This This evening FOAW had a special event – our first ever Moth and Bat watch led by Steve Joul. Steve has led bat watches for FOAW before – the last time 85 people came on it! – but this was the very first time that we combined it with a Moth watch.
We met in the car park of Old Leo’s at 8.10 pm and we had an excellent turn out of about 25 adults and children.
By the time your correspondent arrived, the event was already underway. His neighbour, Paul Morris, a well known ornithologist, and now a keen lepidopterist, brought some (living) specimens he had trapped in his garden, and they were being passed around with great interest.
Steve gave an interesting introduction to the evening and showed us the two moth traps he had brought with him. One was brand new and Steve and assistants had to work out how to put it together! This was the one we used this evening. Basically, a moth trap is an ultra violet light which attracts moths to crawl or fall down a funnel from which they can’t get back out. Steve packed the trap with old egg boxes because moths like to snuggle down in them!
Old Leo’s bar had kindly given us permission to plug the moth trap into their power supply, and as dusk fell, we set off in pursuit of bats, leaving the moth trap switched on and under the care of our treasurer Judith.
Steve had brought plenty of bat detectors with him for us all to share, and we headed off into Crag Lane and the field which used to be the juniors rugby pitch. We did a circuit of that field before heading to the picnic area, and then Stairfoot Lane car park.
It was an enjoyable walk and we had a few sightings and soundings of bats, but they must have been playing away this evening.
After an hour or so of bat hunting, we returned to Old Leo’s to find that Judith was frozen and ready to go home. However, the moth trap was safe and sound.
Large Yellow Underwing – photo courtesy of website of ukmoths.org.uk
Steve opened up the moth trap to much excitement and we found a number of moths inside.
There were three specimens of the large yellow underwing, which is one of the most abundant of our larger moths. There were other moths but they flew off before we had the chance to see them – the younger members of our party were very excited to explore what was in the trap!
Overall, we enjoyed a very interesting and fun evening, and we must express our gratitude to Steve for suggesting this event, leading us on it and bringing the moth traps and bat detectors, to Paul Morris for bringing moths for us to see, to Tony at Old Leo’s for letting us plug into Old Leo’s power supply, to Judith for protecting the moth trap, and to all who attended and made the evening a great success.
As a post script, Michael, one of our longstanding Friends, went home and found an exciting caterpillar in his garden. Here is his email and photographs.
Feel free to pass on to Steve. Got home and went down the garden to find this beauty on the rosebay willowherb on my overgrown veg plot. I think it might have to stay overgrown from now on. Won’t be pulling it up this year. To think I nearly cleared it last week!! My first ever hawk moth caterpillar. Elephant Hawk moth I think. Humongous caterpillar. Thank you both for organising tonight.
This demonstrated just how persistent bracken is. Undaunted, the Friends quickly set to work and removed all this new growth.
A big thank you to Alan and Diane Yarker who welcomed Friends of Adel Woods onto their smallholding for the third year running to mark National Meadows Day.
We were blessed with wonderful weather, and Alan gave a very interesting and informative talk about the local environment and looking after a meadow. He and Steve Joul then took us for a walk around the meadow, pointing out the many plants of interest.
Another morning with Steve Joul, bracken bashing a pulling, and pulling up saplings.
The Slabbering Baby is a drinking fountain in Adel Woods. Have a look at our blog entry for 
The new bowl has been carved by Teresa Dybisz, an apprentice stone mason with York Minster, and she has done a super job.
Did you know that until the late 1950’s there were tea rooms, known as “Verity’s Tea Rooms”, in Adel Woods? They were run by Francis Verity who arrived there in 1901, aged 30, and stayed there until she died in about 1953.
“She had a tragic life. Her husband, Ben, was a highly skilled stonemason but he died suddenly after falling off a roof he was mending. Her son, Benny, was a disabled child and she spent large amounts of time looking after him. Perhaps this led to the harsh expression on her stony face as many remember her as always seeming to be in a foul mood. In addition, when Mrs Verity took her cap off she had unusual lumps over her head. The children who visited the tea-shop were always scared of her….By the mid fifties the sheds had become very ramshackle. Children used to volunteer to help and their reward was ‘a free tray’. Mrs Verity used a motley collection of crockery, a lot of which was brown glazed. She sold Smith’s crisps with salt in the little blue bags and collected the tokens that came with them to get free pens. In addition she sold home-made scones and cakes but was a thrifty lady and told helpers who were buttering the scones to ‘just peel it off again’ so that the layer of butter remained extra thin.
The only remaining vestige of the tea rooms is the Slabbering Baby, a water fountain fed by water off Adel Moor. The people on the right hand side of the picture above are queuing for drinking water from it. It was called the Slabbering Baby because the water streamed out of a carved face – as shown in this newspaper picture.
You may have noticed that the Slabbering Baby disappeared in November last year. It has now returned with the addition of a new bowl, as shown in the picture below. The work is not yet complete.
Disappointingly, on our way to the bog, we found that someone had dumped about seven bags of charity bags – for Children with Cancer and Candlelighters – in the middle of some holly bushes. Clearly, whoever put them there, wanted them not to be found because they were not flytipped on the outskirts of the woods: it clearly took a lot of effort to get them to where they were dumped. Needless to say, FOAW removed them and disposed of them.
Moving on to more uplifting things, the bog looks different every time we visit it. Today, it was quite dry, particularly at the northern end. Over the years, we have removed thousands of saplings from the bog. Today, there seemed to be hundreds of new tree seedlings, and we removed very many of them. Fortunately, the pulled up very easily.
Thank you to Old Leo’s Rugby Club for letting us hold our Annual General Meeting in their bar. Fifteen Friends of Adel Woods attended with apologies from a further three. Thank you to all.
This was a great success. About 15 of us attended. Alan told us about running a smallholding and managing a meadow, and then we were free to look around. Steve and Alan took us on a tour of Alan and Diane’s meadow and Steve led some of us in carrying out a survey of a couple of quadrats – each of which contained about 20 species of plant.
The second was a birdsong walk last Saturday, 6 May. About twenty three of us joined Steve Joul for a birdsong walk last Saturday. It was a fresh but dry morning and we saw and heard many birds.
Firstly, there has been our regular litterpicking whose importance cannot be overstated. Litterpicking makes a huge difference to the woods. I haven’t kept a tally but we have picked up about 50 bags of litter over the year.
Path clearance has been another regular task. Over the last year Friends have worked on improving paths – clearing mud, cutting back branches and removing fallen trees – on three occasions. In March we repaired a couple of steps in the steps leading down from the Stairfoot Lane car park to the stream.
We had two days out in January surveying the nest boxes and the good news is that they were almost all used. You can feel pleased that there is a good chance that the great tits and blue tits you see in the woods or your garden – possibly the nuthatches too – were reared in a FOAW nestbox!
The Buck Stone
Two years ago we had a tremendous display of common spotted orchids in a field near the cricket pitch. However, the field is under threat from Himalayan Balsam and from encroaching trees. Last year we spent a morning with Steve Joul clearing Himalayan Balsam, trees and brambles. Steve counted the orchids and came to a figure of 2,690! We are working on this area again this Summer and Steve Joul will be carrying out work with a team of volunteers in August.
Friends of Adel Woods 