I have just (10.00pm) got in from a woodland charity talk. It was a very local gig, at the WI in the neighbouring village, so it took me six minutes to drive back, which helps average out last time, when I went to Thundersley. I can't see myself getting a more local booking than that unless the neighbours decide they'd like to host a woodland charity talk in their front room.
The woman who books the speakers rang this morning in a state of suppressed panic to check that I was going, which was cutting it fine, supposing I'd forgotten, or double booked myself. I was fairly relaxed about not hearing from her earlier, since I knew that they were expecting me because they'd said so in the write-up of their previous meeting in the parish magazine. Actually, according to the article they were not expecting me, but somebody with a different name. We were discussing this at my brother in law's at the weekend. When you have a name that almost nobody knows how to pronounce, many people fail to hear it, and transpose it into a vaguely similar but more familiar name.
The local WI turned out to be a feisty lot. The Chairwoman started the meeting by ringing a medium sized cow bell on a ribbon, which produced cries of Moo Moo from the front row. There followed a spirited and quite lengthy discussion about whether the national annual convention should be at a larger and grander venue than the usual Albert Hall (as featured in Calendar Girls), either Wembley Stadium (which would cost more) or the O2 (which would cost more still). This provoked howls of protest from the local ladies, who thought either a waste of money which the WI did not even have, and more hoots of derision at the idea that they might like to pay extra for entertainment following the usual proceedings. Then they got on to a national meeting involving second hand hat sales (or swaps, I didn't gather). The Chairwoman demanded to know who on earth wanted to wear a hat that had been on an unknown person's head, and a lively discussion of nits and the evils of children's dressing up boxes containing hats ensued. I felt rather nervous by the time I took the stage.
They were well behaved after that, and all looked interested in hearing about trees and woodland, except for one who yawned throughout, but there's usually one, and nobody went to sleep (a particular hazard with pensioners' friendship groups in the afternoons). They didn't have many questions, seeming more interested in getting on to the tea and cakes, and gossip. They were very good cakes, and I had a small second supper which I didn't need, but enjoyed. I had to judge the competition for an arrangement of spring flowers, which I did more or less at random, since I have no idea how you judge flower arrangements. (The boss once had to judge them at an RHS show, and was given a crash course in judging at the last minute by somebody high up in the national floristry association. I just make it up).
I didn't get caught by the railway crossing gates going either way, otherwise it would have taken more than six minutes.
Addendum I should be glad I am not judging next month's competition, which is for An Edible Necklace. The mind boggles.
Showing posts with label Woodland Trust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Woodland Trust. Show all posts
Wednesday, 11 April 2012
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
talk in Chelmsford
I drove to Chelmsford today to do a woodland charity talk. It is slightly mad to have someone clogging up the roads driving from north Essex to Chelmsford to bang the drum for environmental conservation, but they don't have a volunteer based in the middle of the county. They did have somebody a few years back, but he found his working hours became unpredictable and he couldn't combine work with volunteering. I once stepped in to cover one of his gigs at Hatfield Peveril at extremely short notice, a fact to which the organisation saved from having a meeting without a speaker were totally oblivious, and so completely ungrateful.
Today's group were perfectly pleasant, and the talk went fine, apart from a heart-stopping moment before the start. I'd got the digital projector set up, and done my best to level the image by twiddling the legs under the machine, trying to work out how much of my problem was that the screen is wonky after years of use and makes the picture look off-kilter when it isn't, and to what extent the issue was that the floor wasn't level. The picture looked about right, or at least as good as I was going to get it, I put the remote control down on the projector stand, and the power cut out. Suddenly there was not merely no image, but no green light on the projector. My host said he hadn't switched anything off, so I didn't know if it was a momentary power interruption, or if my equipment had broken. The remote requires you to press the off button twice before the machine will power down, to save you from accidentally switching it off if you press 'Off' once by mistake while talking, so I knew I hadn't turned it off.
The digital projector takes several seconds either to power up or power down, so once you have tried anything you need to give it time to work. I tried pressing the on-off button once, and the red light on the back of the machine began to flash, which normally means it is powering down. My host began to flap around me, trying to be helpful, and looked alarmingly as though he were going to experimentally unplug the machine. My cry of 'please don't touch that' had more than a touch of squeak about it. The machine went through a phase of bringing up the slide menu, but refusing to go into the first slide, claiming not to be able to detect an input, then settled down and worked for the rest of the afternoon. At times like that I still find the digital projector un-nerving, even after years of using it, because I know that if it goes off-script and does something I am totally not expecting, it is only a small and stupid computer and I am not good with computers, so my chances of getting it to work are slim. Especially when I have an anxious pensioner fussing around me who knows even less about digital projectors than I do, and a compilation of popular songs of the twentieth century playing rather too loudly in the background. (I find background music hampers thought, and always have to switch off the radio for tricky bits of navigation in the car. I don't understand all those people who call Classic FM with their requests and say they are at work, or worse still, finishing a thesis or revising for exams.)
On the journey home I got cut up by a van and a four wheel drive on my way back to the A12, and then ground to a halt around Hatfield Peveril, which turned out to be due to a jackknifed lorry blocking one lane at Rivenhall. The lorry had demolished a lampost before coming to rest with the cab at ninety degrees to the road jammed into a large bush, and the trailer across one carriageway, but the glass of the cab was intact and I shouldn't think the driver was seriously hurt. It was a perfectly nice day by then, not raining, decent visibility. Goodness knows how anybody manages to jacknife a lorry in those conditions, but they ought to be prosecuted for causing a nuisance. There are some evil potholes in that part of the A12, which I was able to study in detail at my leisure as we crawled along. They need filling in before the next traffic jam is caused by a motorcyclist sticking their front wheel down one and killing themselves.
When I got home (eventually) I discovered that all four little hens had come out of the chicken house, and been scratching around the straw bale in the run while the rooster stood on top of it with a horrified expression, like somebody standing on a chair to escape from mice. He'll like them when they're older.
Addendum BT refused to admit that the reason why our broadband capacity falls off a cliff in the evenings is because they don't provide enough capacity for the number of customers using the line then, and said we must have a new home hub. The Systems Administrator fitted it, and we discovered that our wireless printers would no longer work. Seems the new home hub can't support them. I now have a too-short USB cable strung across my desk as an emergency measure. Good old BT.
Today's group were perfectly pleasant, and the talk went fine, apart from a heart-stopping moment before the start. I'd got the digital projector set up, and done my best to level the image by twiddling the legs under the machine, trying to work out how much of my problem was that the screen is wonky after years of use and makes the picture look off-kilter when it isn't, and to what extent the issue was that the floor wasn't level. The picture looked about right, or at least as good as I was going to get it, I put the remote control down on the projector stand, and the power cut out. Suddenly there was not merely no image, but no green light on the projector. My host said he hadn't switched anything off, so I didn't know if it was a momentary power interruption, or if my equipment had broken. The remote requires you to press the off button twice before the machine will power down, to save you from accidentally switching it off if you press 'Off' once by mistake while talking, so I knew I hadn't turned it off.
The digital projector takes several seconds either to power up or power down, so once you have tried anything you need to give it time to work. I tried pressing the on-off button once, and the red light on the back of the machine began to flash, which normally means it is powering down. My host began to flap around me, trying to be helpful, and looked alarmingly as though he were going to experimentally unplug the machine. My cry of 'please don't touch that' had more than a touch of squeak about it. The machine went through a phase of bringing up the slide menu, but refusing to go into the first slide, claiming not to be able to detect an input, then settled down and worked for the rest of the afternoon. At times like that I still find the digital projector un-nerving, even after years of using it, because I know that if it goes off-script and does something I am totally not expecting, it is only a small and stupid computer and I am not good with computers, so my chances of getting it to work are slim. Especially when I have an anxious pensioner fussing around me who knows even less about digital projectors than I do, and a compilation of popular songs of the twentieth century playing rather too loudly in the background. (I find background music hampers thought, and always have to switch off the radio for tricky bits of navigation in the car. I don't understand all those people who call Classic FM with their requests and say they are at work, or worse still, finishing a thesis or revising for exams.)
On the journey home I got cut up by a van and a four wheel drive on my way back to the A12, and then ground to a halt around Hatfield Peveril, which turned out to be due to a jackknifed lorry blocking one lane at Rivenhall. The lorry had demolished a lampost before coming to rest with the cab at ninety degrees to the road jammed into a large bush, and the trailer across one carriageway, but the glass of the cab was intact and I shouldn't think the driver was seriously hurt. It was a perfectly nice day by then, not raining, decent visibility. Goodness knows how anybody manages to jacknife a lorry in those conditions, but they ought to be prosecuted for causing a nuisance. There are some evil potholes in that part of the A12, which I was able to study in detail at my leisure as we crawled along. They need filling in before the next traffic jam is caused by a motorcyclist sticking their front wheel down one and killing themselves.
When I got home (eventually) I discovered that all four little hens had come out of the chicken house, and been scratching around the straw bale in the run while the rooster stood on top of it with a horrified expression, like somebody standing on a chair to escape from mice. He'll like them when they're older.
Addendum BT refused to admit that the reason why our broadband capacity falls off a cliff in the evenings is because they don't provide enough capacity for the number of customers using the line then, and said we must have a new home hub. The Systems Administrator fitted it, and we discovered that our wireless printers would no longer work. Seems the new home hub can't support them. I now have a too-short USB cable strung across my desk as an emergency measure. Good old BT.
Thursday, 13 October 2011
a walk in the woods
The music society is starting to look ahead to 2012-13 season, and the process of putting together a programme turns out to be fascinatingly Byzantine in its complexity. There is a trio we would like to book, but the dates of their other tour bookings would push their visit to us into the first Sunday in Advent. Churches have other things to do on that day than give their church over to a chamber music concert so that doesn't work. There are a couple of interesting sounding string quartets, but we don't want the season to be completely dominated by strings. One of them might be available with a clarinetist to make up a quintet, but if we were to have the quintet we wouldn't want another concert with a clarinet or oboe as well. Young singers are apparently inherently unreliable, because if we have booked one for an evening for, say, £300, and they get the offer of five nights of opera work at, say, £1000 a night for dates that clash with us, they have to have incredibly high principles (and a rather dense eye for the main chance career-wise) not to dump us in favour of the opera. We can't have too many concerts requiring us to hire a piano, since that costs extra (although patrons do sometimes sponsor piano hire). The branches of the decision tree soon spread into an incomprehensible tangle, and I have nothing but admiration for the person who goes away with notes of the committee's deliberations, and turns it into a programme.
Today I drove my father to a Woodland Trust charity day for loyal supporters. It was organised by their Legacies team, but to my relief the fundraising part was done with a light touch. Monitoring and assessing the performance of staff employed to get legacy income for a charity must be tricky, as most of today's guests looked pretty healthy, even if not in the first flush of youth, and the lead time between making the pitch and discovering if you've won the jackpot must be quite long in many cases. We met at a hotel outside Stowmarket, and were taken in a coach for a tour of one of their local woods.
This was Priestley Wood, which is an ancient wood, with a rich ground flora, SSSI status, and the remains of mediaeval wood banks still clearly visible. We were shown around by the area manager for the Trust's sites in Suffolk and Norfolk. He led us to something we were promised would be special, which turned out to be a medium sized tree with angular branches and dark, crazed bark. This was a true wild pear, not an escaped garden pear tree, but a European native at the very northern edge of its range. It is thought to be the only surviving one in Suffolk, and is considered by some experts to indicate that the area covered by Priestley Wood has been under continuous tree cover since the last ice age. Somebody has apparently succeeded in taking cuttings from it, but wild pears are on a long-term losing streak. They used to be much more common in Saxon times.
The other piece of forestry information which amused me was that many of the standard oak trees in the wood are thought to have been planted, rather than having sprung from natural regeneration, and were probably grown from stock taken from the Low Countries, which produced better timber for local purposes than the native trees. Given that the local versus foreign provenance debate assumes almost religious dimensions at times, locally collected seed being assumed to be superior because it will produce individuals suited to the local conditions, I think it is really rather funny if some of the 'local' trees were grown from Dutch acorns. (The League of Gentleman completely hijacked the word 'local' anyway, so that I can't help placing it in mental inverted commas whenever I hear it).
For anyone who is not deeply into woodland management, 'standard' trees in this context means trees that have been allowed to grow up to their full height. Looking like a normal tree, in fact. Many of the trees in Priestley Wood are coppice, which are regularly cut down and regrow as multi-stemmed plants, to be harvested again and again. Priestley Wood is in active management with plenty of coppice work going on, thanks to volunteers. The wood they harvest is allowed to season for a year and sold for firewood. Nowadays they leave the piles of logs in the wood, well away from the road, until they are ready to sell them, since a couple of years ago they had several hundred pounds worth stolen. With the rise in the cost of heating oil and the growth in popularity of wood burning stoves, the price of firewood has shot up, and if you leave it lying around it is liable to get lifted.
There are doormice too. They had died out in that wood, and were reintroduced a dozen years ago in co-operation with the Suffolk Wildlife Trust. Since then the population has sustained itself. Muntjac are less welcome, and nowadays owners of the local woods manage them. 'Manage' in this context decodes as shoot, following a survey of their numbers and the extent of grazing damage. Some of our party did see a muntjac faun lying among the undergrowth. I didn't go and have a look myself. I'm sure it was very cute, but in my book they are garden pests and tree murderers.
Today I drove my father to a Woodland Trust charity day for loyal supporters. It was organised by their Legacies team, but to my relief the fundraising part was done with a light touch. Monitoring and assessing the performance of staff employed to get legacy income for a charity must be tricky, as most of today's guests looked pretty healthy, even if not in the first flush of youth, and the lead time between making the pitch and discovering if you've won the jackpot must be quite long in many cases. We met at a hotel outside Stowmarket, and were taken in a coach for a tour of one of their local woods.
This was Priestley Wood, which is an ancient wood, with a rich ground flora, SSSI status, and the remains of mediaeval wood banks still clearly visible. We were shown around by the area manager for the Trust's sites in Suffolk and Norfolk. He led us to something we were promised would be special, which turned out to be a medium sized tree with angular branches and dark, crazed bark. This was a true wild pear, not an escaped garden pear tree, but a European native at the very northern edge of its range. It is thought to be the only surviving one in Suffolk, and is considered by some experts to indicate that the area covered by Priestley Wood has been under continuous tree cover since the last ice age. Somebody has apparently succeeded in taking cuttings from it, but wild pears are on a long-term losing streak. They used to be much more common in Saxon times.
The other piece of forestry information which amused me was that many of the standard oak trees in the wood are thought to have been planted, rather than having sprung from natural regeneration, and were probably grown from stock taken from the Low Countries, which produced better timber for local purposes than the native trees. Given that the local versus foreign provenance debate assumes almost religious dimensions at times, locally collected seed being assumed to be superior because it will produce individuals suited to the local conditions, I think it is really rather funny if some of the 'local' trees were grown from Dutch acorns. (The League of Gentleman completely hijacked the word 'local' anyway, so that I can't help placing it in mental inverted commas whenever I hear it).
For anyone who is not deeply into woodland management, 'standard' trees in this context means trees that have been allowed to grow up to their full height. Looking like a normal tree, in fact. Many of the trees in Priestley Wood are coppice, which are regularly cut down and regrow as multi-stemmed plants, to be harvested again and again. Priestley Wood is in active management with plenty of coppice work going on, thanks to volunteers. The wood they harvest is allowed to season for a year and sold for firewood. Nowadays they leave the piles of logs in the wood, well away from the road, until they are ready to sell them, since a couple of years ago they had several hundred pounds worth stolen. With the rise in the cost of heating oil and the growth in popularity of wood burning stoves, the price of firewood has shot up, and if you leave it lying around it is liable to get lifted.
There are doormice too. They had died out in that wood, and were reintroduced a dozen years ago in co-operation with the Suffolk Wildlife Trust. Since then the population has sustained itself. Muntjac are less welcome, and nowadays owners of the local woods manage them. 'Manage' in this context decodes as shoot, following a survey of their numbers and the extent of grazing damage. Some of our party did see a muntjac faun lying among the undergrowth. I didn't go and have a look myself. I'm sure it was very cute, but in my book they are garden pests and tree murderers.
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
all the fun of the wildlife fair
The Beth Chatto Gardens held a wildlife fair today. I gather it was the first time they'd done one, and nobody knew exactly what to expect. I can guess why they were doing it: because late August is a dead time for plant sales, and anything is to be welcomed that encourages the car park to fill up with people who will buy entry tickets and might buy at least some plants, and in the case of the Chatto Gardens refreshments (their cafe is very nice). The beekeepers had a stand, so I said I'd go and help on that for part of the day, as I thought it would probably be entertaining and the other stands sounded interesting (plus I am a helpful person keen to Do My Bit for my Association).
The Chatto Gardens were very good to us, as helpers got free admission to the fair and gardens, and we were allowed as many volunteers as we needed, and free tea and coffee from the cafe, and borrowed bee-friendly plants from the sales area as part of our display. Our stand wasn't as elaborate as the one we have for the Tendring Show, but we had our teaching beehive, and some basic tools, and posters, and gave out samples of cakes made with honey (recipe booklet 50p) and did candle rolling for the children (£1 a go). Luckily I did not have to supervise any children making their own candles, as I've never done one myself, but I watched my fellow beekeepers carefully while they did it. The candles come out tapered, and if you weren't concentrating it would be very easy to finish up with the wick protruding from the wrong end. It was a grey and rather chilly day, and the wax foundation wasn't as flexible as it would have been given warmer weather, so I was doubly glad to escape. Instead I talked to prospective new beekeepers about what was involved and how to progress things if they wanted to.
On the other stands, the Colchester Naturalists had got trays of pond life, a case of deceased stag beetles, and a live stag beetle grub, so I went and learnt more about how to identify stag beetle larvae, and the best time to clear out a pond (September). The Essex and Suffolk Dormouse stand had hazel nut shells that had been nibbled by doormice versus other sorts of mice, and I think I finally began to grasp the difference in the teeth marks. Apparently there are doormice in the Chatto Gardens, indeed they had a photograph of Mrs Chatto herself holding two, and round here is something of a doormouse hot spot, so the idea that they might be in our wood is not so ludicrous as I thought it was. The doormouse expert offered to check nutshells for me to see what had eaten them, if I wanted to send him samples, and it turned out I knew his parents because they are beekeepers. It's a small world.
I introduced myself to the people on the Woodland Trust stand, and got an update on anything I ought to mention in my talks, though I think I knew most of it. While I was there I did check out the answers to a couple of questions that have been bothering me, even if none of my audiences have asked them yet. The most pressing was, given the need for the UK and the world to increase agricultural production, and the value of some other non-farmland habitats such as heathland, what sort of land does the WT want to plant over with trees? The answer is grade 3 agricultural. I looked at the Tendring Tree Wardens stand and discovered that another beekeeper I know is one of my local tree wardens. I was speaking to his mother yesterday about doing a Woodland Trust talk next year (very small world indeed).
There was a substantial element of people with an interest in nature conservation networking with each other. The RSPB officer in charge of their new wildlife garden at Flatford Mill wanted advice on keeping bees in the garden at Flatford. After discussing the matter we tended towards the verdict that it was a good idea to have bees on site, but not beehives in the area open to the public, especially since so many visitors bring their dogs. Bees don't like dogs (or horses, though most people don't bring those). In theory having nice bees in a garden open to the public should not be a problem at all, but the trouble is that the RSPB would potentially only discover that their hive had developed inappropriate guarding behaviour and become nasty after a visitor (or their dog) had got stung.
The carpark was pretty full by the time I left at about half past one. I'll be interested in any feedback I get from our secretary about whether the Chatto Gardens found it worthwhile, but I enjoyed myself.
The Chatto Gardens were very good to us, as helpers got free admission to the fair and gardens, and we were allowed as many volunteers as we needed, and free tea and coffee from the cafe, and borrowed bee-friendly plants from the sales area as part of our display. Our stand wasn't as elaborate as the one we have for the Tendring Show, but we had our teaching beehive, and some basic tools, and posters, and gave out samples of cakes made with honey (recipe booklet 50p) and did candle rolling for the children (£1 a go). Luckily I did not have to supervise any children making their own candles, as I've never done one myself, but I watched my fellow beekeepers carefully while they did it. The candles come out tapered, and if you weren't concentrating it would be very easy to finish up with the wick protruding from the wrong end. It was a grey and rather chilly day, and the wax foundation wasn't as flexible as it would have been given warmer weather, so I was doubly glad to escape. Instead I talked to prospective new beekeepers about what was involved and how to progress things if they wanted to.
On the other stands, the Colchester Naturalists had got trays of pond life, a case of deceased stag beetles, and a live stag beetle grub, so I went and learnt more about how to identify stag beetle larvae, and the best time to clear out a pond (September). The Essex and Suffolk Dormouse stand had hazel nut shells that had been nibbled by doormice versus other sorts of mice, and I think I finally began to grasp the difference in the teeth marks. Apparently there are doormice in the Chatto Gardens, indeed they had a photograph of Mrs Chatto herself holding two, and round here is something of a doormouse hot spot, so the idea that they might be in our wood is not so ludicrous as I thought it was. The doormouse expert offered to check nutshells for me to see what had eaten them, if I wanted to send him samples, and it turned out I knew his parents because they are beekeepers. It's a small world.
I introduced myself to the people on the Woodland Trust stand, and got an update on anything I ought to mention in my talks, though I think I knew most of it. While I was there I did check out the answers to a couple of questions that have been bothering me, even if none of my audiences have asked them yet. The most pressing was, given the need for the UK and the world to increase agricultural production, and the value of some other non-farmland habitats such as heathland, what sort of land does the WT want to plant over with trees? The answer is grade 3 agricultural. I looked at the Tendring Tree Wardens stand and discovered that another beekeeper I know is one of my local tree wardens. I was speaking to his mother yesterday about doing a Woodland Trust talk next year (very small world indeed).
There was a substantial element of people with an interest in nature conservation networking with each other. The RSPB officer in charge of their new wildlife garden at Flatford Mill wanted advice on keeping bees in the garden at Flatford. After discussing the matter we tended towards the verdict that it was a good idea to have bees on site, but not beehives in the area open to the public, especially since so many visitors bring their dogs. Bees don't like dogs (or horses, though most people don't bring those). In theory having nice bees in a garden open to the public should not be a problem at all, but the trouble is that the RSPB would potentially only discover that their hive had developed inappropriate guarding behaviour and become nasty after a visitor (or their dog) had got stung.
The carpark was pretty full by the time I left at about half past one. I'll be interested in any feedback I get from our secretary about whether the Chatto Gardens found it worthwhile, but I enjoyed myself.
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