A beautiful morning and eleven Friends met at 10 am at the Slabbering Baby entrance to Adel Woods. We had two tasks for the day: litter picking, and working on Adel Moor.
Litterpicking
Two of our team chose to pick up litter.
They made their way up Buckstone Road, across the Village Green, and along Crag Lane to Adel Crag where they found and cleared up bags of litter which had been left to the right of the Crag. Together they filled one and a half purple bags.
One of our team picked up two lots of unbagged dog poo (a first for her) using the dog poo bags donated by Fetch for our last event. Despite this unpleasant job, her verdict was:
“A lovely morning and we both enjoyed our litter pick and a picturesque walk back to the cars.”
Working on Adel Moor
Nine of us chose to work on Adel Moor. As can be seen from the photographs, the moor was looking wonderful in the sunshine. The light green areas in the photographs are areas of bracken. The brown-green areas are heather.
Friends of Adel Woods have been working on Adel Moor for fifteen years now – removing tree saplings, bracken and brambles. Today our focus was primarily on reducing the amount of bracken and removing saplings with our trusty tree popper.
The purpose of doing this is to preserve this special habitat within Leeds, and it was pleasing to find that as we cleared areas of bracken we revealed plenty of heather plants and seedlings. Other typical moorland or heathland plants found on Adel Moor are gorse and bilberries. The bilberries seemed to be doing particularly well this year.
Unfortunately, a small number of dog owners believe that the moor is a great place to let their dogs “do their business”. This is damaging to the moor for a number of reasons. The increase in nutrients in the soil discourages moorland plants while encouraging grass to grow. The damage is apparent in that the paths through the moor now have very wide grass verges. This is probably harming the population of native lizards: their habitat, the heathland, is being divided into small patches separated by wide stretches of grass. We did not see any lizards today but we have seen them previously when working on the moor.
We need to preserve the habitat for the lizards – and for its intrinsic beauty – and so yours truly sacrificed pleasure for duty and took on the task of gathering up deposits of doggy do do.
“Adel Moor is a wonderful place to work!”
Join Friends of Adel Woods!
We hope that you have enjoyed reading about our activities and would be delighted if you would like to join us.
Friends of Adel Woods were formed in 2009 to help maintain Adel Woods and encourage people to enjoy them. We meet one weekend morning a month to carry out various jobs or ”work parties”, and we also put on educational events such as bat walks, fungal forays and birdsong walks.
We are a very friendly group and welcome new members who want to help preserve our special woods, enjoy fresh air and exercise in the woods, and make new friends.
If you would like to take part in our activities, keep an eye on our Home Page and come along to one of our work parties.
If you would like to join our email mailing list, please get in touch by leaving a comment on this website – you should be able to see a comment button at the bottom of this page.
Friends of Adel Woods 