Signs of Spring at Old Copse

On a beautiful early Spring day we did a very rare thing, for us anyway, of not getting stuck into work immediately, but instead, just strolling round the wood to see what was emerging.  We checked out the wild daffodils at the south end and found about a dozen clumps, few flowers as yet, but they appear to be spreading slowly despite being in a dry and fairly shady area. Earlier in the day we had visited Newstead Ghyll, further up the road from Old Copse, where there are a great many wild daffodils growing in a damp, open clearing next to the stream.

For an expert's  view on wild daffodils,and other woodland flora, visit ecologist and botanist Alan Waterman's blog

Only a few clumps of wild daffodils at Old Copse

Though they can be found in abundance not far away

The wood remains very wet after months of rain - the annual flooding is receding  but water glistens and rushes everywhere.

We were hoping to find  a few wood anenomes and primroses but found none, except a few patches of primroses near the south gate, although they grow not far away in St.Leonard's Forest. Bluebells are forcing their way up through the mud and honeysuckle, mosses, ferns, Lords and Ladies have started to come up as well.

Also seen; the first bumblebee of the year; and seen regularly by a fisherman on the pond, two kingfishers, one who lives down at the South end of the Pond, and the other at the North end. It seems that fishing rods provide an excellent perch for these birds to keep an eye out for minnows,  so here's a library picture (unfortunately not taken on our pond).

We've had some success with propagating hazel
through cuttings, so today some more were cut , to be potted up and planted out in the autumn when they've rooted. A  holly, blackthorn and hazel hedge is planned near the new enlarged entrance, with more hazel planted along the bluebell ride through the birch.


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Spot the Grebe - it can just be seen hiding in the reeds over on the Hammerpond

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Why do large branches drop off beech trees .

One of our largest beech trees,  probably the largest in Old Copse, with a girth of 6 metres (19ft 8ins) measured at a height of 1.5 metres, recently dropped an enormous limb, 25 metres (82 feet) long. Lucky we weren't around when it happened.  We wondered why the limb had broken off when it did and  initially thought that it might have been caused by recent strong winds, but reading up on the subject, found that wind is highly unlikely to have caused the limb  to part company with the tree. In the case of this particular beech, it might  have been due to a weakness at the point where the branch joined the trunk, where fungus, evidence of rot, can be seen. Another beech, younger and smaller than our giant, and about 4 metres away, also dropped a limb, though there was no sign of rot.

Below is a blog post (Ashley Peace mail@treeblog.co.uk) on the subject of why beech trees make a habit of losing their branches. The  ancient beech tree in the photo is near Burwash in East Sussex. It is surprisingly, smaller than 'our' beech, which undoubtedley is younger than the Burwash tree, which is estimated at being from 200 - 250 years old. It certainly looks a lot older, and very gnarled. I expect, though,  that trees, like people, shrink a bit as they become aged. 

  

'The beech in the above photo is near Burwash, East Sussex. It displays clearly how the beech can drop its branches if need be. This one is in clay soil, on a steep-ish slope, about thirty metres above a tiny brook. The Woodland Trust guessed it must be between 200 and 250 years old. It is 220 inches in girth at 5 feet.

 So, why would a tree want to lose its branches? It might seem like a ridiculous thing to do, considering the time and effort invested in growing them. Yet many biotic and abiotic stresses (e.g. water  shortage or disease) may cause a tree to shed branches. However, given the size of this specimen, it is likely that simple old age is the causal factor - senescence. I believe the following article describes the whys and wherefores of geriatric branch shedding particularly well. I will reproduce it here in its entirety, The author is Peter Thomas (a lecturer in environmental science at Keele University (UK)), and the article originally appeared in the May 2002 edition of Natural History magazine.' (Ashley Peace)

To live long, a tree must stay small. 

Old age is not the problem for plants that it is for animals. Being modular, plants can grow new limbs when old ones die off. More crucial to the longevity of a tree is its size. A tree reaches a stage when it cannot get taller, owing mainly to the difficulties of bringing water up from the roots, and when its side branches cannot grow longer, because they are too expensive to support. So the number of leaves a tree holds becomes more or less fixed, and this means that the tree's ability to produce food--the sugar made in leaves by photosynthesis--also levels off. 

Yet each year the tree adds a new layer of wood under the bark, and the amount of wood needed to coat the whole tree increases, just as, in a set of Russian dolls, each new doll on the outside has to be bigger. As the tree grows, the amount of food needed for running it rises. The tree resembles a bank account whose income (sugary food) is fixed but whose outgo (respiration and new wood) keeps mounting. The tree compensates for a time by producing narrower and narrower rings, but there comes a point when a ring cannot get any narrower. Something has to give, usually the water-deprived top most branches. The result is a stag-headed tree, so named for the antlerlike dead branches sticking out of the top. A downward spiral begins: the loss of branches means fewer leaves, and fewer leaves means less new wood. 

But many trees can slow the process. Some have buds in the trunk that sprout new branches. These may hold enough leaves to make up for those lost higher up, so the tree can keep the leaf area constant while cutting out the expensive-to-maintain upper trunk and its big branches. 

Although these new trunk branches are fairly short-lived (a hundred years in oak, sixty years in hornbeam and beech, and less in birch and willow), an oak with plentiful trunk buds can stave off death for centuries. As the old saying goes: "Oak takes 300 years to grow, 300 years it stays, 300 years it takes to decline." Perhaps we should think of a stag-headed oak as merely entering middle age and, like many humans, just going a little bald on top. 

A tree has no fixed life span. To live long, it must stay small. One way to do this is to grow slowly. Bristlecone pines are the supreme example: they live on poor soil in a dry, cold environment with a short growing season. One bristlecone in the American Southwest has been documented at three feet tall, less than three inches in diameter, and 700 years old! The other way to stay small and live long is, paradoxically, to be cut down repeatedly. (This strategy, of course, will work only for trees capable of regrowing when cut.) The ash Fraxinus excelsior normally lives for 250 years, yet Suffolk, England, hosts a coppiced ash with a stump almost seventeen feet in diameter. It is at least a thousand years old. 

A tree's bank balance is also influenced by savings in the form of food reserves. As a tree gets bigger, however, it has less food left over. At the same time, the larder--the sapwood--gets smaller. Eventually, infections penetrate inner structures, and storage capacity is lost behind a barrier zone, a layer of new cells produced in the inner bark to seal off infected wood. The living part of the tree is walled into a thinner and thinner space under the bark. Part of the tree dies. New branches on the trunk can still save its life, but a large old tree is not good at producing new shoots, perhaps because it is running out of stored buds or because they are trapped behind thick bark. New sprouts on weak trees often die just when people think the tree is going to live. This may be because the barrier zone is missing or because there are too few reserves left for the tree to grow a strip of tissue from the new branch down to the roots. Either way, disease easily overtakes the tree, and the branch withers away. At this point, the tired old tree bows out gracefully. 

                                                     

Seen in the Wood Today: On the pond we were pleased to have a visit from a Grebe, a welcome sign of Spring. We don't know if  he/she? is new to the pond, or just visiting from the Hammerpond nearby. A pair of Grebes live in the reeds over on the Hammerpond, but we don't know how successful they've been in raising a brood. 

A few avian visitors

Yesterday (16th) was what felt like the first warm day for a week. Short working visit to the wood produced a clear view of the kingfisher zipping along the stream in the north of OC2, a sighting of the male grebe on the  pond, a greater spotted woodpecker close by the gate in OC1 and a pair of jays. Lots of tawny owl activity heard from 3.30 onwards but no sightings. Cuckoo not heard this time but according to Sussex Ornithological Society has been spotted several time on the 14th green of the golf course. 

Local experts

To the wood today to meet Matthew Hutchings, local mushroom expert and author of local fungii identification website - www.mushrooms.org.uk. Although June is far from being the mushroom season, we looked at the different woodland types - the alderwood, the pines, the birch wood and discussed the what mushrooms are likely to be found in each area.The bay boletes favour the birchwood, and to a lesser extent the pine. Ceps are more likely to be found in areas of  mixed birch and beech woodland - which explain why the richest hunting areas for these is in the most diverse areas of our wood. Oyster mushrooms are found on old beech, often on old beech limbs which have dropped from the tree. These may well grow a crop of oyster mushrooms a year later as they decompose. Chicken-in-the-woods (Laetiporus Sulphureus)  is a bracket fungus found on mature oak, beech and cherry (must check out the cherry in next door's wood).

Then went in search of the grebes and the mandarin ducks to see how they were getting on after the heavy rains and high water of a couple of weeks ago. The female mandarin has been spotted, but the other four have not been seen. According to the fishermen the grebes' nest was washed away, but both grebes are still around and the female seems to be carrying something on her back - so maybe one chick survived. I met a fisherman who explained why the mandarins were unpopular with anglers. Smarter than mallards, mandarins have learned to recognise the sound of bait going into the water, and will immediately hurry over and dive for the bait when they hear the swish of the rods. To the fishermen's dismay, when mallards see the mandarins fishing for bait, they too have a go. Mallards are more buoyant than mandarins, and have to wet their feathers to try and stay under water long enough to grab the bait before it sinks out of reach.

July

 We ignored the prolonged bad weather of winter 2010/11 and created a new ride to give views of the pond. It will do for the time being but needs to be widened. Some of the spindly  birch has been cleared around the sallow to create better conditions for this to thrive in the planned ' willow grove'. There's some regeneration along the ride edge and in the birch clearing, though  regrowth might have  been eaten by deer. There's some improvement along the road edge and at the sunnier end of the ride as a result of  our determined bracken control .

 The kingfisher didn't  appear again after the winter, and although a single great crested grebe was seen earlier in the year, there has been no breeding this summer.  No sign of the white admiral butterfly either. It is not clear if this is because they have been absent, or just been missed. Perhaps  rideside clearing has destroyed some  honeysuckle they use as a foodplant, although there is  still plenty of it growing  in shady locations next to the ride edges.

Sightings: A  group  of newly fledged birds including most of the tits,  young nuthatch, (with much duller plumage than their colourful parents) , and a family of treecreepers. Blackcap and chiffchaff were singing in the wood, rather surprising ,   as the wood lacks the shrubby growth they prefer.
A  grass snake on the ride,  sidling away rapidly up the bank . A short distance further on,  the loud  screeching of jays, which continued for some time before  3 emerged from the pines in pursuit of a tawny owl, whom they had disturbed from its roost.  Over the willow grove,  a small bank vole emerged from the scrub to explore nearby  logs  holding  a piece of bread in his paws.  A Roe deer, an unusual sight at Old Copse, and redder and springier than  the Fallow deer we see all the time.