Forestry: Simon Bowes on hornet nests, dead deer, and industry decline

OCCASIONALLY a job comes along that you really don’t want, but circumstances steer you towards an inevitable conclusion. We’ve all been in a situation where there can only be one outcome; we can see it coming, but despite our best efforts the die is cast and it’s pointless to struggle against it. Resistance is futile, as someone once said.

It was a sunny afternoon almost 40 years ago and I was riding from Pickering to Whitby on my then new Kawasaki – a GPz 750 for any aficionados of motorcycles, a much sweeter handling version than the big, brutal 1100 which I owned many years later. Amanda was on the back. We’d only been going out for a few months and were proceeding at quite a lick, well north of three figures. I saw a dot ahead that I knew from experience was either a large fly, bee or wasp. You may think I’m talking tosh, but all motorcyclists will tell you stories about a bee or wasp that has done one of three things: lodged in the padding of a crash helmet, lodged in a jacket collar or gone up a jacket sleeve. The outcome is rarely a happy one – a sting on the face, the neck or the arm – and once you’ve suffered you become attuned to these hazards.

On this occasion I was wearing short racing gloves.

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The dot grew larger and curved towards me. It clipped the right hand mirror and, via the cuff of my right glove, inserted itself almost to the elbow of my sleeve. It stung me every inch of the way. When we came to a rest and I threw my jacket onto the floor, my forearm looked like a dartboard. I was not impressed when my passenger asked why I hadn’t avoided it. It was pointless explaining to her how it simply wasn’t possible. She passed her bike test a couple of years later and then found the answer to that question when she came in one night with a bee still stuck in the cheek padding of her helmet. It was secured into the fabric by its sting.

Last summer we were settled into a decent-sized softwood job – three clearfells, a few hundred tonnes of strip felling and a little bit of first thinning. Nothing spectacular, but several months of good, paying work all on one site. The best thing of all was the next large clearfell we had was so close we could wrap up and drive the machines to it without the expense of a low loader.

Hornbeam this big is rare in my part of the world. (Image: FJ/Simon Bowes)

Consequently I was not impressed when I was asked to look at a small farm-woods job only a few miles away. It was mainly diseased ash, but with quite a lot of beech and oak too. Looking at the maps, all the extraction was along field boundaries and one of the three woods was the wrong side of a substantial stream. The farm machinery used a ford to cross this watercourse, something we wouldn’t be allowed to do. The estimated volume of timber to come out of all three woods was less than 600 cubic metres.

It was a small, awkward job that would require a substantial amount of chainsaw work, some of which would be to fell big, diseased ash. Worst of all was that we were to start immediately. The farmer had harvested the oilseed rape crop currently ripening in the fields.

I reluctantly agreed to at least walk the jobs and submit a contracting rate. It would be a rate big enough to ensure I wouldn’t get it and anyway I knew another contractor was pricing it and he would be cheaper than me because he was short of work. There was a dot on the horizon, but it posed no threat.

We arrived in the farmyard to view the job and we were met by the farmer. His first words had that dot receding even more.

“You were here looking around last week,” he growled at the buyer, who had indeed been before with the other contractor. It was more an accusation than a greeting.

“Did you steal my deer?”

There followed a bemusing conversation that as far as I could tell surrounded the loss of a rotting deer carcass which had disappeared since the last visit of my rather nonplussed companion. The obvious question was why anyone would steal a partly decomposed deer. What possible profit could there be in such a venture?

That dot was now so insignificant I enjoyed a stroll around the farmer’s woods. It was a pleasant afternoon and I felt confident I wouldn’t get stung this time. I worked out my figures, added an extra 20 per cent and forgot about the dead deer job until I talked to the other contractor. He’d just secured a load of work and was now busy for the foreseeable future.

There’s never enough stacking room on small jobs. (Image: FJ/SB)

That dot had reappeared, but then I had a phone call that told me despite winning the tender my boss wasn’t getting the job as the farmer had a preferred buyer who had done a decent job a few years ago and he wanted them to have it. I guessed there was no question of them having purloined the rotten carcass. I heaved a sigh of relief and went back to harvesting biomass on our strip-felling job.

It was a WhatsApp message that proved the futility of hoping against the inevitable, and that dot loomed large before striking home and delivering the sting. The land agent/forestry consultant who had run the tender had persuaded the farmer to take the higher price on the strength of his recommendation that I would do a first-class job of thinning his woods. The absolute swine.

I didn’t take to the farmer at first. I thought he was eccentric and a little bit condescending, but I was off on holiday before we even moved the forwarder, so Richard was left there on his own for a week. In that time he found the farmer to be nothing more than suspicious as he’d suffered thefts and much poaching over the years. Within a few days he’d warmed to him considerably and when I came to start forwarding he quickly changed my mind too and we soon built up a good working relationship. His vision of how his woods should look was clear and he communicated well. He was quick to compliment the work we were doing and the first two woods were completed with little incident, other than the fun we had with lots of wasp nests in the ground and a honey bee nest in a hollow oak. He walked both woods and gave us the go-ahead to lift out the gutter crossings, thereby giving his seal of approval, although we learned it was actually his wife who had the final say.

No difficulty in identifying infected ash in 2023. (Image: FJ/SB)

It was the third wood that really taxed our collective skill and experience. There was the weather, which just about stayed onside, there was the lack of stacking space and there were the big ash trees that posed the most threat. And, of course, there was the wildlife. I brought Karl in for a few days to help with the felling. I trained him back in the early ’90s and he’s been in and out of forestry over the years but he’s always been ready to take on a bit of felling. He made the decision to go back to being a full-time vehicle technician a number of years ago. He’s kept his skills honed, though, and has done regular updates. Indeed, this year he’s joined us to do a windblow refresher on the saws and, just recently, our three-yearly first-aid refresher. He’s another of us who was bitten by the forestry bug and, try as he might, just can’t shake it off.

We started by taking a walk through the wood to identify as many of the dying ash trees as we could, and then, with the owner, decided how many to take down. He didn’t want big holes in the wood, but he wanted to remove any that might pose a threat to his staff and family who used the wood. Karl spent a couple of days felling the ash along the track the farm staff used to access the wood, while I cleared them up with the forwarder. There were some really tasty ones with canker and hollow butts as well as Chalara and we got them done with little problem. It was when we moved to the lower end of the wood, where a second group of ash was, that things heated up. Karl was stung on the back of the leg while we were marking the condemned trees. Wasp nests were everywhere, evidenced by the many holes where badgers had dug them out after we’d been through felling. I don’t know whether we made them easier to spot or if disturbing them made them release a scent the brocks could smell, but they found them for sure. It was bait time when Karl came out of the wood, still rubbing his calf where the wasp had stung him, complaining about a nest in the tree he’d just felled. He said they were different to the small subterranean wasps we’d seen up to now. These were big wasps, enormous wasps and much more orangey yellow. Hornets are rare this far north – in fact, I’d never seen hornets in North Yorkshire until a couple of years before, on the coast near Whitby.

Sure enough, Karl had felled the first tree containing a hornet nest that I’ve seen in almost 40 years in forestry – and it was a big nest.

There was a cloud of the things buzzing around and getting close to the nest with a saw was going to be ill advised, so I told Richard to turn the air con up, secure all the windows and length the tree up with the harvester. I loaded the forwarder with the lengths of ash and put the piece with the nest in on top. I took it out of the wood and put it on the stack after bravely marking it with a large red cross. We quickly learned one thing about the hornets we’d disturbed – they are not as aggressive as the wasps in the area. Handling a wasp nest in the same way would have had a very bad outcome.

I’d brought a hollow oak log out a few days earlier and only realised it had a honey bee nest in after I’d unloaded it. When we felled the tree there was no sign of the bees and someone must have stood right next to it to fell and cut it up. I rang around all the beekeepers I could think of, the farmer tried all the ones he could find locally, but no one wanted to know. I followed their advice and tucked the open end of the log into the hedge, blocking it off with other logs, but over the next few days came a steady stream of wasps that raided the nest, taking the honey and pupae until there was nothing left but empty comb. I wondered if they would do the same with the hornet nest.

It took a couple of weeks after we encountered the hornets to wrap the job up. There was a little drama when, while felling the third area of ash trees, which had been planted to fill a gap after Dutch elm had decimated that part of the wood, we discovered someone had used metal rods to secure the shelters. This required us to check every tree, pull the rods out where we could and mark the trees where we couldn’t.

On completion, we walked the wood and were quite taken by how good it looked. Some of the oaks we had carefully preserved are as good as any I’ve seen in farm woodland. They just haven’t had all the care required to make them into really good timber trees, but they will be valuable if the farmer ever decides he wants to fell them, which he assures me he won’t.

The farm and the attached woods have an interesting history. They were owned by a local family and were part of a large local estate which needed to raise money after WWII. Ownership passed through several hands, including a syndicate of miners who had a big win on the football pools. I researched the pools and discovered to my surprise that they started back in the 1920s. However, winning the pools was the pinnacle of the miners’ success as the farm went bust less than two years later. The current owner bought the farm and woods in the early ’80s as land was much cheaper in Yorkshire than in his native county of Surrey. I know from my observations and from my farming roots that though he is an amateur woodland owner he is an expert farmer who is an excellent steward of the land he occupies.

Challenging ash. (Image: FJ/SB)

The first wood we worked in is a pretty typical estate wood, a mix of ash, beech and a little birch that has been introduced naturally. The second one is similar but older, having areas that are predominantly oak which has not been managed at all, leading to the more diverse mix. The third wood is a classic estate oak wood. In certain parts of the site are numerous hornbeams, planted with oak as standard practice. On the fringes are sycamore and cherry, with an occasional mountain ash. All these will have come in over the years through natural means or by occasional planting. The far end was once almost entirely elm, but that was also pretty standard in old woodlands until the early ’70s. The backbone of the wood remains largely oak with the occasional hornbeam, some of which are quite big. I can only assume that originally the wood was pure elm and either was partly felled and replanted with an oak/hornbeam mix or more likely a piece of land adjacent to the elm wood was planted up to expand the wooded area.

Whatever the history of this wood, it is remarkable in that farm woods rarely contain such good oaks in such numbers. It’s nice to see a rather neglected area of woodland being brought back under management. It’s unusual to see a farmer with such an affinity with his woods and a land agent with such knowledge actually setting out to improve it without simply seeing it as a cash cow. While it is nice, it’s also unusual and maybe the two major benefits gained – a good return on the firewood and a stress-free operation – might see further work and further improvements because it will take several return visits over the next two or three decades to turn the woods into pristine examples. Unfortunately it won’t be me doing it, or the people who work with me, because we’ll all be retired when the next thinning operation comes around.

The experience I bring, that of my staff, the land agent/forestry consultant, and even the farmer himself will be lost and that is a common situation that forestry faces – possibly the one major cause of the decline of forestry in the UK. It’s not about technology. It’s not about circumstances. It’s about people.