You will remember that a large oak had lost a branch in some high winds. Well, our contactors duly appeared when, they, our local reserves officer for the wildlife trust, and me, agreed to prune the dodgy oak, remove a tree split down its trunk, and two old, high stumps covered in ivy, but without branches. Normally we would not bother with all this if they were in the middle of the wood, but to make the trees safe for visitors the work had to be done.

The amount of timber now stacked by the car park, however, is not so much that it may look incredible, but it is the sheer weight of it. And, incidentally, it was a weight off my mind as well! Trees are heavy, and tree-work can be a dangerous job - even without a chainsaw, which we are not qualified to use in any case. Even one small sapling falling on you from two feet would knock your block off - even wearing a hard hat!

I have to admit that tree surgeons are my heroes! The expertise with which they handle themselves in a tree and the apparent ease by which branches and trees are expertly brought to the ground, is almost ballet-like. It takes much hard work to be able to graduate to these heights (sorry for the pun) from being allowed to cut up smaller timber on the ground.

We hope to remove most of the heavier timber for one or two jobs which we have in mind, while the lighter wood will rot down well for the stag beetles and other insects, while the birds will get a good number of free meals out of it as well.

We had a few days following Christmas when we could get on with our main task of cutting out self-sown birches which are overtopping the crop trees in our main plantation. Lovely days: one with lying snow, one with an east wind, but really sunny with the birds singing happily. Good-to-be-alive days! Some of the birches on which we are working must be about 40ft. high (about 14m.) with a bole of, say, 6in. (15cm.) and again, like so many others, they are still experiencing damage by squirrels. Oddly, most of the crop trees show no damage - but that's probably just a matter of time, I fear.

It grieves me to think of all those birch branches going to waste. They ought to be stacked under cover for use in making besom brooms later. But "later" never arrives for us because we never have enough bodies to cope with all the forestry work, much less for wood crafting. Although our Victoria did build a couple of bat boxes in her spare time over Christmas. So it can be done - it's just a matter of applying ourselves I suppose!

I won't invite you to the wood at the moment, because it is so wet on the paths you'll probably be engulfed in mud!

John Hall © 2003