To Explore, Enjoy and Enhance

Friends of Studham Common

Snow on the ground as we write and this winter hailed as the coldest for 10 years. What a change from this time last year! Then we were writing about primroses, crocuses and daffodils in flower, in addition to snowdrops and hazel catkins. These last two are flowering now but few, if any, of the others.

Last year we also mentioned a great spotted woodpecker that was tearing apart a rotten branch on a neighbour’s oak tree. It was back there again yesterday pulling off big flakes of bark while a wood pigeon sat a little way further out on the same branch, apparently unconcerned.

It is good to see at least one of the gorse bushes planted last winter opposite the East Common car park is flowering and others with flower buds. The planting amongst the yellow posts by the car park has been finished. Hopefully the latest plants will survive amidst the tarmac debris. On West Common work continued at the January working party to regenerate the overgrown gorse bushes.  The guards put up last winter seem to have been successful at keeping the rabbits from eating the young growth.

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See January’s Nature Notes

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