Summer


or Fall


The wood is also notorious for foxes that collect stray golf balls and bury them in the leaf mould, thinking they are eggs


is sycamore, but also includes oak, ash, yew, holly, rowan, beech and silver birch, with a bramble understorey, which is selectively brashed in order to allow the bluebells to thrive.


The wood is also notorious for foxes that collect stray golf balls and bury them in the leaf mould, thinking they are eggs. Happily, Jim has resisted the forestry experts’ advice to clear-fell the wood and plant up with oak. In the years to come, it is obvious that he and his team are going to have to apply their arboricultural skills, which include hedge-laying, to a greater extent as trees reach their life span and require management. For over thirty years, I have monitored the density of aphids and other important dipterans, such as the St Marks fly, dependent respectively on the sap and flowers of sycamore in Nuttall’s Wood, and have realised how valuable this often defiled species is to a number of bird species nesting in the wood, especially summer migrants like chiffchaff, willow warbler and blackcap. I would say that the value of the sycamore


in this wood to the insectivorous bird population is more than equal to that of the oak, a statement that must sound like heresy to someone from the RSPB. Even on the last days of October 2010, I watched, through my binoculars, a blue tit feeding on the underside of the sycamore leaves. An examination of a leaf showed half a dozen winged and the fatter wingless form of the aphid, and this after the previous night’s hard frost. A few dead and dying silver birch


provide nesting holes for the great spotted woodpecker, which I have observed feeding its young on the craneflies that emerge from the turf and whose ‘leatherjacket’ larvae are the curse of the greenkeeper. Treecreeper and nuthatch are also Nuttall’s Wood residents, as is the occasional pied flycatcher. In 2005, one of the greenkeepers informed me of a treecreeper’s nest in a bark crevice of one of the old silver birches, only a foot above the ground.


The wood’s insect fauna is also sought after by up to a hundred swallows, resulting from two or three broods in the


stables of Nuttall’s Farm, the former home of Les Swain. When, in summer, the swallow families are hunting for insects over the wood and turf of the 13th, a hobby can be seen flying with them, as this spitfire of a falcon is a specialist in catching swallows. Greenkeepers tell me how they witness this event as their mowers stir up the insects that the swallows are seeking. Before a neighbouring sand quarry was


worked out and turned into a landfill site, sand martins that nested there joined the swallows over the fairway at nesting time. The sand martin is no longer on the course bird list. Nuttall’s Wood is also a regular annual sheltering place for the woodcock, a passage migrant which probes the particularly fertile rough of the fairways for earthworms. I have also recorded it sunning itself on the edge of one of the farmland hedgerows bounding the course. The sparrowhawk watches out for its prey here, mainly wood pigeon, as does the buzzard. This year, a pair of buzzards has raised only two young, for the usual healthy


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