The Impact of Human leisure activity in woods

[splodger]

You are prickly Dexter, you will soon have to change your name again!!

got my moderator cap on - comments like this are not very friendly / helpful

[Andy M]

Terribly sorry old chap, I will try and "think of an interesting post next time"

[SimonFisher]

for anyone that visits here regularly will know, me and oldclawpaws are friends outside of SWOG, and bounce posts off each other regularly, its all done as tongue in cheek

For anyone that doesn't know that though, some of your most recent posts could well come across as being just plain rude as they neither contained any humour nor used any smileys/emoticons to suggest otherwise.

just a pity that some fail to recognize humor

I love humour. Now, what's that got to with your posts

Oldclaypaws posts I find interesting, thought provoking, and sometimes amusing. If I haven't anything useful to make in reply...

[splodger]

back on topic - lets be real about this - every move we make (human) has an inpact in one way or another on everything else on the planet. thats progress for you.
as a woodland owner you may have the opportunity to redress a small fraction of the damage that we all contribute to - if you wish - but it's not mandatory

if you are mindful - giving time and thought to the actions you take - you can, using mostly a fair bit of savvy, create a harmony between yourself and your surrounds - restricting "a direct human impact" thus create / maintain a healthy balance within your little patch of whatever - be it garden, farm, woodland etc

[oldclaypaws]

To be positive about beneficial things we can do to our woods to compensate for other impacts and mistakes we might make, I intend to thoroughly digest, memorise and act on the following volume written by two ecologists for woodlands.co.uk, well worth a read. If my felling some of the oaks deprives a few of the bats of habitat, I'll perhaps make an effort to build them a deluxe house, and they should have more insects to feed on from the extra clearings. One tries. I wonder how many of the songbirds our local wildlife centre nurtures back to health from injury and are then soft released are eaten by the hawks they also repair and release nearby!

http://www.woodlands.co.uk/owning-a-wood/managing-your-woodland-for-wildlife/

[ncrawshaw]

Judging by the activities that most of the forum members have described over the years, I wouldn't have thought that our 'management' activities have much effect on the wildlife or biodiversity of our woodlands. I have 13 acres of coppice and larch plantation and work down in the woods about three days a week. Nevertheless, deer and badgers abound, as do rabbits, pheasants and other birds. Last week a fox stopped and looked at me sitting by the bonfire before trotting on, minding his own business. Most of the woodland that we own, if not all, has been managed far more intensively over the last few centuries with no particular regard for biodiversity etc. There was wildlife around then and I don't think that the type of activities that most of us are engaged in will have much effect on it now.

[oldclaypaws]

Resources for small woodland owners like us to have advice and any subsidy for best practice are virtually negligible compared to the vast sums that go into agricultural food subsidy. Despite the open acknowledgement that woods are of paramount importance for wildlife and biodiversity (eg woods support 64 different bird species in the UK, more than any other habitat, and thousands of different plants and insects), woods are a poor ignored cousin compared to intensively fertilized monoculture food producing agricultural areas which are wildlife deserts. Fell a tree and you get dirty looks from hikers, even though it might be benefiting the wood. Yet the same hikers will walk nonchalantly past a tractor spraying vast quantities of oil based fertilizers and weedkillers on a monoculture field which leaves a huge carbon footprint and poisons the streams they drain into, and being paid huge sums to do so.

Did you know the EU put £57,000,000,000 into the pocket of EU farmers every year, for practices that leave a lot to be desired, and which ends up in millions of tons of CO2, waste and corruption?

If woodland owners got a fraction of this, we'd all be dressed in tweeds and driving Landrovers. While this is slightly tangential to my main theme, the point is as our woods are critical for wildlife, you'd have thought the government would make every effort to support us, advice us, find subsidised markets for our eco friendly produce, and appoint experts to help us maintain this vital resource. Er, no.

Finding the right way to go, working out what the plant, how to manage, buying equipment, we're largely on our own without any help. Most of us will make an annual loss on our woods. No wonder most large landowners find it easier to have a plantation approach to woods and look to make money from ventures like landfill, shooting, lodges, paintball, none of which benefit the ecology.

If our best ecological woodland practices were well advised and subsidised, we'd have idyllic healthy woods and a good return for our time too. Dream on.

[jennysmate]

Woulde you really want euro bureacrats snooping around your wood, giving you advice thats out of date , more suitable for french farmers and more politicaly motivated than science based, telling you what to do, giving you yards( sorry, metres) of forms to fill in, changing the goalposts every 5 minutes? Just for the sake of a few pounds subsidy.

[Dexter's Shed]

If our best ecological woodland practices were well advised and subsidised, we'd have idyllic healthy woods and a good return for our time too. Dream on.

I don't know about everyone else's feelings, but I never bought our wood to make a return on it, or to have someone else tell me what to do, by my filling in of forms, I bought it purely selfishly to have some stress free me time

[splodger]

have to agree with you jennysmate

main reason we have never applied for grants that are available, should we wish to take them - too much hoop jumping and far too many jobsworths sticking their oar in

we prefer to be left on our own and enjoy our woods without outside intervention

grants might suit some - but not me or my dad