Of birds and trees

First I must mention the epic felling of one of the huge pine trees Keith cut down on Wednesday all by his lonesome self.

Two down two to go and then part of the Reserve’s skyline will be free of alien trees. Some new trees have already been planted and there are plans afoot to plant quite a few more. As it is, six of the trees we fetched from Jenny on New Year’s day have been planted out already on the Arboretum, main picnic site and the nursery.

Also on Wednesday Stuurman did his best to catch up with some mowing and he had cleaned up around the braai area, it looks so much better now. The pump in the nursery was not working and it took some figuring out what the problem was but it was traced to the overload trip on the switch so reset and voila, sprinklers going.

Sunday was our first public meeting of the year, as it was a work party and not widely publicised we were only a small group of ten and we tackled the forest of Podalyria seedlings in front for a few hours, we made good progress but a lot still remain. It seems only FOVS sees it as a potential problem which needs to be sorted out.

It was good to meet up with the bird research people doing a catch, ring and release project to determine movement patterns of mainly Cape Sugarbirds.

Here they are busy ringing in the shade of a tree on the main picnic site. Notice the large gap in the bluegum treeline.

They start very early in the morning so when we arrived there were only a few birds still caught, it is quite a delicate operation to avoid sharp claws and beaks when handling them.

After tea it was good to see everybody just wandering around catching up after all the holiday trips and festivities, enjoying the various places we created such as the Arboretum, Wesley’s bench and the flower beds. Only negative note is that the larger number of visitors to the Reserve also means more idiots who leave rubbish a few steps away from the bins.

We also assembled the bench I made from a cut down bluegum which was well received.

Lastly some of us went for a short walk in the forest to find a pock ironwood tree. We had a request to grow them so we took some cuttings and hope that the misting house will do the trick.