Our owl project is off to a flying start thanks to help from villagers who’ve been sending in sightings over the winter, and a grant from South Oxfordshire District Council.
Lu Barton, our owl specialist, will be leading the project. The aim is to:
Survey areas in East and West Hagbourne and Upton to find out where owls are active.
Install nest boxes for little owls, tawny owls and barn owls.
Monitor the boxes and share data with the British Trust for Ornithology.
Improving habitat for owls
Owls need a good food supply, so we’ll be surveying the 3 parishes to find areas where we can plant new trees, hedges and wildflowers which will support the food chain.
For example, Upton Parish Council is looking at the idea of sowing wildflowers in the overflow cemetery.
Wildlife-friendly gardening
It’s not just public land that can help support owls; you could create your own wildlife-friendly garden or a wildlife corner. There’s information on how to do this on the HUGS website (www.hugsustainability.org/nature)
We’ll be running a competition to find the best wildlife gardens in the area – details coming soon.
Other ways to help
When you see or hear owls, please send the details to hugsustainability@gmail.com
Include a postcode or use the what3words app on your phone so we can get an accurate location.
Tawny owls will be going quieter for now, while they start nesting. Little owls should start calling from now until late June/July. And from March onwards you might hear the screeching of barn owls until they start nesting too.
You can listen to the different owl calls on the HUGS website: www.hugsustainability.org/owls
Kieron

The first HUGS Annual General Meeting will be held on on Saturday the 27th of February at 2.00pm. Having started up last summer, we’re now a larger group on the committee and are managing public funding for our owl project, so we now need to be more formal in how we run our activities.
We’re keen that lots of you join us from the three villages at the AGM and find out more about our plans for the 2021/2022 work programme.
Zoom link for AGM Meeting ID: 816 8730 9468 Passcode: 282936
If you have ideas for future projects that you’d like to see HUGS run, do send us your thoughts to hugsustainability@gmail.com by February the 20th and we can talk about them together in the meeting.
The Agenda and supporting documents will be posted at https://tinyurl.com/ze6uhg51
https://www.hugsustainability.org/

David Rickeard

Farthings, Blewbury Road,

East Hagbourne,

 

If you had a massive farm and it was losing money year after year, what would you do? This was the dilemma facing Isabella Tree and her husband at Knepp in Sussex. They ran a mixed arable and dairy operation, but global overproduction and falling prices meant they couldn’t keep their heads above water. To cap it all, the launch of Häagen-Dazs stomped all over sales of their successful ice cream brand.
What they did next is recorded in Isabella Tree’s book, Wilding. It’s an inspiring tale – their plans to try to replicate an older, wilder landscape were regarded with suspicion by many. In particular they were thwarted by scientists and policy-makers who wanted proof that the thing they wanted to try would work before they’d even started.
It’s the pioneer’s paradox: you want to set out in a bold new direction, but you find yourself hampered by the doubts and fears (often based on speculation) of the establishment.
One set of pioneers who are persevering – and with brilliant success – is Sustrans. The railway line is an incredible asset for walkers and cyclists, and the closure of Chilton Road to complete the largely car-free route to Harwell could be another.
Sustrans is worried that after lockdown there’ll be an unprecedented return to the roads. Public transport will have much-reduced capacity so everyone will use their cars, creating congestion, pollution and emissions. We’ll emerge from one crisis only to exacerbate another. Part of the solution Sustrans proposes is to remove every possible barrier to allowing people to circulate on foot and bike including e-bike.
More bicycles, cargo bikes, free bike servicing, dedicated bike and pedestrian lanes – these are the kinds of things that will help us be mobile, healthy and resilient in future. The pioneers of the bicycle, once ridiculed as eccentrics and fanatics, would be cock-a-hoop.
Kieron
Obituaries
It is with great sadness that we report the deaths of two of our oldest residents who have lived in the village for a long time.
Muriel Wright our oldest resident and probably the oldest ever resident of Upton, died on 6th January at the age of 106 years 7 months and 10 days.
Alec Chennery died on 29th November aged 89. Alec moved into a new bungalow in Newman’s Close with his wife Yvonne in 1962. He worked in Research Reactor group at Harwell and was a member of the team that built our village hall.

We were slightly hampered by Covid in our first few months – the perishing pandemic prevented us from holding meetings or getting plans for a refill pop-up off the ground. But, we still managed to launch a nature trail (free on www.hugsustainability.org), run a campaign to plant 1,000 trees (400 planted so far!) and focus on helping the local owl population. Members also wrote to our MP, David Johnston, to invite him to take part in a discussion about the private member’s bill on tackling the climate emergency (www.ceebill.uk). He declined.

We had a workshop on mitigating global emissions using the en-roads simulator – pretty whizzy stuff developed by MIT. You can have a go yourself at www.climateinteractive.org/tools/en-roads/  And we contributed ideas to the various Parish Councils for improving green spaces, supporting nature’s recovery and becoming more sustainable. Hopefully more on these once we’ve seen the PC’s response to the village questionnaire.

Chilton Road Bird Survey

Have you heard the birds along Chilton Road? It’s quite a little chorus following the closure and will be even better as the weather gets warmer. We’ve started monitoring bird species on the new quiet stretch to see if anything changes. There were 10 species logged on the first pass in December. (You can see what they were on the iRecord system at www.brc.ac.uk/irecord – search for “Chilton Road survey”. You can also join the team of volunteers who are carrying out the fortnightly update.)

Ideally we’d also have comparison data from before the road was closed. Unfortunately we don’t have this, but we’re working with the Thames Valley Environmental Records Centre (TVERC) to interpret the data we’re now collecting.

While on the subject of cycle-friendly routes, did you know that there’s now an almost continuous track from Upton to Wantage along the 544 Cycle Route and Icknield Greenway? This is part of ongoing improvements to cycle routes across Oxfordshire.

On Boiling Frogs

Thanks to experiments by Friedrich Goltz in 1869 (and probably numerous predecessors), we know there’s no truth in the idea that a frog will sit happily in a saucepan that is gradually heated up until it becomes an ex-frog. But it’s an image that’s been used a fair bit when describing apathy towards mitigating climate change. The analogy works well: incremental change doesn’t seem to require urgent response. And then, suddenly, when the danger becomes clear, it’s too late. At the point of realisation, you’d expect a fast and decisive reaction. (Frog exits pot; governments ban CFCs to prevent further damage to ozone layer.) So, what’s different about climate change? Why are we so reluctant to take the necessary action to prevent global warming increasing by 1.5 degrees Centigrade?

The most obvious reasons are that governments want to protect their economies, and that as individuals we’re not willing or able to brook the cost or inconvenience of doing without the products that create the emissions. It’s not uncommon to feel powerless when in front of such a big problem. And after all, “the Chinese are building new coal-fired power stations so it makes no difference what I do”.

The main issue with doing nothing is that the problem gets worse. And if we divest ourselves of responsibility we’re being dishonest into the bargain: we’re the ones busy buying affordable goods manufactured in China, so we’re driving demand for that energy.

Facing up to the problem is going to involve changes, sacrifices and some creativity. One writer likens it to medieval cathedral building*. The people who start the job won’t be around to see it finished. But they know they’re contributing to something much more important that will endure.

*(Read the full article at https://cutt.ly/xh6aXfL)

Kieron

 

 

It’s National Tree Week, so it’s very fitting that there’ll be 400 new trees planted across the 3 villages following our ‘More trees, please’ campaign.

Thanks very much if you’ve found space for one tree (or a whole bunch). And if you were already at full capaci-tree, don’t worry, the Woodland Trust has agreed to supply Upton with 400 native trees to plant our own ‘tiny forest’.

The plan is to use a method pioneered in Japan in the 1970s, and successfully deployed in the last couple of years in the Netherlands and Witney! It involves putting in trees very densely – as many as 600 on a tennis court-sized space. Competition encourages the trees to grow much faster than usual in the first 3 to 4 years, achieving higher than usual levels of soil enrichment, and quickly becoming home to large numbers of birds and invertebrates. (Search for the ‘Tiny Forest Zaanstad’ report from Wageningen University if you want to see the species lists!)

The trees arrive in March, and will need lots of mulch to get them started. The young woody growth on hedges and trees makes one of the best mulches, so if you’re pruning or clipping over the winter please don’t brown bin it – let me know and I’ll take it away.

Citizen science: Owl project

We’ve launched a new project to study the owl population in the three villages. Lu Barton, our local owl expert, is working with us to help map and support our owl population. Together we’ll be listening for owls, putting up nest boxes, installing nest webcams and working to improve local habitat for owls.

Lu has already been looking into where our local owls are around the 3 villages. Do help her by emailing her (Lusowls@btinternet.com) to tell her if you’ve seen or heard owls near you.

Lu has already been hosting fascinating Facebook live sessions about each of our local owl species – tawny, little and barn owls. She’s joined in the sessions by her own gorgeous owls and she tells us more about each type of owl and what we can do in our gardens and on our land to support them better. If you missed any ‘owlcasts’ you can watch again on our Facebook page. Here’s a short link to find it: shorturl.at/cmHRU

Joining HUGS

It’s free to join – just drop an email to hugsustainability@gmail.com You’ll get advance notice of events and you’ll get a say in what activities HUGS focuses on in 2021.

Kieron

 

‘Tis the season to plant trees in!
According to The Woodland Trust, it’s best to plant trees between November and March when they’re dormant and there’s less risk of causing damage.
There are lots of reasons people plant trees – to replace an old one that had to be felled, to help wildlife, to grow fruit, to soak up carbon, to remember a loved one, just to watch it grow.
But there’s another compelling reason to plant a tree this year. Because it will help us reach our target of 1000 new trees in the 3 villages!
Native species have the dual benefit of capturing carbon and supporting indigenous wildlife so we’ve got a great list of natives for you to choose from – and they’re all under a fiver.
Depending on what space you have available, how about a beautiful flowering tree like a guelder rose or a bird cherry, or if you’ve got a bigger gap, why not a sweet chestnut so you can be roasting your own in a few Christmases from now. For the full range, see the tree-planting section of our website: https://www.hugsustainability.org/trees-1
We’ll also be able to put you in touch with expert local gardeners for advice on where and how to plant.
Owls over Upton
We’re launching an exciting project with Lu Barton of Lu’s Owls in Didcot to monitor owls in our area. Owls are an indicator species, helping us understand what state our local nature is in. We know tawny and little owls are still around, but we think we’ve lost barn owls in recent years.
Using the data we collect together we want to put up more nest boxes (several with web cams) and we’d like to work with landowners to improve habitat for our owls. More info next month!
Village Questionnaire
You’ll be getting a questionnaire from the Parish Council asking what you’d like to see happening in the village in your mail/email soon.
It’s a good opportunity to register your support for activities and expenditure which promote nature, the rural landscape and sustainable lifestyles.
Members of the Parish Council committee aren’t opposed to these things – in fact they’ve been very positive about protecting the environment and biodiversity. But they need to know what your views are, and what you expect them to take into consideration when making decisions.
If you’re concerned about the environment, biodiversity or climate change, please speak up.
Kieron

HUGS were at the Hagbourne Produce Show last month (socially distanced in the car park) to ask villagers what sustainable activities they’d be interested in. Popular suggestions included tree planting, a repair cafe, a pop-up refill station and wilding of verges and other areas. We’ll be working on making these happen.
We also attended September’s Upton Parish Council meeting to propose ways to keep the village green and low-carbon.

Village Wildlife Walk
We’re pleased to launch a wildlife walk in celebration of the beautiful landscape we live in. It’s a 2 mile circular route connecting the 3 villages along footpaths and the cycle track. It’s mainly metalled path so will be great for autumnal and wintery walks as well as spring and summer.
A printable map and directions are at www.hugsustainability.org/walk
As locals, you’ve probably enjoyed the scenery and wildlife on parts or all of the route already. There are several hidden gems including the Hagbourne cemetery wildflower meadow (in summer) and Mowbray Fields Nature Reserve. There’s a top 10 wildlife spotting list for kids too.
We’ve walked the route with Steve Gozdz of Goring Gap Wildlife Walks, who’s offering guided tours of the route and has described it as a ‘haven of wildlife to be discovered.’
We’d be delighted to see any pictures you take and to hear about wildlife you find along the way.
The HUGS Team hugsustainability@gmail.com

We’d like to tell you about a new sustainability group called HUGS, the Hagbournes and Upton Group for Sustainability.

We formed in lockdown having had the time to appreciate nature more as well as to think about the future.

We also took part in the Climate Coalition’s ‘The Time is Now’ campaign to ask MPs for a greener recovery from Covid-19.  This is an economic recovery that works to tackle both the climate crisis and the dramatic decline in our UK wildlife.

HUGS has 3 main aims:

1. To work with other groups in the area to ensure plans and policies for our communities are compatible with achieving a healthy, nature-rich, low-carbon future
2. To help nature by supporting existing conservation work around our 3 villages, and also starting new projects that promote greater biodiversity
3. To share information about how we can all live more sustainably – whether in our homes, our gardens or our lifestyles. And to develop projects that help us live more sustainably together (e.g. a local pop-up refill station to reduce plastic use).

To find out more read our first blog at  http://www.hugsustainability.org

If you’d like information about our events and meetings, send us an email at hugsustainability@gmail.com

Kieron and the HUGS team!