Spring slime - post 1

Something amazing happened yesterday. I saw frogspawn - the slimy herald of spring.

Weirdly, though, I saw it on a pavement near my house - as if the frogs concerned didn't quite make it to the watery ditch just a metre or so away. Yesterday I didn't realise it was frogspawn, I just thought it was evidence of a dog with a serious problem. But today on my way home for lunch, I realised the true nature of the gelatinous mass. Suddenly it became much less disgusting as I realised it was a ball of potential life.

I went home for lunch, and then dug out my fish tank, procured for just such a purpose. I furtled about in the garden for some rainwater, and managed to find a tupperware-box-full. Would the (at least) two-day old spawn have survived on the pavement? It has been raining almost constantly, so it won't have totally dried out. But will it have had enough oxygen to keep it going?

The tank prepared with a little rainwater, I went out with my box to collect the spawn. On closer inspection, there weren't very many black dots (indicators of the fertilised eggs) but there were a few. I scooped up the slime and returned home to put it in the tank. It looked a bit reddish (not a good sign)? But I wasn't sure whether this was evidence of spawn deterioration or just colour from some dead leaves it was resting on.

The spawn doesn't look very healthy, as apart from its colour there are no nicely rounded slime balls as you usually see around the eggs. Could that just be because it's dehydrated? There are probably only about 6 or so eggs in there - but you never know - they might hatch!

I love hatching out spawn, but I'm always worried about doing it (I don't wish to harm the 'poles or transfer frog disease between ponds). This slime rescue, however, seems ethical. If they do survive, they wouldn't have without human intervention. Maybe they weren't meant to survive though, due to their dense parents? Hmm...

Record of this week's training

Fartlek
Tuesday was the pleasantly-titled 'Fartlek' or 'speed play' session with the OURC. I am not sure whether what we do on a Tuesday is technically fartlek or more properly 'intervals', but we did a set of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 along a 10 k route, with variously timed recoveries. I was pleased with the training - I felt much stronger than the previous week (when I'd also been fighting nausea from a very heavy weekend).

I was able to keep up with some of the faster ones, but I wasn't very consistent. I tended to start off slowly and then try hard in the last minute. It's a good route that we do, with plenty to look at - part of Willen lake and the 'enchanted forest' by the Ouzel on the way back.

Intervals
Today was the (as Mark would put it) murderous 800 m intervals around Woughton Campus field. We had to do eight of these, with sixty-second recoveries. Boy, it was tough. Our first splits were 3 mins, and then 2.58, but then we slipped to 3.05. After that it was very difficult to keep below 3.10. My legs felt very heavy, but the lungs were (relatively) fine. I have so much fitness to build up before December 13, let alone for the London Marathon on April 25. On reflection I think the short recoveries and the sponginess of the grass make this session very hard. It's also much more monotonous. But I feel pleased to have got through it in reasonable splits, and running on grass (if flat) is better training than running on the road for Calderdale.

My last session of the week will be hill running with Leah in the Brickhills - which should do a slightly better job of emulating the hills of Calderdale. We'll try for 1 hour 30 mins I should think - running up and down as many horrible hills we can find.

Hill run
This was much more fun than the relentless field intervals. Leah called for me on Sunday pm and drove us to the woods - Milton Keynes's adult playground (the car park is packed, even early in the morning, with the cars of walkers, runners, mountain bikers, and people who do 'cross-country theatre' in capes and masks, with sticks). Somehow we managed to avoid a deluge and caught the last of the afternoon's yellow sun. Leah took us on a circuit which involved a variety of hills, and we practised splurging through mud without caution, and running downhill over leaves (which can be tricky as you don't know what tree roots etc lurk underneath them).

As we were running, we saw four or five fantastic fly agaric in full bloom, which gleamed out, wet and jelly-like, from plump cushions of brown leaves.

Once we'd done the circuit, we ran over to do the biggest hill we could find - which basically takes you from the level of the road up to the top of the Brickhill Woods mound. We ran down the whole thing, and then ran up. It was terrible - and once again, Leah (despite her week of gruelling training) was way ahead of me. Still, I ran the whole thing and recovered quickly, which is the best I can hope for I guess. Ahh - I'm looking forward to feeling strong in the legs again ... wonder how long it will take.

As I was running I was wondering how Brickhill Woods formed, geologically speaking. Why this lump in the middle of all this flat? Why all the sand, with occasional patches of clay? Is the thing that my friend Hannah found there, a few months ago, a fossil ammonite? I am hopefully about to find out as I'm going to a talk on Milton Keynes's geology tomorrow at Milton Keynes Natural History Society (which I have just joined). This should mesh nicely with my work on Exploring Science (The Open University's Level 1 Science Course). I've just read Book 2 (Earth and Space) which covers some basic geology.

Working in the reed beds

I've recently been volunteering with The Parks Trust once a week on some of their practical conservation projects. One of these is the management of the reed beds surrounding Walton Lake.

These are an important habitat in Milton Keynes - I think they are the biggest reed beds that we have in the local area. Martin also mentioned that last winter we had a couple of bitterns overwintering here from Holland or Germany. (Unfortunately it's unlikely that they will breed and boom, because the area isn't big enough to allow them to feed. They are fussy eaters and, unlike the omnivorous herons, won't eat anything but fish! ) The reed beds also provide habitat for reed warblers and water rails - and I have also observed lots of frog and toad tadpoles as well as caddis fly larvae of two different kinds, dragonflies and damselflies. A while back I went down to the reed beds in the early morning with Gary and Nina, and we listened to the sparkling, varied, 'pouring' sound of the warblers (which have now gone back to Africa). Gary wrote about it here.

Anyway, the RSPB recently gave The Parks Trust some advice on how to manage the reed beds - and they felt that we needed to reduce the willow and alder carr around the beds to prevent them from gradually becoming overtaken by woodland.

It seems terribly destructive to be removing trees - but I guess the ideas is that we're trying to manage the habitat to allow a diversity of species to survive. And, added to this, the reed bed habitat is very distinctive. I hadn't realised that you can go into the area but you can, and it's like another world in there! The reeds (phragmites communis) are well over 6ft tall. The picture above shows us going in for the first time. We needed to use scythes to cut a path through.

Working in the reed beds is hard, because the area is boggy. It is also difficult to pull the felled trees up and out over the banks. In addition to this, we're coppicing at waist height, so that a contractor (who is being brought in) can see the stumps in amongst the reeds and treat them to prevent further growth. Coppicing at such a height means that the branches of the felled trees catch in the stumps.

However, it's immensely satisfying doing physical work - both physcially and emotionally. I love being active, working with the others and learning about the habitat. It's great to see the physical progress made in just one day. It's also very rewarding learning new skills: I'm trying hard to use the bow saw in an efficient manner and watching the others' technique.

The next task in the reed beds is to cut paths through the reeds. The aim of this is to create little waterways for the birds and fish, and to provide a good place from which bitterns can feed (they like to hunt from the edges).

At the end of each day I'm adding to a log of practical conservation work to build towards a possible career change to environmental education (at some point in the future).

One for sorrow

Macabre, you may think, but look at the beautiful green on the tail and the blue on the wing.