Counting orchids is no easy task!

Puxton is home to the beautiful and increasingly uncommon Southern Marsh Orchid. This has a large 50cm-plus flower spike, covered in a mass of deep purple winged flowers.

The Rangers at Wyre Forest district council who manage this wetland have been using this flower to give an indication of the health of the ecosystem for the last 10 years.

At the start of the surveying there were only a couple of orchids despite historic anecdotal evidence suggesting they were present in abundance.

Once the regular cattle grazing was established the number soon began to increase with the peak number reaching the high 30s.

Then in 2007 and 2008 the site was devastated by unseasonal flooding and the following year orchid numbers fell dramatically and by 2012 they had not been seen to fully recover.

Hence it was with some trepidation I set off to carry out this year’s orchid count.

Counting orchids on Puxton is far from easy, and not for the faint-hearted – the vegetation is tall with marsh grasses and horsetails reaching to head height and above.

Hidden amongst this you find the orchids and masses of other flowers, but to get a good look and even to move at all it is necessary to adopt a breaststroke- style swimming stroke with the arms to brush aside the towering growth.

To make progress difficult, hidden in this jungle you can come across fierce nettles but experience has taught me where there are nettles you will not find orchids, so at least I can avoid the worst of these.

Marshes are renowned for having mosquitoes but whilst the site audibly buzzes with the beat of millions of insect wings as you move through there are very few mosquitoes.

One animal you can be assured will always be no more than a metre or so away from you when you’re on the marsh are snakes. They are harmless but some are large and on this year’s orchid count I had a fairly close encounter with a grass snake that must have been 1.5m in length.

This year’s count was quite uplifting with 38 orchids found, the numbers returning to what it was at the best of times before the devastating summer flooding.

Whist this is good news we still have a long way to go. A friend of mine who knew the site from days gone by once said to me we had really achieved something when the site got into the condition whereby we could not be bothered to do an orchid count as there would be just so many.

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