An Idiot's guide to Ancient Woodland management

[Martin du Preez]

Brilliant thread so far, keen to hear more please keep it up!

[JAG63]

Love the thread TVI.

[the village idiot]

1 minute ago, Martin du Preez said:

Brilliant thread so far, keen to hear more please keep it up!

Thanks Martin.

 

Apologies for the slow pace of updates. My photos are stored in 4 different places and I am too much of a luddite to get them all in the same place. Finding the right ones and then running the devil's gauntlet of getting them up on the screen takes some time, and requires all of my 6 brain cells to fire simultaneously.

 

If the merest suggestion of cheese on toast (or similar delightful distraction) enters the mental matrix it's back to square one.

[the village idiot]

8 minutes ago, JAG63 said:

Love the thread TVI.

That's great to hear. Thank you!

[the village idiot]

33 minutes ago, eggsarascal said:

What money are you looking for?

I'll send you a PM Eggs with more details.

[eggsarascal]

1 minute ago, the village idiot said:

I'll send you a PM Eggs with more details.

You're such a tease.

 

[the village idiot]

Question: What's a really sensible and well thought through next step for a grossly inexperienced tree cutter after taking out a few easy conifers in a well spaced stand?

 

Answer: Decide to clearfell three acres of massive leaning 80 year old Ash coppice stems with Spring looming.

 

I'll let you all know tomorrow how that particular brainwave panned out!

[daveatdave]

has the owner have the sporting rights for the wood and do you have to do anything to promote areas for them  

[the village idiot]

4 minutes ago, daveatdave said:

has the owner have the sporting rights for the wood and do you have to do anything to promote areas for them  

Yes, the owner has the sporting rights. He lets a small syndicate shoot the Wood but they are very infrequent.

 

I don't shoot myself, (so to speak!).

 

The gamekeeper was pretty hostile to me for the first couple of years but he is fine now after the estate manager had a quiet word with him about the owner's priorities.

 

We have indirectly made the Wood fantastic for shooting but the syndicate haven't shown much signs of taking advantage.

[the village idiot]

COPPICING.

 

 

 

 

As most of you will know, coppicing is a management technique that takes advantage of many hardwood species' natural ability to generate new growth after suffering damage. Before agricultural humans came along this damage would have been largely inflicted by browsing animals, and very strong winds.

 

A few species (most notably Hazel) put out new shoots from the lower portion of the tree and the root network throughout their life even in the absence of damage to the main stems. In Hazel a proportion of these new shoots are referred to as 'sun shoots'. These grow very fast and arrow straight and are highly prized by the folk still practicing coppice crafts.

 

'Human induced coppicing' in broadleaf Woodland takes this natural process and runs with it. A typical coppice area (referred to as a cant, a coup or a compartment) is anywhere between half an acre and two acres in size, and involves cutting down most or all of the standing trees in the chosen area close to ground level.

 

Pre 20th Century the majority of UK broadleaf Woodland would have had at least some, if not all, of their acreage under coppice management. You can generally tell if an area of old neglected Woodland has had a coppice history by the abundance of large bulbous multi-stemmed trunks.

 

Amongst the present day lay population there is a general feeling that cutting down hardwood trees in Woodland is bad environmentally. Nothing could be further from the truth if done conscientiously. For the most part, cutting down almost any UK native hardwood tree will not kill it. You are effectively giving it a hair cut. The tree will still be alive and well, just mostly hidden underground as the root network. In the absence of an overpopulation of grazing animals the tree will spring back to life more vibrantly than ever as a collection of new stems.

 

Rather than killing a UK hardwood tree, cutting it down to a stump will actually dramatically extend it's lifetime and the volume of growth it will put on in that lifetime. Bradfield Woods in Suffolk has been under continuous coppice management since before the 1300's. There are Ash stumps (stools) thriving at Bradfield that are estimated to be upwards of 1000 years old. A typical uncoppiced Ash tree will do very well to live beyond it's 200th year. The newly arrived Chalara fungus has unfortunately turned up uninvited to spoil that particular party, more on this in another post.

 

Coppicing within a Woodland is generally done on a cycle, known as a rotation. A certain percentage of the Woodland cover will be felled in a year, the resource harvested, before moving on to a new area the following year, leaving the freshly cut stumps to regenerate. If you have planned your rotation well then by the time you get back to your first compartment it is ready to be cut again. The length of your rotation will depend on your objectives and desired product. If you are after bean poles, pea sticks, hedge laying materials and the like you would probably aim for about a seven year rotation. If firewood is your primary product then anywhere between 15 and 25 years.

 

There are a number of variants of the coppice management system which I will go into in later posts. The main point I want to make here is that coppice is an excellent system to incorporate into the Woodland I manage as it not only produces a potentially never ending stream of useful resource, but also, due to the cyclical nature of the cutting and subsequent regeneration there is consistently an abundance of different areas at different stages of their growth cycle within the Woodland, producing a large range of vibrant potential habitats for all the wee beasties (a cycle they have become adapted to over the past centuries). As the Woodland is primarily managed for biodiversity this is a very good thing. 

 

This has been a fairly whistle stop introduction to coppicing. There is much more detail to go into and I will try to cover much of this in subsequent posts. I have somehow neglected to mention light, which is really what my job is all about! Coppicing forms a large part of what we do at the Wood so it will get a fair amount of air time, with the intricacies and history being fleshed out in future ramblings.