One of the hares here on the farm in winter helping itself to some nice protein rich beech buds.

Well, – that’s a slight exaggeration, – but we do have a permanent family of hares living here.  The hawk usually helps keep the numbers down in the early summer. Probably many people would shoot them. End of problem.  End of food for the hawk also. I like to see the hares and enjoy observing their antics throughout the seasons. The presence of wildlife in a forest can be challenging, but to me it enriches our lives in so many ways and I am always learning something new from them.

Hare damage to the soft bark of the fast growing lime tree happened after the tree sleeve had been removed.

This summer I set myself the target of removing all the tree sleeves from the Cabin Woods. The trees are now ten years old. I bought the tree sleeves second hand from Joe Gowran of Ashling Woodland Development, who had used them for five years before I got them.  They’re made of tough material.  One of the selling points of the tree sleeves was that they would disintegrate after ten years and I had thought they would have long given up by now, but only about 50% were being torn apart at the seam as the tree outgrew the sleeve. The other 50% were still gripping onto the tree and during this very wet summer many of them had filled up with water.

Ten year old ash tree bursting open the seam of the tough tree sleeve.

So I learned that I’d have been better to remove the tree sleeves at an earlier stage. Usually the narrower part of the young tree trunk growing out at the top of the sleeve is much thinner than at the base of the tree.  So it looks like there’s plenty of time to remove the sleeve.  But I found that as the base of the tree filled the sleeve, water filled up the sleeve and the trunk was consequently standing in water. Time to cut the sleeve off and free the tree. They were full of slugs and slime and all manner of wetland insects.  But no damage was done and after a couple of weeks of dry weather I can hardly notice the marks from tree sleeve.

This tree is a good size to remove the tree sleeve

And the other thing I would have done differently had I known, would have been to pull out the steel rods that support the sleeve after a couple of  years.  By then the tree itself could have supported the sleeve and the rod would no longer have been needed.  In most cases if I wasn’t strong enough to pull out the rod, some strong man could.  But after ten years some of the tree roots have knitted over the rod and even Hercules himself wouldn’t be able to pull them out. So those rods had to be hack sawed off at the base, having first scraped back the soil to get in as low as possible. Not much fun.

Steel rod from the tree sleeve stuck in the ground and impossible to now remove. It now has to be hack-sawed off at base.

If the tree sleeves are removed at 5 – 7 years instead of later, there might still be risk of hare damage.  But the damage will usually only be to  a few trees by then and the damage is not fatal, as you can see in the top photo of the lime tree.  We’ve also found that if branches of the trees the hares go for are pruned and left lying at the base of the tree the hares will go for the nice fresh young bark of the branch and will leave the trunk alone.  We do that here in mid-February before the ‘March Hare’ activity sets in and so far it has been very successful.

Hare damage on one of the branches we cut in February at the base of the tree we wanted to protect. It works!