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Yellowstone National Park

In May I had the chance to spend a couple of days in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Yellowstone became the world’s first national park in 1872, as federal land protected from the settlement and development that was beginning around it. It’s still the case that its official population is zero, and instead people travel in from towns near it boundaries, or camp or use motorhomes for recreational stays. I stayed in the small town of West Yellowstone just over the border in Montana.

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Owl pellets

We often hear tawny owls at Century Wood in the evening and overnight, but we’ve never seen proof of them or other owl species until this year. Last month I was walking towards a small isolated shed in the wood in the afternoon when I saw an owl suddenly fly out of its open doorway while I was still 50m away. It flew off between the trees at not much above head height and disappeared. Inside I found four owl pellets which have revealed lots of small mammal bones including skulls.

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New sink tap in the Cabin

One of the first things you realise in any off grid set up is how much we take clean water for granted. It’s literally “on tap”. Soon after we built the Log Cabin at Century Wood I installed a kitchen sink with a waste going to a gravel trap dug into the ground behind the Cabin, and a tap supplied from a water carrier. After 15 years of this set up, I decided to upgrade it with an on-demand pump and a better tap.

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My wrist

Last spring I had a bad fracture in my left wrist, had surgery to put the fragments together, and then got the bombshell advice to avoid use of vibrating machinery like petrol chainsaws from now on. As you can imagine, that’s a life changing injury in my case. Since then I’ve been working out what to do and getting as much advice I can including from my physiotherapist. I’m planning to make posts about how I carry on managing Century Wood and I hope it will be useful for other people who are dealing with injuries and conditions like arthritis.

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Lantra clamp down on chainsaws!

Well, to be specific, Lantra wants to criminalise chainsaw use by private individuals on their own land unless they have paid for a Lantra-style chainsaw course. Lantra describes itself as the UK and Ireland’s “one-stop-shop for land-based training and careers”. It has a dominant position in regulating training courses for rural skills. Since there are HSE regulations that require businesses to ensure that workers are properly trained, this brings some Lantra qualifications into that mandatory framework – you can face criminal prosecution for employing people to use chainsaws without the proper training. That’s reasonable and we have a long tradition starting with the Factory Acts of requiring safeguards when employment is involved. But now they are seeking to extend this to private individuals.

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The Wood of Versoix

This month I’ve visited the Bois de Versoix, a forest of about 1300 acres about two miles from the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. This woodland is a working forest but also contains a nature reserve, Les Douves, with amenities for the public. In particular, there is parking near the nature reserve on the Chemin de Douves, and so it’s a good place to start.

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