Viva Brighton April 2015 Issue #26

WILDLIFE
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Elderflower Fields Nature Walk
Go wild in the country
“Go on, eat it,” says
Paul. He’s handed
me some small nettle
leaves, the first I’ve
seen this year. “Pick
the top four leaves,
scrunch them up in
your fingers to get
rid of the sting, then
eat them like a rabbit.
Front teeth first, not
just your molars, otherwise all you get is a bitter
taste. There’s actually a lot of sweetness in them.”
Paul is in charge of the environmental activities
at the Elderflower Fields Festival, and we’re just
finishing a tour of the site in Pippingford Park,
near Nutley in the Ashdown Forest. Elderflower
Fields is a family-friendly festival, about to clock
up its fourth edition. As usual there’ll be plenty
of music, food & drink and sporting activities,
but Paul’s main job is to take both adults and kids
round the site, showing them the abundant wildlife
that will share the four-day adventure with the
5,000 human visitors expected to attend, between
May 22nd and 25th.
He’s a brilliant teacher, it must be said. It’s March
4th, four days into (meteorological) spring, and, in
his words, ‘everything’s started to wake up.’ We’ve
been walking round for an hour and a half, and every
moment he’s enlightened me with a fascinatingly detailed
fact about the surroundings, drawing questions
from me, and giving out pithy, fact-full responses.
It’s a fairly rugged-looking environment, part
heath, part woodland, part open field, with native
trees – plenty of silver birch, plenty of Scotch pine
– to the fore. I learn that these two trees were ‘pioneer’
trees, the first
to take root in Britain
after the Ice Age. I
learn loads of things,
in fact: the flight
patterns of fieldfares,
murmurating like
starlings above us; the
hybrid nature of the
larch; how sap feeds
trees; how medieval
people made candles from rush stems; how to use
sphagnum moss to carry water; how the hazel tree
cross pollinates; why to be careful when you’re
picking edible bull rush roots out of pond (accidentally
eat their similar-looking neighbour, and
you’ll end up in hospital).
The second-best moment is finding a huge woodant
nest, that’s just been disturbed by a woodpecker.
He gets a worker ant to walk onto his finger,
and shows how it bites him, raising itself up onto
its back legs and spraying out formic acid onto his
skin. Then, happy the creature is so small, I ask for
it to be transferred onto my finger, and it has a go
at me, too.
The best moment? Eating the nettles, of course.
Masticating in Paul’s approved manner I do indeed
taste a pleasant sweetness, tempering the bitter
aftertaste that follows. On my springtime country
walks I’ll never be short of a snack again. Alex Leith
So Sussex brings you the Elderflower Fields Festival,
Pippingford Park, May 22-25, elderflowerfields.
co.uk. Paul will be conducting bug hunts and nature
walks throughout the Bank Holiday weekend, supported
by the Sussex Wildlife Trust and Circle of
Life Discovery
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