Sunday 16 December 2012


We had a Wild Weekend for Wales!

Friends of Henllys LNR were one of 190 groups across Wales who were successful in applying for free Homebase vouchers as part of Keep Wales Tidy’s ‘Have a Wild Weekend for Wales’ campaign.
 
Funded by Welsh Government, CCW and Homebase, the aim of the weekend-long campaign was to encourage groups to create new wildlife habitats to improve local biodiversity by undertaking small practical projects to benefit native species.
 
Children from Henllys church in Wales School and Friends of Henllys LNR rolled up their sleeves, got back to nature and gave local wildlife a helping hand on Henllys Local Nature reserve by building habitat boxes for protected species of bat and dormice. We were successful in applying for a £ 100 Homebase voucher which we used to buy wood, nails, and screws.

Henllys Church in Wales Eco-Club making and camouflage painting the bat and dormouse boxes
The Friends spent a day making the kits from the wood and Chris then visited Henllys Church in Wales School over 4 Thursday afternoons with the after-school Eco Club. Here everyone helped to make either a bat or dormouse box using loads of different kinds of tools. To decrease vandalism, we camouflaged painted the boxes, which were then finished over 5 lunchtime sessions. Finally, we came out and met TCBC’s woodland and Education Ranger, Jon Howells, who with Chris and 19 children put up the boxes on Thursday 13th December in -2ยบC. We were all wrapped up nice and warm.
 
Henllys Church in Wales' Eco-Club with Chris from Friends of Henllys LNR and Jon Howells, TCBCs Woodlands and Education Officer putting up the boxes on the Local Nature Reserve
The children and everyone had a great time, we went back to school to warm up and prepared a press release to tell everyone about the great work we had done.

Sonny, aged 7, said, “I enjoyed the hammering and putting the wood together”.
Nicole, aged 8, added, “When we went to the Nature Reserve, it was a bit cold, but we had so much fun looking at our bat and dormouse boxes being put up and seeing the nature’s camouflage”.
Mrs. Sulway, After School Eco Club teacher said, “It was fantastic to see the club take on such a practical project.  All the children involved have been so full of excitement and have been looking forward to working with Chris each week.  The trip to the Nature Reserve allowed the children to see all their hard work put into practice”.
 
Chris Partridge from the Friends of Henllys LNR added, “We are a small group that have struggled with numbers for years.  We have quickly found a great way to bolster the work we can do on the reserve, while helping inspire the next generation.  It was immense fun and the boxes look amazing, we couldn’t have done it without the Wild Weekend Homebase vouchers”.
 
Each year Friends of Henllys LNR volunteers between 600-800 volunteer hours on our Local Nature Reserve. Most of these hours are spent pulling up balsam, although our winter management plan will start to increase this. These numbers of hours are staggering considering the small number of volunteers we have. Over this month, working with Henllys church in Wales after-school Eco-Club, we have worked 113 volunteer hours, but have inspired and educated so many local children, so much so that other children have asked to join the Eco-Club. The Eco-Club teacher asked if there is anything her infants can do, so we may do a bug hunt in the Summer in the tall grass. There'll be plenty of balsam waiting for the older children come the end of May-August 2013, subject to insurance of course. 

Sunday 26 August 2012

Balsam Pulling Season Over on Aug 28th

Well, as of Tuesday 28th of August, the Himalayan balsam pulling season will be over. We have pulled huge areas this year with good success. Some areas were virtually clear of balsam, while others which we thought were clear have come back. These areas are generally by the storm drains. In early August we decided to try and tackle the balsam upstream from the reserve and it will be interesting to see if this has had a positive knock on effect for next year. Sadly, there are still huge areas dominated by balsam, and we will desperately seek new volunteers to help us out next year. A rough map of our work for this year is shown below. Hopefully, we'll be able to bring in School's to help next year, which has been such a successful method over in Cardiff. Thank you to everyone who has helped pull it up especially, Maria, Tricia, Beau, Amy, Steve, Brenda, Anthony, Mr. & Mrs. Barnes, Pat and Mum and to those who we do not know about, who leave small piles of balsam here and there.
 

View Balsam mapping in a larger map
 
 
Some pics from this season's pullings.
Pulling by hand
 

New Information Board

Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Email are all very useful tools, but encouraging local people to take action to actively conserve the local nature reserve that they use and appreciate may be beyond their usefulness. As such we applied for and received funding from Keep Wales Tidy early in 2012 to part fund a notice board which people would walk by and see. The information panel has been really successful since it was put up by Jon, the Ranger, his vols and some of the Friends of Henllys LNR. This is a oak information board, so we thought in keeping with that, we would purchase a wooden notice board. About half the board was funded by TCBC and we put up this board on the reserve with help from Brian, TCBC's the Rights of Way Ranger as Jon was away on Olympics duty with the TA.

Brian and vol getting the legs drilled in place.

Brian had a few vols with him who helped dig the holes for the legs, collect the water for the postcrete and help make sure the board was looking great in its new site.


Finally, I printed off a few information sheets and added a wipe marker board to add information to the board for events etc.

Great news is that we attracted the attention of 2 new volunteers already and during a recent Himalayan balsam pulling session, 2 teenage girls asked us what we were doing and said "Oh, that's that stuff that takes over isn't it, I read about it on the noticeboard". So, it looks like it is very much worth it.


Monday 30 April 2012

30.04.12 Blocked drains, heavy rains & willow gains

After all this rain we have been enjoying, I went down to the LNR today, fully expecting the drain at the far end of the LNR to be blocked and full of twigs. Well, it was, so armed with a mud rake, I unblocked it and moved as much of the wood away from the drain area.


Later, I had a close inspection of the natural fascines made by the Friends Group as well as with HSBC, and they look like they are doing a brilliant job, so hopefully we are safeguarding some of the oldest, if not largest of the trees on the local nature reserve.


Some of the stakes that we cut from living willow are also showing signs of fresh green leaves. Brilliant news.

There are also signs of many thousands of Himalayan balsam coming up all over the place, so we know what is coming up in the next few months.

Another drain was completely blocked and this will form the groups next event, date TBA.

The new noticeboard for events etc will be ordered this week, so hopefully, this will arrive in the non too distant future.

For more information contact us at friendsofhenllyslnr@googlemail.com

Friday 13 April 2012

Henllys Church in Wales event and thundery weather

By all accounts from Jon the Ranger, I was told the class from Henllys Church in Wales relocated 11 oak trees to other sites across the LNR. The kids had great fun, learned all about this valuable resource with the sad loss of 2 spades (tools aren't what they used to be). Sadly, as I was at work, no photos were taken, so you'll have to use your imagination of what happened, my artists impression is much like my pictionary skills, useless.

The sun and rain we have been not been enjoying over the last few days will be doing wonders for our friend Himalayan balsam and it will not be long until we start coming out and pulling it up. Please remember, if you are a dog walker or user of the LNR, make sure you pull it fully up, bend it in half, then wring it, before placing it on a big pile. Over the years on the LNR, we have found that fewer bigger piles are better than many smaller piles. That is because some of the plants re-root in the pile from nodes, these flower and can cast seeds. You may well see one of us jumping up and down on piles of balsam to try and stop this from occuring. If you want to come along with us, please contact us on friendsofhenllyslnr@gmail.com.

Tuesday 3 April 2012

Today, I took a day of work to help TCBC Ranger, Jon Howells with volunteer John adkins to prepare a site for oak respacing on Henllys LNR.

Tomorrow, children from Henllys Church in Wales Primary School will be coming down with Jon to  respace some closely packed oak saplings.

There is a wonderful oak tree which has been subjected to terrible arson from vandals on the LNR. Fortunately, some of the tree is still alive and it has been producing great saplings over the last 3 years. Most of these, however, are tightly packed and have been subjected to the  terrors of being pulled all over the place by brambles so lack great shape.

The idea is to dig up and respace some of these saplings to increase the effectiveness of this crop. The job for today was to cut out the brambles from around these saplings. Jon was using a brushcutter, while John and I used long-handled hooks.

While performing this, as per usual, we uncovered a large amount of historic and fresh litter which filled one large bag. I also found a perfectly functional garden fork which will be donated to a local school group.

All in all, a great morning and best of luck for tomorrow. This is the first chance to bring a school group on the LNR, so thanks to Jon for organising it. Hopefully it will be able to help friends of Henllys LNR no end of good.

Saturday 17 March 2012

New information, new board, a school's visit and networking for positivity

Not a bad couple of weeks for us here on the LNR. Following on the tails of our last great event, bolstered timely by volunteers from Cardiff's Trail Scrubs group, we hear our first grant has been successful and soon we will be gaining a new notice board on the LNR. This was a Keep Wales Tidy Grant, which was match funded from CCW. The noticeboard will allow us to communicate events and relay information on the LNR to users to gain more support, understanding and maybe even help for this much used and loved community green space.

In a great move for the LNR, we found out that the Ranger, Jon, will be bringing a class of pupils over to the LNR from Henllys Church in Wales School in the next couple of weeks. The event we planned together will involve digging up some of the oak saplings which have grown up in one part of the LNR and replant them in some other sections. The parent tree has fantastic form and will hopefully help to improve the biodiversity of LNR. I've taken time off from work to lend a hand on this as it is during the school week and we're not normally able to do this crucial kind of activity to help improve the LNR while increasing awareness of what we do and try to achieve. So a big thanks to TCBC's Countryside Section for helping our group here.

 A wise man once said "it is into the sea the river flows". Well, another not so wise philosopher said just now "from a cluster of small tightly packed saplings which will probably die, we will make mighty oaks grow". The children coming down to help our small group will invigorate us, educate and enthuse them and you never know, these trees may even stem the floods that are flowing along the river down to the sea. Live in hope that you can but try.

Sunday 11 March 2012

11.03.12 Five events in one, great morning

Friends of Hennlys LNR were bolstered today by several new faces. Amy, Nikki and four from the newly formed Cardiff volunteer group Cardiff Trails Scrubs. It was the single biggest event we have hosted in one session so great news for us.

We started off from previous events on the reserve by performing a litterpick and the 11 volunteers quickly collected 10 bags of litter (event 1).
Rhett and Ollie from Cardiff Trail Scrubs picked up the large rakes and cleared out the drain which appears to be a major cause of localised LNR flooding and erosion.
The water was flowing beautifully afterwards (event 2).
The reserve is crossed by power lines and under these lines, trees will never reach maturity. Also, some of the trees were far too close together and were earmarked for thinning by Jon, the countryside ranger. Many of us were familiar with coppicing, but this time, it was tree felling and we went through safe tree felling and tool use. We split into two groups and felled a few trees (event 3).
Following on from this, we cut the trees into lengths to make the external and internal walls for the otter holt (event 4).
The final part of the day was to install some of the willow fascines which I made when performing some work at Cathays Community Centre. I donned the waders and slopped through smelly, bubbling sedimented mud and added the 3-bundles to the wall of willow. I added some new living stakes to stabilise these in place (event 5).
Slideshow of all the photos.

There are plans to finish off the holt, and details will follow.

On another note, some laminated sheets concerning a consulation for dogs on green spaces have been placed around entrances to the LNR. The consulation isn't proposing a ban for dogs on the LNR, but on playing fields and school grounds. However, it does mention enforcement of dog fouling on the LNR and other public access areas. There are many dog walkers who use the LNR and we plea that dog owners do clear up after their dogs. Dog poo bags can be taken home or placed in local authority bins.

Tuesday 28 February 2012

Next Event Sun 11th March at 10am

See the Next Event section, but we'll be coppicing some trees, making an otter holt (house for otters) from the wood, instaling 3 more willow bundles into the stream and a litterpick near the drain.

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Marking up trees with the woodland ranger

There's still some time to do a little habitat work before spring comes along and several trees were marked up today with TCBC's woodland ranger. Most of these were under the pylons so would never be allowed to mature to their full height anyway. Most of the trees are goat willow which we have been using this winter to make willow bundles to try and stabilise the eroding stream banks. This one appears to be working well.
We'll doing this work in the next few weeks so if you are interested in joining in feel free to send an email to friendsofhenllyslnr.gmail.com