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any of you guys noticed our forests and trails getting wrecked??
my local trails in blackwood south wales are getting battered, some awesome little descents are gone
No. But Ive noticed the custodians of our awesome but temporary trails raising more funds for new trail development 🙂
Yeah most certainly have, forest ra*e I call it.
I had a right old ding dong with one of the Forestry Commission chappies a month ago, I was out riding the forest and they were all there chainsaws in hand cutting one of the most beautiful areas where I live.. His argument was it thins out the base level for new growth and encourages tree growth..
I've now joined a local group protesting against ancient woodland being cut down..
Grrrrr'ist
Forestry Commission doing forestry shocker....
forestry commission, all the finese of a panzer division.
Cannock is being destroyed with lots of nice trails disappearing
Lots of the felling taking place in the SW at the moment is being done to try and curtail the spread of an infection that's killing a wide variety of native trees - they've just had to take down a mature horse chestnut outside where I work which fell foul of the disease in a matter of weeks.
I've now joined a local group protesting against ancient woodland being cut down..
Stands of Sitka, ancient woodland 🙄
Recently I've been disgusted by the shocking cutting of beautiful barley, field by field, almost systematically, near where I live.
FC probably are fairly clued up with where they need to fell. If FC are felling or likely to fell an area that you feel they shouldn't- phone hem up, talk to them. They are very approacable. A friend recently contacted them here (S Wales) and they cleared some brush and young douglas fir so that the old Oak tree had a bit more space. Which was nice. 🙂
In related news, unsightly fish seen at harbour.
Stands of Sitka, ancient woodland
Yes, it's been gut-wrenching to see the hundreds of hectares of mature trees being removed from the hills of Argyll. Some of these fine specimens have been there since the early 90s!!!
They do have some pretty amazing kit right enough. There's a couple working behind my folks place 24 hours a day at the moment, which isn't that surprising when you see how much they cost! 😯
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All the timber is being sent to China, they turn it into Swedish furniture and send it back.
Ringo,
just make some more or fix up where possible.
Market for UK timber is back up (a couopel of years ago it slumped due to the access of massive forests in Siberia)
Hence loads of plantations all over the place are being felled.
Means for a year or so, the "usual" trails are unrideable, but once it settles down, it opens up loads of new stuff.
Incidentally, FC, being controlled by civil servants, aren't always allowed to chop down mature trees which are ready for, and need, felling due to the annual quotas they are not allowed to exceed. So the big trees fall down and are wasted. Which is daft.
Felling trees is all part of the industrial scale timber farming operations. Not that every area FC/E manages is commercailly farmed woodland, they also do forestry management (of PoS, recretional etc) areas as sub-contractors to others.
But for the majority of commercially farmed woodland you might as well rail against the tide as bellyache about felling and thinning 😉 Thinning is a fairly common practice as a result of initial (deliberate) overplanting. Like anything trees need space to grow best, "healthily" etc.
Problem with forestry is the timescales are so long you get used to all the trees being there and think it's permanent whereas really it's just one big area of "crop".
Felling and thinning does, typically, make one hell of a mess though. Getting access usually shags the ground and consequently the drainage. Metre plus thick layers of discarded brash and off-cuts / discard covering the ground. Never a truer phrase than "breaking eggs to make an omlette".
most of the pine woods in south wales were planted around the same time and these tree's have come to maturity around the same time. massive swaves of forest are being cut.
As tonyplym says:
Lots of the felling taking place in the SW at the moment is being done to try and curtail the spread of an infection
Especially in South Wales. A lot of Spruce and Larch is being felled prematurely to try and reduce the spread of the disease (which is mostly by wind-born spores).