From PennyGreen at sussexwt.org.uk Mon Sep 6 14:10:48 2010 From: PennyGreen at sussexwt.org.uk (PennyGreen at sussexwt.org.uk) Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2010 14:10:48 +0100 Subject: [Adastra] Kent Wildlife conference on Biodiversity Message-ID: <98A4A0BE1B6C424C851FF8114B2853C801D370BA@mail.sussexwt.org.uk> Dear All, John Badmin of the Kent Field Club has asked if I could forward this on to you. Please see attached. The Kent Wildlife Conference 2010 Kent's Biodiversity 2010 - and beyond. 16th October 2010 at Canterbury Christ Church University College, Kent. All best wishes, Penny Penny Green Species Officer Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre http://sxbrc.org.uk | 01273 497521 Sussex Wildlife Trust is a company limited by guarantee under the Companies Act. Registered in England, Company No. 698851. Registered Charity No. 207005. VAT Registration No. 191 305969. Registered Office: Woods Mill, Henfield, West Sussex BN5 9SD. Telephone 01273 492630 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: KWC2010Programme RM.doc Type: application/msword Size: 112640 bytes Desc: KWC2010Programme RM.doc URL: From dave.bangs at virgin.net Tue Sep 28 19:02:54 2010 From: dave.bangs at virgin.net (David Bangs) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:02:54 +0100 Subject: [Adastra] foraging for fungi - a riposte to the Guardian piece Message-ID: <1ABD87D6939C41D48362B825063879C3@DavePC> Dear all See debate piece attached and below for the list. It was written as a comment on the Guardian Lifestyle mag article (which can be googled to read), but the 'comments' feedback thingy closed before I could submit it. The issue still needs debating, though... Dave Bangs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A comment on Phil Daoust's article 'Fruits of the forest' in the Guardian 16.09.10 Dave Bangs, author of 'A Freedom to Roam Guide to the Brighton Downs' (2008) and co-founder of 'Action For Access - walking and working for a people's countryside' Tel: 01273 620 815 dave.bangs at virgin.net 23rd September 2010 I read the Guardian article "Fruits of the forest" with a sinking heart. For the pleasure that Phil Daoust feels when he forages fungi for the pot is the enemy of the pleasure that I feel when I am foraying in the woods: that most blindingly obvious pleasure. the sheer beauty and profusion of these fungi. Last Sunday we walked in a forest in our local countryside to enjoy what is proving to be the best season for fungi for several years. At the edge of the car park lay a pile of discarded fungi, with a bruised and battered Beefsteak fungus of huge dimensions, and an equally huge bolete, now broken into several pieces. Walking through the pines and spruces near to the car park there were plenty of brittlegills, russula spp., and smaller brown fungi, and some pretty caps of Rosy Spike, but the Bovine Bolete which normally accompanies that species was absent. Absent, that is, except for the tell-tale cut bases of its stalks. Everywhere through that pine wood were those sad little golden circles the size and colour, more or less, of pound coins. Cut, cut cut, those collectors had gone. And that was to be the story everywhere in that part of the forest which was most easily accessible from the car park... and sometimes, too, in the more remote areas beyond the barbed wire and 'Keep Out, Private Woods' signs. Cut stalk bases everywhere, and little discarded piles of dropped Blushers and Panthercaps and pieces of Ceps, at frequent intervals along the rides and banks. The scene reminded me of childhood expeditions into the Kentish Bluebell woods back around 1960, when we would frequently see groups of happy cyclists wobbling down the lanes with great bunches of Bluebells hanging from their baskets or draped across their handlebars. Such innocent pleasures.but such pleasures taken by the millions of Londoners meant that the woods and forests that circle the metropolis have been stripped almost entirely of their Primroses. Those collecting pleasures and the local extinctions they brought about were the reason why legislation was needed to forbid free collection of wild plants. I feel sad.sad that this culture of collecting and using nature like a bottomless bag of unlimited provisions has not been more thoroughly eradicated. To be sure, those Kentish woods are far free-er now of such obvious pillage. Collecting today is usually a much more furtive business. Except when it comes to fungi. I remember seeing an old eastern European man with his family gathered round in Epping Forest a few years ago. They showed him their baskets of fungi and he picked them over one by one. "No good. No good. No good" he went, breaking and throwing aside lovely caps-of-many-colours as he sorted the edibles from the non-edibles. I admired his easy knowledge and confidence, his sense that nature was a provider, not a thing to be frightened of. Yet there are good and robust reasons why that culture of fungi collecting does not really exist in this country. Poland and Germany, Sweden and Russia are countries of woods and forests. They have far, far more than we do. The greatest biomass of macro fungi are to be found in such woods. Fungus collecting is a woodland phenomenon, largely, despite the delights to be found on old downland, heath and meadow. We do not collect in this country at least partly because there are relatively fewer good places to collect. Fungi are having a seriously hard time. Air pollution and the destruction of habitat have vastly reduced the European biomass of larger fruiting fungi. They cannot take the additional stresses of foraging. When my mum was on summer holiday as a girl in the 1920's she and her dad used to get up at dawn and climb the Down, where the hillside would be "white as snow" with Field Mushrooms, which they collected for their family breakfast. I've heard that experts call that phenomenon a "white out". I've never seen it. Nowadays, I'm pleased to see even one decent troop of mushrooms, and I'm careful not to tell others where I find them. Phil Daoust's article shows us "five fungi to collect". Amongst them is Orange Birch Bolete. On last Sunday's foray we found just one solitary specimen of that species, way away from the public access part of the forest. Though it may be common in some areas it is not a species that we find frequently in our countryside. What we did find, though - in an even more remote area - was a truly gorgeous troop of Orange Oak Bolete, a far rarer edible look-alike of the Orange Birch. Huge and handsome brick orange caps above black-flecked stems, catching the dappled evening sun through the oak canopy. How long will that loveliness survive before some of Phibl's friends discover it? Phil encourages us to collect Ceps. "Common in woods", he says, and that can be true. Last week I took a party on one of our Action For Access walks through a local wood. We'd found button Ceps there the week before at the path sides, when we rehearsed the route our event would take. They weren't there when we did our public walk. Someone had taken the lot. That meant 25 eager walkers who missed the pleasure of seeing those delightful 'penny buns'. Phil encourages us to pick the Common Morel. Is he crazy? Some years ago I naively revealed a local site for the Morel in an article I did for a wildlife website. I was roundly and rightly told off by a mycologist (fungi expert) friend of mine, for he knew of only five sites for this species in the whole of our countryside. About the same time, I found two specimens in a springtime wood, like giant golden honeycombs on sticks, under hazel coppice, with warblers belting out their trills in the canopy above, and orchids gracing the woodland floor around. That is one of the most treasured memories I hold. Yet I did not leave it at that. I took one specimen, and we cooked it as we were instructed that night. It was a feeble business. I've enjoyed a plain fresh slice of bread and butter far more than that culinary let-down. I have always regretted my behaviour that day. The way I stole some of the pure loveliness of that springtime wood. And I damn well hope that I am strong enough never to repeat that shameful collapse into cupidity. Phil encourages us to collect Giant Puffball, and to eat it before it matures, that is, before it completes its life cycle and releases its millions of spores to renew itself in new places. THIS IS A RARITY, MATE ! I've found it so rarely that I can remember almost all the occasions upon which I've found it, and I keep well quiet about the spots where I know it occurs. LEAVE IT ALONE ! I know, I know, it tastes delicious, just like steak. I've eaten it. Big deal. In any case, if you are patient and look widely you will eventually find a troop that has been driven over by some daft farmer's landrover, or by some chelsea tractor crushing a troop along the drive side of some posh herbert's country hideaway. Wait till then, and pick up some broken fragments for your fry-up. The mud and crushing won't spoil the taste, if they're fresh enough. Believe me, I am not opposed to taking one or two fungi for the pot, provided the population you find is obviously abundant. It's nice to know what a wild mushroom or Cep tastes like, though most edible species - including the classy ones - are not worth the bother. And if you saw me in the woods at this time of year you could easily mistake me for a collector, for I routinely carry my gran's old shopping basket and a 'hobby box' with little compartments, so's I can take examples of new species for identification. All that does no harm, and wildlife records are essential. But foraging? Hiding behind Phil's paean to the pleasures of the pot, there are battalions of collectors taking van loads to order for posh restaurants - asset stripping our woods and forests. And it's not just the beauty of these things that Phil's foraging diminishes. They have a value far beyond the pleasure we get from looking or eating. Many other species depend upon them. For the hundreds of species of fungus flies and beetles, for the slugs and snails, for the small mammals, for other fascinating and often beautiful parasitic fungi and moulds, or for those species of weird half-animal slime moulds that move across the woodland hunting them, this annual harvest is life sustaining stuff. Phil plans to disburse his Ceps to his mates. Those creatures just plan to stay alive. They have many more layers of human value, too, besides their value to other life forms and their value as objects of beauty and flavour. We could study them all our lives and never get tired..so many questions.how do they live; how do they work; what are their life cycles; what medicinal and productive possibilities do they contain; why are they distributed so and so? Eating and enjoying their beauty are just single steps on a mountain of pleasure we can take in them. I have campaigned for a long time for full and free access to our countryside.for 'allemansratt' - 'every man's right' - to wander the land which is our birthright. We held many mass trespasses to fight for the right to roam legislation when New Labour came in, and still hold them for the extension of its half-hearted provisions. I truly love to see folk in the countryside. Yet for one short season of the year I feel far more ambivalent. I want to walk those woods and see that huge cornucopia of milkcaps and brittlegills, glistening suillus and shammy-leather-like leccinum caps. I want to see that gorgeous splash of orange and yellow that is chicken of the woods sprouting from that rotting trunk. I do not want to look in vain, or to see just the discarded relics of people's pillage. Phil's pleasure is simply not sustainable. For if we are to encourage -as we must - people to reconnect with nature and the countryside on a mass scale - all the many millions of us - then our common behavioural culture must be one of the most careful respect for that which we mutually enjoy. Not just every song bird nest and wild orchid, but every troop of beautiful boletes and hidden springtime morels must be respected. The earth is a common treasury, Phil.so let's treasure it, and end this fungus foraging relic of the millennia-old culture of pillage, which has so incessantly ratcheted up the destruction of nature. Let's start by walking our woods in the spirit of the saying: "take only your memories, leave only your footprints". -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: FUNGIGUARDIAN.docx Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document Size: 21406 bytes Desc: not available URL: From PennyGreen at sussexwt.org.uk Wed Sep 29 10:57:17 2010 From: PennyGreen at sussexwt.org.uk (PennyGreen at sussexwt.org.uk) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:57:17 +0100 Subject: [Adastra] White Paper Message-ID: <98A4A0BE1B6C424C851FF8114B2853C801D82401@mail.sussexwt.org.uk> Hi All, I'm sure you're all aware of the government's natural environment white paper; Defra is inviting everyone to answer four questions about how you feel about your natural environment. The Sussex Wildlife Trust are encouraging as many people as possible to respond, please see the attached document for details including the link to fill in the on-line survey form. On the second sheet there are some suggestions from the SWT that you may wish to include in your response. Best wishes, Penny <> Penny Green Species Officer Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre http://sxbrc.org.uk | 01273 497521 Sussex Wildlife Trust is a company limited by guarantee under the Companies Act. Registered in England, Company No. 698851. Registered Charity No. 207005. VAT Registration No. 191 305969. Registered Office: Woods Mill, Henfield, West Sussex BN5 9SD. Telephone 01273 492630 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: swt white paper members.pdf Type: application/octet-stream Size: 113363 bytes Desc: swt white paper members.pdf URL: From patrick at prassociates.co.uk Wed Sep 29 12:16:19 2010 From: patrick at prassociates.co.uk (Patrick Roper) Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:16:19 +0100 Subject: [Adastra] White Paper In-Reply-To: <98A4A0BE1B6C424C851FF8114B2853C801D82401@mail.sussexwt.org.uk> References: <98A4A0BE1B6C424C851FF8114B2853C801D82401@mail.sussexwt.org.uk> Message-ID: <001801cb5fc7$bf3540e0$3d9fc2a0$@co.uk> Thanks for this Penny. Have done my duty and returned the form. I shall now expect vast changes in government policy in the very near future. See you Friday (I hope), Patrick From: adastra-bounces at lists.sxbrc.org.uk [mailto:adastra-bounces at lists.sxbrc.org.uk] On Behalf Of PennyGreen at sussexwt.org.uk Sent: 29 September 2010 10:57 To: adastra at lists.sxbrc.org.uk Subject: [Adastra] White Paper Hi All, I'm sure you're all aware of the government's natural environment white paper; Defra is inviting everyone to answer four questions about how you feel about your natural environment. The Sussex Wildlife Trust are encouraging as many people as possible to respond, please see the attached document for details including the link to fill in the on-line survey form. On the second sheet there are some suggestions from the SWT that you may wish to include in your response. Best wishes, Penny <> Penny Green Species Officer Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre http://sxbrc.org.uk | 01273 497521 _____ Sussex Wildlife Trust is a company limited by guarantee under the Companies Act. Registered in England, Company No. 698851. Registered Charity No. 207005. VAT Registration No. 191 305969. Registered Office: Woods Mill, Henfield, West Sussex BN5 9SD. Telephone 01273 492630 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: