The Wednesday volunteers joined, by Andy Lee worked on the fallen tree in Pony Wood on Wednesday. The trunk and larger branches were sawn up and left in situ, the smaller branches were taken into the wood to make a hedge of brash: although dead wood is good spread around a woodland to rot down naturally, too much can cover ground flora, encouraging perhaps brambles to grow over it to shade out lower plants.
It can also cause a problem for access for management in the future. Stacking brash either in heaps or rows is beneficial to small mammals, birds, insects etc, but a row or hedge can create corridors through the wood to connect to outside boundaries etc. Eventually they compost down with mosses, lichens and fungi to increase nutrients to the woodland floor.
