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Habitat piles?


spandit
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Another very generous member on here has offered me some logs and as I am quite flush at the moment, I offered them to a neighbour. He says (despite having 8 acres) that he doesn't have the space for many so I said it wasn't a problem and I'd probably just pile the rest up for habitat. He replied:

 

"Environmental equivalent of a paperweight"

 

First I've heard of this - all the advice online (and from the ecologist I had round the other week) is that they are good for invertebrates and small mammals - can't find any evidence to the contrary and my dogs always seem interested in the smells that emanate from them

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I can't see a way that a habitat pile could ever be bad... (For the environment that is)

I have one in my garden! (Only because i filled both my log stores up [emoji39]) it’s attracted and housed a hedgehog for a night so cant be all that bad can it?!! Will be getting split up shortly as i’ve used a little bit of my wood from my store now [emoji106]

IMG_2359.thumb.jpg.304d0b06b8651a0eab46f601f1080540.jpgIMG_2465.thumb.jpg.3581671c6bcddeaed98dbc0b9fb8be78.jpg

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Your neighbour is talking shite.

 

I spend a lot of time in the woods with my girls, and they love finding living stuff.

I'm constantly rolling even single logs to unearth a whole load of stuff for them to squeal about, from woodlice and centipedes up to mice and slow worms.

The trick is not to crush the little beasties when I eventually roll the log back!

 

I know from the timber stacks at my own yard how much life they contain.

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1 hour ago, Mark Bolam said:

Your neighbour is talking shite.

Get off the fence, Mark :D

 

Tree surgeon dutifully turned up with the chip and logs so we went to neighbour who then said he couldn't take any of the logs but could take the chip, so we drove back to mine, unloaded the logs (up in the woods) and then he drove back to my neighbour to dump the chip (which was good stuff, no leaves). Not a word of thanks from the neighbour. Maybe there's a reason my woodland has won an award and his hasn't :D

 

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Yep log piles are the business and anyone who knows what they're talking about gives top points for having one.

Stag beetle numbers have dropped by 90% over recent years and mostly because they spend most of their life in the larval stage in rotting wood and too much rotting wood has been tidied up off the forest floor. I moved one back a bit recently as it had been stacked by the side of a pond-side path and we wanted to enbigenate the path.

Slow worms and newts is what we found.

 

I was once sitting having a bite and a cup of tea when I saw a stag beetle fly in low and crash into an oak tree right by where I was sitting.

That's odd I thought; y'don't see that everyday.

Anyway the stag beetle got up and crashed back into the tree again and again and then down into the leaf litter. And there was the explanation: A female stag beetle up for a bit of action! There was a lipstick like projection out from the back of her abdomen which I imagine was wafting get-it-here pheromones on the breeze - single molecules - and the male stag beetle followed the trail up wind and was guided purely by receptors rather than sight.

 

Someone came along to help recently.

Yep. The first thing they did was burn up all my old log piles and all my stag beetle larvae cos they thought they looked untidy.

 

tldr: log piles good cos stag beetles.

 

Happy Days

Yourn

 

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The latest one is quite close to a pond so hopefully the newts will find it. It's all willow at the moment but I have a load of conifer I can add (not ideal, I'm told). Not a huge amount of other hardwood yet but it's a start

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