Clearing Mayo windblown trees is not for the faint of heart

COUNTRYFILE

IT was only on taking the short cut recommended by my sat nav system that I found myself surrounded by acre upon acre of forestry that had been felled by the wind.

Some plots of non-native softwood I passed through have been completely destroyed, while others appear to have been spared on this occasion.

As much as we hate to see these sterile monoculture woodlands taking over the landscape, we certainly feel for the men and women who invested so much in getting them established.

Yes, there were good grants available; they certainly didn't plant with no prospect of reward. Forestry has proved a lucrative option for many landowners, and particularly for those who had previously struggled to make a living from marginal land.

The grant money carried them through the early days, and the finished crop would provide a tidy sum when the time came for our new foresters to retire.

Not now. Not for all, at any rate.

For now we have thousands of trees lying on top of one another, as if some giant hand had thrown them into a heap. They must be cleared, of course, and the timber salvaged if at all possible.

But clearing windblown trees is not for the faint-hearted. No, such a job is difficult and time consuming, and potentially very dangerous.

The days of tackling such perilous work with a chainsaw are gone, thank goodness. Now there are machines capable of accomplishing the work of 10 men in a day. The trouble is, there is simply too much to be done, and no real prospect of making meaningful profit from the glut of immature softwood about to come on the market.

The task won't be finished this year, nor next. And all the while that tangle of timber lies upon the ground, native vegetation will be taking over. Nor do I mean oak and elm, though such erstwhile species would likely become established given enough time. No, it is blackthorn and bramble that will seize the opportunity and make the land their own, and in doing so will make the job at hand near impossible.

With such storms as we have just experienced forecast to become more frequent as well as more severe, perhaps the days of planting such shallow rooted crops as Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine are near their end, and native tree species more securely anchored to the ground will come to the fore.

Such a development might be widely welcomed. In contrast to those exotic conifer woodlands that support little in the way of other life, native forest cover benefits a wide range of wildlife. We've learned a lot about biodiversity in recent times, and have come to appreciate how completely we depend on the creatures which share our world.

With that in mind, when the time comes to re-establish all that windblown woodland, we might find ourselves thinking more long-term and plant as diverse a range of native trees as we are able.

We have seen how monocultures, where only one or two tree types are planted, are vulnerable to diseases such as ash dieback, and elsewhere to attack by damaging fungi such as honey fungus.

Diversity is key. Ideally, we could leave areas set aside where native woodland could establish itself in its own time, according to the natural order of things. But that would take decades, with no mature crop ready for harvest for more than a century.

The best thing we could do is to bring the juggernaut that is climate change to a stop. Stop throwing climate-altering material into the atmosphere. That isn't going to happen either.

Perhaps our Storm of the Century was just that – a once in a lifetime event. We shall see. For now there is work to do.