It’s been a long drawn out autumn, a very dry September and early part of October coupled with exceptionally mild days and the odd light frost has meant a beautiful bounty of colours as the leaves turn slowly. Crimson maples and dogwood, burnished beech and gold field maples with a whole raft of the yellow spectrum across our native woodland species.
 
When I see the lower leaves on the hazel start to go yellow with the odd leaf fluttering to the ground I know I can start cutting hurdle rods again. Prior to this age old activity I have been on the farm during harvest. One of my jobs is to sow cover crops. These are drilled directly into the stubble either literally as a catch crop between harvest and drilling in the autumn or left until sowing begins again in the spring.
 
I have drilled winter turnip rape, oats, rye mixture, interval kale, sunflowers, mustard and radish this year. There are many more and this practice is an integral part of eco/environmental farming which is practiced around my village.
 
The cover crops use up any fertility in the soil that could be leached out, improve soil structure and increase the organic matter. There is little tillage, that is, minimal or no cultivation, definitely no ploughing which is disastrous to the structure and uses up large quantities of diesel in the process. The following crop is then normally direct drilled into the cover crop residue. Get down on your hands and knees and the benefit of this arable husbundry is clear to see, increased organic matter. scurrying ground beetles and spiders by the score. This is fantastic for seed and insect ground feeding birds. There are plenty of raptors around here, kites, buzzards, kestrels, hobby’s during the summer, and barn owls which shows there is plenty to feed and prey on.. Evidence a plenty that this type of farming although intensive is better for the natural environment. But there is still a long way to go.
 
It was a joy to be back in the woods working up hazel ready to be turned into hurdles. To see the white of the butt end of the rods in orderly heaps and smell the rich cycle of life, of decay and renewal which goes on year after year unnoticed  by passers by.
 
In between hurdle making and delivering firewood I have been coppicing derelict coppice on a nearby estate. I had produced a 10 year management plan for its woodland with the aim of reducing non-native conifers and others such as Hybrid Black Poplar, improve the woodland by opening up rides, coppicing either side of watercourses to create areas of dappled shade and full sun. In places to reduce the holly ingress. Holly is great for birds to feed and for some to nest in, the dry leaf litter is ideal for hedgehogs and other mammals to bury into. However it can be invasive gradually taking over and shading out ground flora.
 
All the woods cover terrain unsuitable for any forestry practice during most of the year except the driest months . Many sites have been dug over for marl in the past leaving massive pits which have been colonised by ash, oak , hazel and holly. Most of the woods have not been cut since the second world war.
 
Coppicing either side of a watercourse in one wood has revealed what looks like the remains of two dams, could these have held water to power machinery further downstream?
 
Evidence of the very mild autumn is finding holly in flower, throughout the wood, Ilex aquifolium normally opens flowers in May!  
 
Mild and damp air streams can make this job uncomfortable, waterproof or no waterproof; I normally wear a long sleeved thermal top plus chainsaw trousers and boots provided you keep moving, to feed a fire by cutting and dragging certainly keeps you warm enough. I use plenty of dead wood to start the fire, time spent getting a good solid heart to the fire saves so much time later in the day. I try not to let any hollow areas form in the fire, each piece and branch needs to be in contact with burning material, the old adage “butts to the wind boy” is a must.
 
I have never cut hazel of this size before, it must be at least 60 years old, there is no fast way of cutting this stuff, just stem by stem, I’m endeavouring to leave a shoot per stool so I can layer and propagate as I go.
 
These old hazel stems have some beautiful lichen and moss attached. The cord wood is stacked to create habitat piles whilst the rest is burnt keeping my fire going.

I left the aptly named Bluebell Wood finally two days ago, dusk was approaching, and the dark cumulus clouds far to the west were highlighted by the unseen setting sun. For once the rest of the sky was clear, the wind had turned to the north. 10 metres either side of the water course had been 
coppiced to allow more light to reach the woodland floor, a glade had been created where the stream disappeared underground and the holly population had been reduced. The mild, gloomy, wet weather had not been the best of conditions to work in, but had prompted bluebells to push through and spread their narrow leaves skyward out of the deep leaf litter. I could also see pale white immature flower heads within. I wonder how many of those delicate premature bells will survive the minus 10.C forecast for the weekend.

I turned and stared back into the darkening wood, bade my farewell and began the trudge back to the vehicle carrying this time my rolled up ex-army bivi shelter used to keep extra clothes, food and myself slightly less damp at break times.

Tomorrow I would resume cutting hazel and begin working up, this means trimming each individual hazel rod of side shoots with a bill hook, cutting off the butt end and the feathery top. This time honoured practice means that gradually, orderly heaps of different hazel products will begin to grow behind and to the side of where I stand. There will be hurdle rods, these are usually 8-10 feet long and between 1-1.25 inches in diameter. Smaller diameter rods I use to start and finish a hurdle, the straightest and slightly thicker rods will be put aside to make the uprights or ‘zales’. 8’ Bean rods and 4’ and 6’ pea sticks for gardeners. I have an annual order for nearly 10,000 pea sticks for the Royal Parks and Buckingham Palace, these will be used in their herbaceous beds as plant supports. If I had any hedge laying to do there would be stakes and binders, these are woven above the laid hedge between the stakes to strengthen and keep the hedge stems in place until they knit together.  
 
Where once gangs of workers worked the woods and fields, now a solitary figure will be found. I number myself in that group as I spend nearly all my working days alone, unless I need to hire contractors to work alongside me, where time is in short supply to finish a woodland task.   

I fell the hazel using a chainsaw, and lay the cut stems together in such a way that they can be picked up easily for working up. Just throwing them all together in a haphazard way will invariably mean they cannot be picked up without first untangling them.  

Walking Ella my black lab around the wood margin at the end of the day I stopped and listened to a song thrush. Amongst the tracery of twigs its clear notes cut through the approaching gloom. On the 31st December 1910 a certain Dorset man wrote the darkling thrush, he had described the bird as frail, gaunt and small with a blast be-ruffled plume. All I could see was the thrush’s silhouette that evening, young or old it was a joy to hear on a bleak January evening.

The winter continues to confuse beast, bird, plant and human, groups of blackbirds squabble, robins are becoming very territorial, the odd celandine open in a half-hearted display while primroses show the odd flower. Sky larks chase each other. Where normally large flocks of field fares and redwings forage across the fields only small groups are seen.

The sooner this human finishes his main cut of hazel the better, because an early flush of sap seems likely. 
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The pictures below illustrate the process of cutting hazel, working up and the trimmed produce, including some recent work.

Working high where the chalk ridge of the North Downs begins to peter out I watched a red kite hang almost at eye level, holding station on the up-draft with occasional movements of its unmistakable forked tail. A passing buzzard was lazily buzzed by the kite before it moved off to join a companion further up the valley. As the buzzard and kites moved away a Kestrel entered stage left and searched a nearby hedge. From where we worked the hangers of east Hampshire could be seen quite clearly with Butser Hill a shadowy bump on the far South Downs.

Later that day closer to home, with the light fast fading at least a thousand starlings rose and fell, I had witnessed my very own murmuration! For the last 20 years I have seen the decline of many farmland birds, vast flocks of lapwings and golden plover flew over the autumn fields while we ploughed and drilled, now reduced to a trickle as the mixed farmland gave way to intensive arable, starlings numbers also plummeted and the last time I heard the ‘rattle of keys’ of corn buntings was at least 6 years ago. So to see a large flock of starlings really has given me hope that as arable techniques change as I described in my earlier blog, so bird numbers will start to increase .

It’s December the 7th and the day temperature is still in the mid-teens. It’s been a grey and dull beginning to winter, and here in the south although the rainfall has not been constant, the ground conditions feel as though the water table is high. This has meant that access to several sites has become impassable for vehicles. So I am yomping in with rucksack, tools and fuel. Four man days left to complete reducing  the holly population in one wood then back to the hazel coppice which thankfully I can reach by vehicle.