Monday 31 March 2008

Coppicing by the pond - part 2

We did some coppicing by the pond last November, and this weekend we went back for a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon to finish the job, now our main coppicing area is done. This is how we left it:
So, this time our focus was on the few stools left, and also cleaning out the pond:
It was only about 40 minutes work - we just felled the chestnut, cut the sticks/logs and stacked them, and left the twigs to form a pile along the side of the pond, hopefully to provide a little cover for any creatures that might want to hide there:
I realise it just looks like we made the pond muddy, but Tracy did actually rake a lot of leaves out of it! We left a couple of dead trees stretching across the pond. No idea if this will be good, bad or indifferent, but we'll see. Perhaps honeysuckle will grow across? There's certainly plenty of it around, and it had a good hold on this chestnut:
We saw two creatures of interest on this trip; a moth:
I think this might be a Carpet moth of some sort, but I don't really know. Any idea?

We also saw a dead mole in the middle of our ride. Don't know what killed it, as there was no sign of injury to it:
Mike

1 comment:

Gardener of La Mancha said...

I've found a few dead shrews in our forest, all of them unmaimed. I read somewhere that moles and shrews easily die of fright. I'm not joking. Maybe your mole was scared to death.