Wildlife on Track - September

I have blogged previously about my efforts to spot wildlife and "get my eye in" so I thought a good challenge would be to record what I've seen on my various site visits this month, mostly to railways. I wonder what I'll see next month? 

The Chilterns, near Luton

I spent a day wandering over some beautiful rolling chalk hills (with associated steep chalk cuttings!) We saw several red kites and a buzzard hovering above us, and a lots of pheasants in the fields or next to the track.

Surprisingly, I also saw some impressive stalagmites forming at the base of a large Victorian viaduct, probably due to dissolved chalk in the track drainage leaking through the brickwork. Given these often take hundreds of years to form, they were impressively large! However, fixing the leaks is probably a good idea in the long term...

Bedford

Yesterday was a great opportunity for wildlife spotting, as we were now looking at locations further north in Oxford Clay country, which had been dug out in brick pits (most of London was built with bricks from the Oxford Clay around Bedford and Peterborough). Someone was doing an ecology survey prior to redevelopment of one huge pit for housing, so we were able to look under the mats and traps laid out along the footpath for fieldmice (one) and newts (none). We also saw several deer and a snowy owl, which (like some of the pheasants near Luton) had been hit by a train. There were also no shortage of rabbits and evidence of badgers too which have even got in behind the netting put out to keep them from destabilizing the earthworks. We'll have to try again!

In another demonstration of the ambivalent attitude required on the railways, we came across vast numbers of ripe blackberries, when all the brambles near me have come to the end of their harvest. But I was advised by the COSS (the person in charge of safety when you're working on track) that you cannot be sure which areas have been sprayed to keep the weeds down, so you should never eat any fruit next to the railway. Bit of a shame, but hopefully the birds enjoy it!

So we have to keep vegetation under control so that we can inspect and maintain the earthwork beneath, and keep rabbits and badgers away from the most vulnerable areas with netting. But despite all that and the risk of being hit by trains, the railways are still a haven for wildlife, especially since high fences mostly keep people out of railway land. And every rail project is required under Network Rail's sustainability policy to looks for opportunities to leave the situation better than we found it