Thursday 4 June 2015

last talk for now

I spent this evening doing a woodland charity talk, the last of three in the space of a month.  That completes the set for the current run, indeed, I'm not sure I've got any more booked for the rest of the year.  It can be quite handy when they end up bunched like that, yielding some economies of scale since by the last talk I can remember what I said in the previous ones, and there's minimal preparation time.  When it's the first time I've done the talk for months I have to search through the files on my laptop looking for the notes that accompanied the slides, so that I can remember what I'm supposed to say as I get to this picture of a tree versus that picture of a different tree.  From that point of view it's a harder talk to deliver than taking pension fund trustees through their quarterly fund performance, where all I had to do was elaborate on the death-by-powerpoint bullet points or graph on each page of the presentation pack.  On the other hand, I don't have to explain away why the charity underperformed the Woodland Creation Index by twenty basis points last quarter.

Tonight's questions were not the easiest.  Nobody would ask questions in front of the group, but various people came up to ask individually as I was eating my tea and biscuits.  I was very glad of the biscuits, since at ten past five I was still working my way round the borders spraying Grazers on anything I could spot that might be vaguely palatable to rabbits, after discovering that some of the asters and a young Sanguisorba that is not yet large enough to withstand that sort of damage had been eaten.  The talk was beyond Chelmsford, and allowing time for delays on the A12 I needed to be on the road by six, so the apple I ate before dashing out had worn off by the time I got to the biscuits.

What somebody should do about ivy up a large ash tree in her garden was straightforward.  The woodland charity would tell you the same as any member of the arboricultural association.   Ivy does not directly parasitise trees and is good for wildlife, but mature ivy weighs a lot and adds to wind resistance in the winter gales when a deciduous tree would be otherwise leafless.  Ergo, leave the ivy if the tree is in a place where it won't do any great harm if it drops a branch or falls over, be more cautious if it's growing somewhere where either of these things would be dangerous.

The mystery of the tree trunks that were turning orange stumped me.  The questioner had noticed them when walking in a local wood, a whole clump of them, trunks turning orange.  Although she clearly liked trees she couldn't say what species they were, and although the wood had a notice board at the entrance she couldn't tell me who the owner was.  I couldn't think of any native tree whose bark would naturally turn orange with age, and didn't think it was likely to be caused by the trees taking anything up from the soil.  It might have helped marginally to know what sort of trees they were, but I'd probably have been none the wiser.  Could it, I tentatively suggested, be a growth of lichen?  That can look orange, or at least a mustard colour.

As for the person who wondered whether it was now OK to destroy badger setts, given that there was a cull going on, as far as I know it isn't.  Just because there is a government sponsored controlled cull on the opposite side of the country does not mean it's open season on badgers in Essex, and interfering with a sett without a licence or intentionally killing, capturing or injuring a badger is still punishable by a fine of up to five grand or six months in prison.  But just because the slide pack the woodland charity sent me has a picture of a badger in the wildlife section does not make me an expert on badgers.

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