June 21st – Svinesmarka – an ancient Scots pine forest near Stavanger?

It was an early start this morning to make the most of the long day – this of course being the longest of the year! We met up with Fylksmannen ecologists Auden Steinnes and John Inge Johnsen to take a ferry across the Sound of Stavanger followed by a short drive to a Scots pine wood that has developed on an upland area which (like most uplands round here, we are beginning to learn) involves scaling lower slopes that are practically vertical in order to access the more gently rolling uplands.

We felt very much “at home” in this woodland, for in many ways it was very similar to our own native pinewoods.  Except that there were some notable differences. Whilst the woodland itself was dominated by Scots pine, the canopy also contained frequent birch, aspen and rowan. There were occasional ancient oaks and, in places, a well-developed juniper understorey.  This forest was also extensive – not like anything we have in Scotland, covering over 4 square kilometres with pine dominated woodland. It is a scale of natural forest that we just don’t have in Scotland. Consequently there is room for a much greater range of structural and species diversity – and that is just what we found.

The field layer was dominated by a luxuriant thick carpet of mosses and blaeberry, richly peppered with all the usual pinewood associates such as twinflower, lesser wintergreen, serrated wintergreen, tormentil, cowberry, chickweed wintergreen, May lily, wood anemone, clubmosses and lichens. Here also, unlike Scottish pine woods, northern bilberry and dwarf cornel were frequent and abundant.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The wood was also known to contain a number of red data book lichens, and Auden and John were today surveying and collecting samples to augment this knowledge.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Rogaland Fylkesmannen is in the process of creating a nature reserve over this bit of woodland, but not all owners are in agreement, and a recently bulldozed track for timber extraction right through the middle of the forest shows that the Norwegians are up against all of the same issues that we also face in Scotland.

On the whole, apart from in the bogs, the soil in this forest is very thin – a few inches over bedrock. We had noticed that the canopies of many of the trees seemed very sparse, particularly when compared with our trees back home.  A possible explanation for this could be that because of the poor soils the trees are nutritionally limited; they are simply growing very, very slowly.  In this forest the trees are all tall and straight-grown – unlike our granny pines – a consequence of having grown up in a forest where recruitment is through colonisation of the gaps created when older trees die or are blown over, rather than growing up in an open, grazed landscape where they can develop full open canopies.

A stand of huge old aspens that had recently blown down bore witness to how thin and rocky the soil is:

We did not see much evidence of herbivores in this forest – there are red deer and occasional moose using the area, but they are not browsing on the pine or birch saplings.  Saplings of rowan and aspen however were showing signs of heavy browsing, to such an extent that we felt if this level of browsing was to be sustained, the next generations of trees in this forest would certainly lack the diversity of previous ones.

There was lots of standing and fallen deadwood – this is important for supporting amongst other things, the 5 species of woodpecker that are found here.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

During the course of the day there was a fair bit of discussion about the age of the pine trees in the forest. Initially we had judged the majority of the trees to be fairly even-aged, and comparing them against growth rates that we are familiar with in Scotland we guessed them to be around 100 years old. This also fitted the wider picture of the known history of woodland exploitation in south-west Norway, which is understood to have been almost entirely cleared of its forest by about the 1920s. Unfortunately, the Norwegians do not have old maps such as we do in Scotland that they can use to verify the age and continuity of a given forest. As a proxy they use maps from the 15^th and 17th centuries that show the location of saws, and they use these to make informed conclusions about the historical distribution of woodland at that time.

In the process of bulldozing the new track referred to above, a number of pine trees had been felled, and we took the opportunity to count the growth rings of these trees.  We were quite amazed at what we discovered.  The growth rings were incredibly tightly packed proving that these trees really are growing very, very slowly indeed. A stump of around 30cm was over 150 years old. Another nearby stump (not particularly large) we estimated to be over 300 years old.

Granny pines such as this one being hugged by John (girth 2.7m) could be well in excess of 300 years old.  Trees of this size occurred throughout the forest.

 

These insights raised interesting questions about the history of Svinesmarka forest which appeared to be not the even-aged result of the cessation of forest exploitation that we had presumed. Could this forest in fact be a remnant of the ancient forest where recruitment and senescence are in balance; with a range of age classes from sapling trees through to standing dead ancients? We wondered how it could have survived the exploitation that had affected most of the semi-natural woodland of the region at that time. Possibly it is a little too remote, and also extremely inaccessible (before the days of bulldozed tracks).  Either way, the revelation I think made us all look on the forest with a new and even greater reverence.

All in all a truly wonderful place to experience!

 

 

 

June 20th – Stratviet, Vindafjord: ancient pollards on precipitous block scree

Early morning we set off to catch the ferry north from Stavanger across Boknafjorden as part of our trip through a series of tunnels, bridges and ferries across fjords and islands to visit a woodland at Stratviet which is a proposed nature reserve on Yrkefjorden. Like everything else in Norway, the ferries here run so smoothly that you barely notice the seamless transfer from road to ferry and back to road.  Without any direction, the Norwegians load and unload themselves from their ferries – the whole process being completed in a matter of a few minutes leaving the ferries able to do (very) swift turnarounds. We were impressed!

Stratviet is a small farm on somewhat precipitous fjordside slopes (see photo below) – previously abandoned, and now privately owned.

Large areas of the farm were planted by Skogskelskapet about 50 years ago. Skogskelskapet is a forestry members’ organisation started in 1898 with money from the herring industry as a response to the fact that at that time there were “no trees left in Norway to build homes with”. Thousands of productive conifers (Sitka spruce, Norway spruce and Western hemlock the main species used) were planted on small farms all over the country by (amongst others) school children and others on private land. The main habitats targeted by planting were grassland and heathland.  Nowadays the focus of Skogskelskapet has slightly shifted to 2 main planting priorities: forests for health and forests for climate, and the organisation is keen to encourage sustainable use of their forests by the public.

The owners of Stratviet have recently proposed part of the woodland area as a nature reserve to Fylkesmannen i Rogaland – the regional environmental agency for which (if approved) they would receive a substantial payment from the Norwegian government.

So part of Stratviet farm was planted up with exotic conifers some 40 or so years ago – mainly on what had previously been the hay meadows or in-bye grazing. As evidence of this, embedded within the sterile, dark rows of Norway spruce we found many rather sad-looking ancient pollards like the one below – struggling to survive for lack of sunlight.

Until relatively recently pollards were still being cut for “leaf hay” along the west coast of Norway to feed to livestock over the winter.

The pollards at Stratviet were mainly lime, elm and ash, and looked like they had been last pollarded some decades ago.  The trees themselves were ancient.

One particular lime pollard was right on the edge of the plantation and therefore not doing so badly, but could now do with some halo thinning of the adjacent conifers to let in some much needed light – see picture below:

According to the present owner, 100 years ago this farm had a lot of sheep, and was known to have supported up to 36 people. In order to be able to provide enough food for the sheep over the winter, and consequently the people, leaf hay was cut from the pollards – despite the incredible physical challenge that this presented, for the area on which the pollards grew was mainly precipitous block scree – challenging to walk over, never mind to cut pollards over! (see photos below of some “typical” pollards!)

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Elsewhere on the farm, the steep fjordside slopes are now entirely covered with spontaneously regenerated semi-natural woodland that appears to have arisen as a result of the withdrawal of grazing when the farm was abandoned.  Given the formerly very intensive agricultural use of the area, we were interested to see how much the woodland and its understorey had recovered in the intervening time.

The woodland was now a complex mosaic of richer ash-elm interspersed with more acidic birch and pine, all of which appeared to have developed on top of boulder scree on pockets of soil that was developing out of the decomposing leaf litter from the forest.  It was incredibly difficult to walk over – and hard to imagine that this very steep ground had previously been treeless and that people had struggled up and down the steep slopes to manage the pollards which, as you can see from the pictures above, were growing at an alarming angle out over the slope.

Whilst it would be nice to see the re-instatement of the ancient pollards which now are becoming lost within the emerging forest, for their undoubted cultural and biodiversity value, they are however, a product of a cultural and economic landscape that has now disappeared. Livestock breeds have changed, and silage and imported feed has replaced the need for farmers to produce leaf hay to feed stock over the winter.  Unless a genuine niche for the cut material can be found, to re-instate the management of these pollards, other than as a biodiversity demonstration would be economically unsustainable, despite the undoubted benefits for wildlife.

It was very encouraging to see the extent to which a species-rich field layer was developing within the woodland, and interesting to speculate on the process by which this had come about, given what we had been told about the historic deforestation of Norway; and in the context of thinking about opportunities for potential woodland restoration timescales in Scotland. Presumably some of these species had persisted on the site in “refugia” out of reach of grazing mouths on the cliffs up above during the time that the lower slopes had been so intensively grazed and managed.  Others are likely to have subsequently blown in or been brought in by birds.  There were a good number of woodland associates flowering in the field layer such as valerian, wood avens, wild garlic, sanicle, wood anemone, woundwort and wood cranesbill; while in the shrub layer there were plenty of things like dog rose, honeysuckle, ivy, hazel and even some holly.  Plenty of flowers and fruit/nuts for insects and others to enjoy – check out the bumble bee having a little rest on the valerian!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This woodland is currently used by roe and red deer but in general their impact on the vegetation is low. We only saw very occasionally higher impacts on some of the more palatable species such as holly.  There were signs of Chalara ash die-back on some of the sapling ash unfortunately, but otherwise the woodland appears to be developing into a rich and structurally diverse habitat roughly 100 years after it was released from intensive agricultural management.

Norway Blog – June 18th – Into the uplands of Rogaland

June 18^th

Today we drove a little way up into the mountainous interior of Rogaland Province. Here massive rocks gouged by glacial ice now support burgeoning new birch forest all over the precipitous valley sides.

Creeping up onto the shoulders and summits of the hills montane scrub is developing. These areas are browsed by few deer, and in contrast to Scottish hills where the sheep are out grazing all year round, Norwegian sheep spend their winters either in sheds or grazing on snow-free coastal pastures, and are only brought up to the hills to graze the newly flushing vegetation once this has emerged from the melting snow over the summer months from June to September.  There is therefore little or no browsing in the upland areas over the winter when in any case the vegetation is covered (and thus protected from browsing) by snow. It seemed to us that this difference was having a very significant effect on the structure and species richness of the resulting vegetation.

Consequently, this upland heath is in much better condition and contains a great many more species than its Scottish equivalent.  Furthermore a great many more of these species were flowering than you would expect to see on a Scottish upland heath.

Deer grass, for example, although common on Scottish upland heaths is rarely seen flowering as abundantly as we saw here:

Flowering plants such as bog rosemary, cloudberry and dwarf cornel were everywhere and in flower – again a rare sight on a Scottish heath.  As the flowers are high in nitrogen, they are therefore favourite titbits for the deer and sheep, and frequently the first things to be eaten.

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Cloudberry – although a frequent component of Scottish snowbed communities rarely flowers and fruits in Scotland – could this be a consequence of being browsed?

The tasty fruits of this plant are a much relished seasonal treat for mountain hikers in Norway. People have their favourite patches keeping the knowledge of their whereabouts a closely guarded secret!!

We in Scotland are clearly missing out on something good!

Due to browsing pressure on Scottish heaths juniper and rowan rarely manage to develop beyond being suppressed “old seedlings” within the heather. In contrast, due to the lower wild herbivore pressure and the seasonal nature of the sheep here, we could see that a smattering of juniper was becoming established, and in the process providing protection for the much more palatable rowan to find a space where it could grow free from browsing pressure!

 

Norway blog – June 17th – Vest-Agder

I’m in southwest Norway with Dr Duncan Halley from NINA and Helen Armstrong to visit some of the amazing woodland that has developed here since the 1950s. And there is just so much of it!! – See photo below!

We are south of Stavanger, on the coast in Vest-Agder, at the same latitude as Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. The climate in this part of Norway is almost identical to that of the west coast of Scotland, if anything slightly “worse” in that it is slightly windier and slightly rainier, but average temperatures and snowfall are pretty much the same.  Geology and soils are also pretty similar being mainly acidic gneiss and granite.

This is an area that prior to the 1950s was largely deforested due to burning and overgrazing by livestock and deer. It looked then much like the Scottish uplands do today – largely devoid of trees. Today in this part of SW Norway forest is the main land-cover.  From 1860 to 1920 many of the small farms in the area were abandoned as people left the land in their thousands, mainly emigrating to America and leaving nature to slowly recover.

Today south-west Norway is a very afforested region; and the vast majority of this woodland has arisen through natural regeneration. Deer and moose were extinct in the region until the 1960s, and although their numbers have gradually risen since the 1980s, there is now so much forest and so much browse in the forest understorey for them to eat that for the most part they have very little impact.

The forest near Hidrasundet that we visited felt very familiar – with many of the tree species we are familiar with from Scotland – but what was completely unfamiliar to us was the amount of growth in the understorey.  Such lush growth, so many flowers – such sheer abundance in complete contrast to what we have come to accept as “normal” in Scotland.

Plants such as dwarf cornel and northern bilberry were abundant within the woodland

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In Scotland these plants are restricted to upland snowbed communities and do not occur in woodland. Why are they not in our woods?

In this Norwegian woodland ferns attain a presence not just in terms of their abundance and diversity, but also their exuberant vitality which amazes…these plants are favourites with the deer and sheep, particularly in the early summer, and so are often absent or very sparse in Scottish woods. I’m running out of superlative adjectives to describe the lushness of the field layer of the woods we walked through, but just take a look at the pictures:

Blaeberry, raspberries, brambles, dog-rose were everywhere flowering and later in the year will certainly be fruiting, so providing important food and habitat for a huge number of dependent species.

Creeping willow was everywhere and flowering!!

But one of the most noticeable differences between this Norwegian wood and our Scottish woods is the fact that they have understorey – there is “stuff” under the canopy that provides food and habitat to a huge number of dependent species making these Norwegian woods so much better for biodiversity than their Scottish equivalents. You can’t see through them – and that is a sign of a “good wood”!

You may notice that none of the trees are very old.  In fact these woods are less than 100 years old.  There are very few old trees in them – most of the old trees that we found – some incredible old elms and small-leaved limes are associated with the former agricultural landscape and field boundaries. And yet despite their young age, in such a relatively short space of time the woodland ecosystem here seems to be well on the way to recovering its health and vitality.  So good to see that this is possible. It is such a source of inspiration and possibility for Scottish woods….

If this can happen in Norway why not in Scotland?

Friday 2nd June – Briddlesford Copse – where I learned about the importance of understorey for the rarest bats in the UK!

I was visiting Briddlesford Copse today in the company of Jon Cox who first came to manage the forest back in 1983,  even before it was designated as an SSSI.  Briddlesford Woods is the largest remaining ancient semi-natural woodland on the Isle of Wight, and was bought by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) in 1991 as a 160ha nature reserve for its important and special plant life, in particular the abundance of narrow-leaved lungwort. This species is very rare and in Britain is restricted to ancient woodlands on the shores and tributaries of the Solent.

PTES’s objectives for the wood are to manage it for the red squirrels, dormice, Bechstein’s and Barbastelle bats. (The bats is the reason why the site has been designated as a European Special Area of Conservation). The Trust has established a long-rotation (15-20 years) coppice regime to ensure a steady supply of hazelnuts for the red squirrels and dormice to eat.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Trust also maintains a network of rides (essentially paths through the woodland) and glades to allow light to reach the woodland floor, which benefits the wild flowers, butterflies and many other invertebrates.

A bat survey in 2003 showed that all the maternity roosts in Briddlesford Copse are in ash trees in old woodpecker holes! The Isle of Wight is good for all species of bats, and all woods on the island have populations of the rare Bechstein’s bat.  This is linked to the presence of an understorey in the woods, and  Jon believes that because the understorey within the wood provides habitat for lots of insects, this in turn is good for the bats which feed on the insects.  It is not unreasonable therefore to suggest that due to the absence of herbivore impacts in woods on the island, all woods on the island have an understorey, and it may be as a direct consequence of this that all woods on the island have populations of Bechstein’s bats!  Bechstein’s bat is now one of the UK’s rarest bats having gone from being one of the UK’s commonest species after the last ice age due mainly to the loss of ancient woodland.

PTES are now thinning out the oaks in the forest and selling the timber which pays for the cost of restoring the hazel coppice.  Coppice ride edges are now being managed on an 8 year cycle to maximise flower production.

Oak sawlogs from Briddlesford Copse are milled on the island and sold for £70-80 a ton.

The photo below shows a new native woodland which has established by natural regeneration on the edge of the ancient woodland.  Further expansion of this new native woodland was achieved in a second phase through planting.  As the trees were planted, a builder’s bucket of wood chips from the woodland was put down around the young tree.  This served to keep the weeds down, but may also have inoculated the area with mycorrhizae because the trees established much more quickly and better than those planted elsewhere in the wood pasture where the inoculum wasn’t used.

In newly cut hazel coppice, the bramble comes away really quickly, but after about 6 years, the hazel out-competes it and suppresses it. So bramble should not be seen as a “problem” – the abundance of bramble is a temporary phase, which lasts until the canopy recovers and then the bramble declines in vigour as it is suppressed by the shade of the developing woodland canopy.

In the meantime the bramble and dog rose flowers provide an important source of nectar for insects and delight for passers by!

Thursday June 1st – A chat with Richard Grogan in Parkhurst Forest about the value of woodland to society

Early on Thursday morning I met up with Richard Grogan in Parkhurst Forest.    Richard has had a long history of involvement with woodlands on the Isle of Wight and I was really looking forward to hearing what he had to say about these woods that have had no large herbivores in them for so long! Parkhurst Forest, which is now owned and managed by Forest Enterprise, is an ancient woodland and the second largest forest on the Isle of Wight.  Formerly it was a grazed hunting forest of some 1000 acres established in the 12^th Century, until it was enclosed in the late 19th century.

Although one third of the Isle of Wight is wooded today, it has not always been like this for in 1794 a historical document commented that there was “not a useful tree left growing on the Isle of Wight”!  All of the trees had at that time already been felled and probably used for ship building!  In the 1930s, the Forestry Commission became involved on the island and took on the management of Parkhurst Forest, mainly planting conifers, however a significant area was left intact as ancient semi-natural woodland.

There are good records of the King coming to the Isle of Wight to hunt deer in the 1640s , but by the 1870s when Victorian naturalists were coming to the island and documenting the animals they found, there were already no deer, foxes or badgers.  It is assumed that they had already been hunted to extinction by this time.

Deer were re-introduced to the island into deer farms in the 1980s.  Three deer farms were established, although only one with red deer still survives at Chale. The other two collapsed, and the deer were sold off.   Richard said that when the deer escaped from the deer farms in the 1990s, you could follow where they had been in the woods as they would just eat the tops of all the ash seedlings at their height! Since this time some more deer have escaped from Chale, so there is now (unfortunately) a small population of red deer on the island to the west of St Catherine’s Point.

The Isle of Wight does have a “Deer Free Policy” that all the major agencies are signed up to. However, it is not possible to legally prevent people from bringing deer onto the island, in spite of the fact that there is a risk that bringing deer onto the island from the mainland could introduce TB to a TB-free area. Unfortunately it is also not possible to legally require people to maintain their fences, so it is therefore almost inevitable that deer are going to be brought onto the island, and that they will then escape.

Having seen some of the amazing and beautiful ecologically rich woods on the island that have evolved in the absence of deer browsing, to allow deer into these woods would certainly be a tragedy. The unbrowsed woods on the Isle of Wight are unique in Britain, so the island is therefore a very important place where it is possible to study woodland processes in the absence of herbivore impacts. Indeed, having visited so many of these unbrowsed woods, I cannot but wonder to what extent herbivores are needed to maintain the ecological balance in woodlands at anything other than VERY low levels.  The trouble is, it would be almost impossible to achieve such very low levels of deer browsing through management alone.  This highlights the need for predators, as it is probably only through the re-establishment of predator-prey interactions that a level of herbivore impacts in a woodland ecosystem that would allow the fulfillment of all the trophic levels in a woodland could realistically be achieved and maintained.

Richard said that there is some pressure to introduce deer to the island from the hunting lobby, but (fortunately) so far this has been resisted by the agencies.

As well as being unique for their lack of deer, the woods on the Isle of Wight are also unique in Britain for their red squirrel and dormice populations.  70% of the woods on the island have dormice in them, and 96% of woods have red squirrel – in fact the only ones that don’t are the wet woods!  Richard did a study in the 1990s which showed that critical to this finding is long rotation coppice, as the big hanging clumps of honeysuckle so important for the dormice take time to establish, and therefore tend to be absent from short rotation coppice.  As we have seen in many of the woods already visited on the island, the success of coppice management systems in the island woods is dependent on the absence of large herbivores.  The cost and hassle of protecting the coppice re-growth (and the other understorey species so valued by the dormice) from the deer would mean that few owners would do it, and so the habitat value of the dormice woods would almost certainly decline.

Although there is a lot of woodland on the Isle of Wight, and growth rates are considerably higher than the mainland; this is partly due to climate, but also because there are no losses to herbivores.  In spite of this, because markets for the timber tend to be off the island, it is hard to make timber harvesting on the island profitable when you need to take into account the ferry charges. Until recently there was no timber being harvested on the island as it was not economically viable. 5 years ago there was a resurgence in the price of timber so the Forestry Commission has started felling again. However, in order to ensure continuity of resources and employment, timber harvesting needs to be freed from the economic constraints of having to find a market on the mainland.

Woodland enthusiasts on the island have thought about encouraging the development of wood chip boilers for local schools, prisons and hospitals using small roundwood from the island.  The Forestry Commission said they would supply 70% of the timber, but said that the remaining 30% would have to be found from private sources.  There was concern that it would be hard to guarantee this supply, and also there needed to be 1 year’s supply of seasoned wood “in the bank” so unfortunately the project didn’t go ahead.  The Forestry Commission needs to be freed from having to make a profit, so it can take on a new and important role in nurturing and fostering fledgling local forest management industries in places like the Isle of Wight.

An alternative idea would be to get e.g. Lottery money to train people to make high quality products out of the unprofitable roundwood, like the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Trust are doing at Martin’s Wood.  A 6′ x 6′ hazel hurdle can sell for £60/70 – it only remains to persuade people that they need to buy these for their gardens to support local producers instead of buying imported bamboo fencing!

We need a study to show how the economics of managing a woodland for small roundwood stack up. People need to be supported in developing more of a sense of local social-economic awareness, to know and understand the importance of supporting local industry/initiatives, and the consequences of their purchasing decisions.

Richard also talked about the idea of community woodland management, where local people would get a firewood quota that would allow them to come into certain parts of the forest and cut their own logs for firewood. The problem with this is that there are very few publicly owned woods currently…but this is where the new native woods could play a role.  With the island’s growth rates, economically utilisable wood could be produced from newly established coppice woods on a reasonable rotation.  Local authorities could buy land and plant it with productive forests for local people to be able to use.  The sale of felling licenses to regulate firewood collection could then help to generate a small amount of revenue to pay for the Council to administer such a scheme.  Local authorities could be encouraging more communities to think about getting involved in managing their own bit of woodland for economic outputs, and in particular firewood.

 

People do value  forests and access to green space – even if it is just to walk their dogs or have a picnic with their children.  But the forest can provide so much more than this. People are just not yet conscious of all the other ways in which the forest could be working for them.

AA Milne used to take a dormouse to school in his pocket.  Now most people have never even seen a dormouse let alone handled one.  We have become too far removed from our environment, and need to begin to take small steps to return to our roots and reconnect with the natural world.  We will be richer in so many ways if we do.