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I’ve just been alerted to this great video about peat bogs and the argument for conserving them, featuring my good friends Mette Risager and Hans Joosten:

I was directed to it by Leonas Jarašius and his LIFE-Aukstumala team, who are engaged in establishing a major restoration and conservation programme for the legendary Aukstumala Bog in Lithuania and for which they have a great website. I was introduced to Leonas at the recent excellent Cumbria BogLIFE Conference and this link with Lithuania is now one of those happy spin-offs from that conference.
 
The Aukstumala Bog (or in former times also referred to as Augstumal Bog) is legendary because of this book:
 

 
It was written more than a century ago but it should arguably still be used today as a core textbook for all peatbog scientists. The fact that it is not, highlights an increasing and worrying trend in modern science. There is a growing tendency in scientific academic circles (and academic teaching environments as well) to assume that papers or textbooks written much before the 1990s are somehow no longer relevant, are ‘out of date’, have passed their ‘sell by date’ and are thus discouraged or frowned on by the editors of today’s scientific journals or reviewers of university courses.
 
Few publications can demonstrate the profound error of this attitude more than C A Weber’s account of the Augstumal raised bog (modern-day Aukstumala raised bog) published in 1902 and translated illuminatingly into English by John Couwenberg, with additional edited information by John and Hans Joosten in 2002 – though now alas this excellent translated volume is out of print. This extraordinary monograph sheds light of great clarity on a great many aspects of raised bog ecology, yet little of what is written so lucidly by C A Weber more than 100 years ago is acknowledged – or even recognised – in today’s peatland scientific literature. We may be able to measure more elegantly, we may be able to investigate to finer levels of detail, but the fundamental understanding of ecological processes is not necessarily better – and indeed may often be very much worse – than the understanding which Weber sets out in his monograph. We need to remember that sometimes the past can illuminate just as much as the present.
 

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The sunset was looking promising so I grabbed camera, tripod and folding stool and headed off into the fields. The sunset did not disappoint:

 
I arrived just in time because everything happened rather quickly. The glorious glow developed for perhaps 2 or 3 minutes:

 
Then it quickly began to fade into shades of steel grey and blue:

 
Then I realised that there was another little show going on behind me – rather like a cloud-based aurora:

 
By the time I turned back from this little display the last of the golden glow was fading, and it very quickly turned to inky darkness:


 
As I started packing up the camera in its bag, I realised that to the east the sky was developing into something equally spectacular, possibly somewhat illuminated by approaching moonrise:

 
Walking home back along the track which runs in the lee of a large hedge, I was suddenly dive-bombed by five or six bats. The light was terrible and they were scurrying round the sky like frantic winged mice, but I had a go at capturing something. Firstly, two examples of dots-that-are-bats:


 
Then, amazingly and thanks also to the wonders of RAW imagery and Photoshop, a pair that swooped low over me, apparently sharing some news or something more substantial:

 
Sunsets and dive-bombing bats. It must be Halloween soon!

I still have a huge backlog of images from earlier commuter trips, including a journey up to Cumbria for the excellent Cumbria BogLIFE Conference, but the skies from the last couple of commuter journeys were interesting enough to merit a quick post now, then I can try to work back through a range of other journeys.

 
After several days of rather grey and miserable drizzly rain falling from thick layers of altostratus and nimbostratus, the skies on the 12th began to brighten. Layers of altocumulus stratiformis, with their little cloudlet streams, could just be spotted in the distance as the Abellio Greater Anglia train from Colchester to Stratford took us past Galleywood, west of Chelmsford:

 
The poplar field near Ingatestone now has a large herd of grazing cows, munching happily beneath the first glimpses of blue sky for a while:

 
The Lone Oak to the east of Shenfield is surrounded by ploughed fields and is presumably dropping acorns in the thousands if the oak trees outside our house are anything to go by:

 
Arriving at Gallion’s Reach DLR Station, the cumulus clouds bubbling up behind Canary Wharf were fairly impressive:


 
The journey home is alas going to be in the dark until next spring, so most photo-opportunities are restricted to the morning commute for the coming months. On the 13th, the layers of altostratus had finally cleared away to be replaced by banks of cumulus and altocumulus, giving some brilliant patches of sunshine over the Colne Valley weir:

 
By the two poplars just west of Marks Tey the cloud cover had simplified into a single band of altocumulus giving many glimpses of blue sky above:

 
The fields have been put down to grass or are ploughed – some very recently so:

 
Vast tracts of fresh-ploughed soil now characterise the Essex landscape. Flocks of crows, rooks, wood pigeons and black-headed gulls plod methodically over the bare fields in search of worms and other soil fauna, or the fallen grains of wheat or barley which the gleaners (scroll to second poem in this link) would once have gathered:

 
By the fields west of Witham the bands of altocumulus to the north were starting to deposit rain over the distant landscape:

 
And although New Hall School east of Chelmsford was bathed in bright sunshine, the cumulus behind it was fast building up into cumulonimbus capillatus with its drenching rain filling the darkness beneath:

 
The banks of what was probably cumulonimbus calvus roiling out over Galleywood, just to the west of Chelmsford, were certainly spectacular:

 
But there was no sign that they would combine or swell into anything more threatening. The cows grazing the fields west of Chelmsford enjoyed patches of bright sunshine:

 
As did the herd in the poplar field near Ingatestone:

 
Every now and again the sun would vanish behind a particularly thick bank of cumulus, as here near Billericay:

 
But it would re-emerge into blue sky once more quite quickly. Consequently the Lone Oak east of Shenfield had a classic backdrop of white cauliflower cumulus:

 
While the O2 Arena, seen from Canning Town DLR, had a fine collection of cumulus soaring overhead:

 
The Cumbrian journey, and others, will hopefully (work permitting) be coming soon…

Some catching-up to do in terms of commuter travel blogs and events, but for the moment this evening’s sunset was worth commenting on. After a fairly wet middle of the day, the clouds finally parted and produced a brief period of blue sky. This promised the possibility of an interesting sunset so I set off into the local fields. In the end the evening sky divided into various parts. To the west there was a thick band of low cloud which hid the final stages of sunset, above which half the dome of sky was streaked with high cirrus (click on images for full-screen view):
 

 
To the east the sky was largely just empty darkening blue, but to the north a thick bank of stratocumulus was moving rapidly across the sky:
 

 
Just before the high cirrus was swallowed up by the bank of stratocumulus it burst out in a blaze of golden streaks:
 

 
The stratocumulus rapidly obscured everything and darkness settled across the landscape, but as I walked back home I spotted a round blob sitting on the telephone wires which cross the last field before emerging into Myland. The blob could only be an owl – specifically a Little Owl (Athene noctua – symbol of the Greek Goddess of Wisdom). I quickly set up the tripod because the darkness meant that only a long exposure would capture anything at all. In the end the owl was no more than a black blob on a dark background on the camera screen, but the magic of RAW and Photoshop revealed that this blob was indeed my acquaintance from a previous trip to these fields:
 

 
A good way to end today’s visit to the fields.
 

I have a limited stock of Merlin Magic with b+w illustrations available at reduced price and reduced postage compared to those in the Blurb WebShop. These are available through my own webstore.
 

 

There’s been a few quite spectacular sunsets over Myland during the past week but alas there was no opportunity to capture these. Yesterday looked promising again. This time I was able to grab camera and tripod and walk out to the Myland fields in hopes of yet another spectacular sky. In the end it didn’t develop as I’d hoped because a thick bank of cirrostratus in the west blocked out the final stages of the sunset, but the high cirrus overhead nevertheless put on a fairly good show:
 

 
The wheat and barley have now gone, leaving just the stubble, and there’s a deeply earthy smell over the fields now:

 
Watching the light fade in the west, there was suddenly a somewhat blood-curdling shrieking noise from the hedge half-way across the field – almost certainly a rabbit screaming – so perhaps there was a stoat or weasel hunting along the hedge-line. It all fell silent again as I watched the high cirrus spread like snowy dragons across the sky. The fact that this was disappointing compared to the sunsets from earlier in the week perhaps gives an idea of just how spectacular they were. But there will always be other sunsets…

 
Click on the images to enlarge them; click back arrow on your browser to close the enlarged images.
 

Planning consent is required in the UK when commercial peat extraction takes place. One of the conditions imposed as part of any such consent relates to the after-use of the land.  Given the loss of lowland peat bog habitat both in Britain (e.g Lindsay & Immirzi, 1996) and elsewhere across Europe (e.g. Bragg & Lindsay, 2003), there is general recognition that peat bog sites subject to commercial peat extraction should have restoration to peat bog habitat as the prime target of after-use management.
 
The residual thickness of peat remaining at cessation of commercial extraction is a critical factor in determining whether bog conditions can be re-established immediately on the site or whether an extended (and often indeterminate) period of fen conditions will prevail before ‘ombrotrophic’ bog (i.e. rain-fed bog) conditions can re-establish. A concept frequently encountered in planning applications and consents is that of “an average minimum depth of 0.5 m” to remain as the residual peat depth at cessation of commercial working.
 
Scottish Natural Heritage commissioned us to examine the basis of this concept and determine whether available scientific evidence supported this concept or instead indicated that a different depth of residual peat is appropriate if the after-use objective and consent condition is for bog habitat to be re-established as quickly as possible.
 
Our review of the available scientific evidence indicates that there is no supported case for “an average minimum depth of 0.5 m”. Furthermore the available scientific evidence indicates that if the residual peat depth is less than 2 m then restoration is likely to lead to a vegetation which is essentially ‘poor fen’ rather than ‘ombrotrophic bog’, while the timescale for such poor fen to develop into true bog is unclear but likely to be measured in centuries rather than decades.
 
The key messages of our report, now available from SNH, are therefore that for new consents on sites where more than 2 m of peat remains across the site, planning consent should require that no part of the site (other than areas at the margins) be left with less than 2 m of peat. On sites where some parts of the site already have less than 2 m of residual peat, commercial extraction should cease at the earliest opportunity in order to minimise the extent and duration of poor-fen development.
 

Unfortunately the colour-illustrated edition of Merlin Magic has been removed from my Blurb Store window in error. It has now been re-instated with a new link:

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Furthermore, given the relatively high postage costs charged by Blurb for the purchase of individual books, I am investigating the possibility of selling the various editions (colour and b+w illustrated editions) direct through my own store linked to this website. This should significantly reduce postage costs for purchasers of individual volumes. I will post an announcement soon when I have investigated the mechanics of doing this.