August in the woods: logs and bugs

Thankfully it's been much sunnier this summer than last year, and there have been some good opportunities to photograph insects in the wayleave. I was particularly pleased with this shot of a male Souther Hawker dragonfly:

I got some more of another type of dragonfly too, but not sure what type it is:

Butterflies are also back in reasonable numbers, such as this Meadow Brown:

and this White Admiral (which was near our camp, rather than in the wayleave):

We've made use of the dry weather to finish moving logs back from further parts of the woods to near the camp:

We also squeezed a few chunky holly logs into the car to fill up the last little space in the firewood store at home:

Finally, here's a few views of sunshine in the woods, which was quite rare last year!

We've also have a few camping weekends, photos to come shortly from the most recent one...

Mike

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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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Butterflies at last!

The wet summer has not been great for the UK's butterflies, so it was pleasing to see so many this afternoon, especially as we had friends who'd been helped in coppicing in Sweep Wood visiting to see the wildlife benefits of their work! Some of them lived nearby, others were from Rother Guardians.

Here's one of the old favourites, a Peacock:

The Buddleja it's settled on has self-seeded at the top of Sweep Wood - we have quite a few garden escapees up there, and while I wouldn't have planted this one in a woodland, as it's arrived by itself I'm quite happy to leave it - and the butterflies are delighted I'm sure!

Just as a reminder, Sweep Wood used to look like this:

Then we got busy coppicing and it looked like this:

And just a year or two later it looks like this:

The hill in Sweep wood had lots of other butterflies present, especially Meadow Browns and Gatekeepers:

There were also various White butterflies, but I didn't get photos of them. Lots of dragonflies too - remember none of these insects were to be seen here before we did the coppicing:

Heading further into the woods we saw several Speckled Wood butterflies:

White Admirals:

and a beetle too...

In the wayleave were Comma butterflies and more dragonflies; I got a rare opportunity to photograph two together:

We also saw this wasp feeding on Common Figwort - apparently they're a good pollinator for them:

Great to see all of these creatures around again!

Mike

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An antidote to London

I spent all of last week in London for work, so the weekend was a great opportunity to make up for it by camping in the woods, which are looking great at this time of year.
We took it easy on Saturday, and walked in the wayleave to do a butterfly count to feed into the local Butterfly Conservation database. Here's a few of them...

White Admiral (in our wood, and the wayleave):
Tortoiseshell, which we don't see very often up there:
Meadow Brown:
and a mystery one - any ideas?
Heading back into the woods, it's amazing to see what's happened to where the footpath got a bit muddy with us extracting wood there last winter. The churning of the ground, combined with the light let in by the coppicing, has made it a fertile place for grass to grow up:
As it's not being driven on again (perhaps ever?), it'll be interesting to see how the grass gets on.

I was pleased to see that the young oak we had to pollard a year and a half ago (after it was accidentally damaged) is doing well:
and that a slightly older, but still quite young, oak near the footpath/ride junction has responded to the extra light by putting out dozens of side-branches:
Near the pond, foxgloves have arrived. Not that they're rare, it's just nice to see new plants appearing:
Another new pant there is this one, which I think is a Spearwort of some sort:
Back near our camp, the chestnut that we coppiced first, back in 2007/8, has now started to flower!
I'll be interested to see if any fruit develops...

Saturday night we had light provided by solar PV:
which is also handy for charging your mobile phone:
Sunday was a work day, and we set to levelling out the ruts in the path:
After doing this we thought we'd better test it out, and completely emptied one rack of logs into the land rover:
leaving just a few depressions in the ground behind:
and moving all the wood into a location where we can access it easily this winter:
I know this means moving the logs more than once, but we want to get them out of the deeper parts of the wood while the ground is dry, so that we don't churn the tracks up in the winter.

That's all for now...

Mike

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