West Stormont Woodland Group

West Stormont
Woodland Group

Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO) SC051682

Join us today to bring Taymount Wood and Five Mile Wood into community ownership

Community Monthly Update – March 2022

We've been enjoying the lovely bursts of spring weather in between the grey and wet days! We hope you have been too. On 4 March and 13 March, 17 enthusiastic volunteers turned out for our WSWG “Protect a Wild Tree” events in Taymount Wood. A fun time was had by all and even the weather was good to us!

What has WSWG been doing this month?

It was tricky to find the tiny, heavily nibbled broadleaf saplings at this time of year, but we tubed about 60 oak and willow plus a few Scots pine, so that is a good start to our ongoing efforts to protect the natural regeneration that is trying to come through in the woods. We used plastic-free, biodegradable tubes made of specially coated cardboard to keep our carbon footprint low and avoid plastic pollution in our environment. It will be interesting to see how they stand up to our Scottish weather and the deer themselves, so we will report back on that later in the season. At least they were all still there, upright and intact a week later! We plan to do more tubing once leaf burst is underway, which will make the little trees much easier to locate and identify, so will let you know when we arrange future sessions if you’d like to help out. Thank you to everyone who came along this month, and to the very kind bakers of the delicious cakes we enjoyed at our coffee breaks!

WSWG volunteers looking for broadleaf saplings to protect them from browsing by deer, hares and voles.
Oak sapling in Taymount Wood, hard browsed by deer for several years. Hopefully tubing it will let it grow away at last.

Alan has also been hard at work distributing free Ovo trees to groups and individuals who requested them. Thank you to everyone who participated in this excellent scheme too.

The Shadow Board members have now all joined the Steering Group, currently 11 strong. WSWG has also lodged its application with OSCR, the Scottish Charity Regulator, to become a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO) which will be governed by a Board of Trustees.

The Steering Group continues to work hard to complete the costed final WSWG Proposal and Business Plan and the WSWG Community Events Programme for 2022, including the Community Consultation on our final CATS Proposal.

On 8 March, we had another very useful meeting with Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) to review progress towards our CATS Application due for submission in late May.

Litter-picking (again) at Taymount Wood car park. Needing to do the same at Five Mile Wood car park! Thankfully, there is rarely much litter in the woods themselves, just sadly at the main car park entrances. Hopefully this is a problem we can really address once the woods are in community ownership.

Bird nesting season is upon us, so it is looking like FLS might not get the gorse and other encroaching vegetation in the woods machine-cleared this winter as hoped. If not, we will see if some light manual clearing can be done at some point in the worst areas, then aim for the full works later in the year. Storm Arwen damage to FLS forests elsewhere in the region put routine works well behind schedule. 

On 8 March, we also attended a meeting of Perthshire Nature Connections Partnership as part of their wider partnership network working together to make nature recovery happen at landscape-scale in our area. Perthshire Nature Connections Partnership | Perth and Kinross Countryside Trust (pkct.org)

We’ve recently discovered Paths for All “Voices of the Walk” podcasts. To hear about the multiple benefits of walking for “Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day”, tune in to these inspiring talks: www.pathsforall.org.uk/podcasts

Word of the Month

Catkins. We see catkins on many different species of tree in winter and spring, such as alder, hazel, birch and oak which are monoecious (male and female flowers on the same tree) and willow which are dioecious (male and female flowers on different trees). On hazel and oak, only the male flowers form catkins, droops comprising sometimes hundreds of individual flowers, with the female flowers clustering as single buds (eg hazel) or cones (eg alder). On other species such as poplar and aspen, both male and female flowers are borne in catkins. Most species are wind-pollinated; willow are insect-pollinated. If female hazel flowers are pollinated successfully, this is what produces hazel nuts in the autumn. Different trees have different mechanisms to avoid self-fertilisation. With hazel, the male flowers release their pollen days before the female flowers on the same tree are ready to be pollinated. So clever.

What’s coming up next?

WSWG Community Events Programme to be publicised soon. Walks, talks, foraging, fun events, community consultation on final CATS Proposal, more tree tubing. Something for everyone!

There is a new Community page on the WSWG website which we would like you to help us fill up with imaginative and uplifting expressions of support for the WSWG Project over the next few months. Community – West Stormont Woodland Group We’d love contributions for any of the headings we’ve set up at any point. However, at this time of year, with birdsong and other spring sounds filling the air again, we would particularly love it if you send in sound clips of different things you hear when you are in the woods which we can put in the Songs and Sounds section. Maybe a chiffchaff chiffchaffing or a woodpecker hammering or a buzzard mewing. Or a bumblebee buzzing by. Or the breeze rustling through the trees. Or a horse’s hooves on the track. Or your children playing. Or yourself singing or talking about what you are seeing as you walk or sit in the woods! Just something to highlight the pleasure we get from our woods and to share it with people who maybe don’t get in to the woods so often or at all. We are really looking forward to hearing what you hear. Please use the Contribution box at the bottom of the Community page to send in whatever you want to share. You can do this anonymously or be credited on the WSWG Community webpage. Thank you in anticipation.

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Previous Articles

Community Monthly Update – November 2023

We are really thrilled to let you know that Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) has approved WSWG’s Revised Wildwood Proposal and Business Plan for Taymount Wood. This is the first big goal achieved in our Community Asset Transfer Process to bring Taymount and Five Mile Woods into community ownership!

Read More »

Community Monthly Update – October 2023

A highlight for the WSWG Project this month has been the timely teaming up of a group of employees from Aviva in Perth with some unexpectedly lovely autumn weather for a day of corporate volunteering. On 2 October, five enthusiastic Aviva colleagues spent the day with WSWG in the middle of Taymount Wood on a range of interesting and very useful tasks, quite a contrast to their usual office based working environment.

Read More »

Community Monthly Update – September 2023

Given the distinctly seasonal change in the weather of late, we thought we would bring our Word of the Month up to the top of our September update. Psithurism: (Noun) The sound of wind in the trees and rustling of leaves, from “psithuros”, the Greek word for whispering. Enjoy your woods this autumn!

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Community Monthly Update – August 2023

This month we really want to share with you a wonderful event we had – the joint woodland picnic on 22 July with Tayside Woodland Partnerships (TWP). We pitched our gazebos in a lovely grassy glade in Taymount Wood and set out a delicious picnic spread courtesy of Alison’s Kitchen in Blairgowrie – quiches, sausage rolls and cakes galore – on portable tables kindly lent to us by Stanley Village Hall. More food and home-baking was brought by the picnickers themselves. Despite weather forecasts to the contrary, it was a beautiful day with not a drop of rain or drizzle. After lots of great chat and good food, we heard a little about each of our organisations’ respective projects and then took a walk up the main track to King’s Myre Loch.

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Community Monthly Update – July 2023

First up this month is for us to say a big thank you to a lovely group of young people from Ochil Tower School in Auchterarder who had come on a mini-bus trip to visit Taymount Wood on 21 June … and just did a litter-pick whilst they were there!! What a great example of being good citizens – enjoying the environment and taking care of it together.

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Community Monthly Update – June 2023

We want to start with a big thank you to all WSWG volunteers who helped in the Wildflower and Mining Bee Rescue Mission this spring. Many times more wildflowers have come through along the various stretches of raked verge than would have been the case had they remained swamped by gorse mulch and, as seen in the photo here, mining bees have successfully emerged where the track surfaces were cleared to help them out too. And of course the cleared sections of track make for more comfortable going again for walkers and dogs. Lots more areas still need attention, and we will keep doing what we can when we can, but thank you again to everyone who helped make a difference for nature this spring.

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