If you go down to the woods today, you… may see some unusual trees? There’s a new addition of deadwood poles, installed to create vital habitat for bugs, birds and other wildlife.
Over the last few years, The Parks Trust with support from local school children, volunteers, and community groups including Community Trees MK, have been planting thousands of new trees to form a woodland meadow in Middleton – a great addition to the city’s landscape, but fresh new woodlands offer limited deadwood habitat.
To combat the shortage of older sizeable trees, the charity caring for MK’s parks have introduced standing deadwood poles - known as ‘snags’. These additions create invaluable habitat, with flaking bark and decaying heartwood that are used by many species of invertebrate. Deadwood is known to support up to 1 in 5 woodland species, who depend on dead or dying wood to complete their life cycles.
Kyra Turner, Community Ranger at The Parks Trust says “Our operations team pre-cut the logs, and then - like a colony of very angry beavers - we used various tools and teeth-like tools to hack, saw, drill into and rip up the logs as best we could. Creating these wounds helps to fast-forward the process of decay, meaning the invertebrates will be able to move in sooner.”
Despite the frozen soil at the time, the team of volunteers dug in and hoisted the logs upright into the holes to provide 9 brand-new snags for wildlife in Middleton’s woodland meadow.
To find out more about the historic site and parkland features like Middleton wood meadow, head to theparkstrust.com/middleton
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