Quantock Education

Ranger's notebook - Wooded Combes

Deep valleys cut into the hills by streams. Sheltered.
Ancient woodland: sessile oaks, and also hazel, maple, holly, ash, sallow, alder.(Used to be coppiced, for charcoal, and for leather tanning). Look out for huge old oak trees (veterans) and the famous whortleberry. Sometimes very moist and shady, ideal for ferns, lichen + moss.
Dead wood - great for insects, nesting birds, fungi and bats.

Spring flowers, (before the leaves on the trees cut out the light): snowdrops, celandines, primroses, violets, bluebells, wood anemone.
Lots of woodland birds: Summer visitors: Chiffchaffs, willow warblers, wood warblers, blackcaps, pied flycatchers, redstarts Treecreepers and great spotted woodpeckers like the insects that live in bark and old wood. Green woodpeckers feast on wood ants. Nuthatches go for hazelnuts! In winter, flocks of finches and tits.
Deer and Sheep graze in the woodland pasture - (also squirrels, badgers, foxes, foxes, woodmice). Cow wheat.
Where the woodland ends and the heath begins you might find nightjars, tree pipits and redstarts.

The Wooded Combes are Special Areas of Conservation because they're beautiful and old.. (like me? Maybe not)