For my wild friend Ceri, a small token of my appreciation of you. You saved me!
Contents
Dedication
Handy stuff for exploring with
Looking up through the bright green, newly unfurled leaves of a beech woodland, you may feel like you are in a huge cathedral gazing up through the stained glass windows – ones that are made up of many shades of green. But we chop these trees down, use them as crops or as things to climb. Woodlands are places to walk the dog, they form barriers and boundaries but they are the lungs of the planet.
Trees are amazing light machines. Just like other plants, they trap the Sun’s energy by using it to combine water and carbon dioxide gas in the air to form sugars. But trees do it on a much bigger scale. Each one is a light factory, with tiny microscopic work stations inside each leaf. While looking up through the canopy, hold a leaf in your hand and imagine the scale of production. Think of the millions of little cells in the leaf and then multiply by the number of leaves you can see all around you. Just half a hectare of woodland is such an effective factory that it produces over 6,000 tonnes of roots, wood and leaves every year!
To smaller beasts, a field of grass is like a forest, but a forest, wood or copse is a unique experience for human-sized creatures. This is exactly what this book is about: exploring our woods, forests, hedgerows and some of the habitats that are associated with them.
The book is divided into chapters that roughly reflect the different levels of woodland. Imagine the woodland as if it was a layer cake. If you were able to take a slice through it, you would see a pattern to the apparent tangled mass of life.