For the Office National des Forêts, spring is rather Synonym of returning to calm. The major winter work is ending and the summer work has not yet started.
The main change for forests managed by the board is public reception. During the winter, walkers are more rare but in the spring with the return of fine weather they are more numerous.
It is therefore necessary to ensure that the paths are well marked and cleared : we take our pot of paint to put a little color back where it has chipped, we cut here and there branches that might fall on the heads of walkers, we make sure that the reception areas lack nothing (benches, tables, information boards, etc.).
And it is also an opportunity to recall the few rsimple rules to follow in this particular period for nature:
- Avoid walking off the path and keep your dog on a leash because it is a calving period for the animals. Going off the path or letting your dog approach small fawns or wild boars can be dangerous.
- Be careful not to not light a fire. Whether it’s a cigarette butt or a barbecue, the forest in spring is particularly flammable in Normandy: ferns from the previous year are dry and likely to catch fire very quickly. It is often thought that it is in summer that you have to be most careful, but for Philippe Coudoulet, spring in Normandy is a season particularly prone to fire starts.
- Also pay attention to oak processionary caterpillars which appeared two years ago. They clump together in nests on the trunks of oaks and look like big cobwebs. These caterpillars are hairy and their hairs are particularly stinging. They can especially cause breathing problems. Dogs can also be prone to it, so be careful to watch where they put their truffles.
Find the walker’s charter on the NFB website.
For forestry work, this is an opportunity to carry out two types of work:maintenance of young tree plantations and maintain forest ponds.
– Milena Aellig
Regarding tree planting, Philippe Coudoulet:
“Naturally, it’s the law of the strongest. But we intervene to help those who today may seem the weakest”
The strongest trees are indeed the ones that take up the most space and can suffocate their young comrades, but they won’t make the most beautiful trees in the future : too many branches or trunk that separates… This is not not because we grow fast that we will eventually be the most beautiful. It is therefore up to the forestry technicians to enforce order in the plantations of young trees.
Serge Le Bec, forestry technician, says however thatyou don’t have to cut everything and in particular the other tree species, other species. Some can be harmful, like the honeysuckle that wraps around the trunks, but the charm is tolerated.
Too often in the past, “single species” plantations, i.e. with a single type of tree, have been decimated by droughts or diseases… So the idea today is to grow several species so that if one were to die out, the other could take over and maintain the forest on the plot.
On the management of forest ponds, Serge Le Bec is inexhaustible. Each year, he takes care of listing the plant and animal species in certain ponds in the forest of Montfort-sur-Risle. It is part of ONF missions to observe and monitor biodiversity in French forests, in collaboration with associations, the Regional Action Program in favor of the Mares de Normandie
It is estimated that i200 years ago, Normandy had more than 400,000 ponds. In 2015 it was down to 20,000. But thanks to the inventories and the maintenance of the ponds, we arrive in 2022 to 40,000. Serge Le Bec says:
“Who says disappearance of the ponds, says disappearance of the biodiversity that had been created around”
Significant biodiversity since the ponds are home to entire populations of batrachians, amphibians such as frogs, newts or salamanders, or odonates such as dragonflies.
It is also sometimes the occasion to launch archaeological digs because some ponds have peat three meters deep in which one can find tools that date from the Roman period ! The forest of Montfort-sur-Risle was indeed a space of agriculture and habitation at that time, since it was only forested two hundred years ago.
But the instruction for curious walkers is rather to avoid approaching ponds that do not border the paths especially in the spring, since this is also the time when frogs lay their eggs.