Mhm, choice of clothing for work today: combat camoflage pants, steel toe-capped boots, high vis jacket and safety glasses...

No, I was not on my way to a fancy-dress fettish party but simply getting ready for my fourth visit to our 'breathing places project' at the Open University's regional centre in Oxford. We have been working on this project for six months now, and today was to be a day of ACTION ... hence my getting kitted out in all the neccessary health and sefety gear.
We were going to declare war on the vegetation, because as Patricia so aptly put it - "conservation is destuction". In particular, we were planning to give non-native invasive species such as Sycamore and Rododendron ponticum a hard day, one in fact, which they were unlikely to survive!

click here to get Janet's introduction video clip to 'action day'


Alan (Meet the academic team) who is responsible for the land management of the site had selected certain areas where we would carry out clearance of non-native invasive species in order to give the native British wildlife a chance to flourish. You can read Alan's blog to find out what problems there are on site and what can be done to address them (Alan's blog ).

To a certain extent the clearance that we are carrying out is in the nature of a closely monitored experiment. If you do have invasive species on a site, it's no good just carrying out a wholesale clearance, as this might just allow other monocultures, such as stretches of bracken, nettles or bramble, to establish themselves. The whole idea of intervening is to encourage a diversity of species and habitat. So, if you are starting your own 'Breathing Places' project you might want to adopt our more cautious 'patch clear and observe' approach for yourselves.
You can find out more about how to get involved with 'Breathing Places' projects in your area by visiting (Breathing places Website).

Getting back to taday: My job was to get 'down and dirty' in the undergrowth.. and over the next few day's we'll be posting our blogs, video clips and audio MP3 files that explain just how we went about that.

Ok this is the Oxford site as we returned to it in October


My first job of the day was to join Alan and one of his site staff, Mark in a little bit of Sycamore clearence. Sycamore are a non-native, invasive species that are seeding and sprouting madly all over the site. They produce a dense canopy of foiliage and are particulalry effective at cutting out the light reaching the forest floor - so, some of them had to go!


click here to see a video clip of 'the end of the sycamore'


We chainsawed down three equal-age sycamore, which exposed a good expanse of the forest floor to sunlight, and we plan to come back in December to plant some wildflower seed mix (more on that later in the year). In the meantime we cut off the braches and stacked them to be shredded and spread over the site as mulch.
The tree trunks we sawed up into equal length logs to make a habitat pile to attract invertebrates and small mammals.


find out more about our 'log pile' by clicking here


After that it was really a case of 'no rest for the wicked' as Alan detailed me to engage several large and invasive Rhododendron pointicum bushes in mortal combat - this is another invasive nasty, so armed with loppers and saw, I set to with a will. The idea is to cut the 'rhodie' down to ground level and then move in with a stump grinder or chemical stump killer and finish the beast off.

click here to see some tips on Rhododendron execution


While I was busy attacking the vegetation, the other members of our team were out continuing the quadrat survey, Tom was digging ditches, and Mike was out and about getting great photo's of the native fungi on site - you can find out more about their day by visiting their blogs : http://natureofbritain.wetpaint.com/page/The+blogs
You can find out all about our day and how you can get involved by clicking here


Here are the out-takes and bloomers from the day...