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.

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.?

Hmmm. I'll see if I can get it into a different format. I've got a couple more videos it would also be good to show you. Does anyone know an idiot proof way of reducing video file size to below 64MB, and converting them into an 'open to all' format?

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.

Here you go Gary. The report was written in 2013 as I was just getting started in the Woods. It's actually 25 pages rather than 15. Pondy stuff starts on page 5. Hopefully the link works. juliet pond report 2013.pdf

I've leapt ahead a little bit here but thought it might be useful for those who haven't had the pleasure of experiencing a barber chair to see what one looks like. This video is from last winter, and you'll get a good idea of how potentially dangerous leaning Ash can be if not shown the utmost respect. I had to reduce the file size dramatically so the quality isn't fantastic. I think the video might only play on certain devices. It plays on my laptop, but I only get the audio on my phone. Apologies to those who can't see it. Do check out my high tech patented method for knocking out a felling wedge, and note the fact that I am not on my ownsome. A second idiot??? barber chair video_mpeg4_001.mp4

No such luck unfortunately. Going through the photos jogs my memory. Bizarrely, I feel like I hardly ever take photos. I'm genuinely not sure where they have all come from!

I've neglected to take a photo of digger driver Crispin close up whilst he's been in the Wood so found this one on the internet. That's him and his unruly mane on the right. He is a lovely chap and great fun. His Wood near the coast in Suffolk is spectacular. Crispin will be back with a vengeance later in the thread, where he gets into a spot of bother. More to come on the ponds too, with specific emphasis on the biodiversity gains.

Gosh! Thank you Giles. I've actually been really enjoying telling the story. It's really nice to learn that there is a lot of interest in the subject. There's not that many people doing this sort of stuff, It would be fabulous if there were a lot more.

BIGGER DIGGER! Now that John and friends had helped me finish the third coppice area around the ponds it was time to get the larger digger in. The ponds had been totally surrounded by trees for decades. All the autumn leaves had been falling into the water, sinking to the bottom and forming a thick silty slurry that snuffs out any oxygenating water plants from getting established. Because of all the shading from the trees, any plantlife that did get a foothold in the water or on the margins didn't get enough light to grow and soon died. Without the plants there were no insects, and without plants and insects there were little or no amphibians. The ponds were to all intents and purposes dead. Just taking down the trees around the pond would have brought some life back, but to really get the ponds buzzing with activity we needed to dig out the sloppy leaf mulch and get back to the clay bottom. Enter Crispin and a 14 ton excavator. I got to know Crispin through Pete Fordham (Suffolk Wildlife Trust Woodland Warden). Crispin owns and manages his own Wood near the Suffolk coast and also contracts himself out as a digger driver specialising in ponds. It was quite a tight squeeze getting the machine down some of the rides. Note the low ground impact: Crispin was working to a specification drawn up by a lovely lady called Juliet who is a friend of the Woodland Owner and is our conservation adviser. She was very specific about details such as the angles of the slopes down to the water, and length of the margin to leave untouched. She even asked Crispin to chuck some material back into the water to give the pond bottoms an uneven profile. I have a 15 page document detailing the woodland ponds with pictures and a lot of detail about the management options. I can probably post up a link to it if any of you want to get nerdy? In the meantime here are some pictures of Crispin in action: The pond sites looked horrendous straight afterwards with a layer of thick smelly slop surrounding each pond on all sides, but within a growing season or two, and once the water has settled down the results are spectacular, both visually and in terms of the abundance of life that moves in. Here is a picture of the pond in the above photo 2 years later.

Great stuff, interested visitors are always welcome, especially those bearing goodies! (chocolate hobnobs gain you free entry). I do have an Exeter retort. I'll try and bring the charcoal section of the thread forward a bit so I can give you my thoughts. You can also have a good look at it when you visit. Where are you based?

Hi there, great to hear from you. Do please pay us a visit. It would be great to have a walk around and compare notes. You have many years more experience than me. Maybe it would be possible to visit one of your sites too? Don't be fooled by all the big kit pictures. I spend the vast majority of my time thigh deep in brambles moving sticks from one place to another. The machinery shots generally make for the best pictures. It's very difficult to take interesting photos of stands of trees, although there will be some when we get onto the ride widening posts. Do feel free to post any interesting experiences you have had in the Woods on this thread. The more input from people, the merrier. Do you know how to send a personal message?

SHIPP AHOY! So now you've all hopefully met John Shipp, I'll tell you what he did. As previously mentioned I had only completed two out of the three coppice compartments (with ponds) and the big 14ton digger was booked for the pond restoration. I had taken all the understorey (Hazel) out of compartment 3 but didn't have time to do all the larger felling. Things were also complicated by the fact that the pond in compartment 3 was pretty big with a lot of mature Ash and Alder leaning over it. I didn't have any kind of winch for pulling trees out of the water, but John has an 8ton excavator with grab. Sorted! John arrived with an assortment of merry men and they set to on the coupe. The excavator is a massive help with this type of job as it can stack brash and timber, pull down trees which have hung up (fallen into the canopy of a neighbouring tree) as well as drag trees from the pond, all without rutting up the precious forest floor. And here's me turning up just as they were finishing to tell them I'd actually prefer a light thinning. John did a fantastic job, as he always does. He stacked all the timber (around 200 tons) at the ride edges ready for extraction. John has the machinery for log extraction but on this first occasion I actually called upon another new acquaintance, Chris Howard (CHC on arbtalk). He had some low impact kit that I was keen to see perform and it was small enough to fit over the small bridge which leads down to my firewood processing area. You can see by the greenery that the extraction was done the following Spring. If at all possible it's best to stay off Woodland rides until they are hard. A dry spell in the Spring or Summer bakes the heavy clay soils into a surface akin to concrete.

Thanks Nepia, that means a lot! The trick is to find what you really enjoy and try to do that for as much as your life as possible, (stop sniggering in the back!) It's a tired old adage but true that it really doesn't feel like work then. We're still only in year one threadwise so plenty more goodies to come.

Of the two farmers locally that I know, one plants thousands of trees every year and wants to plant more. The other is planning to plant his entire 150 acres up with trees. There may be a better uptake than you think.

Hugely disappointed in the new Head and Shoulders For Beards.?

JOHN SHIPP. I think I first met John (Arbtalk's Logan) at an 'improve your firewood profitability' course in 2014. The course was rubbish but John wasn't. We got on well and he was the first person I called on when my self imposed workload became too much. John was then, and still is now, a forestry contractor operating in Essex and Suffolk. He also produces firewood, honing his production methods and machinery over the years. Not one for the limelight, a few years ago poor old John got bullied into appearing in a short Forestry Commission video to talk about the grants available for forestry and firewood machinery which crop up from time to time. He will thank me profusely for posting it up here.?

Hmmm, that does sound more than a little bizarre. Unfortunately I am not qualified enough to give a counter argument to take to Natural England. Do you have a relationship with your local Forestry Commission Woodland Officer. Perhaps they could give you a second opinion that would carry some weight?

EVERYONE NEEDS A JOHN, OR PREFERABLY TWO. During this first year of my time at the Wood it began to dawn on me that a ratio of one very green cutter to 200 acres of Woodland were not odds heavily stacked in my favour. I was barely scratching the surface and the sheer magnitude of the Woodland was going to gobble me up without even bothering to chew. Unless that is I could call in reinforcements. It's at this point that I'll introduce you to two key players who have contributed a great deal early on and also to the ongoing management activities in the Wood. John and Jake Fish, aka Big Fish and Little Fish, aka Treewood Harvesting. and John Shipp, aka John Shipp, aka J.S.Forestry. I have tried my very best to persuade them to join forces and give a glorious birth to Fish and Shipps Forestry Services but frustratingly they remain stubbornly independent. These guys have had such a big impact that they deserve some dedicated posts of their own.

That sounds a bit strange. The one habitat type were are by no means short of in the UK is overstood hazel. You really need a very large area for environmentally significant wood pasture (generally very widely spaced trees with grassland in between). Coppicing Hazel promotes Dormice habitat, especially if you get bramble. My personal suspicion is that they are much more tolerant of that first intervention than we are led to believe. One thing is for certain. If the area is left for the many decades needed to encourage wood pasture you can kiss the Dormice goodbye.

TOO MANY TREES, NOT ENOUGH SAWS. My decision to tackle three compartments in the 50 acres of lapsed coppice that first winter was not just the result of amateurish over-enthusiasm. There was some sound reasoning behind it. Each of the three planned coppice compartments had a pond within them, although they were totally lost amongst the trees. I was keen to get started on the pond restoration and in order to make it viable getting a big excavator in to do the de-silting it made sense to have three sites to go at. The three planned coupes were all in area 2 of the map below. Area 2 still maintained a multi-stemmed coppice structure but had not been cut since before the second world war. It is mostly Ash over a scrubby hazel understorey with many gnarly Oaks dotted about. Areas such as this where coppicing has ceased for a prolonged period of time are categorised as 'overstood' or 'neglected' coppice. The hazel had become large, bent and relatively unprofitable to both man and wildlife. The Ash stools, which previously would have been cut maybe every 20 years ago were each sprouting between 2 and 10 massive stems- some 2 foot or more in diameter. Left much longer these weighty stems become too much for the stool and they come crashing down, splitting the stool open in the process, often resulting in tree death. I first set to work taking down the hazel understorey, making habitat piles from the tops and putting the stem wood aside for charcoal making. Clearing the understorey first is good practice as it makes room for when the larger stems are felled and provides a safer working environment (aka 'leg it' routes!) The Ash stems were challenging at first as a lot of them were leaning which gives them a tendency to barber chair (too gruesome to go into- feel free to look it up). I found that the best way to decrease the frequency of these cheek clenching events was to use a dog tooth cut. Even more effective was when I started boring a 'letterbox' through the gob. Both of these techniques have the effect of reducing the amount of holding timber keeping the tree upright before you make the final felling cut. It takes a bit of practice. Too little holding timber and the tree goes over before you are ready, too much and the tree can violently split up it's stem whilst performing the back cut with potentially very concerning results for the forester. I managed to get through two of the planned three compartments. I haven't got many good pictures of these areas at this time but the photo below shows one of the areas post felling with several of the Ash stems having gone for a dip. I still wanted to do the third planned compartment that winter so had to call upon a proper forester for help. More on this in the next post. My next task after having felled the Ash was to work out a way of getting it to the Southern portion of the Wood (area 3 on the map) where I was setting up my processing area. As you have seen in a previous post all I had at the time was my dinky tractor and trailer without crane, so I set about crosscutting all the stems down into 10 inch rings, splitting the big rings down into chunks with a maul, and chucking it all into stock fencing rings to begin seasoning whilst I waited for the ground to dry out enough for extraction. Some of the nicest straight large Ash stems were left in long lengths with a view to them being milled, in scant disregard of the fact that I had at the time no means to move them an inch, let alone the half mile down to the processing area!

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.

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.

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!

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