Island 2000 Trust Blog

Sunday dawned bright and blue despite the rotten forecast from the day before and an intrepid band had soon assembled down on Small Hope Beach for the 3rd annual SandmanSnowman event. The great thing about that bit of the Shanklin esplanade is that there are so many people out and about anyway and sure enough we soon had some game passers-by joining in. There were carrots and coal and lashings of hot chocolate, all the necessary ingredients for an excellent day and sure enough wonderful creations soon began to sprout from the sand. Take a look at the Flickr gallery to see them all:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandmansnowman/

Hello everyone and sorry we’ve been a bit slow in greeting the New Year but here we are again. Things are of course pretty tough economically the world over just now and  it’s no different for us. The next 3 months will be pretty tough but we’ll be as busy as ever delivering projects as we restructure ourselves to better fit more straightened times.

We’re just about to begin some major wetland works in the Alverstone Marshes SSSI to continue to manage the exciting progress of drier parts of the site from nettle bed to reed bed. We’ll also be finishing off the winter’s work at Bohemia Bog by scraping off old slumped soil from what might be a good bit of the original bog just beneath. Even now in the dead of winter there are bits of that amazing bog flora visible. Here you can see the red of sundews showing through. Of course 2009 is the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and there will be celebrations and events the world over. Interestingly Darwin worked on a study of insectivorous plants including sundews (there is a story that some of his samples may even have come from the Island but it seems more likely that he used the New Forest) and we’ll be marking this with special walks at Bohemia later in the year.

Thank you to the ‘little angels’ at east Cowes Primary School who have made this fabulous Christmas Tree for the hoardings in East Cowes.

Here’s hoping you have a thoroughly amazing Christmas.

Don’t forget to tune in again next year.

Now that the autumn leaves are all but gone these striking growths have become very obvious in birch trees around the Island. They can look a lot like birds’ nests and a large birch can support over 100 of them. But they are in truth the result of a fungal infection.  The fungus is called Taphrina betulina (sounds like a Russian ballerina) and does a clever thing - it stimulates the tree to produce a mass of new growth (twigs and leaves) from the point of infection and then proceeds to feed on that larder. Surprisingly this  does little harm to the tree and strictly speaking this makes Witches’ Broom a gall, defined as an abnormal growth prompted by parasitic attack. The colloquial name for the gall originates in the belief that they were a sure sign of a witch having passed over.  Bearing in mind just how many of these things there are out there the Island sky must be fairly buzzing with commuting witches; now was that a crow flapping raggedly overhead just now or……..?

We are currently in the throws of a fairly extensive modification of the Gift to Nature website ready for 2009.  Please bear with us if anything on the site is not quite right over the next few weeks.  Everything should be in order by the end of December.

Don’t forget to come along to the fabulous WoodWarming expo at Newport Football Club tomorrow and saturday. There’ll be everything you need to know about switching to wood fuel: boilers, stoves, chips and pellets and all the other bits and pieces. There will be experts and suppliers from the Island and the mainland ready to answer all of your questions.  See you there!

I’ve been playing at the wordle website.  This is a word cloud generated by wordle from the latest Gift to Nature posts.  Click on the image for a bigger version.

Ooh everyone loves a good trip to the tip, don’t they?  that lovely smug feeling from de-cluttering your life and disposing of your unwanted goods in the proper manner, preferably with a hefty dollop of recycling thrown in.  So staff at Island 2000 were privileged to be given a deluxe tour of both the recycling plant on Forest Road and the landfill site at Lynbottom recently.

Island Waste’s Community Liaison Officer, Lynn Clarke took a group of us around the site to see first hand all the new recycling technology and the gasification chambers, which sound slightly sinister, but when working at full capacity they will produce enough energy to power approx 3,000 homes, simply by burning un-recyclable rubbish and selling the resulting energy to the National Grid.

We were surprised to discover just how much of our domestic rubbish is recycled on the Island.  Although newspapers, magazines, food waste and glass is collected at kerbside, the remainder of recycleable material is extracted at the plant.

Look at this pile of bales of squashed aluminium cans - can you see the face that Island Waste staff have created in the pile in a light-hearted moment?

Only material that cannot be recycled or used to make fuel for gasification is sent on to the landfill site at Lynbottom.  As well as the landfill facility, the Lynbottom site collects garden waste which is turned into high quality garden compost and sold locally.  Kitchen food waste is also collected here and is broken down into a low grade compost material which is used to cover the landfill area at the end of each day.

We also took a quick peep at the birds of prey that are brought onto the site every day and flown to deter seagulls and other vermin from the area.  After having seen all the excellent recycling and waste reduction techniques on the site, it was still pretty daunting to see the vast landfill area in use at Lynbottom.  The current space available in this landfill is due to last until 2015, and Lynn reckons they’ll just about manage it, but what happens after that is anyone’s guess, particularly as Island Waste’s contract ends in 2015.

The message is pretty clear - whatever you throw away will be dealt with responsibly and effectively by Island Waste, who will do their utmost to minimise what goes into landfill, but we also have to do our bit in managing our waste, both in our bins and what we take up to the tip.

We have now added the fantastic Snorkelling on the Isle of Wight to the Gift to Nature Shop.

The guide is great for beginners or more experienced snorkellers or simple for a more involved rookpooling experience.   It combines great tips on where to go with quality photographs of some of the species you are likely to spot.  Best of all it’s 100% waterproof, so you don’t have to worry about dropping it in the sea!  You can buy it online or drop into any Isle of Wight Tourist Information Centre.

You too could look like this!