The Old Man of Wytham

Some kids at our primary school came from Collier Row: a name commemorating sturdy Essex pitmen perhaps? Hardly; while most people today think of a collier as a miner or deliverer of coal, the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is actually a ‘maker of charcoal’. Collier Row was on the edge of Hainault… Continue reading One day, there came that way, a sooty collier…

I started thinking about this because of two comments from recent conservation discussions. In the first planting was argued to be less desirable than natural regeneration because ‘unnaturally high densities’ of trees were being planted. In the second natural regeneration was being promoted as better than planting because the much higher numbers of seedlings produced… Continue reading Natural regeneration or planting – does it matter which produces a denser stand?

Boar are rootling in the Forest of Dean, Beaver are swimming in the River Otter in Devon. Now another B, for Bison, is being considered for various conservation projects, such as in the West Blean Woods, as reported by Countryfile, the Guardian and others https://www.kentwildlifetrust.org.uk/wilderblean. Coming across large animals such as bison roaming the countryside… Continue reading Another B… Mammal Re-introduction?

We tend to focus on the more natural aspects of Wytham Woods, but quite a lot of the trees are planted or the descendents of planted trees from the 19th and 20th centuries. Moreover, although there is no evidence for earlier planting we cannot rule out that acorns might have been collected and dibbed into… Continue reading The plantations in Wytham Woods

Suddenly it is mid-summer’s day. Where did the spring go? I have hardly been in the woods in the last  four months which has made me realise how much I have missed the changing patterns of wild flowers. They have been part of my life from childhood, starting with the patch of celandines and cuckoo-pint… Continue reading Wild flowers in my past and present

Woods, especially ancient woodland, exist over much of the country as small patches surrounded by a totally different habitat, whether lowland farmland or upland moor. During the 1970s and 1980s it became common to compare such patches to real islands surrounded by sea and to apply island biogeography ideas to terrestrial conservation questions. The continuing… Continue reading No wood is an island

Wytham Woods should really be called the Woods of Hazel in commemoration of Hazel, the daughter of Raymond and Hope ffennell, the owners of the Woods in the 1920s and 1930s. She died quite young and is commemorated by the marker stone along the Singing Way. The ffennells subsequently transferred the estate to the University.… Continue reading The Woods of Hazel

The jackdaws are swirling over our street, dropping sticks into chimney pots; in the hedges and woods new growth is appearing – cow parsley, lesser celandine, primroses and anemones. Spring is underway. It may temporarily get put on hold, if we have a sudden cold snap, but it won’t then be long before things get… Continue reading Strange times

Time and again people stress the usefulness of long-term records and bemoan their lack. Yet at a recent conference http://www.ukeof.org.uk/conference-2020 , organised by the UK Earth Observation Forum, monitoring and long-term surveillance were described as the Cinderella subjects. It is generally much more exciting for funders, and often for the researchers themselves, to set-up new… Continue reading How do we best organise studies of long-term change?

When did you last press a plant?