A Hornets' Nest, False Death Cap and coppicing update

It's been a few weeks since I last posted, so there's quite a bit to say... First, here's a short video of a nest of European Hornets in our woodland. They're actually quite timid, and didn't bother me at all while I was making the video. I hear Asian Hornets are a different matter all together...

Also of interest is this mushroom - the False Death Cap (Amanita citrina), so named because of its similarity to the lethal Death Cap. It is allegedly edible, but given the risk of confusion with a killer, I don't think anyone actually eats it.

I was working along the edge of the area we're cutting today, so got my rope and pulley set-up out for the first time in a few years, to avoid trees falling over the fence into the wayleave. They're not big enough trees to need the winch, so the rope and pulley is a nice quick solution - I learned how to do all this on the Coppice Harvesting Efficiency Course some years ago...

Here's a sequence of photos taken from the same viewpoint at the end of each visit to the woods over the past few weeks. Sometimes part of the work done was out of shot, so not much change is visible, but I think you'll see we've made some progress...

That's all for now...

Mike

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Clearing up storm damage while avoiding a hornets' nest!

Meet the European Hornet...

We had to work around a nest of them today, as they were in the storm-damaged oak tree I mentioned in yesterday's blog post. You can just see a couple of them going into the crack in the tree that was probably what weakened it and resulted in the storm damage.

Fortunately they look much more scary (being an inch long and noisy!) then they are, and are actually quite timid and if they do sting it's no worse than a normal wasp sting (see Wikipedia).

Here's how the oak tree looked after the storm:

It took us a while, but after some chainsawing and winch work, we got the broken section down on the ground:

To get it down we looped a 4-tonne sling round the branch near where it attached to the tree - this effectively doubles its strength to 8 tonnes, see the table on this page. We attached a 10-tonne pulley to the sling using an 8-tonne bow shackle - using a pulley doubles the power of the winch:

Through the pulley was a 20 metre 15-tonne steel rope, with one end anchored to a tree with another sling and bow shackle:

The other end was attached to the steel rope that went through our Tirfor T516 winch - this can pull 1.6 tonnes, so all the other components in use are stronger, eliminating the chance of unexpected failures.

That's an awful lot of gear to push through the woods on a wheelbarrow, but it got the job done with us stood at a safe distance from the tree! We even managed to avoid damaging the hornets' nest, so they can carry on living in the trunk of the tree and the cracked bit of the branch which is now on the ground.

We cleared up some coppice stools that had been blown over too, and there are still a few more of these to do before we've finished clearing up from the St Jude's Day storm which hit the UK on 28 Oct 2013.

Mike

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An afternoon in the woods

For various reasons we've not made it to the woods for a couple of weeks, so it was great to get back up there yesterday afternoon, and also have some friends from church visit. We're looking at using the wood for a couple of different groups to visit for BBQ or camping - I just hope we get more weather like yesterday's!

The mixture of recent rain and strong sunshine has really made the plants shoot up, some of the coppice we cut last winter has grown a few feet already!

Also in that area there are Bluebell seeds now ready to grow - we might collect a few and scatter them more widely I think...

Further up the hill, where we cut the previous winter, the foxgloves are still putting on a good show:

Deeper inside the wood everything is very green, but there's more evening shade now:

This winter we think we might selectively cut some of the coppice stools along the rides, to create alternating ages and a permanent 'shrub layer' which should be beneficial for the wildlife.

Speaking of wildlife, we saw a few hornets near the camp today. Don't forget these aren't any more dangerous than a normal wasp, and are in fact less aggressive. I only managed to get a poor picture of one - wrong camera setting, so entirely my fault! Here it is though:

Remember that's a chestnut leaf it's on - the insect is over an inch long!

Anyway, now work has calmed down a bit we should be visiting the woods more often, so normal service shall be resumed on this blog!

Mike

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