Yesterday I was looking through the eyes of a sheep, today I am thinking like a birch tree. This is the lot of a reserve manager, you have to wear many hats.
Yesterday I was out with Alan, a grazing specialist looking at part of the Moss to work out how good it would be to be grazed by sheep. We want to get sheep grazing again on parts of the Moss so that they can help us stop the trees spreading by eating them. But the bog is a tough place for sheep being exposed to wild weather, being very wet under foot and there being not much in the way of tasty food to eat. So when we plan a fenced area for the sheep we try to make sure that it includes some cover for them to get out on the wind, some drier areas and some patches of better grass. I learned from Alan that in the early spring the first "bite" for sheep is the cotton grass especially the new shoots and the juicy bottoms of the stems. The sheep tug up the stems and munch the bottom part. It seems from Alan that we have our grazing areas well planned from a sheep point of view so we are working on getting sheep out there later in the year. Watch this space.
As for being a birch tree well they do different things on different parts of the Moss. In some parts they grow vigorously and set lots of seed while in other places they are more fragile and are killed off more quickly. It can be hard to work out why this is, it could be the levels of plant food available in the peat, it could be the slope of the ground which makes it drier, it could be due to the ground cover with grasses seemingly easier for the seeds to grow on compared to the heather. This is important as I am meeting the contractors with the tracked chipper to work out which area of birch trees they need to clear that is not going to grow back quickly. Once got going they will chip the branches and put the chips into the drainage ditches to help block them up. So we get 2 birches with one stone, removed scrub and blocked ditches both make the Moss wetter and help to bring back the special bog plants. The filling in the ditches is the real fun, I've been doing that since I was 10 !
Yesterday I was out with Alan, a grazing specialist looking at part of the Moss to work out how good it would be to be grazed by sheep. We want to get sheep grazing again on parts of the Moss so that they can help us stop the trees spreading by eating them. But the bog is a tough place for sheep being exposed to wild weather, being very wet under foot and there being not much in the way of tasty food to eat. So when we plan a fenced area for the sheep we try to make sure that it includes some cover for them to get out on the wind, some drier areas and some patches of better grass. I learned from Alan that in the early spring the first "bite" for sheep is the cotton grass especially the new shoots and the juicy bottoms of the stems. The sheep tug up the stems and munch the bottom part. It seems from Alan that we have our grazing areas well planned from a sheep point of view so we are working on getting sheep out there later in the year. Watch this space.
As for being a birch tree well they do different things on different parts of the Moss. In some parts they grow vigorously and set lots of seed while in other places they are more fragile and are killed off more quickly. It can be hard to work out why this is, it could be the levels of plant food available in the peat, it could be the slope of the ground which makes it drier, it could be due to the ground cover with grasses seemingly easier for the seeds to grow on compared to the heather. This is important as I am meeting the contractors with the tracked chipper to work out which area of birch trees they need to clear that is not going to grow back quickly. Once got going they will chip the branches and put the chips into the drainage ditches to help block them up. So we get 2 birches with one stone, removed scrub and blocked ditches both make the Moss wetter and help to bring back the special bog plants. The filling in the ditches is the real fun, I've been doing that since I was 10 !
