Hello all,
It’s March already and 2017 seems to be flying by, made all the more apparent by the fact that our noisy habitat management finished for another season! Birds are starting to sing (blue tits, great tits, goldcrests, bullfinches, song and mistle thrush), woodpeckers are drumming and territorial disputes have begun, marking the first few moments of spring. We have had a fantastically productive winter season. Thank you to all of our volunteers at Blean and Seasalter for their hard work and dedication through the freezing cold and wet of January!
The Blean Team
Blean Woods
Coppicing
This year has been a bit different, with most of the coppicing carried out by local contractors rather than volunteers. This has been paid for by the income from the wood sales they generate. Now finished, they have covered a total of 5 hectares across the entire woodland. These plots will develop over the next decade providing habitats for a range of different species as they mature. The first few years will give nesting and feeding grounds for warmth loving creatures such as butterflies, bumblebees and reptiles. The open ground also creates potential nightjar habitat. As the dense scrub develops it will then provide nesting ground for warblers such as nightingale, willow warblers and garden warblers.
Rides
With the coppice work taken care of, our volunteer team has pushed on to achieve great things with upgrading the ride network. Just before the festive break we completed the final section of this year’s planned work – an early Christmas present! We met our target of 2.5 km, a great achievement for the team. We have further refined our way of working – going back the full 20m whilst scalloping in and out to maximise the edge habitat surface area, leaving pinch points for dormice and reducing the wind corridor effect. We are also using the products to greater effect – cutting to defined lengths to maximise firewood value, cutting stumps low to help with extraction and separating out the straight chestnut for use in fencing.
Oak thinning has been carried out along our rides from the previous winter, allowing dappled sunlight to reach the newly exposed ground and encouraging new growth. It also gives the dominant oaks with interesting form and evidence of woodpecker/bat activity the room to expand. It will be great to see these areas develop over the next few years, with potential for an array of wildflowers to colonise the widened ride system and birds like nightingale and willow warbler able to move into the maturing scrubby areas. Mulching was finished at the end of February and has increased the proportion of the ride which we can manage with our quad mounted mower. This will create a better balance of area dedicated to herbaceous growth within the ride alongside the woodier, scrub element.
Linear glades
In the autumn update we reported that the glades were almost finished, which wasn’t quite true! Although we have finished our biennial brushcutting of the small grassy glades, we hadn’t actually started cutting our heather dominated linear glades that run through the woods between the coppice plots. This is the first season in many where we have had the time to give these great features the attention they need. The glades were put in many years ago as a way of breaking up the mono-culture of coppice and to create ‘ecological corridors’ that add a bit of diversity to the woodland. Over the past few years these areas have suffered from a bit of neglect and have become quite overgrown. We are now getting on top of them by cutting back 50% of the vegetation in selected sections on a 4 year rotation.
Looking over maps from previous years, the edges of these glades have been traditionally used by nightjar for nesting, especially when next to newly coppiced woodland. In the summer these linear glades will be covered in flowering heather and wildflowers, creating nectar sources for flying invertebrates including moths – the main prey for nightjar.
Heath
Our work ‘haloing’ around the large heath finished just in time for the end of the cutting season. This work is already proving to be vital towards making our fence repairs easier as many posts have already started to be replaced. The heath itself has seen better days as over the last few years, birch has started to take over.
To counter this, we plan to graze the heath with goats. Goats, whilst great at browsing on young saplings, are also notorious for their propensity for escape. Removing the surrounding tree line will help remove any bridges that they could be tempted to use. This haloing is the first step in a series of improvements to initially make the heath more goat proof and ultimately return the heath to its former glory.
Wood sales
All is going well with wood sales and we have been getting an influx of local buyers coming to pick up timber. Word is obviously getting out and all those work parties spent shifting timber from the rides up to the wood stack by the heath are seriously paying off. Since July 2016 volunteer work parties have forwarded 95m making up a big part of the £10k in the last 6 months from firewood sales. The rejuvenation of the woodfuel market is great news for Blean and the money generated will go to vital work within the woods including coppicing, track repairs and mulching.
Tracks
At long last the tracks at Blean are going to start getting some much needed TLC. The first to get this treatment will be the track leading from the New Road down to the A2 entrance (bypassing the large heath and the wood stack). These much needed repairs will greatly benefit the day to day running of the woodland and will make the site easier to access for contractors, timber buyers and our own work vehicles! Work will be starting in March.
Extra helping hands
Recently we have been lucky enough to receive some extra help from some local volunteer groups. In the last few months we have had multiple weekend visits from a group of students from nearby Kent College who have been coming down to lend a hand. This enthusiastic group have really been getting really stuck into some dragging and stacking as well as some glade clearance and heather burning. A massive thank you to Kent college who have made light work of tidying up after our chainsaw team. Not only have they contributed lots of hard work but they have also donated several new dormice boxes for our monitoring program. Massive thank you to headmaster Julian Waltho and all of his team and students for another great year of collaboration with the Blean Woods team.
Another group to get stuck in at Blean was the Kentish Stour Countryside Project. They came along to brighten up a very overcast day in January and helped rake up heather in one of our linear glades, as well as scallop the edges to create a varied structure. Instead of burning/stacking all these cut saplings the group bundled them up into faggots and loaded them onto their trailer. This is to help them with essential repairs works along the Stour river by preventing erosion along the banks.
Forest schools
Starting in February half-term, a new educational group started at Blean Woods. Led by local resident, Jasmin Chiaramello, these events aim to connect children with nature using the woodland as a classroom to learn about and care for the environment. Jasmin’s classes are aimed at kids aged 4-11 and compliment Brambles Outdoor Group which have been using Blean Woods for many years as a place to connect nursery aged children with the outdoors.
Long service awards
For those of you that might have missed it, we have had a few volunteers receive their long-service awards at Blean. We presented 10 year puffin badges to Michael Hooker, Roger Matthews and Bob Wilson.
The Blean team, along with the whole RSPB community, former wardens and anyone who has been connected with Blean in the last decade owe a great debt to Michael, Roger and Bob for their hard work and endless support towards this special reserve. Absolute heroes! Roll on the next 10 years!
Seasalter Levels
Bunding
In the last Seasalter update we reported that the ditching work had begun to clear sections of over-vegetated ditches that have dried up and have little use for wildlife or as a water source for cattle. The spoil that came out of those ditches has been used across the site to create bunds in the fields that we are flooding to create habitat for lapwing and redshank. Many of those fields do not hold very much water as there are low points around the edges where the water spills out once we pump onto them for a day or two. These small bunds block up the low points and keep more water on the grassland and therefore create more suitable breeding and foraging habitat for wetland birds. The more damp and muddy the grassland becomes, the easier it will be for the birds to forage for invertebrates and rear their young.
Scrub on Alberta
Seasalter is divided into many areas that are all at different stages of grazing marsh restoration. One of our newest acquisitions is a collection of 4 fields that we call Alberta (next to the caravan park of the same name). These fields are currently unsuitable for flooding and wetland creation, but we have now completed the first step of restoration - to clear scrub from the edges. Taking this scrub out removes perches for corvids and hiding places for foxes, both of which predate the eggs of highly threatened ground nesting birds such as lapwing and redshank. The Alberta fields are some of the closest we have to the Swale shoreline, so once we start wetting up the fields in the future we should also start to see curlew, golden plover and dunlin use these fields during the cold winter months.
Pennywort
During the coldest days in December and January the ditches stayed frozen for a good few weeks. This killed off some good sized chunks of pennywort, but of course not all of it. The ice stops the pennywort growing and turns it into a horrible brown mush. The last few years have been ice free and this has given us quite a challenge as the plant has never stopped growing! Now the ditches have thawed out we will do one final push towards clearing what remains of this invasive plant so the ditches are clear once the breeding season starts. Once out of the water we got some extra help with disposal...