Blast Beach Litter Pick

Yesterday we were joined by 17 willing volunteers from Northumbrian Water for a litter pick on Blast Beach near Seaham. I’d like to thank them for their hard work and effort. Luckily it was a beautiful, warm and sunny day.

Ranger Jonny and volunteer John Parks. Unfortunately no pic with the Northumbrian Water volunteers

They helped us collect over 30 bags of rubbish over the day which will help make Blast Beach cleaner and safer for visitors. Also, it will make Blast Beach look beautiful to the public. Despite the rubbish it can look nice as you can see

Despite all we picked up, littering is still a bad habit and problematic and cause a wide ranges of issues such as;

• It wastes money and time, in many places around the UK the goverment have to get in people to clean up areas which costs millions. On National Trust sites it means we have to spend time clearing litter on a regular basis.
• It is also hazardous to your own health and others. We found many smashed bottles and sharp objects on the beach, which could be stood on by adult/child/pet animal and go into their foot.
• It is also very harmful to birds as they could swallow small piece of plastic which can cause the birds stomach to become full of plastic. The plastic will never decompose and it will eventually fill their stomach and cause them to starve as they have no room for real food
• Finally it makes places to become ugly and will put off people coming to visit a place which without the litter is a lovely place and it usually encourages others to litter

If you are ever out anywhere, National Trust property or not please take the litter to the nearest so that other don’t have to tidy up after you.

Thanks.

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Gareth | National Trust

Managing mountain biking

Sometimes managing the countryside can be a real challenge. We really want to help people enjoy the outdoors in their own way, but we also have a responsibility to do what is best for wildlife conservation and sometimes the two don’t go hand in hand.

Recently we’ve done a couple of contrasting jobs that show why sometimes we have to take a different approach to the same problem.

Firstly to Scarth Wood Moor in the Sheepwash area of the North York Moors. This is a fantastic place both for people and wildlife. Right on the doorstep for Osmotherley residents it’s perfect whether you’re a picnicker, dog walker, rambler or cyclist. It’s also an important and fragile wildlife habitat.

Scarth Wood Moor is a beautiful spot for a stroll

Here we discovered we had a problem caused by local mountain bikers who had taken it upon themselves to dig tracks and build a series of jumps in an old quarry on the moor opposite Cod Beck Reservoir. Aside from not asking our permission as land owners and the physical damage caused to the area, the major problem with this is that the area has special protection as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). This is in place because the area is important wildlife habitat with a high number of rare species. Through this protection Natural England can prosecute any individual who ‘intentionally or recklessly damages or destroys any of the features of special interest of an SSSI, or disturbs wildlife for which the site was notified’ with fines of up to £20,000.

Scarth Wood Moor has a huge population of common toads – a protected species (northeastwildlife.co.uk)

With such protection in place it was very much in the interest of the mountain bikers own interest to stop what they were doing. We got the message out by putting signs on site explaining the situation as well as putting an article in the Osmotherly Newsletter. We then spent a day with our  volunteers removing the tracks and jumps that had been created so far and restoring the area as much as possible.

Volunteers hard at work trying to restore the damaged area

So to some, the National Trust may seem like a stuffy old organisation trying to stop young people having fun, but that’s not true! Just a few months earlier our volunteers have been out helping to build a mountain bike track.

This took place further north at Penshaw Monument on the outskirts of Sunderland. Here, in a piece of woodland at the back of the hill mountain bikers have been creating tracks for many years. In the past this has been without our permission and has been a source of conflict. However in recent years we’ve managed to get a relationship with many of the people who ride here to the benefit of both parties.

For us, we’ve been able to allocate an area of the woodland for them to use. It’s an area of sycamore plantation that has low value in terms of wildlife habitat. This has allowed us to put up warning signs to make the area safer for our other visitors, while the rest of the woodland is reserved for wildlife and walkers.

For them, we’ve got actively involved in helping to construct a couple of the tracks. This has allowed us to get a bit more ambitious with the creation of some bigger features such as berms and jumps. We’ve then been able to use these more exciting lines for organised downhill mountain bike competitions.

Action from Bikefest 2014 (Anthony Taylor)

Ian Hughes, owner of Sanctuary Bikes in Shiney Row is the organiser of Bikefest. The event was first held last year and returned on Easter Sunday even bigger and better. Over 60 competitors spent the day hurtling down the hill as fast as they could to see who could be the fastest. It was certainly quite a spectacle and many of our visitors stayed a while to watch the extreme action. The quickest riders managed to get down the hill in less than a minute.

The winners celebrate at Penshaw Monument

In an area with little in the way of mountain bike facilities it’s great that we’re able to offer this track and host Bikefest. Hopefully it helps to show that the National Trust are an organisation that helps people enjoy the outdoors in their own way whenever we can.

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Gareth | National Trust

Hedgelaying – what a bind!

Anyone visiting Penshaw Monument over the weekend may have noticed that we have put the finishing touches to our hedge. It’s taken us the last two winters to lay the hedge – a process that involves cutting part way through the stem of each plant in the hedge and bending it over. The stems are then held in place by a row of stakes to create a kind of living fence.

This is a traditional skill that has died out somewhat over recent decades. Happily we’ve been able to do some training for a few of our volunteers and our Trainee Ranger, Pat. They all managed to pick up the techniques pretty quickly, so the next generation of hedgelayers are good to go!

Adding the bindings to the finished hedge.

The final part of hedgelaying involves weaving long pieces of hazel between the stakes. These bindings help to hold the hedge together even more firmly, plus it looks really nice when it’s done. You can see Pat and the vols hard at work putting them on in the sequence of photos. Hopefully you like the finished results.

We also spent the day burning off the brash we’d cut out of the hedge. It was a lovely sunny morning and there were plenty of signs from nature that spring is firmly here. The blackthorn trees were looking particularly nice covered in May blossom. It’s just a shame the spring showers were in evidence in the afternoon as we took a right soaking!

May blossom

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Gareth | National Trust

Graduation Day

Last week I had the pleasure of taking a trip down to the National Trust’s Attingham Park property to see the graduation of 2012’s intake of Trainee Rangers. I was there as the former manager of Chris Wood who left us in May to take up a post at Lanhydrock in Cornwall.

Attingham Park hosted the graduation ceremony

When Chris first came to us as a volunteer he didn’t really know anything about being a Ranger. What he did have was stacks of enthusiasm and an appetite to learn. He’d just come back from a holiday walking on the South Coast where he found himself falling in love with the British landscape and wildlife. It was a life changing holiday for him as he returned from it knowing that a career in conservation was what he wanted.

The class of 2012

Fast forward three years and that’s just what he’s got. He was lucky enough to get one of 8 places on the Trust’s Ranger Training Programme and has spent his time with us learning practical estate management skills, habitat management theory and wildlife ID skills. Chris worked tremendously hard during his time with us, and this was recognised by him receiving a ‘trainee of the year’ award at the ceremony. He can certainly now consider himself a fully fledged Ranger. Well done Chris!

Chris was clearly overjoyed with his ‘Trainee of the Year’ award

Sadly for us, the draw of the South Coast was too much for Chris and he has now settled in Cornwall. Happily he’s still working for the Trust and I expect he’ll have a long and successful career within the organisation.

I’m currently working on an application for us to get another Trainee Ranger in September. Should we be successful we’ll be recruiting in the summer, so if you think that being a National Trust Ranger could be the career for you, or you know someone who does, watch this space.

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Gareth | National Trust

Super Furry Animals

This month our regular Sunday volunteer group took a bit of a break from practical work to learn about the small mammals that call Roseberry home with the Yorkshire Mammal Group.

The previous night Area Ranger Gareth had met up with Ann Hanson from the mammal group to set the trap with the help of a couple of volunteers. This involved filling the traps with hay for bedding and a range of different food. We put in a mix of seeds, a few pieces of carrot, some nuts and some casters.

Casters are the pupae of blow flies and are essential if you are going to trap shrews. Shrews are carnivorous and need to eat their own body weight every day if they are to survive, so will starve to death if there isn’t suitable food for them in the trap. For this reason you have to get suitable training and apply for a license from Natural England if you want to trap shrews.

A very cute bank vole.

The following morning a large group of National Trust volunteers were joined by mammal group members to see what we had caught. The first traps we opened contained several bank voles. Voles can be told from mice by their blunter noses and small ears. Bank voles have much longer tails than their close relative, the field vole.

Our volunteers had a great time learning about small mammals.

Ann showed us how to handle the voles by gently picking them up by the scruff of the neck. She then put them into a plastic bag so they could be weighed before releasing them. The voles seemed remarkably tame and didn’t mind being handled too much. Some even sat on the palm of people’s hands for a moment or two before scampering off into the undergrowth.

Ann weighs a field vole.

As we continued to check the traps there was an opportunity for everyone to have a go at opening a trap and handling a bank vole. We also trapped a few common shrews. These much smaller mammals which weigh only a few grams are not handled as they have very sharp teeth. Instead they were just popped into a bag for weighing before release. Strangely we didn’t find any wood mice in our traps, despite them being a common small woodland mammal. Ann told us that this year seems to be a bad year for mice and similar poor catch rates are being seen at other sites.

Ali checking one of the mammal traps.

By lunchtime we’d checked all the traps so the mammal group headed off to leave to volunteers to do some ‘proper’ work! Many thanks to Ann for giving up her time to teach us about trapping and handling mammals.

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Gareth | National Trust