Ash

I was in Treswell yesterday, on a golden autumn day with the Notts Wildlife Trust volunteers, who were coppicing hazel. I left them at it and went for a walk around the wood and had a good look at the trees.  Treswell is typical in many ways of woods in this part of England because it is dominated by ash.  When NWT bought it forty years ago it wasn’t so long since the war and the mass felling that had gone on then to support the war effort.  A huge number of woods were clear-felled, including Treswell, and left to do their own thing in the years afterwards.  Traditional woodland management was dead then, certainly in Nottinghamshire, and it wasn’t going to revive at all until the 1990s, and even then only in a few lucky woods like Treswell.  So all those abandoned woods, that were probably fairly diverse with oak, field maple and other broadleaves, as well as ash, became almost entirely ash because ash can set lots of seed and establish very quickly on disturbed sites and nothing was done to thin them out.  If you wanted to set the scene for a disaster to attack those woodlands then you couldn’t do much better than that.  All that was needed to finish it off was a disease that kills ash.  And what do we have to do the job?  Chalara fraxinea.  It could have been avoided, or come slow enough to allow time to get those devastated woods back into good heart, if we didn’t have this insane system of transporting live plants around the globe and if we really valued and understood our natural resources.  But cash is king, if we knew then we ignored and Chalara is here to do what it will do. 

But Treswell Wood is in good heart, thanks largely to the revival of coppice management over the last twenty years.  Thanks also to good luck.  It belongs to the Wildlife Trust who have allowed it to be managed sensitively using old, tested ways, it’s fairly big and there are other trees than ash here.  In fact it has a very diverse range of trees and shrubs including oak, elm (they didn’t all die in that other much-cited tree disaster), field maple, wild cherry, apple, dogwood, midland hawthorn and lots and lots of hazel.  It’s probably the hazel that has rescued Treswell.  It’s a valuable and entirely renewable resource.  And many of those masses of ash trees have been thinned out over the years for firewood and timber.  Now there’s space and light for all those other species to flourish and keep the wood alive, whatever our mad society throws at it.  I hope.

I’m writing more about this in my forthcoming book, Treswell, a working wood.  I’m not sure when it’ll come out but ash dieback is concentrating my mind.

Chasing butterflies

I was at Treswell last week and spent a couple of mornings chasing butterflies, trying to take photographs.  It's a bit of a zen pursuit.  I know I will get one eventually but it can take some time.  It's very meditative in its way.  This small skipper was relatively easy to catch compared to the gatekeepers and meadow brown that were also feeding on the knapweed amongst the long grass of the field that edges the wood.  The field is like a chunk bitten out of the wood (an asart I think, taken from the wood in medieval times, at least). It has a great view of the nearby Cottam power station, belching CO2 into the morning sky.  Notts Wildlife Trust are hoping to buy it and incorporate the field into the nature reserve. Judging from the butterflies it's already a valuable habitat.  Grassland that hasn't been fertilised, cut and reseeded into relatively sterile uniformity is increasingly rare, so I hope the Trust do manage to get it.

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.

A crowd in the woods

I had another day in a quiet place yesterday with lots of people. It wasn’t really a crowd, though it felt busy. I went to Treswell Wood nature reserve with Rob and his volunteers to work for the day, mostly burning brash from trees that have been felled this winter. There were seven of us plus three other veteran volunteers who like to go at their own pace. Then there was a little posse who came up from the Notts Wildlife Trust head offices in Nottingham to have a look around, a couple of professional woodmen who were working in the coppice and at least a couple of dog walkers, including one old man who had known the wood for at least seventy years. I’d travelled down from Scotland on the train a couple of days before and I saw no-one in the countryside, apart from the occasional dog walker. There’s not much to attract people into the arable lands of Eastern England but there’s plenty to bring them into a wood like Treswell. And some of them are making a living by being there. Yesterday was a good example to me of how a well-managed wood can be much more socially, economically and environmentally valuable (in its way) than an intensively farmed field.

Treswell Wood

I’ve been working with my brother, Rob, to produce a book about Treswell wood just a few miles from where we grew up in Retford, North Nottinghamshire. Rob works for the Notts Wildlife Trust, who own the wood, and he manages it on their behalf. At first sight it doesn’t seem all that special. Although it’s an ancient wood there aren’t many old trees since it was felled in the war and then sold on to a forestry company who wanted to plant it with conifers. It was rescued from that fate by the Wildlife Trust nearly 40 years ago and they tried to get some coppice going again but it didn’t have much long term impact. In those days nature conservation was about preservation and change was suspect. Ideas in the field have moved on and it’s started to be recognised that nature is remarkably dynamic and resilient, if it’s allowed to be.

In the mid 1990s the pace of change at Treswell stepped up when a Rob and a group of like-minded people started to try and make a living from coppicing. Coppicing is all about change, taking out canopy trees for timber and to let in light, cutting hazel shrubs regularly to get a range of useful habitats and lots of lovely sticks. It can look like tidying up, housekeeping transferred to the woods, but the tidiness doesn’t last and wildness quickly returns. Generally a tidy countryside is bad for wildlife but coppicing is unusual in that it creates a range of habitats that can be used by all sorts of plants and creatures. A well coppiced wood should be a healthy wood.

Treswell has been quite intensively managed for getting on for twenty years now by a small army of professional woodsmen and volunteers who are helping turn it back to healthy coppice that provides a range of valuable products and habitats. It’s the people that make Treswell unique. Although the wood is owned by a conservation organisation whose priority is its wildlife, it is treasured by many people who value it in many different ways. The book will focus on those people and hopefully will provide inspiration and ideas for anyone who is interested in ecologically and economically healthy woodland.

And as Christmas present for Rob I had my first go at woodcut printing. This is the result, inspired by Treswell. I’ll write more on woodcuts another time.