That’s the most common reaction among friends, family and colleagues when mentioning our latest project. So I thought it would be fun to share a little about why we have in the hope it will help others who may be considering it.    We’ve always had a love for the outdoors; I grew up practising my Scout skills on Dartmoor and Exmoor and my wife hiking and living on the North York Moors.  Fast forward 19 years and with boys of 8 and 11 we had spent days and days during Co#%d outside. We’d chat about the environment, ecology, camping and escapism amongst other things. I’d dreamt of owning a woodland for years and we could now think about making it a reality. I must confess that it’s taken a year or so of convincing my wife that rather than having money sat doing nothing in savings, thinking about a camper-van or extending the house -  it would be much more prudent to leave something for future generations and critically much more fun to learn about and apply our ideas from those Co#%d chats in our own woodland and more so to share some of that with our family and friends.   What blew me away in the process was how much the boys would help. The ideas were flowing; camping, hammocks, making fires Bear Grylls style, bird/owl/bat box making and installing, planting new trees, wildlife trail cameras, dens, bird hides, benches, swings, obstacle courses, tree houses, a pond, a zip line, a zip line over a pond! You get the idea. The boys’ ideas have spurred us into investigating and learning about the interconnectivity of many of these ideas; bracken control by digging a pond to encourage a new natural wetland habitat, new wildlife, opening an area above for bats and birds, the potential for new mammals, creating an area for relaxation and quiet reflection. We might also be creating entrepreneurs as the boys have realised they could earn some pocket money by selling poles or netting kindling or even one day carving spoons. They’ll keep us on our toes that’s for sure. And how about something for me? Apart from the gadgets I’ve been secretly buying, the latest project is a compost loo with a view - made from  old pallets. Ticks off the categories of environment, sustainability, ecology and escapism all in one hit. And we’re only at the beginning, what else might come in the future?   Four weeks have rolled by since the purchase, many of those same friends and family now say things like “it’s so great how much the boys are into it!”. Isn’t it just?!…and in reflecting on the title of this post; no, we’re not sorry at all! Far from it! To track our progress and time as a woodland owning family please follow us on Instagram @grange_close_wood.   Jethro.  

There are times when one does begin to wonder whether one has tumbled too far down the rabbit hole of mycological obsession. Though the Spring months might seem something like a drought period for many in search of curious fungi, they are all around us and all year round. For the hardcore few, the next few months in particular are a time of rummaging through hedgerows and peering at dried twigs, grasses and herbaceous stems in search of what effectively appear as little more than black dots. From then on, it is a just a small step away from the full-blown insanity of lichenology. This month’s focus is on the more common and recognisable of these obscure types, which all fall within the category of ascomycetes: these are the spore-shooter types that develop their spores internally, typically in tube or flask-like sacs and in batches of eight, as opposed to the basidiomycetes, where the spores grow externally on cell-like structures known as basidia, typically in groups of four, which drop off as they mature.  Patellaria atrata, growing as inconspicuous black dots on a dead fennel stem, with the spores arguable more interesting looking than the fungus itself. I’ve written quite lengthily about various groups of ascomycetes in previous posts, but despite the fact that they far outnumber the basidiomycetes in terms of prevalence and the proliferating number and variability of species – which include the colourful goblet-shaped Green and Turquoise Elfcups, the hard black woodwarts and tarcrusts, and other less noticeable things like Sycamore Tar Spots and Holly Speckle) – many consider them a no-go area due to the inedibility of the majority of them, not to mention the fact most are very difficult to even see, unless one is looking specifically for them, yet alone identify.  Few have common names, and even the Latin names change with alarming regularity as individual species find themselves reclassified or split up into numerous subspecies. The obvious exception here is that prized edible, the Morel (Morchellan esculenta, although there are a few other lookalike species), one of the few that make it into spotters guides and foragers handbooks.  The spores of Bracken Map developing within its ascus, with their characteristic crescent shape, relatively large size and multiple segments. To really get to grips with the subject would take the kind of life-long fanaticism and fastidiousness displayed by the likes of Peter Thompson, the author of Ascomycetes in Colour (2013), who has evidently spent years driving around the country in search of photographic examples of the numerous nondescript specimens that can be found on specific hosts such as dead grasses, leaves and other organic material. It took literally a lifetime of research before the husband and wife team of Martin B. and J. Pamela Ellis devoted their retirement from teaching to put pen to paper for their landmark Microfungi on Land Plants: An Identification Handbook, first published in 1985 with a revised and enlarged edition appearing in 1997. Though it’s technically been out of print for years, the book remains a must-have for serious mycologists, giving an exhaustive list with detailed illustrations of the type of species one might find on a wide array of specific hosts, and secondhand copies are accordingly pricey. There’s also been more recent scholarly books such as Bjorn Wegen’s up-to-date and even more comprehensive Handbook of Ascomycota (2017), but again, this is a specialist publication intended for an academic readership and priced beyond the range of all but the most curious of amateur naturalists. The foreword of the revised 1997 edition of Ellis and Ellis refer to microfungi as “ones which require the use of a microscope to see their variety”. Nevertheless, a microscope isn’t always necessary for the identification of a number of common types if you can ascertain their host. For example, over the next few months, if one looks closely at dead nettle stems, one might spot the tiny tangerine-coloured fruiting bodies (ascocarps) of Calloria neglecta, an ascomycetes fungus specific to them. Two very similar looking species grow on ash keys: Diaporthe samaricola, grows on the seed part; the smaller Neosetophoma samarorum only grows on the winged part. An even more extreme example of host specificity is Diaporthe samaricola, which over the winter months appears as miniscule black dots, less than half a milimeter in diameter, on the dried winged seeds, or keys (‘samara’) of ash trees. However, they will only appear on the seed part of the ash keys. Another fungus, Neosetophoma samarorum, produces eruptions of even smaller dots on the winged parts of the keys. The two will often appear side by side. They have no adverse affect on the health of the tree in question, although there is another ascomycetes that does have a notoriously detrimental effect on its host - Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, responsible for Ash Dieback and detailed in a previous post. Its small, white nail-shaped fruitbodies can be found on the blackened twigs and petioles at the foot of the infected tree around June. Bracken Map (Rhopographus filicinus) is another commonplace and instantly recognisable species that is host specific. It can easily be spotted at this time of year in most places where you find dead bracken, just prior to a new season’s growth sprouting up to replace the last, but actually one can find it all year round. The reason for its name is self-evident, as it grows in elongated spreading black blotches that eventually merge to form irregular shapes like countries on a map. Dead bracken stems throughout the year can be seen hosting the tell-tale ascocarps of the Bracken Map. These blotches are the ascocarps, the fruitbodies from which the spores are released. The are described as pyrenomycetous, meaning that like the tarcusts or woodwarts or commonly-spotted Cramp Balls (Daldinia concentria, aka King Alfred’s Cakes), they are hard, brittle, and often carbonaceous, optimised to continue releasing spores over a relatively long period of time during the late-winter and spring months when the weather is relatively dry and temperatures start increasing, and yet there’s little greenery about to shelter them from the dry wind and lengthening hours of sunlight or get in the way of spore dispersal. Each of these fruit bodies contains numerous tiny ‘perithecia’; flask shaped pits in which the asci sacks and the spores that develop within them are housed and are kept from dessication. The spores are released from holes known as ‘ostioles’ in the top of the perithecia that cover the black surface of the Bracken Map. If one looks really closely, one can see that the ostioles in the case of the Bracken Map are elongated along the length of the bracken stems. The ostioles from which the spores are released can just about me made out when the ascocarp is looked at extremely closely. The shape of the ostioles are a key feature in identifying other pyrenomycetous fungi, as detailed in my 2020 post on Woodwarts, Blackheads and Tarcrusts. It’s just as well, because there are many other types of such fungi that are not quite as distinctive-looking as the Bracken Map, and often much much smaller. I’ve been scrutinising various hedgerows recently, and noting that despite their superficial similarities, the seemingly identical black dots that appear on, for example, elder or hawthorn, are often very different species from those that appear on the woody dead stems of clematis or hogweed or other plants. Fortunately, for those with a microscope, these kind of ascomycetes do have very distinctive spores that often serve as much better means of identification, in consultation with the literature cited above, than the actual ascocarp fruitbodies. As mentioned, basidiomycetes produce their spores externally on basidia, growing like apples from trees almost, and so they are typically asymmetrical and one can note the vestiges of a kind of stem by which they were attached to the basidia. The ascospores of ascomycetes tend to be much more symmetrical, often much larger and in some cases much more complex, consisting of multiple cells in different arrangements.  These tiny specks on a dried hogweed stem could be anything, but the complex multi-celled spores compare with a species called Pleospora phaeocomoides. The spores of the Bracken Map are a great example of this – they are 27-35x7-8 microns in size, making them about three to four times the size of a typical mushroom-shaped basidiomycetes type like a Brittlegill – and to put this in perspective, they are just a smidgen smaller than the 40-micron threshold considered visible to the naked eye, or about the size of a small grain of salt. They are crescent shaped with 4-8 segments, and look rather like croissants under the microscope. I’ve detailed a scant few of these types of fungi prevalent over the next few months that can at least be recognised without recourse to a microscope. There are, however, at least 10,000 ascomycetes species found in the British Isles alone, so this is clearly a subject few will want to engage with too thoroughly. There are a couple of other more readily identifiable species that might catch the attention of the woodland walker, however, but I’ll leave these for next month... Bracken Map

There is evidence that trees lost to fires and drought are not returning to fire damaged areas.  Fire has been ‘part and parcel’ of  the dynamics of some forest ecosystems.  The fires take out smaller trees, giving space and light to others.  Fire (or the smoke associated with it) can even help the seeds of some species to disperse and/or germinate (eg. serotiny in certain Pines). Different chemicals from smoke such as karrikinolide and glyceronitrile are known to play key roles in smoke-stimulated germination of certain species, such as heather. However, climate change is affecting forests (and woodlands) across the globe. Fires are becoming more frequent (associated with increasing drought) and trees are struggling to return / regenerate after intense or repeated fires.  An analysis of a number of sites in the Rocky Mountains suggests that in some areas fire, moisture stress and increasing temperatures result in a loss of resilience so that forested areas are being replaced with shrubs, grassland and flowers.  "Fire refugia" are areas that somehow avoid significant or frequent damage; they burn less often and/or less intensely than the surrounding landscape.  Such areas are important in the recovery of the ecosystem after a fire - allowing re-population of the area with a variety of species.  [caption id="attachment_35352" align="aligncenter" width="650"] Woodland recovering from a fire[/caption] Consequently, studies have been directed towards understanding the physical and biological nature of such refugia.  The work has focused on mature, conifer dominated forests in the States (The Klamath-Siskiyou region)  and the fires that have occurred over a period of some 30 years.  It was found that refugia were associated with physical features of the habitat such as rocky outcrops, depressions in the landscape.  It was also noted that the density of the smoke that the fires generated was a factor in tree survival (perhaps dense smoke offered a degree of shade?).   The area studied has a complex and diverse geology,  with varied habitats that support considerable biodiversity.   Fire has always been a key factor in the maintenance of the varied landscape but with the climate becoming hotter and drier, there is concern that an increasing frequency of fires will ‘eat away’ at the forest’s ability to regenerate - with the loss of refugia and incineration of seed banks in the soil. Severe fire can reset the path of succession - so that forest can be reduced to bare soil. Complex and established communities of fungi, microbes, plants and animals are lost, reduced down to bare soil. Intense heat will damage the structure of the soil, reducing its organic content and its complex community of microbes. In extreme cases, this can lead to the erosion of the soil.  

For millions of years, forests and woodlands have been changing - as a result of natural regeneration, storms, fires and climate change.  However, with the expansion of human populations, woodlands and forests have been cut down to make way for towns, cities and the infra-structure of ‘modern’ life.  Sadly forests, and woodlands such as those in the path of HS2,  are still disappearing. ‘Untouched’ rain / tropical forest is being cut down to make way for cash crops; plus vast wooded areas have been destroyed by fire in Australia, Sweden and on the West Coast of the United States in recent years. Clearfell of any forested area for timber or agriculture involves the removal of all trees / vegetation and is sometimes followed by burning of the remaining debris. Clearfell can also have unintended consequences (beyond the loss of entire animal communities.  An Australian study has shown that it lowers soil nutrient levels - notably nitrate and phosphate.  Furthermore, the use of heavy machinery in clearfelling can compact the soil and its consequent exposure to the elements can lead to erosion (rain runoff).   When an area is subject to intense fire, there is a drop in the organic carbon content of the soil and structural damage to the soil; it can take many years for such fire-damaged soil to ‘recover’. Forests and woodlands support the vast majority of land-based species. However,  the species that we see today on a woodland walk may be different to those our ancestors might have seen five hundred or a thousand years ago.  Certain species only survive in relatively undisturbed (and ancient) forests / woodlands.  There are species that can ‘deal’ with disturbance and are adaptable, indeed opportunitistic,  such as red deer and fox.  The same can be said for certain plants species, which can become invasive.   Changes in species make-up and biodiversity do not always immediately follow loss of forest or woodland.  Generally speaking, the longer the life span of a species then the longer for the effects of forest loss to become apparent.  It may be that the effects ‘span’ generations, raptors / birds of prey may manage to raise their young in the immediate period following loss of forest or woodland. But their offspring may struggle to survive in a depleted environment. It might be that with limited resources an animal might simply not reproduce for years, if ever again.  Consequently, the impact of forest destruction / loss that species depletion might not be apparent for many years. The loss of forests and woodlands has lead to many local, national and inter-national initiatives to offset these losses: for example, New Zealand’s ‘One Billion Trees” project and the Nature Conservancy’s “plant a billion trees’ campaign.  Broadly speaking, reforestation involves the planting of native trees in an area, whereas planting with new (non-native) species is afforestation. Recent research suggests that whilst non-native plants often grow faster than native species, they also have less dense tissues (think: oak versus larch) and decompose more readily, which can contribute to more rapid cycling of carbon.  This will not help to mitigate climate change. It is also important to consider which trees might prosper and offer resilience in the light of climate change. Our climate is changing and will be different in the future, with summer temperatures being higher.  We have already seen more extreme weather events (leading to flooding and wild fires).  Forestry England has a number of tools to help plan which tree species will be suited to a site, now and in future.   There is ESC4 which offers a means to help forest managers and planners select tree species that are ecologically suited to particular sites; and there is also the climate matching tool.  As Forestry England says this is “so that we can see which places in the world currently experience the climate we are projected to have in future. We can compare these different places to help us plan which tree species will be suited to a site, now and in future”.  One strategy is to create woodlands that are more diverse, as it thought that diversity helps woods more resilient to climate change. This can be through encouraging a range of different, but carefully selected trees to grow, and being aware of the provenance of seeds or saplings.

In recent decades, signs of Spring have occurred earlier and earlier, indeed the early flowering of crocuses and daffodils in our gardens is one such sign. Now a detailed analysis of such ‘signs’ has been undertaken by using the information held in Nature’s Calendar.  This is an enormous database * of records of seasonal changes; it has records of some 400+ species of plants, from trees, to shrubs and herbs. Nature’s Calendar includes records from organisations like the Royal Meteorological Society, plus those of scientists, naturalists and gardeners. Recording when things happen (such as when horse chestnut and ash trees come into leaf, or when the first swifts or bumblebees are seen) is known as phenology. These timings vary from year to year.  Phenology is not a new discipline. One of the first phenologists was Robert Marsham, who recorded ‘indications of spring’ starting back in 1736. He catalogued some 27 different natural events on his family’s estate in Norfolk.  In 1875,  the Royal Meteorological Society set up a national recorder network.  Nature’s Calendar includes thousands of these historical observations and enables scientists to look for trends and see if they correlate with changes in temperature, rainfall, weather phenomena. The research team from Cambridge University looked at FFDs - first flowering dates and temperature records. They found a difference in flowering dates from the 1750s and the most recent years of almost a month.  Professor Ulf Büntgen has said that rising global temperature has brought Spring forward by several weeks.   This raises concerns. For example, if a plant grows and comes into flower earlier in the year what happens to insects that are dependent upon it? For example, some bees collect from only one species of plant.  Or to put it another way, suppose the plant flowers earlier but its pollinating agent (an insect such as a hover fly) is not about, has not emerged from its over-wintering stage? What if there is a ‘late’ frost?   * Nature’s Calendar : The Woodland Trust joined forces with the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology to collate phenology records into Nature’s Calendar; this has some 3.5 million records- some going back to eighteenth century.  

In late winter, it’s good to put up new nest boxes and clear out existing ones, in time for the breeding season.  In Ellekers Wood, as part of our management plan, we've been making lots of new boxes for birds and bats. Bats are currently having problems finding food to eat, plus many of their natural roosting places have disappeared. Building a bat box offers them :- somewhere safe to roost,   a place to raise their pups and  Sleeping quarters during the day.  Our biggest boxes are the two tawny owl ‘chimney boxes’.  Tawny (or brown) owls (Strix aluco) ‘own’ the classic owl hoot. They will nest in large gardens with trees, but woodlands are good for them. Their diet ranges from worms to rabbits.  Tawny owls like a north east facing entrance,  with a clear route.  Our boxes are made from 1" thick, rough sawn larch planks. We followed the RSPB design. Each box is approximately 800mm long (measurements / specifications available here).  Fortunately,  Dan has a head for heights and he has installed the boxes in mature oak trees at a height of approximately 6 metres.  The tawny owl typically makes its nest in a tree hole where it can protect its eggs and young against potential predators. They will occupy / nest in smaller cavities than barn owls and the design of the box reflects this. As tawny owl chicks start to explore their surroundings before fledging, it is important that the boxes are placed with easy access to nearby branches, so that they can climb over.  As with many species of birds, tawny owls are sensitive to disturbance when incubating their eggs, and should not be approached as they can be aggressive.  It is important that consideration is given to the siting of any box [embed]http://youtu.be/RfXIHXCyTNk[/embed]   Full details of RSPB nest boxes for various birds can be found here : https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/how-you-can-help-birds/nestboxes/nestboxes-for-owls-and-kestrels/