Back to the top...

Having progressed far enough down the hill with our coppicing for this winter, we've returned to the top of the hill to deal with some of the edge trees that we're going to thin out. First though we went to collect a load of firewood for a neighbour and top up the bird feeder.

We found the bird feeder on the ground - probably the work of a squirrel! Anyway, we fixed it back up and within minutes there were several birds back in the area:
Back in Sweep Wood there were also a lot of birds, and there seem to be some complex interactions between them - at one point there was a sparrow, a robin, a chaffinch and a blackbird all within a metre of each other. Not sure who was threatening who, though clearly the blackbird has a size advantage. Here's the chaffinch:
and a female and male blackbird (there were two pairs hopping around):
Anyway, on with the work. Here's a before and after shot:
The holly was quite awkward (again), it all needed roping and I had to go into the neighbours garden (with their permission) to recover some of the branches.
The brash will be used to cover the stools of trees we've coppiced, to make it harder for rabbits to get at the shoots as they regrow in the spring. There's a lot of logs too, but we've not decided what to do with them yet.
We're helping some friends move house tomorrow, and then we're not back in the woods until Friday - our normal jobs need us back...

Mike