Wet winter ground spells doom for upper dale wildlife

Winter in the upper dale is getting wetter. Reporter Alex Metcalfe finds out how this is having a dramatic effect on the wildlife, particularly birds


THE DEVIL is often in the detail when it comes to climate.

Farmer, botanist and former rescue volunteer Ian Findlay MBE has spent more than half his life tracking and noting down the weather of the upper dale.

Ruminating and speculating on climate is a popular pastime but Mr Findlay has the facts at his fingertips and it’s the intensity of rainfall which has stuck out for him.

He says: “Just to give you an example – in the first 28 years up to 2000 I think we probably had 12 inches of rain in a given month ten times and 12 inches is a lot of rain.

“But since 2000 up to now we have had it happen 14 times – in December 2015 we had 19 and a half inches.”

The 82-year-old spent many years working for the Nature Conservancy Council and English Nature until his retirement 22 years ago.

Part of that job was monitoring the weather station at Cow Green reservoir which has sat at his Langdon Beck farm since 1995.

But it isn’t just the weather Mr Findlay is interested in.

His background in ornithology and botany gives him a finely tuned sense of what’s going on with the wildlife of the upper dale.

“If you are monitoring a particular species and you’ve got that down you can see what effect the weather conditions are having on wildlife,” he adds.

“That’s what the weather station was used for in the first place.

“Human beings can adjust and nature will too – but it doesn’t happen overnight.”

A classic example is birds and invertebrates in the winter time.

Snow cover and hard frosts in the upper dale in a “normal winter” mean the ground doesn’t get particularly wet.

Invertebrates don’t multiply during this time and chicks have plenty to feed on in the spring.

However, if the ground gets wet – as it has done in more recent upper dale winters – invertebrates mistakenly think now is the time to pupate or spring their larvae and they die off in the cold.

This leaves little for the chicks come spring time and numbers subsequently struggle.

How does Mr Findlay know this? He traps moths.

“Numbers over the last few years have been much lower than they used to be,” says Mr Findlay.

“And it’s all down to this wet.”

Wetter ground takes longer to warm up – something Mr Findlay believes is making the spring growing season later in the year.

Another thing such extensive records allow you to pick out are those years that buck the trend.

Mr Findlay’s data shows how 2006 and 2013 had two months with more than 250 hours of sunshine.

Something which, he says, poses “more questions than answers”.

Another creature he’s studied in detail on his doorstep is the black grouse which lives in the upper dale all year round.

“We had a bad spell of winters from 1976 to 1991. We had a lot of snow cover and 1979 was incredible for the amount of snow,” says Mr Findlay.

“It really knocked the black grouse for six and it wasn’t until 1986 when we had milder winters that numbers started to increase.”

A farmer at heart, pests are also at the forefront of his mind.

He adds: “Snow cover is also good for keeping pests like rabbits down but, coming back to farming, a mild winter means there’s always more rabbits which get through the winter.

“So the weather can be a major factor in farming.”

When it comes to the debate on farming practices in the upper dale, Mr Findlay is in favour of it and believes it is wildlife that has reaped the rewards.

He says: “I am a middle of the road person – it’s no good having extremes in an argument or you will never get anywhere.

“For wildlife, ornithologically and botanically, it is one of the best sites in Britain – there is a necessity that it’s farmed because if you did not farm it the whole thing would collapse.

“The argument could be it’s not always been farmed but over the past three or four centuries the pattern has been ideal – especially for waders and botanical interest.”

A keen photographer, Mr Findlay still chronicles wildlife and snapshots of natural interest in the upper dale.

His formative years teaching at the Plumbton Agricultural College, in Sussex, saw him become something of a trailblazer when it came to understanding the relationship between conservation and farming.

A nature trail he set up there in the late 1960s still welcomes visitors to this day.

“I had the principal of the college on my side and he went along with it,” he adds.

Despite being into his ninth decade, Mr Findlay is not one for putting his feet up.

He still hosts presentations, leads walks and helps the Durham Wildlife Trust whenever he can.

And whatever the weather brings, he marks down the conditions every morning before sending his sheets to the Met Office.

But as we part he has a confession.

“I hate rain,” he adds.

“And I still moan about it.”