Busy busy busy....

Sorry for the slight, well actually very long delay in updating you all on all the exciting things going on in the Forest of Dean.

I started on the 1st September and found out that they had sold the student vehicle so I have to borrow vehicles off other people if I need to go out on my own. My first week was spent driving around trying to find places as the Dean is notoriously hard to find your way around. I can now just about find all the main sites that I'll be visiting throughout the year. The highlight of my first week was seeing a wild boar - dead, hanging up in the larder, but I'm constantly scouring the edge of the road for my first glimpse of a live one.

My 2nd week was spent being reunited with my fellow Newton Riggers on our induction week, where we learnt to eat a ridiculous amount of food in 5 days and how to deal with drunken or retarded chainsaw operators. Plus, we did have an excellent lecture from an Austrian man which taught us everything we'd forgotten from 1st year Silviculture in just 3 hours.

Then it was back to the Dean and out with the tariffing squad (tariffing involves measuring and marking trees to work out the volume of timber in a stand of trees, and choosing which trees will be removed during thinnings). I soon learnt that everything that Andrew Leslie taught us about using nice easy to use spray cans to mark trees needed to be ignored, as I was handed a slasher and had to hack away at Douglas Fir with 3 inch thick bark. I think I was beginning to develop a bicep muscle by the end of the week, but then I had to move on to lighter jobs.

After this I was put with a Beat Forester obsessed with Star Wars and that is where I still am. Beat foresters in the Dean have a very different job to beat foresters in other areas as there are small villages all over the forest, who's residents always want things doing, including pruning trees, filling a small dip in a grass verge so that the resident could use his lawn mower more easily and finding a solution to stop wild sheep from leaning against their stone walls! So far I have been out looking at clear fell sites and thinning sites and writing harvesting site plans (which would have come in handy for my harvesting site plan last year!) and generally becoming a GIS genius from all the map making I have been doing. I've finally seen a scarifier in action and got to supervise the scarifier driver. I've been meeting up with contractors at thinning sites and learnt that foresters and anyone involved in forestry drink an unbelievable amount of tea.

I've been able to do some recreation work and have been doing recreation trail checks, making sure everything is safe and there are no major problems along any waymarked routes. It's now my job to make sure that a Scheduled Ancient Monument of the first iron works in Britain (where steel was invented before a man from Sheffield stole the recipe) is cleared of bracken and brambles. I'm going over to East Anglia at Halloween to visit James and Luke and to help out at their districts Halloween Extravaganza, so hopefully I'll get to wear a ridiculous costume.

I've been doing loads of other random little jobs which are too many to mention and I won £70 at Chepstow Races last weekend so my wages are being well spent.

Well done if you've kept reading until the end and perhaps I'll update this sooner next time!