As well as willow coppicing, now is also the time of year when we start doing our hedgerow management. This mainly involves coppicing but we also do a bit of hedge laying and sometimes some flailing too. There are a number of reasons we manage the hedgerows, not only does it keep them thick and healthy, providing more shelter and food for the animals that use them, but it also allows ensures the hedges don’t get too tall, as a wet grassland site tall hedges can be a problem as they provide ideal perches from which crows can scan the fields looking for wading bird nests. On top of all this we are also lucky enough to have two fairly rare species of butterfly on the moor; black and brown hairstreaks. They lay their eggs on blackthorn bushes of different ages and so it’s important we always have suitable bushes of various heights.
As with our willow coppicing, we don’t just clear fell vast areas, we have a rotation system in place. Following advice from Butterfly Conservation and our own RSPB ecologists the rotations this year are a lot more variable with some hedges being cut on a 15 year cycle with others being anything up to 50 years. We are leaving stands of un-cut hawthorn and blackthorn bushes within the sections that are coppiced, log and brash piles will be created, dead elms and small whippy thorns left and some bushes will be pollarded. It all creates lots of variety and lots of different micro-habitats within the hedgerow, allowing them to benefit as many species as possible. Norbert the newt, Wilbur the whitethroat, Terence the turtle dove and Barnaby the bank vole will all be very happy.
The Wednesday and Thursday teams got started on the coppicing this week and with about 485m ahead of us it will keep the volunteers occupied right through to March when the bird breeding season starts up.
There was a power outage last week and as a result of this the electrics controlling our reedbed pump shorted out. This has been a bit annoying as we are trying to raise the level of the Northern reedbed at the moment so we can float our tern raft to a more suitable winter storage area. I’m wanting to move it as soon as possible as the thought of another cold swim really isn’t very appealing!! We are fortunate however to have a volunteer who is amazing with electrics and so with him solving the pump problem I had an opportunity to scan the reedbed to see if any interesting birds were around. Lots of fieldfare and redwing were feeding nearby, bullfinches and long-tailed tits were moving round the edge of the reedbed, I heard 2 water rail calling, a stonechat was sitting on top of the reeds and a big flock of about 20 reed buntings were moving about. The bearded tits were seen yesterday so are most probably still out there somewhere, but the firecrests seen at the end of last week will I’m sure have moved on. On the way back to the office I got excellent views of a kingfisher sitting on a pile of branches in front of the viewing area looking out over the newly flooded Closes field, this is proving to be a popular feeding area for these colourful autumn visitors.
Wow, that's a lengthy explanation! Thanks for that.
So.... since the RSPB started managing the Otmoor reserve back in 1997, we have been managing its hedges. Up until this year they have predominantly been managed so that one fifteenth of their length is cut each year, as this benefits black and brown hairstreak butterflies. However... we have recently decided that not all the hedges on the reserve need to be managed to such an extent and so they are now going to be cut on longer cycles, so for example it may take 20 years for the whole length of some hedges to be cut and 50 years for others. This means in these particularly hedgelines there will eventually be thorn bushes ranging between 0 & 20 and between 0 & 50 years old respectively.
There are also some parts of the hedges that have never been managed by the RSPB, although they may well have been managed by the former land owners and so some of the larger thorn bushes may well be quite old (next time I coppice a large one I'll count the rings). The older thorns though are not necessarily great for wildlife as they get tall and leggy, with lots of trunk and not much thick vegetation cover. When we do the coppicing we leave a few older trees as well as encouraging the growth of lots of new thorn, it's all about variety and creating lots of different habitats within the hedges :)
How are the hedgerows aged, ie, you say some are c.50 years old, I would like to know? Thanks.