Monday 21 November 2011

Autumn glories



A big job this week was to start working around the shore of Derwentwater doing litter picking.  Of course litter picking is a regular feature of our year but now that the vegetation is dying back we can see the stuff that has been hidden for some time.  Once again I had a great group of volunteers working with me.  We know that we have many more unsung volunteers.  Huge numbers of dog-walkers routinely take a carrier bag and collect litter.  Most fell-walkers will bring down any litter they come across.  Taking a bag when we go out is something we can all do easily and keeping the area tidy discourages careless littering from others.  We can all compensate for that day when the gale blew the wrapper out of our hand and whisked it beyond reach!



Some of the rewards for litter-picking in our area are to be seen in the following pictures – morning mist on the lake and a skein of geese being just two of them.  On sunny days the place is a blaze of colour from the copper of the bracken to the reds of the rowan and holly berries.   Keats nailed it when he wrote about the "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness'!






We were hoping to see otters because we now have a healthy population of them in Borrowdale.  They have been breeding in the valley for the last ten years.  I have seen and heard them a number of times and one of our recruiters has also frequently seen them from the Kettlewell car park between 10 and 11 am.  No luck this time but we’ll get lucky one day.

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