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On a misty mid-October morning at High Ash Farm, with the clay pond in the woodland completely dry and deer tracks printed in the mud, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin turn their attention to ivy — the last great pollen and nectar flow of the year. Thick stems, some four inches across and fifty years old, climb the oaks without rooting into them, clinging instead by tiny sucker discs. Chris explains the plant’s two lives: the pointed juvenile leaves on the trunk, and the smooth lance-shaped flowering shoots that appear after five or six years, opening into yellow drum-heads now busy with bees, wasps, moths and the last butterflies. The green berries will not ripen until December, January and February, when they become vital food for wood pigeons, redwings and other winter thrushes. Evergreen shelter for nesting wrens and hibernating butterflies, and once the pagan symbol of Christmas before holly took its place, ivy answers much of the puzzle of the farm’s rich wildlife.
A short drive brings them to a common wasp nest in an old mouse hole beside a busy footpath. Sandy cell-caps litter the entrance as workers ferry nectar and insect prey to the grubs below. Chris follows the wasp year from the hibernating queen in March, through the first golf-ball-sized comb, to the late-season large cells that will produce next year’s queens — while the workers, males and old queen all die. Badgers, impervious to stings, have already dug out many such nests across the farm; Chris recalls the day he and Rat both fled after accidentally treading on one.
In Notre Dame Wood the jays are frantic, caching acorns in the long grass, while strange parallel lines on the woodland floor turn out to be sows dragging armfuls of dry leaves and pine needles backwards into a newly enlarged sett — fresh winter bedding gathered while the weather holds.
Listener letters bring an offer of unused swallow nest cups, a family visit that produced woodpeckers, a young marsh harrier and clouded yellows, and a thoughtful question about whether jet aircraft contribute to insect and bird decline — answered by Chris’s recording of the delayed “whip” of colliding air masses beneath a Boeing on the Norwich approach.
This episode is a late-season celebration of one overlooked climber and the hidden societies beneath our feet — ideal for savouring the last nectar of the year, the busy end of the wasp colony, and the quiet housekeeping of badgers at High Ash Farm.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19924444-episode-2-93-hedera-helix-and-vespa-nests.mp3?download=true
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