Work party at Old Copse

Another gorgeous day in the wood. Our deer stalkers gave us a  much appreciated helping hand with ongoing tasks. The work party arrived at 8a.m and left 8 hard- working hours later, having cleared and cut up a large  fallen birch; mended the fence it had fallen onto; adjusted the top gate and continued with some challenging holly clearance on a steep slope, followed by a big bonfire. They even had time to make a lovely sturdy bench for the top of the bluebell walk where we can sit and look across the valley to St.Leonard's Forest. Beautiful. Many thanks to Mark and his team.

Mark and team enjoying the sunshine on the ride

Lovely new seat!

The new seat is made

Regeneration following thinning

With the first few days of May bringing the warmest weather of the year, it seemed like a good time to review how the wood has reacted to the winter's big thin.

The bluebells seem to have benefitted from the increased light levels in the thinned pine. While we can't expect them to spread until at least next season, we seem to have more in flower this year, and fewer blind ones. In the tracks where the tractor has been, the bluebells are slowly regenerating in ones and twos, but with the crushing from the machinery we'll have to wait until next year for flowering. Now that a third of the Scots Pine plantation has been removed  the large number of thriving, regenerated and regenerating beech and oak to be seen is surprising,  particularly now  when their leaves are bright green.

Beech seedling in the leaf litter

Protected from deer predation

The rain followed by warm days has brought on a fine crop of seedlings. Rowan seedlings are prolific in the ground layer, but there are also beech, alder and the occasional small oak. In the thinned pines where we find a healthy new seedling in a good situation with space to grow, we are protecting them with our recycled tree tubes. On Sunday we found and protected 14 new trees in this way, and will continue to do this through the Spring. These will all help to increase diversity and aid the transition from PAWS to ASNW. The top photo shows how beech trees thrive once they have escaped from the deer and are out of browsing reach.

At the moment deer damage seems to be less severe than usual. The deer stalkers have only managed to shoot five this season, and one of those was old and diseased. Their target was 12  but even a small amount helps to keep numbers down. Whether it's stalking activity, the felling operation,  or the mild winter which has kept the deer well fed elsewhere, it's an opportunity to see what can regenerate in the ground layer with less deer pressure. For example, bilberry is appearing in several patches on OC2, where previously there was none.

Bilberry

In the willow grove, the pollarded sallows are sprouting. The ground is still very wet, supporting a fine crop of liverworts. New ferns are uncurling.

Liverworts

The ride is drying out. Grass is gradually returning to the surface following the scraping and levelling, but there is some way to go. The photo below shows the contrast between the foreground area which had a small amount of use by machinery and the background where there was heavy traffic. 

On Sunday a pair of marsh tits were spotted near the willow grove, and the cuckoo was heard calling from St Leonard's Forest, back from his 4,000 mile trip to south west Africa. 

Snake!

Spot the disappearing grass snake (clue - follow the dog's nose).

A 4ft long grass snake was basking in the Spring sunshine when spotted by Herbie.  Being a cautious dog, he sniffed carefully at its tail. The snake promptly uncurled and slipped into the safety of the woodpile, showing its fine striped markings as it went.

Spring on the pond

A clear Spring day. A film of green as the new leaves get going. Bluebells pushing up everywhere. On the pond the mallards are pairing up, squabbling to find partners and then retreating upstream for a little privacy. The moorhens are already building nests and quacking at anyone who comes near.

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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Weather

At 8am the sunshine was brilliant, but the forecast wasn't too good,  -  strong  wind, wintry showers, sleet, maybe some snow, perhaps some sun, but as Herbie the dog doesn't mind what the weather's like when a day at the wood is in the offing, and we didn't want to disappoint him, we decided to chance it. Forestry work takes place all through the year, but the winter months tend to be the busiest, especially for felling, so there's no point in  moaning about the weather, or using it as an excuse not to do any work .

As we drove north the skies became ominously dark and soon we were in the middle of a storm of wind blown snow and sleet. It only lasted 10 - 15 minutes, and by the time we arrived at Old Copse the sun was shining again.  That was the pattern of the day, - freezing cold wind, rain and sleet, alternating with brilliant sunshine. But it's great to see the wood in all weathers. You don't see weather in town in such a close up way. Today you could see the weather happening; the heavy showers were announced by darkening skies followed by strong gusts of wind which made the trees, especially the pines, bend alarmingly. Then the rain would come sheeting down.

So today we were right in the middle of the weather, getting tasks done when the rain held off and the sun came out, and then dashing for shelter to the cabin to watch another blast of  gusty rain and wind pass through the wood, while warming up at the stove and drinking tea. An exhilarating day.

We  love a wood burning stove on a cold day

Visitors: We met Martin (bird expert) between showers -  he is contributing to an RSPB  survey of Marsh Tits, Willow Tits and Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers who might (or might not) live in the wood. He had a tape of bird sounds with him, presumably to attract birds in the vicinity, but had to give up on this today because of the noise made by the wind in the trees. He is waiting for the next still, sunny day.

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.