The Jackdaws Ate My Trees

One of the delights of travelling is the little gems you pick up on the way. While I was off helping with what I am calling the Deer Project, I was able to buy some home crafted cheese from the Mull of Kintyre (Cue The Music). It is one of the things that delights me is finding gems of food suppliers like this, and the cheese is gorgeous.

On the subject of food, while I do enjoy cooking, it is something that I have been neglecting for many months now, partly because I have been so busy. However much of what I have been doing has been sorting out everyone else's problems. When I got back from my expedition, I had a mass of messages and emails to plough through. Yet the one common factor was that while they were all vital at the time, because I was not available, they had to find their own solutions. While it may seem tough, I am no longer willing to be at everyone's beck and call. While it is in my personality to try and be helpful, I have had the feeling for a long time that many of the people were in fact just using my willingness to try and help as a way of them not doing what they didn't want to do.

So since getting back I have been having some quiet time and doing some proper cooking. I am loving rediscovering the pleasures of taking time to cook fresh meals. For months I have been cooking meals just to put them in the freezer as I knew that I would be pressed for time here or there.

It has been like getting control back of my life. So often it has been I/We need you here, not can you help, or is it convenient. Having this extra time also enabled me the opportunity to go out and check on the badger setts. What was noticeable was that none of the females (sows) were out at all only the Brock's. That's a clear indication that there will soon be the patter of tiny paws.

One thing that occurred while I was away that has disappointed me, was all the trees seeds that I sowed in the autumn have gone. When the snows came recently, I spotted the Jackdaws taking an interest, and they did take some then. I have been doing my best to stop them as once they realised that each pot contained a beech nut or acorn or whatever, that was it, they were probing every pot. Don't tell me that birds are bird brained, they are clever. If I do it next year I think that I will need netting.

The First Snow of the Year

Today I need to apologise to the whole country, yesterday (by the time I post this) we had the first substantial snow this winter. The reason I need to apologise is when talking to a friend over in Maine who had just had a foot of snow, I told her to send some over here. Well it looks as though she did just that.

It was a strange coincidence but last night after getting the woman I spoke of yesterday to read and approve the posting; I went to the Pub for a couple of pints of Irish. As I was walking to the pub it started snowing a bit, but it was more like hailstones. Anyway as one has to, I stepped outside to act as a leper, and while I puffed away, I was told that, with authority, it was to cold for snow. Well the white stuff must be dandruff, memo to self, must get some shampoo! I didn’t want to get into an argument over the point, but I think that when everyone is saying its going to snow, then snow it will.

I did want to get out and take some pictures, but I had a meeting in the morning and I had to do some food shopping in the afternoon, maybe tomorrow.

While it does look picturesque, it does have an impact upon the wildlife. Some will suffer like the robins I reported on recently. And the snow cover will make it more difficult for birds to find food, that’s why I have been feeding the birds since I moved in here. But the snow can also help; small mammals like voles and mice can become insulated from the cold by a blanket of snow. Additionally many tree and shrub seeds need a period of cold the trigger germination in the spring.

Lastly, a reasonable period of cold will help kill off the insects like midges that have brought diseases like Blue Tongue to the UK this year.

One of the difficulties with snow is the way that people drive. I realise that most people don’t experience snow that frequently, that fact should make people more cautious, but they seem to drive with wild abandon. While on the bus I saw several drivers who were on the verge of loosing control of their vehicles. Even as the bus travelled up the hills to Consett, I saw more than ten incidents were a car was driving to fast for the conditions and where the car lost traction and was sliding. Later when I went to the greengrocer in the village, I heard that effectively the village was blocked by accidents at both ends of the village. The main road through the village was just a sheet of ice, yet people were determined to drive on it and were slipping and sliding all over the place. As I walked back home, I advised the driver of each vehicle of the problems and most realised that it was wiser to safely park up and walk rather than trying to slide up the hill home.

I realise that most people need (or think they need) their cars for work. But today the common sense thing to have done was use public transport, but in my experience sense is not common.

Golden Larch

I just thought I would share this image of the Larches in Chopwell Wood. Often in the UK when people think of conifers they think of evergreen trees, but the larches needles turn gold and they shed them, as has now happened days after this picture was taken in the high winds here.
While they look attractive they don’t support much in the way of wildlife, not in this wood anyway, as they are an introduction to this habitat.

Many hands make light work

Today for me every thing has turned full circle. Last year I went out and helped collect some of the acorns from the wood. I rather rashly agreed to look after them in the back yard of my house. And in spite of hoards of ravenous corvidae a good number survived.

It was in fact the third activity I had carried out with the Friends of Chopwell Wood, and it makes me realise just what a remarkable year it has been for me. Last year I would never have expected to be elected to a committee position nor to have re-found my link with the natural world, all this because of a small wood that happens to be right on my doorstep.

Today quite literally I was able to give something back to that wood, in the form of baby oak trees. Fortunately I was not alone as we had a good number of volunteers arrived from Newcastle University Conservation club. The majority were planted and those that were not can be planted as two-year-old trees next year.

It was remarkable that the place chosen for the planting was clear felled about eight years ago, but remarkably it is regenerating quite well anyway and with oak too. That actually made it quite challenging to find the space to plant our seedlings the four to five metres apart we were aiming for. But I must say that the volunteers did a fantastic job and at least two thirds of the trees were planted and we did it without loosing a single volunteer. What is even more remarkable is that they want to come back.

So from the Mouse in the Wood;

Three cheers for Newcastle University Conservation Club.

To Intervene or not to Intervene that is the question…

The anonymous person that made the comment that they feel that in conservation they would like to see a landscape untouched raises an important point. I too would prefer that the land is not touched unnecessarily. However, in the UK there is not a single part of our country that does not show the hand of man upon it. Therefore, ironically to get back to a natural landscape we actually need to intervene and manage the regeneration.

Chopwell Wood is a tiny remnant of ancient woodland; we are in fact one acre short of a thousand acres now, when the original wood was over one million acres. Now there is no way that I can see, that we could even think of expanding the wood beyond its current boundaries. Therefore we need to manage the wood very carefully so we keep what’s good, and improve the rest. We could just rely upon natural regeneration, and allow the sun lovers such as Beach, Birch, fir Pine and Spruce to grow from the latent seed bank. That’s the dormant seeds in the soil already, and if we had even a quarter of the land the old wood used to occupy then that would be the right way to move forward. However, we have only less than one percent of the land occupied by the ancient woodland and if we let nature take its course we risk loosing the gene pool from the ancient trees long before the forest has the chance to regenerate.

In recent history, the last hundred years, the wood has constantly been devastated as wood and timber was harvested to supply the war machine of the two world wars. Going back even further, the wood was destroyed by Charles the first to build his flagship, so warfare has been the greatest environmental devastator of our woods here than anything else.

It is on the steep and inaccessible valley sides that retain the remnants of the ancient woodland. People tell me that the Oaks there are about three hundred years old, but as many of the trees are rooted into the stones of a cliff face, the standard measure of age based upon girth and height are inaccurate and some of these trees could be five or even six hundred years old. And that’s using data from Kew gardens.

Further, because in the North East of England we are loosing our ancient woodland, if we did not intervening positively, we could loose what little we do have. Additionally if we just allowed natural regeneration the small population of endangered or threatened species that we already have in the wood, would be at risk of dying out before we had recreated the habitat for them.

Any landscape management is and has to be a long-term project, even more so when we are dealing with woodlands, as a truly healthy wood requires various stages of decay and re-growth. Therefore, keeping dead wood is vital. Often the greatest difficulty is overcoming ignorance of what constitutes a healthy landscape. Some people want to see the countryside as a nice and tidy place just like a garden. But as anyone who gardens with wildlife in mind will tell you there needs to be some mess; those piles of logs, the nettle patch etc.

Add into that equation the need to ensure that the paths, tracks and bridal ways are safe from falling dead branches, and the balance becomes even more delicate.

While I know that some people don’t like other people using our woodland, it is only people that will protect it in the end. Therefore, while all this regeneration work is being done for the wildlife, ultimately it is for the benefit of all the people who use the woods.

The landscape is a living, breathing place, and just as a rotten apple needs to be removed from a bushel, we need to tend the forest to maintain its health.

Taking the Trees for a Walk

Your friendly neighbourhood Wood Mouse will be appearing in the local paper soon. The reason for this is my obsessive-compulsive behaviour of growing Oak Trees.

It all started when I was first out walking in the wood and I first encountered the ranger. She told me that the forest had a friends group and they carried out practical work in the wood. So I decided I would become an acquaintance of the Friends of Chopwell Wood.

Well you know how these things can escalate; I was foolish enough to offer to plant up the acorns that were gathered during last year’s tree seed collections. If only I had realised that there were nearly six hundred of them. I then had to go out, on the scrounge, to garner enough pots together to put them in. Fortunately the local community helped and soon I had all the pots I needed.

It was not easy, as I had to fight off all manner of birds, mainly the jackdaws but also the odd Jay and several magpies as they were constantly trying to eat their future perches. Eventually in the spring my compulsive, others would say eccentric, behaviour paid off and about two hundred and fifty baby oaks emerged.

It was as a result of doing this that this morning I had to take some of the trees back into the wood so that the Press Officer from the Forestry Commission could take some pictures of me with these trees. Now while I know that some people love performing in front of the camera, I don’t relish it, as I am very much like an oil painting, an old master in fact, cracked and flaking! However I did my duty, I don’t know how the images came out, as I haven’t seen them, but I felt a complete idiot standing there holding pots of trees in contrived poses. Even the Dog walkers were laughing at me, I think even the dogs were too.

Well there was I thinking that this is just for the staff magazine or some obscure place where no one would see them, like my Blog, then I get a call from the biggest paper in the region and it’s the environment editor, and before I know it, I will be in the local paper.

Well at least it will not be saying “Don’t Approach this Mouse” I just wish that the Ranger had not beguiled me when I first met her. It’s all her fault really.

All joking aside there is a serious point to all this, as these trees will be planted so that we can regenerate the ancient wood here in Chopwell. In doing so we can directly aid over one hundred species that are on the UK at risk list of flora and fauna. The reason for the publicity is so that we can encourage other people to become actively involved in collecting seed, helping to plant the trees and do their little bit.

As it was such a great morning it was worth, well almost, the humiliation of having my visage captured on film.

I got my own back by snapping this picture of the photographer!

Understanding Conservation

Conservation is a complex subject area, as often the question is, what is it we are conserving? As the landscape in the UK is all the result of human intervention, we are often conserving something that is a human construct anyway. Therefore a better question should be what is the purpose or effect of this conservation work. Only by understanding what the desired end result should be, does the purpose of the work undertaken in the name of conservation, start to make sense.

Far too often people assume that doing nothing and leaving an area of land alone and letting whatever are the strongest plants grow, is all you need to do. However, because we have been impacting upon the land for so many centuries, we can’t just leave an area of land to just go wild.

In previous generations, and we only need to go back three or four generations, it was the land management for agriculture that provided the UK with its rich, varied and colourful tapestry that is the British countryside. With the advent of industrial farming in the last sixty years, there was a dramatic effect upon the landscape. Traditional farming had helped support the diversity of habitats and hence the wildlife that lived within these diverse landscapes. With these changes to land use, the impact upon the populations of many species was devastating. I can sit and read books about the countryside written in or from the firsts half of the twentieth century and see just how much we have lost.

Therefore the challenge for conservation is to carry out work that provides the correct condition for many endangered species to live. However, this does present a difficulty as often this can and does mean destroying another form of habitat.

This dilemma was perfectly illustrated in the Conservation task that this mouse was involved in on Tuesday. Along side one of the burns (a stream) in the area, is a ride of thickly growing trees. These are mainly pioneer species like Silver Birch, Rowan (Mountain Ash), Elder and the dreaded sycamore. But there were also plenty of Oak, small leaved Lime and Ash as well. The ride was being opened up so that butterflies would benefit from the open glades that will be created alongside what will become a bridal way. Dealing with the sycamore is not a problem, it is prolific and invasive, it shades out other trees and if allowed to would take over. The Silver Birch while a beautiful tree, is one of the pioneer species that establishes its self very quickly, but would eventually die off naturally as more longer-lived mature trees of oak took over. But here they are trying to take advantage of the open glades and needed to be reduced in number. The Elder, while it to would eventually die off if this were full woodland, needed to be removed totally. They will return but in their present numbers they would have prevented the insects, butterflies and moths from re-establishing themselves. And while it will cause a small impact upon food for small birds in the short term, in the long term the greater the moth and butterfly populations the more food there will be for the birds, especially at breeding time.

The difficulty starts to occur when dealing with the Rowan and the Ash. They are useful trees as well as being beautiful, but while there were many young trees there, they mainly were growing in the areas of the glades. That meant they had to be removed. It is never an easy decision to cut down a tree, but it was only happening because of the long-term goal of creating areas where insects, moths and butterflies could live and breed.

The wood from these trees was deliberately left so that insects like beetles could bore into the cords, as well as providing hibernation sites for all manner of animals.

What made the work so poignant though was the fact that while working I received a call about growing trees and replanting work that will be happening in my normal stamping ground of Chopwell Wood. The difficulty is getting people to understand that sometimes to preserve a habitat sometimes we have to destroy what’s already there.

The Curse of the Mobile Telephone

Have you ever had one of those moments when you are thinking of something and it appears that others are thinking the same thing? Yesterday, that’s exactly what happened. While I had been busy in the morning, I wanted to get out into the wood with the specific aim of collecting tree seeds. As our wood is an ancient woodland site, it is going to be replanted over the coming half century with native broadleaf trees, and this will come from seeds collected locally. It is important that they are local as if we planted Hawthorn from seeds gathered from the south, they would flower at a slightly different time and hence not have the same benefit for the environment and wildlife as would the local genetic stock.

So there was I getting myself together to head out when the Forestry Commission Ranger telephoned me, she had passed on my details to the FC Press Officer and he would be giving me a call. This is because from the last acorn gathering, I ended up fostering about Two hundred and Fifty Oak seedlings. There would have been a lot more but I had to defend them from Jackdaws, Crows, Magpies, and even a Jay or two, so the numbers diminished as the birds ate their future perches. The FC press officer wants to do a picture of the trees and me, all rather contrived but I agreed to this. Not because I am looking for some kind of self-aggrandisement, but because I feel that it is vital that we do plant trees and if by loosing some degree of anonymity I help encourage others to help or take the initiative and do the same, it will be worth doing so. It is also why in part, I keep this on line journal, I hate the word Blog, as it may inspire others to do their bit for the environment.

However, when the call came through from the Forestry Commission Press Officer, I was already in the wood and I had just sighted the fox in the picture. It had shown no indication of having seen me, until the cellular phone rang. I snatched a couple of pictures none that sharp. After cursing the contraption I called back and had a chat with this chap.

I hope that I will see this dog fox again, and that I will not have had need to carry the phone with me. But at least I can say that I had another encounter with the wildlife that inhabits my countryside.

Copper Beech

Here in Chopwell Wood we have along one of the rides an avenue of Copper Beech trees and while they look great at any time of year, in autumn they are spectacular.

Preparing for a transformation

Here in my local wood we are on the brink of a new era. As the wood is a plantation that sits on the site of an ancient wood, it has been decided that it will be replanted with the native hardwood trees that would have been part of its natural mixture long before it was used as a plantation. Thus I find myself in the luck position of being around to see this happen. Or at least the start of it happening as it will continue long after I have departed.

What makes me so pleased is that if we, the Friends of Chopwell Wood and the Forestry Commission get the management right, we will be regenerating a habitat that has been in rapid decline for years. Therefore we will be helping in preserving many rare and endangered species for future generations.

At the moment I am busy trying to collect seeds from the trees that we will need to grow on and plant in future years. My back yard already looks like a mini forest with hundreds of Oak seedlings in there. I expect that while these will be planted in November, watch this space for details, and there will be a new mini forest in my back yard for years to come.

In the picture you can see the trees marked with coloured dots are the trees that are to be thinned.