Heathland Clearance.

[Luke Quenby]

I'm jiggered if i can get my head around this "conservation" thing. Earlier in the year we cleared 27ha of oak, birch and f maple, to revert back 50yrs in time to heather covered heathland! In the name of "conservation" I saw 2 dead adders and a dead lizard, compressed by the machinery chipping the timber. The stumps all were to be ground out, the surface to be removed, how many inhabitants of the area would be killed or migrate away in this time?

Another job (conservation) was felling 9 large pops and removing a long thorn hedgerow "because it wasnt there in Constables time", really baffles me, I just cut trees, I do!

 

Couldn't agree more! Sometimes you have to take a few steps back to go forwards, we all know that. But if an area is that far gone and neglected, and a new ecosystem is springing up and doing well, surely it's sometimes best left? Is that not a large part of how we got to where we are, habitat wise, in the first place?! Not purely through neglect, obviously, but by letting things evolve to what they are now. We can't spend all our time trying to recreate the past, when things were a lot different. However, I am just about to start clearing an old overgrown 9 acre field in a coppice woodland, that hasn't been touched for at least 50 years and has been well colonised by birch, alder, sallow, ash etc. All I think to myself is that the likes of us are lucky enough to be employed doing what we are good at and what we enjoy doing.

[Lee Winger]

like Ed said in the natural world there is no such thing as heathland

[Buzz]

Guys look out of the window, there's no such thing as a natural world / landscape. Everything we see is man made from the arable fields of Suffolk to the Mountainsides of The Lake Distrct.

 

Heathland is being managed for the flora and fauna that would otherwise die out. Heathland is the only habitat that supports all 6 of our native reptiles.

 

Andy that job you described sounds like a badly managed project, i have worked on heathland projects for over 12 years the main problem is insuffcient funding to carry the maintenance forward and lack of public support to fence and graze.

[Tree cutter Stu]

i love a clearence / Heathland job.

[Log-ologist]

IMO snakes and lizzards would best be presreved in glass tanks in schoolboys bedrooms not reconstructions of artificial landscapes. And who is weeping over the loss of , the dodo or dinosaurs. They are gone get over it.

[ScottF]

Probably couldn't be certified at least under the UKWAS remix of the FSC as the land isn't intended to be restocked.