Wildlife Circus

  Ham Lands is a mass of yellow buttercups as well as white hawthorn and cow parsley; with three species of buttercup in the first meadow north of the  Thames Young Mariners. Buttercup identification features  are in a handy guide produced by the BSBI on Twitter below.    During my walk I heard sedge warbler in the burnt out reed bed, many dunnocks and blackcaps and > 15 song thrush territories over the two sides of the Mariners; this fell short of the usual standard walk but was sufficient to confirm that this is still one of London's top sites for song thrush. A common tern was flying over the lagoon despite the water sports and a brief kestrel appearance over the grassland. Sadly only a few whitethroat and no hirundines were seen at the moment .

Marina at Kingston Cemetery This is the  new website of the Kingston Biodiversity Network www.kingstonbiodiversitynetwork.org Talk to Marina Pacheco about getting involved in any of the projects at marina@kingstoneco.org.   We have just planted a disease resistant elm in the old part of the cemetery. These trees can be obtained from organisations such as the Conservation Foundation; they are usually grafts. In the meantime elm is an important component of our hedgerows and although we lost 60, 000,000 trees to disease, there are still nearly as many elm 'suckers' creating habitat for elm-specific insects such as white-letter hairstreak butterfly; recorded nearby at Lower Marsh Lane. New Elm   It is looking pretty good and a second elm will be planted in September. Andrew Rossabi, President of the Richard Jefferies Society, will give a talk about the writer's time in the area. Richard Jefferies lived in Tolworth for five years, from 1877-1882, at 296 Ewell Road, t...

  Yesterday, Richard Jefferies exited his blue-plaqued villa at Woodside, 296 Ewell Road, opposite the former St. Marks school(built on Tolworth Common during his 5 year  residence). Here he wrote, ' The copse adjoining the back gardens of Woodside was visited by pheasants, which sometimes strayed into the neighbours’ gardens. Early in the March mornings he woke to the ‘three clear, trumpet-like notes’ of a missel thrush ringing out from the copse. From his window in the evenings he could hear partridges calling. Stone-chats perched on the furze bushes of Tolworth Common. He strolled towards Tolworth Broadway and Greenway, followed by 30+ participants keen to locate RJ's observations from 'Nature Near London'; first published as a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette for the commuting public. In 1920 the very same paper celebrated his work by reprinting excerpts from his regular column - along with joining instructions for his walks - by tram and motorbus-b...