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 – October 2021

“Soggy Saturday in October” – this month’s wonderfully descriptive blog from Margaret Lear on the “olfactory hamper” that is Five Mile Wood at this time of year. Although it has to be said that we have had some amazingly warm and sunny weather this month too!

What has WSWG been doing this month?

Update from Margaret on the “unknown unknown” fungus in Five Mile Wood! “I got onto the British Mycological Society facebook group eventually and quickly got an answer. It is Paurocotylis pila, the Scarlet Berry Truffle. It is rare in UK and from what I can gather from google, recorded sightings in Europe pretty confined to UK.  4 recorded in Scotland, only 2 verified. I am to record this one as verified by BMS. It is actually a New Zealand species! How it got to 5 mile wood who knows….

  • As well as the smells of autumn, we’ve been hearing the sounds of autumn too. In Taymount Wood, rutting fallow bucks can be heard – a sort of deep, grunting belch! And we’ve seen some visual signs of the rut too – territorial scrapes in the ground and nearby small trees frayed by rubbing and sometimes even uprooted.
  • Ongoing meetings of the WSWG Shadow Board and its three Working Groups, mostly on-line but sometimes now in person (hurrah!), usefully progressing the Forest Management Plan, Business Plan and computation of the range of community benefit the WSWG project will deliver.
  • Participation in an on-line Climate Café as part of Dunkeld and Birnam Unplugged Week, showcasing local projects people can get involved in.
  • Attendance at an update meeting of the Perthshire Nature Connections Partnership within which we very much hope to develop useful links for both WSWG and West Stormont Connect going forward.
  • Participation in an on-line Workshop on community engagement as part of the Community Woodlands Association Annual Conference. Four CWA member groups were invited to reflect on their experience in a range of contexts. WSWG’s topic was Events and Guided Walks; other contributors covered consultation on plans, involving children and young people, and using social media to reach out to the community. For our presentation, it was particularly enjoyable remembering the range of lovely community events we had in 2019 in our “Feeling Good in the Woods” programme. Here’s to more of that in the future.
Mossy clumps and deer-browsed birch tree in Taymount Wood

Word of the Month

Deer rutting season: That is the time of year when deer mate. In the case of fallow deer, the rut runs from late September to early November. This allows females to gestate over winter and give birth in the spring. Both fallow and roe fawns are born in late May and June but as roe deer have a longer gestation period, their rutting season is in July and August. Particularly at the start of the rutting season, fallow bucks spend a lot of time and energy making and maintaining conspicuous ground scrapes. Most scrapes are about 1m wide and appear to be scattered randomly within the herd’s territory, but some show clear linear distribution alongside deer paths and field boundaries. Larger scrapes are usually associated with rutting stands – group display areas in populations with a high density of bucks.

A fallow deer scrape in Taymount Wood

What’s coming up next?

  • Progress Meeting with Forestry and Land Scotland and the Scottish Land Fund on 28 October.
  • Planning for WSWG winter events programme.
  • Ongoing work by the Shadow Board members to pull together the WSWG Business Plan and CATS Application.
And finally, a red admiral butterfly was sunning itself on the forest floor on a warm October day in Taymount Wood. It closed its wings and stayed stock still when approached, showing only its camouflaged underwings.
Red admiral butterflies top left and bottom right, with peacock butterflies (summer time on white buddleia).

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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!

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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.

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Community Monthly Update – September 2023

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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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