Woodland Management for Wildlife with the PTES (Part 2)

My name's Ian White, I work for the conservation charity People's Trust for Endangered Species as their Dormouse Officer and we're here at Bridlesford Woods on the Isle of Wight. People's Trust for Endangered Species are lucky, they've owned this woodland for about 30 years, they put a lot of management into it. The woodland is very diverse both in terms of species that are here but also in terms of the range of habitats that are here and that obviously has a huge impact on the biodiversity. So over the course of this video we'll be looking to try and show you how you perhaps can create a woodland like this of your own. We also have to remember that although this is predominantly about how to attract or maintain dormice in your woodland, dormice are also a very good key indicator species that means if you get things right for dormice you get things right for a broad range of other species such as woodland birds, woodland bats and woodland butterflies. So dormice are a species of successional scrub, so successional scrub is the habitat that comes back when you cut trees, you cut shrub, it's what regrows and regenerates and most of the woodlands on the mainland struggle with understory scrub because they're impacted by the canopy from above and also browsed off by deer from below. So what I'd like to show you here is how we might regenerate and how we might recreate understory scrub within a woodland setting and that has huge benefits for woodland wildlife such as dormice but also for woodland butterflies, woodland birds. We're standing in an old coppice woodland at Briddlesford Woods and perhaps if your woodland looks like this it might be time to think about doing some coppicing. So what is coppicing? Well it's the process of cutting trees down, usually understory trees like this hazel over here, that we cut them down and that allows them to regenerate and regrow again. So coppicing is not a destructive process, it's a regenerative one that you're allowing the plants to regenerate and regrow and it's that kind of regrowth that creates a broad range of habitats that can help create a broad range of habitats for a broad range of species. I can hear the bees are humming behind me as they journey in and out these foxgloves. This is a species that is valuable nectar source for bees and of course they only come back, they only grow up when you've got space in the wood, when you've done some clearance. These flowers will come up in there, they'll flower in their second year so they need a couple of years of open space before they get over covered by bramble or over shaded, out shaded by the hazel coming through, but I say clearance is good because it creates new opportunity for plants to grow and develop. If you do decide to coppice, this potentially is what you could expect to see in the first year or two perhaps, lots and lots of bramble coming through and growing up, a really good understory plant, really good for a broad variety of species and you can start to see that hazel there just poking its head out and starting to grow up now and over time that will grow up and then start to shade the bramble out until it's reached an old enough stage that again you'll start to renew the process again. So bramble is very important to hazel dormice because that's a long flowering and fruiting season so provides them with a food source throughout their active period and also it provides some very secure and safe nest sites and as well it's again a well-connected low-level shrub that allows dormice to get around their range and move throughout the woodland. But dormice need more than just bramble and the value in a woodland like this is that there are a broad range of shrubs and tree species that provide food for dormice throughout their active season. So this is hazel coppice now at about seven years old, you can see the bramble stems underneath and now starts to die off so the hazel has now started to dominate, it's shading that out. At this sort of age from the dormouse point of view is there's potential nesting sites within the old bramble. Hazel is a tree that's a native tree, it has a lot of invertebrates that live on it so dormice can use those for food and often if you've got a good light coming in this will this tree will also produce nuts as well in the autumn which obviously dormice can use to fatten up and feed on. So this woodland now is about 18 years old so perhaps time to to re-coppice the woodland again but there's a few things we need to consider as well. If we do cut these stools down we might need to think about planting them up to increase the stool density and also when we take the understory down we need to look and see what the canopy is like above because understory does not grow underneath shade so potentially we might need to take a few of the standard trees out as well. So that's managing the canopy, it's managing the planting and managing the stool density, there also might be browsing pressure from deer as well so those stools that you've just cut mainly protecting as might the new plants you've just put in as well. Doing some coppicing is a great way to regenerate woodland but it does have its problems, not least in terms of you might do the first cut and perhaps get some grant funding to do that but 12-15 years on where does the next lot of money come to to help that process go help you go through that process again. So perhaps another thing we could look at is actually ride management and what we again what we're trying to do is create this successional scrub along ride side and often on rides you have less canopy cover impacting on the rides so if you start taking back some of the shrubs at the edge of the ride that will start to allow the bramble to regenerate and regrow and also you often be bringing machinery in to actually manage your rides and mow your rides and perhaps you could use that machinery at the same time to manage the bramble banks at the side. The other great thing about rides of course is they give you this connectivity through your woodland that again is great for woodland birds, woodland butterflies and obviously for dormice as well. If you don't manage your hazel what tends to happen is it either starts to become old or it becomes derelict so old hazel is where you've still got stools that are quite close together, they're touching which is again fine for dormice because they can then move between them and often it'll be producing quite a lot of hazelnuts or if moved beyond that stage it starts to become derelict where the stools spread out some of them will start dying off and hazel is not a particularly long-lived tree it'll usually live about 100-120 years but the process of coppicing actually extends that indefinitely so by coppicing an area you're actually allowing the trees to survive for a much longer period than they would normally. One of the advantages of hazel coppice to dormice is as you can see above me that hazel tends to grow together and creates this connected canopy above us that allows dormice to move around and find new feeding areas and new areas to nest in.