Clearing the wayleave

As always, summer has brought rapid growth from the plants at the edge of the wayleave, and hence the need to cut them back so vehicles can get through easily. Not having a brushcutter, and given there are smaller trees as well as brambles and bracken, we tackled the job with chainsaws...

It's hard work, you sometimes have to be at awkward angles...

You also end up with huge mounds of foliage to move as well...

On the plus side, with some sunshine the butterflies are out in force - we saw several today, here's a pic of a White Admiral:

Hopefully out cutting will last through August now, but that'll depend on how fast the plants grow back!

Mike

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Coppicing at the End of the World

As some people thought today  (21 Dec 2012) would be the end of the world, I thought I may as well go and coppice some trees. I guess it didn't end while I was in the woods?

Carrying on the the maintenance theme of this winter, I thought I'd coppice some of the wayleave, as it's grown a lot since we bought the woodland. It needs to be kept down for the wildlife - it's a really great spot for butterflies, etc. National Grid will cut it all eventually, but I got bored of waiting... There's also the advantages of getting some logs out of it and making it easier for people to drive along it without scratching their cars on overhanging trees.

Here's how it looked in 2008:

and here's a shot from this week looking the other way at that curve in the track:

To make life easier, I parked the car and trailer just up from where I was felling, and took the ends off the trailer, so it was easy to load up logs for immediate transport:

Here's a couple of views of the area after spending a few hours working on it:

I've left all the brash piled up, as there's plenty of space and it'll make a nice wildlife habitat:

Having moved the logs to a storage place, I also took the opportunity to collect some logs for use at home, where we've got through half of our firewood store now. The store at the wood is now slowly emptying...

I think we might burn a bit less this winter as I've done some draughtproofing - more on that later...

Mike

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Making an entrance

This weekend my friend Alex was visiting, and we started work on a more useful entrance into his wood. But first, I want to show you some pics of birds, because now it's heading into winter the leaves have gone and our feeder is filled again, so there's plenty to see:

As well as that Great Tit, there were several Coal Tits:

I wondered if some of them might be Marsh or Willow Tits, but I'm not good enough on the ID to be able to tell, as they all look similar

Anyway, over in Alex's wood, which is near ours, we started work on the entrance. When we started, there was just a gap in the fence and a wooden foot bridge over the stream inside the border.

After a day's work, we had a clear track area as far as the stream:

It was a nice area to work in, with plenty of space to fell trees into.

Alex did a lot of splitting and moving logs while I was chainsawing:

and also piling brash up to make a dead hedge along the boundary:

The logs have all been put in a rack to season, so perhaps next winter Alex will be burning some of them himself at home...

Here's the view from inside the wood back onto the wayleave:

As it's facing south, it should get a nice amount of sunlight into the wood, as well as providing access, so it'll be interesting to see what grows there next summer.

Today we got back into coppicing over in Sweep Wood - last week was very busy at work, so we didn't get to go. However, Tracy had to go to a meeting at school for much of the day, so I busied myself with sorting out the end walls of the firewood shelter, which were in danger of falling over. This was due to putting the stakes in during the summer, when the ground was hard, so they didn't really go deep enough. Anyway, it's all sorted now:

We're not the only people who've been working in the wood. The National Grid's contractor has been along to selectively fell trees in the wayleave. They've chipped the brash, but left logs for the woodland owners to make use of:

They'll come along again in a few years to do it again, and then again a few years after that to flatten the whole area. When they do this it will look appalling for a short time, but it's this method of management that's made it into the unique habitat that it is today, so that's OK.

Mike

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Update on wayleave felling

I wrote yesterday about the work we'd seen going on in the wayleave. We've since heard some news about what's going on. Apparently this is the periodic clearance of the wayleave, but thanks to the efforts of Steve Wheatley of Butterfly Conservation, the company doing the work has agreed to minimise damage to the valuable habitat there. This explains why they're been felling individual trees and chipping them, rather than coming along with a forestry equivalent of a combine harvester.

We're really pleased about this, and very grateful to Steve for the work he's put in.

Mike

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A dead oak and felling in the wayleave

We first saw our wood about 21 months ago. Since then we've walked round pretty much every part of it at least once. We've measured every single oak. Yet despite all this there are still surprises ready to jump out at us from every corner.

Today, walking along the main ride from our base to where we're felling, I noticed an interesting dead-looking oak tree. Granted, when the leaves were on it would not have been obvious, but I don't understand why we didn't see it last winter. Here it is:
To get an idea of why it's special, here's a closer view:
Standing dead oak is a fabulous wildlife habitat for things like bats, woodpeckers and much more besides. The following pictures are just a few of the holes we could see in this tree:
We're going to keep an eye on this tree, and see what's living there. Could be interesting...

Moving on, we've been hearing a lot of noise coming from the far end of the wayleave, chainsaws and a big chipper by the sound of it. Today we went to investigate, and here's what we saw:

It seems that the trees at the edge, that are hanging over the wayleave, are being logged, while the trees in the middle of the wayleave are being chipped. Although it's doing a certain amount of damage, it's less than I'd feared it might be. We don't yet know if they'll be carrying on past our entrance and down to the road.

And finally, we also did some coppicing, as that was why we were actually there! We're working on the other parts of the footpath and the main ride at the junction. Here's before&after of a part where Tracy was working (it wasn't possible to get all the parts into one photo).
I was doing similar work behind where the camera is, and we worked together on some of the larger trees, Tracy snedding while I did logging and splitting, prior to stacking the split logs straight into the racks we'd put up yesterday.

That's all for now, more to follow tomorrow, when we'll hopefully complete the clearing around the path/ride junction and carry on up the path.

Mike

p.s. We also had one slight annoyance today - some helpful person had decided to lift out a few of the pieces of hardcore we'd been using to repair the track in the wayleave, leaving them in a position where they might damage a vehicle coming along the track. We've put it all back in place, and also took photos and reported the incident to the police - not that they will follow it up, but just to keep a log of things like this in case action needs to be taken in future.

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