Tales from the Woods

Today I took Cosmo to work with me in the woods. I negotiated the entrance and surfacing works for the new car park and spent the whole day routing local school childrens designs onto tree stumps. As the nearest entrance  was closed I only saw two people all day. One of them the imfamous Sid the Schnowser who I have spoken about on another blog.



Cosmo always on the look out for squirrels



detail; toadstools



I did as many as I could in one day, they dont take too long if your prepared to cut boldly. I sketched them on the stump first with a coloured pencil, the rather boldly cut out shapes. Often I could not see the junctions of the lines, and once or twice cut through bits where I would have rather not! The main toad stool above should have had the stalk reaching down to the ground but I cut it off my mistake as the whole thing was covered in saw dust. But you would have never even known that if I hadent have told you eh...! I liked designing things to fit in what are nearly circles, and these designs remind me of coins in some way. They are woodland currency depicting animals, insects, fungi and plants etc. 

Highland Cattle in the padock nearby,

I have included a couple of owls as I have heard them at dusk walking Cosmo

 The two above show different insects and the one on the left is the fiercest beetle I have ever seen!



Butterfly and leaves



I really enjoyed my day, but Cosmo drank all the water and I was thirsty when I got back home after leaving through an extra gate that was not there when I arrived in the morning.

It seems all the permissions have been granted by authorities and conservation bodies including Natural England, so things should start happening over the rest of the spring and summer months.

The Final Schools Workshop

We ran a workshop along the lines of the ones done previously, this one was in the Junior school closest to where I live. Anyway this class had been to the woods before with KWT and were very talkative, they were actually really noisey. So noisey in fact I thought that after about 20 minutes they would have all shown me their drawings about 4 times and start throwing stuff about and tell me stories about firing their brothers air pistol or something similar.

Although noisey they continued to work and my prediction was utterly wrong. They carried on working very well, right to the end of school. I listened to a few stories while we worked, one or two might have been a little on the tall side, but they just worked in a noisey way!

some of their work was amazing

again working best with good reference material provided bt KWT


The other thing about this workshop was that I carried this socking great tree trunk up a number of flights of steps. This was a finished example from one of the previous classes workshops were I had carved their designs onto the tree trnck. I wanted to show then what the finshied thing would look like. They were excited then right at the start.

There will be a total of four of these mini totem poles made, and many more of their designs will be cut into the top of flat tree stumps cut by a chain saw when coppicing. I will start these in the woodland within a week or so and will post photos then.

the Blean Woods is home to the very rare Heath Fritillary Butterfly

This is the finished pole for class 6 Szarbo in my garden



deatil including 'Cosmo' further in the background

 And the final piece of news is that I updated the map of the trail features, as things have developed slightly and some things being eliminated while others added, or modified this made the old one rather out of date.

the updated map