Meeting report
Wishmoor Bottom is the site of a small valley mire in the Barossa nature reserve, just over the Hampshire border, straddling Surrey and Berkshire. It is an MOD site, managed by Surrey Wildlife Trust who invited the BBS Southern Group to visit.
Unfortunately on the day of the visit there had been quite a frost and most of the bog was frozen solid. This made doing justice to the target habitat something of a challenge, but we were able to find nine Sphagnum species, including S.medium which is only the second recent record for Surrey. There were some good patches of the bog liverwort Cephalozia connivens with its large, glistening, bulging cells but there may well have been other species encased in the ice. There had clearly been some recent grazing which had caused some welcome disturbance and opened areas up for the Sphagnum, but much of the site was dominated by bog myrtle and dense tussocks of Molinia.
The other notable habitat consisted of a few patches of wet woodland with the inconspicuous Oxyrrhynchium speciosum spotted by Pete Flood. Of note also were a few small cushions of the epiphyte Dicranum tauricum with its characteristic fragile leaves. This is a species of acid bark that seems to have declined recently, possibly due to the reduction in acid rain, and is not often seen in Hampshire.
