RXbirdwalk at Beech Farm
Beech Farm is another of those quintessential RXbirdwalks venues: deep, beautiful, varied hinterland, unseen from any main road. In fact, any road at all other than the tracks that serve it. A short distance from the throbbing heart of Battle, it is part of a 2,000 acre estate which in recent years has abandoned its previous role as a cattle and beef farm to concentrate on conservation objectives, particularly the regeneration of semi-natural grasslands.
You can learn more about this from The Grasslands Trust and more locally the Weald Meadows Initiative.
In the course of a short walk from the farm-yard, you can pass through stubble fields, rough grazing, traditional woodland and commercial plantations including that managed by the Forestry Commission in the adjacent Ashes Wood.
A bright, frosty, perfect morning for the walk, though at first we failed to find some of the farmland birds I’d seen on a recce during the week. The Skylarks and Yellowhammers had vanished but later on we came across a flock of 40 Meadow Pipits on rough pasture. There must be flocks like this all over the county, but unrecorded since hidden away in unremarkable fields, keeping a low profile among the tussocks and only visible when flushed (in our case by a Sparrowhawk).
On the late 18thC Yeakell & Gardner map, you can see that Birch Wood was about twice its present size. Its southern half is now three fields, presumably cleared in the 19th century.
Plenty of work has been done on Ashes Wood since I was last there: thinning of plantations, widening of rides and the startling clear-felling of Mill Wood which had for many years been a gloomy, gothick stand of Western Red Cedars where you could hear but rarely see the squeaks of Coal Tits and Goldcrests.
There’s a lot of industrial archeology in the area, with almost every stream valley repeatedly dammed to conserve the water which powered millstones, saws, bellows and hammers. The are also many pits and quarries for ore, clay and sand. The mill pond above has recently been de-silted. Some marshy areas have been dug out, to the detriment of shier species, but the deeper basin is obviously to the liking of diving Tufted Ducks, present in greater numbers (21) than previously. There are more Moorhens too (21 again), maybe profiting from food now put out for a gaggle of very noisy domestic geese. An ornamental element has been introduced with the installation of some Shelduck and Snow Geese. And wallabies…
The bright sunshine showed up numerous small birds passing to and fro though the trees lining this stream, with Blue, Great, Coal, Long-tailed and Marsh Tits, Nuthatches, Chaffinches and Siskins. G S Woodpeckers were active and conspicuous too, drumming, flying overhead and Showing Well on peanuts in an oast-house garden.
Not Showing So Well were the Crossbills and Buzzards I’d found a few days before, but that’s life and we still found 45 species in all.
