The wildlife hide, finished and ready for its first residents, human and squirrel alike.
We’re delighted to share that the wildlife hide at Howes Wood is finally standing tall!
After weeks of sawing, notching, and no small amount of log-wrangling, our volunteers have pieced together a sturdy timber frame with slatted sides and a handsome rounded-log roof. It’s already looking very at home among the trees, almost as if it grew there rather than being built by us.
It’s not quite ready for its grand opening just yet, we’ve still got a proper floor to lay and some benches to build before anyone can settle in for a spot of serious squirrel-watching. But the hard part, the bones of the thing, is done. The rest is finishing touches, and the team can’t wait to get back out there with tea flasks and good intentions to complete it.
A closer look at those roof beams also tells its own story of teamwork, every log up there was felled, and hoisted into place by hand. Not bad for a volunteer group whose number one power tool is probably the incredible levels of sheer determination that they bring to the woodland for every work party.
This mystery elm is impressively large and now we know why.
While out and about, the woodland volunteer team also got rather distracted by a magnificent elm towering over the woodland edge. Elms of this size are a rare sight these days, sadly Dutch elm disease has seen to that over the past fifty years, so this one had us not only incredibly impressed but also properly scratching our heads. How had it grown so large without succumbing to the disease that’s wiped out so many of its relatives?
The mystery was solved when Helen mentioned it to Paul Sivell, renouned local wood sculptor (http://www.thecarvedtree.co.uk/), who let us in on the secret: this particular elm isn’t a survivor by luck, but by design. Paul planted it himself back in the 1960s, and it’s a genetically engineered variety bred specifically to resist Dutch elm disease. And here it is, decades on, thriving, a quiet, leafy monument to some very forward-thinking planting.
It’s a nice reminder that Howes Wood has layers of history well beyond our own volunteer work parties, and that every so often the woodland hands you a puzzle worth solving.
If you would like to support our work there are so many ways that you can get involved, from;
Volunteering: https://iowredsquirreltrust.co.uk/become-a-volunteer
to
Fundraising: https://donate.giveasyoulive.com/join
to
Donating: https://donate.giveasyoulive.com/charity/the-red-squirrel-trust
or even simply
Donating by shopping online: https://www.giveasyoulive.com/charity/the-red-squirrel-trust