An Idiot's guide to Ancient Woodland management

[the village idiot]

8 minutes ago, roboted said:

TVI

Educational, Interesting, Well written, Humorous. All the hallmarks of a best seller.

Well done that man ?

Thanks roboted, that's very kind.

 

I'm well into the second of two days off the saws. I'm supposed to be writing the mid term report for the current round of woodland grant funding but I haven't even started yet! I'm having too much fun.?

[the village idiot]

FOOT OFF THE GAS,

 

Up to now this thread has been dominated by some pretty heavy forestry activities. This was just a consequence of me getting those jobs out of the way early on so some of the more 'subtle' interventions could start.

 

As you have probably gathered, I don't wholeheartedly agree with the school of thought that says that large machinery should be excluded from Ancient Woodland sites. As long as you are careful and get your timings right I think it is sometimes prudent to be bold.

 

That being said, most of our activities in the Wood are much more firmly rooted in the 'low impact' camp. I'll be majoring on these as the thread progresses but with a few more big'uns cropping up from time to time.

 

Now that the first round of pond restoration had been completed and the last of the conifers had come out it was time to put some serious thought into rides.

 

Rides are the arteries of the Woodland, providing access to and from all areas, and homes for a plethora of flora and fauna along their sun bathed edges.

 

When starting out in a neglected Woodland one of the first priorities should be to open up the rides. You will thank yourself for ever afterwards, as will the birds, bees, blooms and butterflies.

 

When the Woodland Agent and I drew up the initial management plan a huge emphasis was placed on ride creation and maintenance. I have no idea how many kilometres of rides there are at the Wood, but it is certainly in excess of ten. As the Wood had sat largely untouched since the 1960's the non concreted ride network had all but closed up into narrow tunnels you could just about follow at a stoop.

 

The ride widening program is ongoing to this day but we are making steady progress. In the next post I'll try and give an overview of rides, their importance, and give you an idea of how we approach their management in this Wood.

 

 

 

[Stubby]

1 hour ago, the village idiot said:

FISH n' SHIPPS REVISITED.  THE FISH.

 

You may remember that there were two main people that helped me with the bottleneck of heavy forestry in the early stages. John Shipp was one. The other was Jake Fish.

 

 

I had started to supply wholesale charcoal to a company called Treewood Harvesting owned by a chap called John Fish. John is as mad as a bucket of squirrels. 

 

The main thrust of their business was not in fact charcoal, but forestry harvesting. 

 

When I started at the Wood there were still two fairly big plantation blocks of conifer to get rid of. The contractor who had done all the previous removals had left a shocking mess of deep ruts so I asked the Woodland owner if I could try a different company for this final intervention. The owner agreed and Jake (son of John) pitched up in the Summer of 2014 with this strange contraption:

 

 

This is a harvester. Not generally a common site in ancient woodland, but unsurpassable in efficiency when you have large areas of conifer plantation. A harvester has a specialised felling head on the end of a long arm. It can fell, de-branch (sned) and cut any straightish thin branched tree to predetermined lengths in a matter of a few seconds. They are big machines but the large wide tyres mean it exerts pretty low ground pressure which is vital. 

 

Jake was at the time one of the youngest harvester operators in the country but he was highly skilled, and it was awesome watching him fell areas in a few days that would take a good hand cutter weeks and weeks.

 

Unfortunately I haven't got any video of the machine in action, but if you google tree harvester videos you will see what these machines are capable of.

 

Jake worked his way down racks (access tracks between stands of trees) almost literally mowing down the spruce and pine, leaving neat piles of sorted lengths in his wake.

 

This picture hopefully gives you some idea of the aftermath. He was asked to leave any hardwood trees that had managed to cling on to life amidst the gloom of the plantations in the hope that these would help to re-seed the newly open ground.

 

 

Once all the felling had finished, the timber needed to be extracted. The harvester was swapped for a forwarder (timber carrying machine) and Jake stacked all the product roadside so that it could be collected by timber lorries and taken to the sawmill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We chose to carry out this work in the Summer, after bird nesting season, so that the non concrete rides could stand up to the weight of goodness knows how many tons of passing timber. If I remember correctly it was somewhere in the region of 2000 tons.

 

To my relief the rides held up very well:

 

 

The money generated from the sale of the timber went into a pot held by the estate to reinvest in future woodland management operations.

 

The two sites that Jake was working in looked very sorry for themselves afterwards. But I knew from what had happened in the previous deconiferised blocks that all we had to do was wait for the regeneration magic to happen.

 

As it seems fairly flat there V.I. did you cut the racks every 7th ?

[the village idiot]

It is very flat Stubby.

 

I'm totally ignorant I'm afraid on Jake's spacings. I left the operational side of the job completely up to him. He most certainly knew what he was doing, I most certainly didn't.

[Stubby]

3 minutes ago, the village idiot said:

It is very flat Stubby.

 

I'm totally ignorant I'm afraid on Jake's spacings. I left the operational side of the job completely up to him. He most certainly knew what he was doing, I most certainly didn't.

Oh. I just assumed you went in and hand cut every 7th row to create the rack prior to Jack going in with the harvester . 

[the village idiot]

47 minutes ago, Stubby said:

Oh. I just assumed you went in and hand cut every 7th row to create the rack prior to Jack going in with the harvester . 

I think he cut his own racks, or possibly just worked his way in from one side. I can't actually remember. He did very little hand cutting.

 

We are letting his 'straight line' harvester and forwarder wheelings tree over as they'll leave too uniform a network for an ancient woodland site if we keep them in place. We'll put a new, more sinuous track network in soon.

Edited November 28, 2019 by the village idiot

[Bolt]

1 hour ago, roboted said:

TVI

Educational, Interesting, Well written, Humorous. All the hallmarks of a best seller.

Well done that man ?

 

Netflix mini series.

 

[Stubby]

33 minutes ago, the village idiot said:

I think he cut his own racks, or possibly just worked his way in from one side. I can't actually remember. He did very little hand cutting.

 

We are letting his 'straight line' harvester and forwarder wheelings tree over as they'll leave too uniform a network for an ancient woodland site if we keep them in place. We'll put in a new, more sinuous track network in soon.

Yea . You don't want it looking like a plantation . Any bats ?

[tree-fancier123]

'A thatcher is clearly taking hazel rods on an ad hoc
basis throughout Cocksedge Wood and because it is in shaded areas, the cut stump is rotting and
potentially killing each coppice stool where it dies back.'

I'd have been more worried about someone with a see in the dark logging horse nicking the ash

[Stere]

Does this rogue thatcher have permission ? ?