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    Re: Daily Mail article 📂 Archived Message

    Posted by Ken Waldron on November 29, 2021, 8:48 pm, in reply to "Re: Daily Mail article"

    Yes... I was once asked for advice on how to put back to rights a bit of degraded woodland a friend had bought. He and his family had all kinds of (to my mind...) somewhat backbreaking and sometimes deluded "eco" ideas.
    Mine? A temporary electric fence to keep em in and four pigs to break apart the thirty years of dead grass "thatch" that had made the entire woodland understory barren. Its often the very lack of interference that lets nature be strangled into monocultures. We need to face the fact that there are necessary links missing from our woodlands because of millennia of human intervention: i.e. we got rid of them... and pigs are a large part of that. After they had done their work I suggested smoked bacon...using some of the poorer trees as thinning and that if he wanted to keep some life in the wood after they had departed he needed to encourage badgers to take up residence as they would over the long term do the same as the pigs in keeping the soil open to be seeded: usually by the shit dropping from the birds roosting in trees above.
    He also wanted to take out all "non-indiginous" tree species, which seems to be a thing in modern eco-fascism. I pointed out that though the sitka spruces were indeed "foreigners" they were colonising trees with a short life span and some of them had reached that age and were already on their way out. pointing up I had him note all the holes in the dead ones, emphasising they might not be "indigenous" but they were keeping indigenous woodpeckers alive by providing grubs and indeed also nest sites, therefore they had their place and should be left: especially the dying ones.
    Been years since I last visited, might take a trip and see if they did any of that. Who knows?

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