Bat Park & Ponds
28th March 2023
A typical Tuesday morning at Wilderness Wood. In fact my first visit for a couple of weeks after a spring holiday.
March, in the spring, at Wilderness Wood – it has to be raining of course! Fortunately only lightly.
This Tuesday I'm looking to do a few hours erecting the new deer fence extension around Bat Park. So I collect my tools and bump into Jake, who will deliver the extension poles for the fence using the quad bike. Nothing too demanding – I just bolt extension poles on top of the existing stakes holding the sheep fence around Bat Park and then will later add a further 80 cm of mesh between the poles to keep our spring-healed visitors out.
Deer are very fond of nibbling young saplings, which is not good for the new hedge we are trying to grow. I suppose you might ask why we didn't put up a deer fence in the first place? In 6 years I had never seen any deer in the wood until Covid lockdowns. All of a sudden, with the absence of people and dogs, the deer all decided it was a nice quiet place to visit. By the time things were back to normal the deer had lost their timidity - and acquired a taste for hornbeam, hazel and hawthorn saplings.
An hour later there are enough extension poles attached ready for volunteers to start fastening the mesh to them during next Saturday's Stewardship Saturday (Stewsat).
Jake has engaged a couple of chaps with two dogs and a ferret to check for rabbit warrens on-site. We have something of a problem with these eating our young Christmas Trees (the rabbits – not the chaps). One of the guys has the feret in a box under his arm (I always thought they kept them inside their trousers – but maybe that's an old Morcambe and Wise joke). He takes it out to show me and one look at it's row of sharp teeth convinces me against stroking it. I can see why rabbits don't hang about in a warren when the ferret comes calling!
I decide to inspect the leaky dams in Hemlock Valley to make sure the trail boards are in good condition. I knocked-up the trail boards a few weeks ago to tell visitors all about retaining water in the woods, by building leaky dams and ponds. Ponds and damp woodland are missing environments here, but we are striving to remedy that at present. Unfortunately water is able to penetrate the trail boards, so I fit strips of plastic on the top to stop the information sheets getting wet.
The restored penstock ponds restored at the end of last autumn look OK. Willow twigs planted at the edge of the pond bay have started flowering, so hopefully this will form a low living fence to disuade dogs and small children from jumping in them. The ponds are only about 50 cm deep so don't present a safety hazard, but we would like to see newts and other amphibians breeding in the ponds. Disturbed water is not good for wildlife, whilst the active ingredient in many dog flea powders is poisonous to newts.
Just downstream of the ponds is an area I'd love to see becoming proper wet woodland with Marsh Marigold, Wild Blackcurrent and Wild Angelica growing in it. The woodland currently contains some alder trees, which love wet ground, but I want to turn it into a full-blown bog. Then we will be able to call it Alder Carr – a threatened habitat in the UK.
The great plan is to take the stream through the woods and break it up into a number of distributary channels as it passes. Partially blocking-up a channel will force the water down lots of smaller channels, giving the woodland soil a thorough soaking.
Lunch awaits, but not before I have checked on the status of the Common Spotted Orchids and the Twayblade Orchids in Orchid Glade. They don't mind a good bit of shade, but the tree cover has been getting a bit dense for them of late, so Jake agreed to thin a few of the trees over the winter. Good news, despite his big boots no damage has been done to the orchid's underground tubers and they are just starting to poking through for another session of spring flowering.