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On a warm, unseasonably sunny mid-October morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin are stopped in the pickup by a spectacular feeding display beside the farmyard. A charm of around 250 goldfinches — the “clown faces” with their red masks and yellow wing bands — is working the five-acre teasel plot. The birds prise the loose, nutritious seeds from the prickly heads with their specialised beaks, rising briefly to the electricity wires to watch for sparrowhawks before dropping back into the crop or resting in the trees. Chris recalls how these same finches were once caged and trained as “draw waters,” pulling tiny carts of water with their beaks.
A short drive to the southern edge of Cantley Hill Plantation reveals flowering ivy still encircling the trunks of larch and Douglas fir. Red admirals in pristine condition are feeding and sunbathing on the last nectar flow of the year. These are the UK-born offspring of spring migrants from southern Europe; whether they will attempt to hibernate on bare oak trunks and in ivy or fly south again remains one of the countryside’s open mysteries.
On a boundary hedge the tone turns more serious. Chris produces a free-running snare and explains how such wires are set across traditional animal runs through gaps in old hedges. Though self-locking snares are illegal and the law requires checks every 24 hours, loopholes remain, and Norfolk has ranked high for wildlife persecution in recent years. He makes clear his own disapproval: at High Ash there is no predator control, and nature has been left to find its own balance.
In Notre Dame Wood, rabbit excavations have brought up a new and potent plant — thorn apple (Datura stramonium). Its trumpet flowers last only a day or two before forming spiny capsules full of black seeds rich in powerful alkaloids. Once grown commercially for asthma, the plant was also used in “witch’s brews”; its seeds can remain viable in the soil for well over a century.
Listener letters bring memories of sheep stripping ivy from hedges, the sad news that the young shepherd has had to sell his flock, practical advice on establishing yellow rattle, oxeye daisy and sainfoin in existing grassland, and an invitation to a talk on the changing fortunes of Britain’s wild birds.
This episode is a rich late-autumn mixture of colour, mystery and hard countryside realities — ideal for savouring a charm of goldfinches, the lingering beauty of red admirals, and the quiet power of plants that wait a hundred years to emerge at High Ash Farm.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19972263-episode-2-94-band-of-gold-and-hedge-gap-wires.mp3?download=true
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