U3A Nature Explorers - Gilchrist Field

U3A Nature Explorers - Gilchrist Field

10.00am Wednesday 6th September 2023


The pond in Riverside Wood

After the deluge from storm Antoni that forced the abandonment of the August nature exploration it was a joy to meet for the September event in warm sunshine!  A dozen or so of us met at the Livornia Road entrance to the Byes from where we set off across Margaret's Meadow to Gilchrist Field where our 'work' started in earnest.

Being late summer much of the flora had turned to seed but there was still a good amount of greater bird's-foot trefoil about and amongst the vast number of the black heads of knapweed seeds there were still flowers of both common and greater knapweed. Adding to the purple array were a few remaining betony flowers, some rosebay willowherb and a single broad-leaved willowherb plant.

Most of the trees and shrubs are now bearing fruits with berries obvious on rowan and hawthorn and a number of acorns could be found on both pendunculate and Turkey oaks. A couple of the acorns found showed signs of knopper gall, a curious deformity caused by the tiny wasp Andricus quercuscalicis. This gall was first discovered in Britain in the 1960s and can be extremely abundant in some years but it has not shown any sign of damaging the population of oak trees.

From Gilchrist Field we descended into the woodland area alongside the river. As this is a very different habitat I have named it 'Riverside Wood' for the purposes of keeping records for it separate from Gilchrist Field on my website.

There are flowers remaining in the wood despite being late in the season with apple mint being notable. There were also ivy-leaved sowbread and pink purslane in flower and both of these are usually considered 'garden escapes' so one wonders how they come to be in this piece of woodland? 

With autumn approaching there were a few signs of fungi emerging with jelly ear and cramp balls being found on dying timber as well as peeling oysterling and wood mushroom on the woodland floor, although the former was almost certainly emerging from a partly buried fallen branch.

The final leg took us back across Margaret's Meadow and a small number of us stopped off to see the seed heads of broad-leaved helleborine in Golden Copse.

Insects were surprisingly few today despite the warm sunny conditions but we did encounter a second generation common blue in Margaret's Meadow and a number of large white and speckled wood butterflies.

A full list of species recorded can be found here: species list



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