Earley Environmental Group Newsletter
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EARLEY ENVIRONMENTAL GROUP NEWSLET TER ISSUE 3 MARCH 2006 Earley – Old English 'Earnley -eagle wood' pring is on our Earley doorstep. By March we should be able to spot the early signs Sof young queen bumble bees, still dazed by the winter cold, visiting the earliest spring flowers and, with luck, a Brimstone butterfly. Spring flowers, like lesser celandine, should be appearing and there will be the excitement of increasing bird activity. We report on the bumblebee talk by our Chairman. Stuart Hine, and throw some light on these lovely creatures, so vital to the well-being of our flowers and us (p.6). Get your camera out and let us have your photographic gems of bumblebees. Earley human residents will be busy with their blossoming gardens, but the local foxes will be just as busy, nurturing their newborn cubs, and soon hedgehogs and bats will be on the move. Read two items on Earley wildlife from members (p.5). After the gloom of January and February, spring is probably the most uplifting time of the year. However, if your lack of fitness is making you depressed, take our walk, or read “Grahame’s Working Parties”, forget the gym and find out how you can, for free, get fit and help the environment at the same time (p. 3). Or, you can help in our RESCUE Litter project (p.7). We now have a new website (see below) and, to discover what’s happening further afield, read “News from Beyond Earley” (p.4) to check out what’s going on in the global village. Get to know your Earley Hooray! Our website’s up and running Thanks to the sterling efforts of Paul Beckett, our Website Manager, we And we do mean short, about 35 mins! now have a fully operational website Lower Earley Woods and Meadows www.earleyenvironmentalgroup.co.uk. For a family stroll to counteract that big meal, or an Some of the pages are not complete yet energy-sapping power walk for the kids, take the but will be added to over the next few northward path where Rushey Way meets Lower months. Surfers can now read Latest Earley Way at the Sindlesham roundabout. For a few News, check Upcoming Events, can yards this is parallel with Lower Earley Way and then join the EEG in Downloads by printing out a Membership Form or fill in an e skirts the west bank of the River Loddon, gradually mail to our Membership Secretary, moving away from the din of the traffic. Following this path, you eventually come to a flight of steps, access other interesting sites in Links, read archived Newsletters, and take (which would take you out onto the Wokingham Road). part in various surveys including our Turn left at the steps and follow the path in a circular own on the Birds page under Survey. direction to arrive back where you started. Pause when you get to the notice board there. It’s worth studying, being very attractively illustrated, with lyrical details on the past history of the area you’ve just circulated. For instance, did you know you Want to access are treading in the footsteps of very early man, or that people used to set up eel traps on the Loddon the websites ? No computer? No until the recent past? problem. Phone your local library for help 1 habitats and landscapes suitable for white-tailed eagle, such Eagles in Earley? Or What’s In a as earn-leah, an Old English name for ‘eagle-wood’ (e.g. Name? Arley, Cheshire, Earley, Berkshire)….Most of the woodland The origin of ‘Earley’ has provoked a names cluster around major river systems like the Severn (Areley, Worcs) and the Thames (Earley, Berkshire). In the lot of discussion. It features in the case of the latter site, white-tailed eagle bones were found Domesday Book as ‘herlei’. It was just 20 miles away at a fifth century archaeological also recorded as ‘Arle’ in 1297. excavation. (Margaret Gelling, ‘Anglo Saxon Eagles’ pages ‘Arley’ as a place name in other 173-81 in Leeds Studies in English {eds Thorlac Turville counties was known to derive from the Petre and Margaret Gelling} University of Leeds 1987.)” Old English ‘earn-leah’ meaning A small prize for anyone who can track this down! ‘eagle-wood’, hence the proposition that Earley came They have been reintroduced successfully into from ‘earn-leah’, sometimes translated as ‘eagle’s Scotland (see note below). There are currently plans wood’ or ‘field of eagles’. If your eyes haven’t yet for a possible reintroduction of these eagles into East glazed over, read on as to a possible tangible Anglia. www.english- connection with eagles. In Birds Britannica there is nature.org.uk/about/meetings/GCP0536.pdf, see top an entry for Earley (yes, we’re famous!) under White of page 2 Tailed Eagle (Sea Eagle). It was a winter visitor in recent times, several being shot in Windsor Great Park Just one more thing. If you visit the Lower Earley in Victorian times. But here’s the interesting bit. The Woods and Meadows Park, south of Rushey Way, book goes on: near Sindlesham Mill roundabout, you will find a notice board featuring the white-tailed eagle. The “The intriguing evidence contained in English place names board confidently asserts “Over 1000 years ago white suggests that at one time white-tailed eagles also bred in tailed sea eagles once swept across the flooded plains heavily wooded parts of England as far south as Devon. The of the River Loddon hunting for fish.” Well, evidence Anglo-Saxon name for eagle was erne or earn. .. suggests it could be true. ….(Margaret) Gelling found consistent associations with (Note: the BBC Springwatch featured these eagles last year. Hopefully they’ll do so again in 2006) This bird of prey is very up. The male is smaller than the female. It eats many small creatures and birds, even much alive in Earley bigger birds like wood pigeons. It will skim The Sparrowhawk rapidly over fields, along lanes or roads, One member had a close encounter on 15 perhaps making for the nearest hedge, Feb. “Had a head-on encounter with a skirting this and darting through any gaps or sparrowhawk this a.m. on cycleway beyond gates. It seldom rises more than hedge ASDA. Fortunately it swerved - I had no height, except for when taking up a watching time to react but it managed to. There was position on the branch of a tree, perhaps near just an incredibly fast-moving blur and a a bird feeding station. The victim is eaten on memory of barred underside of tail as it went the ground, the bird standing on its kill and over me.” Its aerial skills proved to be spreading its wings like a tent, ripping off the superior to John’s cycling skills! feathers or fur. Both male and female build Sparrowhawks have been sighted in gardens the nest, often using an old crow’s nest. Four by several members during the winter. It’s a to six eggs will be laid in May, but only the secretive bird of prey with very mixed female incubates them. Visit the RSPB fortunes. A few hundred years ago it would website or www.birdsofbritain.co.uk/bird- have been valued by falconers for providing a guide/sparrowhawk.htm. Photo copyright meal for the pot. Even as recently as the and courtesy of Gary early 1900s the use of sparrowhawks in Cox . Click on his Hungary to hunt quails was still in vogue. In name to see some the UK it would frequently feel the double lovely natural history barrel of a keeper’s shotgun, but by the 1950s photography. it was a common bird of prey, the war putting a stop to the killing. Then the full effects of toxic chemicals in farming decimated it, but with regulations on these it’s now on the way 2 GRAHAME’S WORKING PARTIES lake. For the first session, a group of 6 Get Fit For Free by Jean, people from CROW (Conserving Reading our co-ordinator for Hillside On Wednesdays) arrived, so we were able to I was delighted to see an item, tucked away finish clearing the rest of the Old Pond at the end of the December issue of the Copse brambles that morning: subsequently, Newsletter, in which Grahame offered that area has been replanted with saplings, members of the group the chance to be which will make quite a difference. There involved in practical work on Wednesdays, were 2 of us for the second session, in early and rang him to say that I was interested in February, plus Gary from ETC, and we did a helping, but couldn’t guarantee to be variety of tasks: pruning the wildlife garden available every Wednesday. I duly turned up in Instow Road, re-marking the boundaries early in December at the appointed time, to of one set of steps from Laurel Park into Old find that I was one of two volunteers that Pond Copse, measuring the amount of day. We spent a productive morning chicken wire required to re-surface the removing ground-covering ivy from a piece board-walk further along that path (towards of woodland near the path leading down to Egremont Drive), and putting up a new the weir end of the lake in the local Nature fence near the weir, so that the wild flowers Reserve: I hope the difference is noticeable! there have a chance to survive without being As I had other arrangements for the trodden down.