Bluebells, and wild boar poo

The Bluebells in the wood are nearing their peak now, a little bit later than 2012 and a lot later than 2011, thanks to the cold Spring. Here's a few pics, click each one for options to view larger versions in Flickr if you like, or click here to go to my Flickr photostream.

There's still the odd patch of Wood Anemone lurking around as well:

The leaves on the Sweet Chestnut coppice are coming on really well now, doubling in size in less than a week:

Meanwhile, the wild boar have been busy digging:

This time they even left some droppings as a calling card!

Although the bird feeder obviously got a lot of use during winter, it then got used less as Spring arrived, but is busy again now - I'm guessing that as the adults have chicks to feed, or will do soon, they are keen to get any easy food they can! Here's a Chaffinch at our feeder - we don't see these too often in the woods.

The Chaffinch was knocking some seeds out, and this Pheasant crept up underneath the feeder to gather them up...

It's great to finally be away from winter, let's hope the jet stream behaves and we get a better summer this year...

Mike

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Easter camping trip

We bought a new tent last weekend! The old one sleeps 8, so takes so long to put up that it's not really worth it for one night, so we thought we should have a smaller one as well. As there was a bank holiday, it seemed like a good time to test it out in the woods:
We were blessed with beautiful weather, and it was nice to be up there to prepare some fuel and cook dinner:
There was a great sunset to photograph as we walked along the wayleave to see the work that's been going on in other parts of the wood over the winter.
Then it was back to the camp and time to build the fire up a bit:
As it was a clear night I tried taking a photo of the stars with my camera on a tripod, which worked OK:
but what turned out to be more interesting was the faintly lit clouds, which you couldn't see with the naked eye:
Or, seeing as it was a long exposure, the same view but using a torch to light up the trees:
With a clear sky, the night was cold, and we've decided we need better sleeping bags for this time of year! Still, it was great to wake up in the wood, and when I crawled out of the tent at 6:30am I saw a pair of Greater Spotted Woodpeckers in the oak above me. The light was pretty poor, but I just about managed to get a photo of one of them:
then it was time for a cooked breakfast, which always tastes better when cooked over wood, of course!
and also time to hang out the bedding to air. We were really glad we'd had our bivvy bags over the sleeping bags, it would have been much too cold to sleep otherwise.
We saw plenty of wildlife while we were up there, such as this Sparrow and Chaffinch at the top of Sweep Wood (they're not found deeper inside the wood):
and there are lots of insects out as well; we were pleased to see bees enjoying the wood anemones:
The buds on the trees were developing really well now, here's the Chestnut:
Hornbeam:
Hazel:
Ash (at the top of the tree):
At the top of a large hornbeam, the leaves were much further on:
as are Sycamore saplings:
and Hawthorn:
There's also some nice blossom on the "mystery" plum tree in Sweep Wood:
Down at ground level, things are beginning to grow again:
and the wood anemone blossom is spreading:
Brambles are pushing out new leaves:
and a gorse bush in the wayleave is in flower:
There are of course some unwanted plants, such as the dreaded rhododendron, which can take over entire woodlands if left unchecked:
So we dealt with a few of them with a chainsaw!
After that we dug the roots up too, and placed them where they could not re-root. There's still some more to do, which we hope to get to in the next few weeks.

Thanks all for now,
Mike

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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

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