We're really pleased with this - we only put the camera in this location, actually quite close to our little camp in the woods, yesterday! At about 8pm last night these deer wandered through! You can see that the first is a male, the second a female, and the third another male, but with an antler missing - presumably lost in a fight. The fourth looks smaller, perhaps a younger one?
We've already moved the camera back to where we got the boar earlier in the week, but lower to the ground. I think it was pure chance that we got deer at the spot near our camp so quickly, but we'll try the camera again there at some point.
UPDATE: we're not sure now what type of deer these are - any more opinions welcome!
UPDATE 2: The consensus is that they are Fallow deer, thanks to people on the Wild About Britain forums.
Mike
Friday, 14 August 2009
And now some deer videoed on our trail camera!
Thursday, 13 August 2009
Wild boar video!
At last the trail camera has paid off! We got a film this week of a wild boar in the "mud bath" they use in my parents' wood, next door to ours.
I've started the video with a few seconds taken during daylight (with nothing there) to set the scene, and put the same clip at the end as well. This helps because the footage was actually taken at around 2am, so the camera is in infra-red mode. You can see the boar wandering around looking for stuff in the mud, and also make out its eyes reflecting the infra-red illumination from the camera.
Next time I'll position the camera a bit lower down, and hopefully get a better view that way, as the main area of illumination was above the boar in this video.
Mike
Tuesday, 11 August 2009
Access, access, access...
If there's one thing that's important in managing a woodland it's access. If you can't get your products out of the wood, then there's not much incentive to produce them, and the woodland may become neglected. So, today's job was all about improving access to the wood we cut last winter.
Here's where the public footpath crosses from the track in the wayleave to the corner of our wood, where the stile is:
We have a right of way through here and along the footpath to get to our wood, but at the moment you would struggle to get a vehicle through. So, I got to work with the chainsaw cutting back the trees at the edges, while Tracy cleared the brash to the sides. I also used the saw to cut any stumps off low to the ground and round off their edges, to prevent damage to tyres.
After 40 minutes work it looked like this:
and before long we had the trailer in there and loaded with logs (the fence by the stile can be unhitched):
after which I backed the Defender in (reversing in low ratio is great!), and towed the trailer out:
Hopefully walkers on the path will appreciate it not becoming too overgrown as well.
We'd been working in the same area yesterday, with Tracy cutting up and splitting some logs that had been there drying over the summer:
I'd also been filling racks of lengths of birch and chestnut, to cut up later on:
One other job we did yesterday was preparing some 6ft poles for a customer to use at their allotment. Rather than measuring each pole individually, you normally measure one, and then hold it next to other poles and cut them to the same length. This time though, I came up with a neat idea to make this easier. I often use an off-cut with a "V" cut in it to raise a log off the ground for sawing - this time I made one with two "V"s, one for the measured pole, and the other for the pole being cut:
Then the poles are exactly parallel, and it was easy to cut accurately to length.
That's all for now. We're up in the wood again later in the week...
Mike
Monday, 10 August 2009
Mysteries solved...
On our Moth Survey a couple of weeks ago, we were fortunate to have Phil Sansum, of the High Weald AONB unit there. His job is to identify and map ancient woodland in the area, so he is of course an expert in identifying plants! We showed him our mystery trees/shrubs:
and he immediately identified this one as alder buckthorn! We were sure we had this somewhere, as we get a lot of Brimstone butterflies in the wood, and this plant is the food of their caterpillars. We'll be cutting the chsetnut around it this winter to get a bit more light to it - at present it is shaded and doesn't fruit.
Phil also identified the other mystery tree as crab apple, which some people had tentatively suggested. Both this and alder buckthorn are ancient woodland indicators.
He also identified some other plants for us along the way. Our 7-foot high thistle is a Marsh Thistle (sorry, no photo), apparently they don't just grow in Marshes!
This is Wood Sage, which we have all over the place:
And this is Common Figwort, with a drunk wasp drinking from it:
These are all growing in the coupe we cut 18 months ago, where there are now patches of ground alive with plants:
We're up at the wood quite a bit this week, tidying some logs into racks ready to cut up in the winter, and doing various other odd jobs.
More to come on that later...
Mike
Sunday, 9 August 2009
The Defender has arrived!
We collected our Land Rover Defender on Friday! The 25 mile drive home helped me get used to it, and on Friday evening Tracy drove it out to Dungeness to get some practice on quieter roads. While out there I thought it would be get a few photos...
There's quite a bit of space in the back, either for stuff or for people:
and if we run out of space there's always room for one more on the front:
I took it up to the wood yesterday, and found it drove very nicely there, even round the sharper bends inside the wood, and was easy to reverse, as the low-ratio gearbox lets you creep along and take your time. I didn't get any pictures up there as I was busy re-tuning my chainsaw, after dismantling and cleaning the carburettor - it hadn't been running too well, but rather than take it to the shop and pay them to fix it, I thought it would be better to spend the money on a workshop manual for it and a digital tachometer. Seems the decision was right, as it's running nicely again now!
Mike
