"There’s a higher-than-average chance that you don’t have a considered stance on saproxylic invertebrates and fungi" says Will Masefield, GWT's Treescapes Project Manager.
"We’re prepared to accommodate and perhaps even forgive this. But consider this a paean for decaying heartwood in trees, for rot-holes, sap-runs and slime-fluxes; for crumpled cracks and crevices, white rot, red rot and the underappreciated architects of decomposition and decay"
Three Wildlife Trusts in partnership, under the banner of the Severn Treescapes project, are seeking to champion the value of deadwood in the environment, for the benefit of the thousands of overlooked species (including around seven percent of our entire fauna) that depend upon it.
Saproxylic organisms – those that depend upon dead and decaying wood for at least part of their lifecycle – include thousands of beetles, flies, wasps, hoverflies and fungi, and include some of our most threatened species. They play an important role in decomposition, recycling nutrients into the soil and storing carbon along the way.
Dead Wood Society
But not all of the potential beneficiaries of the Dead Wood Society are cryptic and tiny – consider the jewel-like noble chafer beetle, threatened denizen of traditional orchards and deadwood specialist. The finch-sized lesser spotted woodpecker can be found excavating nest holes in rotten trees in traditional orchards and ancient or veteran trees, and what about the giant sabre comb-horn cranefly - well named on account of its large size, its needle-like ovipositor (the sabre) and, presumably, comb-like antennae.
As for the nobility of the noble chafer, well…who are we to comment on the value-systems of such creatures? The marvellously-monikered mistletoe marble moth is, admittedly, cryptic. Like other moths in the tortricid family, it has evolved – fascinatingly - to resemble a bird dropping when at rest on tree trunks and branches, which presumably not many birds want to eat (my dog would hoover it up though, yum).
An emphasis on orchards
It was such creatures, and the fungal colonisations that create their wood-rot habitats, that formed the basis of our recent Dead Wood Society workshop at wonderful Wick Court in Gloucestershire. Renowned beetle-expert Keith Alexander and the Severn Treescapes team gave fascinating talks to a group of equally fascinating attendees, and Keith then led us (after a hearty communal lunch in the Elizabethan manor house, courtesy of our hosts, Farms for City Children) on a tour of the orchards and veteran trees at Wick Court.
Some of these trees are astonishing, gnarled beauties – the hollow oak as you enter the farmyard might have been already impressive when the manor house was built 600 years ago. Many of the trees in the orchards are also rich in complex deadwood habitat, but are much younger, and this is an important reason why traditional orchards are such important habitats for wildlife.
Quite apart from the fruit and apart from the blossom, fruit trees are also important for wildlife because they can become veterans (with all of these dead and decaying niches) much quicker, perhaps an order of magnitude quicker, than something like an oak or an ash tree.
And these orchards were a great example, with deadwood in the trees and deceased and moribund trees retained on site, of these important and locally significant habitats. And, satisfyingly, one of our visiting entomologists on the workshop identified the leaf-mines (squiggly tracks of the larvae) of mistletoe marble moths in the mistletoe leaves on one of the Wick Court apples.
Get involved
With more of these workshops to deliver, we are confident that an emphasis on traditional orchards, as part of the Severn Treescapes vision of habitat connectivity, is a sensible approach to prioritising, restoring and expanding these complex and bountiful habitats.
Visit https://www.gloucestershirewildlifetrust.co.uk/dead-wood-society to sign up to one of our Dead Wood Society workshops.
Severn Treescapes is funded with thanks to the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
