Target Orange

By the session leader:

This pond has been quietly refilling:

Why was it ever empty in the first place?  Because it had been deliberately drained, and left empty for several weeks, to remove all traces of carp, its fry, and its eggs.

The carp had been a problem because they so dominate a pond that other species cannot live there.  So: no great crested newts; no invertebrates; no weed, as carp feed at the bottom, and stir it up …  In fact, very little pond life at all, besides carp.

The carp themselves went to a good home.  250lbs of them were transported to Lancashire, so that they can grow on in peace without muscling out other wildlife.

While the pond was just a sea of mud, it would have been too much of a temptation to passing dogs.  (Site-warden’s dog Jack included.)  So it needed one of those orange-netting fences all round it.  Now, all was safe again, so: enter Green Gym.   We lifted the fence – detangling it from the brambles – rolled it up, and lugged both it and the metal stakes up to the landrover.

Our other task was coppicing hazel: all those marked with an orange splash.   We don’t need to be shown any more how to create a neat stool, with the cut trunks sloping outwards, and finished off the way this site-warden requires, with one or two young upright stems left to give the plant a head start in regenerating from next spring.  And orange is of course the colour-code for the target, not a code-word for the agent used.  Our tools were just hard steel:

Assessing the situation before the first cut

If carp are the bullies of the pond, deer can be the big-boys in woodland.  We all know they are very sweet, bouncy creatures, especially when sighted in an unexpected context.  Their browsing habits, however, can be seriously damaging to young tree-growth.  Some stools had piles of brash left on top to protect them from being grazed …

but this one had a rather neat netting-surround:

 

From the photograph below, you might think Jack had been trained as a team-member:

It does look as though the dog is helping to carry the binders.  But no: he just wanted to play.  It was us humans who had to carry the harvested hazel-rods up the hill.

[Green-Gymmer still going strong towards session-end – respect!  While my colleagues were hazel-coppicing in the South-Oxon countryside, I was engaged on a very similar task in North Devon.  Except that there the brash had to be piled 2-feet high, to ward off Red Deer, who like nothing better of an evening than to wander down off Exmoor to enjoy a social with nibbles: fresh hazel-shoots seem to be their favourite delicacy.  Oh, and the slope was a little steeper, which meant that from time to time this happened:

I’d have been able to pick myself up quicker, if I hadn’t been laughing so much: no harm done

If any fellow-Green-Gymmers were caught out by the slope at Wittenham, they were smart enough not be caught on camera.

Normal service for publishing the blog should be resumed next week.  Thanks to our readers for their patience. – Ed.]