Episode 2.96 - Weather’s Silver Linings and Bridge Butterflies

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In the dying light after Storm Boelo has begun to ease, Chris Skinner sits on a fallen ash trunk in Fox’s Grove and records the roar still moving through the canopy. Gusts of forty miles an hour have brought down venerable ashes already weakened by dieback; some have simply keeled over with almost no root ball. The chaos, he reflects, is also opportunity: light now reaches the woodland floor for the farm’s famous bluebells, jays are frantically caching the newly thrashing acorns, and bats and woodpeckers will find new roosts in the snapped limbs. He recalls the far greater destruction of the 1987 storm and the three years it took to clear the timber.

A few days later, with mist burning off into November sunshine, he and Matthew Gudgin crawl under a farm bridge that can carry thirty tonnes. In the cool, damp stillness they find dozens of peacock and small tortoiseshell butterflies hanging upside-down like charred leaves. Chris explains how the sugars from late ivy nectar are converted into a natural glycerol antifreeze, and how the insects spend half their short lives asleep yet can still flash their eyespots if disturbed. The stream beneath them is little more than a trickle — a reminder that the eastern counties remain drought-stricken despite the recent storms.

Driving past twenty-five acres of overwinter wild-bird seed mix, they watch the sky fill with nearly a thousand wood pigeons, many of them continental migrants pushed west by cold weather further east. Yellowhammers, linnets, goldfinches and the occasional snipe or woodcock also use the crop; at night barn owls hunt over it.

Listener questions about rainfall prompt a careful check with Weather Quest at UEA: only 383 mm so far this year (just over a foot), with a mere 6 mm in April, though October’s 81 mm pushed the month slightly above average. Finally, at the High Ash Bog — still wet enough to hide an E27N Ford tractor that sank in the late 1940s — Chris discusses a free pond-restoration offer from the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, and the mysterious Roman oak pipes that once ran uphill from this low spot to a Romano-Celtic temple.

This episode is a weather-themed portrait of damage and renewal — ideal for savouring the strange beauty of hibernating butterflies under a bridge, the silver linings of a fallen ash, and the quiet importance of water in a still-parched Norfolk landscape.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/20047523-episode-2-96-weather-s-silver-linings-and-bridge-butterflies.mp3?download=true

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