Completion Day

Posted by Tanos on Mon 10 Mar 08, 6:53 PM

I completed the purchase of Bridgewood today, so the first part of my next trip will be putting a new padlock on the gate. It also means I can start cutting out the woodland tracks ("rides") which I roughed out using last time's survey.

Part of the non-BDSM part of the management plan is to create more varied habitats in the wood to encourage more wildlife and more plant/tree species. Since all the woodlands in England have been managed by man to some extent, it's not possible to preserve "natural" woodlands because we don't have any left.

There's no agreement about what "natural" English woodlands should look like for a start. For instance, take sycamores. They do very well here and I've got a few which were probably the result of "natural regeneration": that is, without human intervention. But sycamores aren't counted as native species, since they were introduced in the 17th century (or maybe by the Romans.) You can even get Forestry Commission grants to replace them with native species in some cases. But Britain has been progressively recolonised by trees after the end of the treeless Ice Age glaciation, so would we have had sycamores eventually anyway - "naturally"?

So it's hard to find a "natural" woodland environment to aim for. Instead, it's "diversity" which is the attainable goal.

This also leads to the idea that you might cut down trees (gasp!) to promote wildlife. If you leave many species of tree to their own devices, they kill almost everything else by denying them sunlight. This happens with both broadleaf (eg beech) and conifer species, and is visible in many Forestry Commission woodlands which have been managed to produce long, straight timber planks. You get a high canopy with all the leaves up at 20 or 30 metres and insects and birds living up there. Then you have a virtually dead space around the nice straight trunks, a forest floor of leaves or needles, and then some fungus and insect life down to a few inches involved in the decomposition of that. If you're lucky, flowering plants grab a couple of weeks in spring to grow and flower before the canopy closes up again and it's like twilight even at noon.

For this reason, opening up glades and rides with a gradient from grass, up through undergrowth, shrubs and small trees provides a lot more habitats, all ultimately fuelled by sunlight, rather than just letting the trees have their head and let them try to create a monoculture.

And they're nice to walk or ride along too of course

Edited Sat 18 Apr 09, 1:21 AM by Tanos