Bee-autiful Brocton
“Don’t go any closer. We haven’t brought enough Piriton,” shouted Sarah as I homed in on my target – a swarm of honey bees dangling on the thin branch of an oak tree. There must have been a few thousand of them and, with only a standard lens on my camera, I felt the need to get closer.
I got away unstung, at least by the bees, and the next day, by which time I had been forgiven, we saw a swarm of bees living happily in a hole in a nearby oak tree. This was in Brocton Coppice, a short walk from our campsite, and one of its key features is its beautiful old sessile oak trees. In fact, this coppice is technically an oak-birch wood pasture. It is a mix of mature oak and birch trees, which was once grazed by domesticated animals and now by fallow deer.
There are plenty of other deciduous woodlands around Cannock Chase, but this is arguably the best because of the mix of mature and veteran trees together with the wildlife they attract. I spotted plenty of woodland specialists, including nuthatches, jays, mistle thrushes, spotted flycatchers, garden warblers and common redstarts. In fact, redstarts, one of my favourite birds, can be seen quite widely across the Chase, primarily in woodland and around scrub, particularly hawthorn.
Young birch trees have a paper-like, almost silvery-white bark but the older ones have a wonderful deep tiger-bap-crust pattern. Where the birch trees have lost their heads, they frequently gain bracket fungi. Of note, we saw many birch polypore (aka razorstrops) and hoof fungi (which are known as tinder fungi, because they can be used for starting fires).