Summer sonnet

I collected my Dun Coillich summer sonnet print from the Quarto Press last week, ready for sale at the Highland Perthshire Communities Partnership AGM in Kinloch Rannoch last Saturday, and for this unexpectedly summery weather. I’m donating a proportion of the sale price to HPCLT who are on a fundraising and awareness raising mission at the moment. A large part of the ground was planted up with trees a few years ago in an attempt to create native woodland on the hill but the deer have been getting in through a leaky fence and nibbling the trees so at the moment there’s not much sign of anything above the heather. I’ve just been elected as a trustee so I’m trying to do my bit to help, at the moment mostly through selling the print to help raise funds for tree planting and fencing and, hopefully, footpath work. Trish Waite, another trustee, has been putting in lots of effort and energy and has organised a Celebration of Trees for Saturday afternoon on the 31st March in the Lesser Hall, Aberfeldy. It should be a good afternoon celebrating as many tree things as possible: wine, wood engraving and wood cut (my bit), charcoal drawing, stories, baskets, etc. etc. It would be good to blog after the event with pictures but I’m off to Oman early on Sunday morning so I’m pre-empting. Oman may well be the next entry.

Birds, horses and frogs

I spent Saturday in Treswell Village Hall at a meeting arranged by TWIG, the bird monitoring group for the wood. It was a remarkable day, 50 people gathered to hear about and discuss the work that’s been going on there for nearly 40 years. Treswell is one of the best studied sites for birds in the country now, a fact acknowledged by Andy Clements, director of the British Trust for Ornithology. It's the BTO's mission to get the sort of data they've been gathering for years at Treswell. There’s such a mass of it, and it’s been so carefully collected, that academics are starting to publish papers without having to do any more fieldwork. A couple of them presented published work on how the changing climate is affecting tit species and how coppicing can benefit a range of woodland birds. It was good stuff to hear. The bird monitoring will be an important part of the book so it was good to have the opportunity to catch up with all the people who’ve been involved and to see how it is beginning to be appreciated in the world outside of Treswell Wood.
Early the next morning the ringers were back in the wood and I went along to catch up with them, at the nets catching and recording the local birds, like this treecreeper.

And on Wednesday the volunteers and woodmen were back in the wood. There were horses too, brought in for a course on horse logging, extracting timber without machines. The horses were magnificent Shires, Alison and Emily, and they were very patient being driven by, mostly mildly terrified, novices and picking their way through thickets of rose and bramble. Spring was in the air and a mass of frogs were spawning in a small pond by the track, intent on their own business, despite all the horsey activity.