What to look out for on the Park in January.

 Along Oak Walk, find a Lime tree, and Ash tree and a Horse Chestnut tree. Identify them from their bark and buds.

Lime bark and bud.

Ash bark and bud.

Horse Chestnut bark and bud.

Find areas of molehills. It will be one mole per area of molehills. So how many moles to think we might have on the Park?

Find the old veteran Lime tree which has finally collapsed. Find the mistletoe still growing on one of the live limbs.

Look for signs of rabbits. Find these small holes that they have dug and marked with dung pellets. Look out for areas of dead grass which they marked with pellets and urine. See if you can identify the rabbit trackway across the grassland.

Find places where rabbits have stripped the bark from small fallen branches.

Listen for a Robin singing. Copy the link into your browser to hear a Robin singing on the Park.

https://youtu.be/ZJupAjJOgQc

Find an Elder Tree (look in the top left corner of the dog training enclosure) and look for the first signs of bud burst.

Pishiobury Park. Springhall Field Hedge Project.

 The old Field hedge around Spring Hall Field is largely derelict. There are lots of gaps and places where failed hedge shrub plantings have taken place some years ago. There are some older Hawthorns and old Hazels. It is possible that the Hazels go back to the time of Thomas Rivers when they were planted to provide sticks and poles for use on the Nursery. The plan is to carry out a biodiversity study of the hedge, coppice the Hazels and plant up the gaps with young shrubs next year. A short film on You Tube shows wasps and bees feeding on the Ivy over growing some of the Hawthorns. The first work party was on 16th of December where we have started coppicing the Hazels and clearing away some of the dead wood to make eco-piles.

https://youtu.be/MDU-HnE-sr4      for wasps and bees feeding on the Ivy.

Old Hazel with barbed wire inter- grown.

                            The derelict hedge.

Old Hawthorn covered in Ivy

                    Failed earlier plantings.

We have got to be careful when coppicing the Hazel.

            Six of us attended the first work party.

Starting work.

We are going to have to cut the Hazels quite high to avoid the barbed wire.

Making sure the worksite is left neat and tidy ready for the next time.

Coppicing in the Maple Belt area of the Park.

 On 18th November 2021 a Friends Work Party completed the coppicing started in the Community Event on 28th October. Seven of us worked to build protective 'baskets' around the Hazel tree stumps which had been cut down to about 30 cm. What we are doing is to continue a practice, not necessarily on the Park, but certainly by Thomas Rivers, who probably leased the Osier Bed to plant up with Osier Willows for fruit tree packaging. The areas which were too dry for Willows were planted up with Hazel  to provide rods and poles for use on the Nursery. Some of these original Rivers Hazel trees are to be found in the area adjacent to the boardwalk and also in the hedges around the edges of Springhall Field.

Very old hazel trees.

We harvested straight poles as the trees were coppiced, a billhook was used to put points on the poles which were then driven into the ground as a framework.

The Hazel rods produced by coppicing were then woven between the stakes to make a 'protective basket'.

If we did not do this then the new shoots which would be produced from the stumps next Spring would be browsed off by Muntjac and rabbits. In Thomas Rivers day these would not have been a problem because Muntjac were not introduced into this country until early in the 20th century and rabbits would have been regularly controlled and considered an item of our normal diet for country people.

19th October 2021.

Autumn is steadily progressing and the leaves are starting to come off the trees. It will be interesting to see what happens to these leaves in the coming weeks as the earthworms start to get busy and drag them down into their tunnels. This is all part of the food chain and food web on the Park.

                                                                        Hornbeam.

                                                                        Sycamore.

                                                                                Beech.

                                                             Ornamental Plum.

.The cattle are supposed to be going off the Park in the next few days and they are making the most of clearing up the last of the conkers.

The grass has been mown because the cattle were not keeping pace with it and one of the terms of the Higher Level Stewardship is that the grass be reduced to a height of about 10 cm by the end of the grazing season.

The first of the fungi are starting to appear. I am not going to try and name many of these because identification is difficult. The role of fungi is that they break down organic matter either in the soil or in dead tree trunks. The nutrients are then returned to the soil as part of the food chain.

Moles are starting to get busy and it is interesting that there are not as many on the Park as you would expect. I think this is largely because most of the soils on the Park are very difficult to dig in which is why Moles are found in the north-west corner, by the Spring and all the way along the bottom of the sledging slope adjacent to the Osier Bed.

The Friends are currently planning a Bat Roost Box Project and here are five photographs of lightweight concrete boxes which are already on trees in the Park. We are hoping to be able to add some more ones in the not too distant future.

Just to demonstrate the biodiversity we have on the Park here is a shot of a section of Ash tree which has got two different types of Moss and four different types of lichen growing on it.

Birds are difficult to photograph but today there was a flock of Jackdaws taking advantage of the blustery wind. There were also some Jackdaws, Carrion Crows and Magpies feeding where the grass has been cut.

And finally, this is a rarity this year an actual Acorn in a year when the Acorn crop seems to have totally failed. This will have consequences for animals which rely on these nuts for food as part of the food chain.