Searching for Exmoor Ponies in Scotland
Plus white storks and chequered skipper butterflies are back! And how to talk to kids about climate change.
Hello there lovely person, I’m Vicky Wren and I run Wren and the Wild. Britain is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world so I use illustration, film, photos and words to enjoy, explore and encourage the protection and rewilding of our wonderful British Isles. Subscribe for free to enjoy monthly newsletters and in between posts from Edinburgh and the land and water beyond. You can also find me on YouTube, Instagram and my digital nature connection printables are over on Etsy.
Wild Wanderings
Last Sunday a friend and I went to spy some rare Exmoor ponies who live on Traprain Law in East Lothian. This hill, or law in Scots, is a laccolith - a mass of igneous rock sticking up in the middle of fairly flat surroundings that came into being around 320 million years ago.
The information board beside the little car park at the base of the hill describes the flora and fauna we might be able to see on this Site of Specific Scientific Interest (SSSI). Besides the ponies, the wildlife includes skylarks, wheatears, meadow pipits and speckled wood butterflies as well as gorse, wild thyme and the pretty yellow flowers of tormentil. The Law also has a deeply rich human history and is one of the most important archaeological sites in the whole of Scotland - it can even boast about housing the largest hoard of Roman ‘hacksilver’ ever to have been discovered! (You can see the hoard on display in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.)
After having a little read about the Law, we made our way up the north side in what became quite a steep climb but it wasn't too long before we reached the top and spotted the trig point, a drystone wind shelter and a large pond in a rock basin! The wind whipped around us but the early March sun and the pretty views over to North Berwick, the Firth of Forth and the North Sea made up for any chilliness that ensued. On our way down the west side of the hill we spotted a couple of birds flying low to the ground but they were too quick for us to identify them. As we cut around the base of the south side, the wind dropped and for a while, especially as we made our way through the glorious yellow of the gorse bushes, it felt more like May than March.
We passed climbers making their way up the rocky crags of the Law, dodging horse poop as we went and then before we knew it there they were - the beautiful Exmoor Ponies of Traprain Law! We spotted around ten of them uphill, calmly chewing on scrubby grass and shrubs. The ponies being able to graze on these tougher specimens means that it creates space for more delicate plants to grow such as wild flowers. These expert conservation grazers are managed by The Moorland Mousie Trust in cooperation with the East Lothian Conservation Department of the East Lothian Council and you can read more about these wonderful creatures and how they’ve improved the biodiversity of the Law here and here.
Wild Watch
This is possibly one of the best wild watches suggestions I’ve ever made! The Knepp Estate in Sussex has reintroduced white storks onto their land and two of them - Bartek and Ania, both from Poland, have been a bonded pair from 2020 and you can watch them live in their nest right here. When I first watched them the other week, one of the storks pooped right towards the camera and while I watched them today I was lucky enough to see them both bill clattering! You can hear that amazing noise here on the British Trust for Ornithology page about the white stork.
White storks are native to Britain and there is even a documented record of them nesting on St. Giles cathedral here in Edinburgh in 1416! However that was the last record of nesting storks in Britain - through persecution and habitat loss, they declined until all we had left was around 20 or so birds who migrated to the south of England from the continent every year. In 2016 The White Stork Project began reintroducing white storks into Knepp and last year the live stream web cam was set up which filmed characterful Bartek and Ania laying four eggs from March 9th and by April 16th all four chicks had successfully hatched and then had fledged the nest by the end of June. So let’s keep an eye out and our fingers crossed for more precious white stork eggs in the coming days!
Wild Wares
Greenpeace have published a short guide on how to talk to your kids about climate change written by Caroline Hickman - a professional therapist working with children and young people experiencing eco-anxiety. I don’t have any children of my own but I do have four nephews, two nieces, one goddaughter, one godson and many kids of friends who call me Aunty Vicky and I feel like this guide will help me feel able to talk to them about climate change if they feel anxious about it.
‘…feeling anxious about climate change is a mentally healthy response to the problem. Reframe eco-anxiety as a positive feeling.’
As someone who has deep eco-anxiety, I feel like this guide has helped me as a grown adult as well!
You can access the guide here and on their website Greenpeace have an excellent range of visual guides which will help children understand the problems our planet faces and what they can do to help. You can also request for a Greenpeace speaker to run a workshop at your child’s school here.
Wild Win
The chequered skipper butterfly went extinct on our shores in 1976. Woodland management has been blamed for their demise, in particular, a rise in conifer plantations and a decline in coppicing and maintaining long narrow tracks. However, in the December just gone, a reintroduction project of the chequered skipper butterfly to Fineshade Wood in Northamptonshire, was announced as a great success!
A group of 128 butterflies were initially introduced from Belgium in 2018 by the Butterfly Conservation charity in partnership with Back from the Brink. Together they worked towards the reintroduction and the woodland management projects needed to create ideal habitats for the butterflies to arrive into, including widening of 7.2 km of flowering woodland tracks (known as rides). They have now counted more than 350 chequered butterflies and the range of land they live in has increased.
In a statement from a BBC article, the charity’s chief scientist Dr Nigel Bourn, said that:
“This project shows us that restoring wildlife is possible, but only if we put in dedicated and sustained effort to tackle the reasons the species went extinct in the first place.”
If you want to support the incredible work of the Butterfly Conservation charity, you can donate here. A colouring in sheet I created of reintroduced British animals features the chequered skipper butterfly (see above) and is available in my Etsy shop as a digital download here.
With love and wild hope,
