The Woodlands.co.uk Blog
Cooking and eating woodlice (pillbugs) – a real bushcraft experience
Woodlouses or woodlice have never previously seemed to me the kind of thing you would want to eat. But I came face to face with a cooked woodlouse recently when we made a woodlandsTV film about finding, cooking and eating woodlice. It turns out that they are very nutricious and as long as they are cooked they are perfectly safe. A big advantage of woodlice over slugs or snails is that they can be eaten almost immediately after collection, whereas with slugs and snails you need to put them in a plastic bag for about 24 hours so that their gut empties. For woodlice you just put them straight into the boiling water and they are soon ready to eat. Read more…
The holly leaf miner : Phytomyza ilicis
Phytomyza ilicis is a dipteran fly that lays its eggs in holly leaves. It is one of the few insects that is able to make use of holly leaves as a food source / habitat. The female fly lays eggs in the holly leaf (near the main veins or midrib – on the underside) using a thin tube or ovipositor.
The eggs are usually laid in early Spring when there are young and ‘soft’ leaves. Older leaves have a thick and tough cuticle that is far more difficult to penetrate. The larvae or maggots emerge from the eggs and tunnel their way along the midrib / veins emerging some time later into the lamina or blade of the leaf. Here they feed on the photosynthetic tissues of the leaf – the palisade and mesophyll layers, creating a leaf mine (see featured image). The number of leaf mines per leaf is a maximum of three and often just 1 or two. Read more…
Smile Meadow – a forest school
St Mark’s CE Primary School (Sussex) were surprised and delighted to be given the use of a piece of woodland and meadow, only 400 metres from the school.
First the whole school visited the Ashdown Forest (under the aegis of the Sussex Wildlife Trust ), Then all the staff took part in an INSET day – also led by the Sussex Wildlife Trust. This gave the staff the opportunity to develop and refine some ideas on how to use the wood and meadow land to enhance children’s learning. Read more…
Aspects of The Storm of ’87.
On 16th October 1987, the Great Storm took away many mature trees from the landscape of southeast England, a great swathe of destruction was wreaked on our woodland and parkland trees.
Many trees and overlarge coppice still lie where they fell, the coppice more often than not growing up again but from a much larger base. The mature trees have been gradually rotting. All the resources locked up in the wood being released and taken up by bacteria, fungi, invertebrates and so to higher organisms. It was a major ecological disturbance, that in some ways has been of considerable benefit to wildlife. Read more…
Managing hedgerows.
The importance of hedgerows in the maintenance of biodiversity cannot be over-emphasised. Hedgerows provide vital food, in the form of a variety of berries – sloes, haws, blackberries etc, for small mammals and birds (redwings, blackbirds) and hedgerow flowers support pollinating insects – a variety of bees and butterflies.
However, the ‘management’ of hedgerows or trimming / flailing of a hedgerow can make a significant difference to its productivity – that is, the number of flowers and fruits produced. Read more…
Is land the “new gold” for investors? What might this mean for woodland owners
The ongoing financial crisis was expected by many to push down the price of land but it seems that it has in fact pushed up land values. What appears to have happened is threefold:
- people are getting such a low return on their cash that they feel land is a more attractive option
- investors don’t trust the banks and think of land as a “safe haven”
- whilst many are suffering from the downturn there are many others with cash who are choosing to invest in land.
Land has been described as the “new gold” – a safe haven for wealth even if actual returns are low. This also seems to explain the buoyant residential property market in central London. Read more…
The Robin
Season’s Greetings.
The robin, frequently pictured on Christmas cards, is making something of a “come back”. Its numbers have increased by roughly 50%, compared to when it was first recorded back in 1970.
The RSPB has suggested that milder winters and earlier Springs have contributed to its increased numbers; and it is estimated that there are now some 5 – 6 million breeding pairs of robins in the U.K. However, its populations can be ‘knocked back’ by hard winters – such as we have experienced recently. A small bird, such as the robin, can rapidly lose much of its body mass through a short succession of cold nights and days – burning its reserves (of fat) to generate heat energy to maintain its body temperature. They also use up energy in the search for food, which is often in very limited supply under cold conditions. Read more…
Unseasonal weather
We have experienced an extended and warm autumn, and now true to Pliny’s words -
winter weather has now firmly settled upon us. The temperature is down to “more representative” seasonal values for December, and cold, high winds have recently lashed Scotland and other parts of the U.K.
The warmest Autumn (for some 300 + years) was in 2006, when the temperature was some 2.4 / 3 oC above the seasonal average ; places like Kinlochewe recording a daytime temperature of 22.5 oC. The recent mild weather * was due to an unusual pattern of high altitude winds over the Continent. The course of the jet stream meant that there were southerly winds and relatively settled conditions over the United Kingdom.