked through heavy rain until midday and managed to clear large areas, though there is still a great deal to do.
Adel BogHappy Friends of Adel Woods, Adel Bog
The area where our Friends are standing was covered in brambles at the start of the morning.
Likewise, the area where we are standing and the area behind was all brambles and saplings two hours earlier!
In January 2010, Friends of Adel Woods, under the expert tutelage of Steve Joul, senior countryside ranger with Leeds City Council, put up nest boxes and seven bat boxes in Adel Woods.
The bat boxes were fixed to two trees about 25 yards to the right of Crag Lane, just before reaching the Rugby Club car park. Four were placed around the trunk of one tree and three around the trunk of another nearby. The bat boxes are placed together around the trunk so that the bats have a choice as to which one they prefer.
Bat boxes differ from tit boxes in that, rather than having an entrance hole in the front, they have a slit in the base through which bats can climb up into the box. In the picture above, Steve Joul is holding a bat box and you can see the slit just above the number 25.
The function of a bat box is also different from the function of a tit box. Whereas tit boxes are used for nesting by a single pair of tits, sparrows or nuthatches, many bats will share a single box for roosting and bringing up their young.
The fallen bat box
Number 23: not ET! Note the slits across the back plate to help the bats to climb up inside.
It is illegal for people without a bat licence to interfere with bat boxes once they have been put up, and so our bat boxes have been untouched by human hand for the last nine years. This weekend, Rob, one of our committee members, found that the back plate of one of the boxes had rotted and the box had fallen to the ground. So this was a great opportunity to find out if the box had been used.
On opening the box, we found no evidence of bat use, but the box was full of cobwebs and bird nesting material (bats don’t make a nest)!
The inside of the bat box
The contents separated out
The bottom part of the nesting material seemed to be small bits of straw, while the upper part seemed to be moss and manmade fibres which we often find in tit nests.
Close up of the “tit” type nesting material
What species of bird or birds could have built a nest in the bat box? The obvious candidate is the tree creeper which usually builds its nest behind the loose bark of a tree. The website of garden-birds.co.uk says that the treecreeper nest is made from twigs, grass and moss lined with feathers – which seems a reasonable description of the materials found in our bat box. However, there seemed to be a clear distinction between the lower and upper part of the nesting material, which raises the intriguing possibility that treecreepers originally nested in the box, but that later a pair of blue tits or great tits used it to build a nest above the treecreeper nest. We’ll never know.
Treecreepers are a common sight in Adel Woods – we had some excellent sightings on our birdsong walk in May – have a look at our blog entry
Friends of Adel Woods have organised a number of well attended and well received bat walks over the years – here is the report of our walk on 4 September 2015
Kibitz: Alwoodley Village Green, Leeds on 18th August 2019
On the afternoon of Sunday 18th August there was a free concert on Alwoodley Village Green when Kibitz performed Klezmer and Eastern European Folk music for an appreciative audience.
Despite fears that the concert might be cancelled due to the weather (it rained heavily earlier in the week), it was a lovely afternoon, though a little blustery.
Friends of Adel Woods decided that this would be a great opportunity to publicise our work and to muster up some more recruits and we put up a grand gazebo at the northern end of the green. Our treasurer Judith was anxious that the gazebo might blow away in a gust of wind, but in fact the real problem was remembering how to put it up and the chair had to go home to find the instructions!
Friends of Adel Woods: Alwoodley Village Green, 18th August 2019
Once up, the gazebo was turned into a treasure house of interesting information about the fauna and flora to be found in Adel Woods and the work carried out by FOAW.
Friends of Adel Woods: Alwoodley Village Green, 18 August 2019
Thoughout the afternoon we had a visitors to our stand and we signed up six people to our mailing list.
At the end of the afternoon, Fetch, the pet shop on King Lane, brought over some gluten free cakes to revitalise our enthusiastic volunteers – and very nice they were too!
Two Friends tuck into supplies brought by the pet shop while our treasurer looks on. Friends of Adel Woods, Alwoodley Village Green, 18 August 2019.
Thanks to Stephanie and Judith for excellent creativity and ingenuity in providing displays for our stand and to Barbara, Tamsin, Michelle, David, Rob, Diana, Chris and Pippa for helping to put up the stand and talk to the public about our work.
Packing away at the end of the day.
Thank you to Kibitz for an excellent afternoon’s entertainment. Thanks to Alwoodley Parish Council for organising the event. And thanks to Fetch for some excellent cakes!
Kibitz perform Klezmer and Eastern European folk music on Alwoodley Village Green, Leeds 18 August 2019
After several days of very wet weather, the BBC weather team came through and gave us a really nice morning to work on Adel Moor – it was a bit touch and go, though: beautiful sunshine at about 8 and heavy rain at about 9 am.
We had a great turn out of 9 friends and continued with our program of clearing bracken, saplings, and brambles from the moor. As you can see from the picture above, the heather is looking fantastic and definitely inspires a feeling of joy in the heart!
The work which FOAW have carried out over the last 10 years – and the work carried out by many other volunteers – is definitely paying off. It was also gratifying to find that beneath many of the bracken plants there were young heather seedlings coming up.
A selection of Friends on Adel Moor: 17 August 2019
Alan Yarker has sent me these beautiful photographs of southern hawker dragonflies.
They were taken not taken in Adel Woods, but around his garden pond in Adel, just a short distance away, and they show just how much a small pond can contribute to the diversity of wildlife in our gardens.
A fine day. One Friend went litter picking and ten of us worked on Adel Bog.
Adel Bog is a lovely little habitat in the middle of the woods. When FOAW was set up in 2009, the bog was in serious decline – in danger of being absorbed by the surrounding woodland. It had become overgrown by molinia caerulea (purple moor grass) and many saplings or small trees were becoming established. However, it still had a population of beautiful heath spotted orchids.
Adel Bog: 28th April 2010 – the straw like tussocks are molinia caerulea
In 2011 the British Trust for Conservation volunteers worked on the bog for several days, removing much of the molinia and the saplings, funded in part by Leeds City Council and in part by Alwoodley Parish Council. Since then we have carried out work on the bog every year except 2017), clearing trees, brambles, and bracken. There is a gallery of photos below showing some of the work.
Heath spotted orchid: Adel Bog 21 July 2019
In the last three years FOAW have not spent as much time working on the bog because we have focused on Adel Moor, and the saplings, and brambles were definitely staging a comeback. However, the bog was still looking beautiful: there were plenty of heath spotted orchids and a wonderful display of bog asphodel and other native wild flowers.
Bog asphodel: Adel Bog, 21 July 2019
Today we cleared brambles and saplings. It was a beautiful morning and we saw interesting insects including leafhoppers and a grasshopper. We also saw (and heard) a pair of buzzards circling overhead.
One of the special places in Adel Woods is a meadow near the cricket pitches.
The meadow had escaped the notice of Steve Joul and the Friends of Adel Woods until our treasurer, Judith, drew it to our attention about five years ago. At that time it had a magnificent showing of common spotted orchids and other meadow flowers, but it was in danger of being taken over by trees, bracken and himalayan balsam.
Since then we have carried a lot of work to preserve the meadow and last September Steve and one of his volunteers spent a Saturday mowing the meadow (which is how a meadow should be managed) – see our blog entry for 1 September 2018
Your correspondent is pleased to say that all the hard work has paid off and when he visited the meadow today he found the meadow looking wonderful.
Common spotted orchids: Adel Woods on 30 June 2019
Common Spotted Orchids: Adel Woods on 30 June 2019
Today we were litter picking and continuing with our mission to clear saplings and bracken from Adel Moor.
It was a fine day and we had a good turn out. Apart from that, your correspondent cannot remember much about it as it was six week ago.
However, one thing that was particularly memorable was that one or two dog owners are allowing their dog to perform its business on the main path traversing the moor and not bothering to pick it up. There were lots of particularly large deposits all along the path and one of our members, a dog owner, volunteered to collect it all up. It took some time.
Your correspondent feels nauseous just thinking about it.
In addition, one of the rangers has advised your correspondent that when he was recently working on the moor he found a number of black doggie doo doo bags thrown into the heather.
Apart from the sheer unpleasantness of having dog faeces all over the place, it also seriously damages the habitat.
Apart from that, it was really good morning: we cleared a lot of bracken and saplings from the moor, and it was looking particularly fine today.
The weather forecast for today was cloudy with sunny spells in the morning and rain from 2 pm onwards.
Your correspondent woke at 7 am to a glorious day – a blue sky with not a cloud in the sky.
By 10 am it was overcast but still a pleasant morning and twelve of us, including Steve Joul, met in Buckstone Road to work on Adel moor and litter pick. Three of us set off to litter pick and the rest of us set off to the moor.
Our task this morning (on the moor) was to dig up brambles and saplings, pull up weeds (like rosebay willow herb), and cut back tree branches encroaching onto the moor. We also had a look at what we could do about trees which have been cut down – or in reality coppiced – in the past.
The moor was looking great: the hard work of FOAW and other groups of volunteers led by Steve Joul and the other rangers has really made a huge difference.
The small light green bushes are the coppiced trees.
All was going well until it started to rain at about 11.15. Being hardy souls, we continued with our work, but then the heavens really opened!
Adel Moor: devotion to duty!
We continued working for a few minutes, but it soon became obvious that the rain was not going to stop and we were all completely saturated.
Adel Moor: 11 May 2019
We abandoned ship and packed away our tools – not an easy thing because everything was by now really wet and we had pools of water in our tool bags and wheelbarrow!
Adel Moor: 11 May 2019
On the way back to the car, we came across our hardy litter pickers!
As always, in good spirits! Note the waterfall coming off the path in the bottom right corner.
Ironically, when we got back to the car, the rain slowed down and eventually stopped and the sun came out!
It was a day of mixed fortunes: your correspondent was delighted that so many Friends turned out today to litter pick work on the moor – which is a lovely place to work, and a favourite among Friends of Adel Woods. But it was frustrating to be rained off when there is so much work to do.
PS It started to rain again at about 1 pm and didn’t stop all afternoon.
Today we had our AGM in the back bar of Old Leo’s Rugby Club. Twelve attended, including Steve Joul of Leeds City Council, with apologies from five Friends.
The Chair gave a review of the last year’s activities before we moved on to the election of officers and committee.
Roger Gilbert was re-elected Chair; Judith White was re-elected Treasurer, and Stephanie Clark was re-elected Secretary. Rob Hall, David Hampshire and David Smith were re-elected members of the committee.
The Chair’s review of the year’s activities will be published to this blog shortly.
Thank you to Old Leo’s Rugby Club for letting us hold our AGM in their clubhouse.
Friends of Adel Woods 