Monthly Archives: October 2011

Doug Simpson OBE

Doug Simpson MBE, co-ordinator for the red kite project in Harewood, enthralled a capacity audience at St Barnabas’s church hall with a fascinating and amusing talk about red kites (his 201st!).

After the talk many of the audience stayed for refreshments and a chat with old friends and new acquaintances.

Doug and Steve Joul reminisce!

A wonderful evening for everyone which raised £300 for the work of Friends of Adel Woods.  FOAW would like to thank Alwoodley Parish Council which generously sponsored the talk.

A big thank you too to the members of the FOAW committee who worked hard to make the evening such a success.

Tree work on Adel Bog

A beautiful morning.

There were three teams of us today.  David and Rob cleared a fallen tree.  Judith, Ade and Brian did some litterpicking before joining the rest of us clearing saplings from around the northern perimeter of the bog and removing tree stumps from the bog itself.  The aim is to reduce the amount of water being lost from the bog through being sucked up by trees.

The northern side of the bog is very dry.  However, the southern side of the bog, which is down hill from the northern side, is now a true bog in the sense that it is very muddy and water oozes out when you stand on it.  Reeds are beginning to shoot in this area and it is looking very encouraging.

We have now made a big impression on the bog and we need to see how it responds to the winter rains.  Your correspondent’s guess is that the next step is to remove more trees from around the perimeter, and to increase the wet area on the southern area by lowering the ground level of the adjacent area to the north.

Thank you to Mark and the BTCV volunteers who did a further day’s work on Adel Bog – a day of constant rain and drizzle.  Respect!  The focus today was on clearing the bog of purple moor grass and brambles. The next step is to clear saplings from the body and the perimeter of the bog.

One of the volunteers dug a trial hole to find the depth of the water table, and it is about 45 centimetres below the surface.  We could see the water trickling into the hole.

We now need over the next year to monitor the effects of the work we have done so far.