Ready for first cut

It's been a very busy and full few weeks, during which I've had the chance to really get acquainted with the site in some depth.  On the hardware side, we've now got all ten rainshelters up, and just await the first cut before we can install the irrigation system that will carry the intercepted precipitation to the supplemented plots. 

Rainshelters in the sun

Before that can happen, baseline vegetation surveys had to be done - this comprised 100 metre-square quadrats, so I've been busy recording the species present, and their percentage cover, and taking a  biomass harvest from each quadrat location.  I've started sorting the biomass harvests into 6 categories: graminoids (grasses, sedges), legumes, non-leguminous forbs, woody species, bryophytes, and litter; once dried, this will give me an indication of productivity in each group.  This data will form the baseline reference against which all my subsequent surveys will be compared, so it's been important to get it right - grass ID continues to prove time-consuming, but I'd like to think I'm getting better, at least at some species; this is in no small part due to an excellent training day with Dominic Price of the Species Recovery Trust (http://www.speciesrecoverytrust.org.uk/), whose enthusiasm and knowledge kept us all going through a day of incessant rain - no mean feat!

I have grown to love the chalk grassland plant species over the last few years' surveying, and it's a pleasure to see some of them here on the limestone at Wytham, along with some familiar Lepidopteran faces in the guise of Marbled White and Common Blue butterflies.

Marbled Whites in the sun

This plant species assemblage makes for a very colourful sward, with pinks (Red Clover, Common Centaury, Pyramidal Orchids), purples (Self-heal, Field scabious, Common Vetch), whites (White Clover, Hedge Bedstraw, Common Mouse-ear, Fairy Flax) and yellows (Smooth Hawk's-beard, Perforate St. John's Wort, Bird's-foot Trefoil, Black Medick, Mouse-ear Hawkweed).  As the season has progressed, I've been interested to see more species coming into evidence and flowering, and by Friday last week, it looked very different to the low green grass-dominated sward it had been.

There's plenty of non-plant interest, too; the invertebrate community is rich and fascinating, and really warrants a page all of its own.  Similarly the bird life - there's long-tailed tits flitting about in the remaining scrub and woodland edge, a pair of kestrels regularly hunt over the hillside, and buzzards cruise by over the nearby woods.  In places, the flowering heads of grasses and Wild Parsnip is now shoulder-high to me, and providing shelter for a number of roe deer (including fawns) that up and run if I get too close.  The southern side of the field has been claimed by a male pheasant, who regularly makes me jump with his clattering call and accompanying rattle of feathers.  As I have just taken my final biomass harvest for this round, the field will now be mown, and will look very different next week to how it was when I left on Thursday:

Upper Seeds up to my knees (and beyond, in places!)