Brash bashing and pothole packing

Thursday, January 25th 2018

As promised yesterday, the morning's task was to tidy up after the mess I made tidying up after storm Georgina. The team quickly removed the brash from alongside net rides 2 and 3 whilst another, smaller one man team, made a start filling in potholes along the main access route.

The brash bashing team then moved on to deal with another casualty of storm Georgina down by Risedale Beck, dragging the long willow whips to a small burn site further downstream.

Natural fractures caused when a tree loses a limb to storm damage can result in an array of effects on wood tissue at the wound, including fibre separation (along the grain) and splintering in various planes (linear, radial and circumferential). This occurrence creates microhabitats that are colonised by microorganisms and succession species.

The benefits of these features as habitat for many rare and declining tree colonising species is such that in recent decades the practice of replicating such damage has become more widespread. The term veteranisation was coined to describe such techniques whereby younger trees are “damaged” so as to speed up the process of production of valuable habitats, found otherwise only on very old trees.

With all of the brash successfully bashed the team split up after lunch, with some catching up with our lone pothole filler and others doing the rounds cleaning signs across the reserve.

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