Happiness is a **bleep** sound

On Wednesday night I emailed Sal and asked for special dispensation from Thursday's long slow run. The reason being that I had a full day's woodland survey, at Wytham Woods in Oxford, and Keith was worried that if I went running beforehand (my intention) that I wouldn't have the energy to survey all day. I was worried that if I surveyed all day, I wouldn't have the energy to run afterwards. Also, as I typed the email, my leg was throbbing from the morning's run, and I realised that being in a B&B in Oxford, I didn't have the required ice pack (or frozen peas) that I'd been instructed to apply. Sal's response was swift: wait till Saturday, do the run then. This was good. However, I did feel that walking all day around a wood was good exercise, and I expect that when Sal catches up with this blog, she will probably incorporate it into her training program, so we will have a lot more woodland surveyors, a win-win situation.

Now, truth be told, I'm flailing a little for subject matter on the blog, especially since I haven't been running with Nigel and the rest of the boys for a while, but it struck me as rather fine to have the opportunity to talk about surveying Wytham, because generally Keith goes off for a week or two each year, and cheerfully informs line managers and colleagues alike that he is "off to Wytham", taking along an assistant or two, and I don't think anyone really has a clue what he's doing. And don't go away with the idea that this is what my work involves generally: I wish.

So here's the scoop. Keith started working at Wytham for his PhD on brambles (some people have ALL the fun). And around that time, one of his supervisors at Oxford, Colyear Dawkins, decided to set a 100m grid across the wood. You can find all about this simply by reading this book. This is no mean feat, especially given that Keith's brambles were 2 m high at the time. It was all laid out using chains and proper surveyors' equipment, and each 100m square was marked with a wooden post, painted orange, and its grid reference stamped on an aluminium tag. They then surveyed every other post. The survey involved a 10x10 m square, but they deemed that putting the square right by the post would mean it would get trampled all the time by the millions of Oxford students studying Wytham, so they offset it, 45 degrees (South East), by the distance of another 10x10m plot. The post, and the two diagonal corners of the plot, were marked with a piece of metal pipe knocked into the ground. This is crucial because we survey the wood every 10 years, and a wooden post rots and falls over about every 9 years.

So armed with only a compass, an all-weather clipboard, a load of tent pegs, some 50m measuring tapes, a clinometer, a reloscope, a girth tape, a metal detector, and crucially, a raincoat, we set off to "survey Wytham". Oh, and lunch, some hopeful sunscreen, and some crucial insect repellent. (Why haven’t they invented stinging nettle repellent yet?)

I love spending time with Keith in the wood because, providing the surveying is going pretty well, conversation can veer wildly and get really quite silly. So, we covered all range of subjects as we wandered round the wood. Around about noon, a heavy rainfall started, so we opted for an early lunch while sheltering in some shrubbery. Yes, that’s just what it’s like working in woods. Keith told me about the rest of the week, as we’d tried to arrange a week long extravaganza of all Keith’s past assistants helping him resurvey Wytham. What happened in the event, of course, was that we could all do different days, so he had a stream of us, much liked actually working with us. Rebecca, Chris and Suzanne had been earlier in the week, and Keith said they’d all done well. He told me about Rebecca’s theory that a post marker was likely to be within 2 m of a fallen post, because of the height of the post. This made eminent sense, as does everything Rebecca says. By the end of the week, we were both calling it “Rebecca’s Law”. 

He added, “And I didn’t lose anything either, except the knife I left in a tree, but luckily I remembered, and was able to go back for it”. Now, for obvious reasons, losing, or leaving anything behind, is disheartening (although re-finding things is rewarding), but I was nonetheless alarmed by this statement, because if you scan the equipment list above, you won’t find “knife” in it. It’s not a statement you want to hear when you are alone with a bloke in a wood. Especially not one with a big (formerly black) beard. I tried to imagine Keith stabbing a tree, and wondered what fit of peak had driven him to it. “You left a knife in a tree?” I questioned. Anyway, it turned out he had a semi-plausible explanation, which had not resulted in the death of anyone, so I could rule out psychopath from my list. Apparently while he was surveying by himself, he couldn’t reach the end of the girth tape, and didn’t have anyone to help, so he’d pinned it in place with the knife. Lateral thinking, you might say (although I wouldn’t). I didn’t like to point out, as it’s usually one of my tasks, that I never need assistance, or knives. So I asked him for help with it later on in the day.

A word needs to be said about the compass, which has a mind of its own. Other people have compasses that point north. This one points through blackthorn, bramble or other spiny, prickly or generally impassible things. I kid you not. The needle doesn’t stay still and wanders each time you line it up, until it’s found the impassable object. It put me in mind of Jack Sparrow’s compass today, which I was thinking of because of the way it spins, and today my compass was mainly pointing at Keith, which I thought was poignant, because Captain Jack’s compass pointed at what he wanted (don’t go there – not like that), and I do want Keith, specifically, I want him not to go. Fact of the matter is, he’s going to leave the organisation soon, and the whole notion terrifies and depresses me.

Anyway, we had a day close to miraculous in terms of finding these wretched plots. Three times, we found pegs in the ground with no marker visible whatsoever, although the frequency with which we also found nails, cartridge cases and other random bits of loose metal meant that I insisted on seeing the end of a peg, no matter how good the “bleep” sounded, nor how straight a line the three noises were. But those bleeps did cause some big smiles when we’d tracked through the wood by pacing out from a distant feature. Once we only traced the plot markers by the location of two trees previously recorded in the plot. Amazingly, although we’d been all over the area the day before, when we did find the plot marker by the post, we also found the rotting post. Sometimes it’s almost as amazing what you don’t see as what you do.

Well, after lunch, while we hoped for the rain to stop (and it didn’t), we surveyed a plot that had been in Keith’s PhD area. Right by the post there was a lovely patch of herb Paris. Don’t ask, but woodland ecologists are hardwired to photograph herb Paris. We’ve all got stacks of pictures of it, but you find it in the wood, and out comes the camera. This was all in fruit, which was nice. Herb Paris is one of the better indicators of ancient woodland that we have – it’s really poor at dispersing, so it’s unlikely to be found in more recent woods. Then Keith told me that the first time he ever saw herb Paris was in that patch of woods! What do you know! This herb Paris may be related to the very first herb Paris that Keith ever saw! Fancy. Although I learned a few years ago that Paris is a corruption of pares, (parts) so really there’s no need for it to have a capital P. But you know, convention.

Towards the end of the day, I found myself getting pretty tired. I was right about not wanting to do a run, I felt like I’d be lucky to get back to the car without a snooze. But Keith decided we’d do one more “on the way back to the car” – it never does to trust this statement. For some reason, it involved a big hill, so on the bright side, that hit another part of training. When we found the plot and marked it out, needless to say, through a hawthorn bush, I was struggling with knackered-ness, and as I clambered over the tape-measure, I paused astride it. Keith looked at me questioningly, so I explained, saying “I’m just trying to get the energy to get my other leg over”.  He gave me the raised-one-eyebrow expression and said “I’m just trying to imagine how Heather would respond to that statement…” 

We told Rebecca about this story tonight, and she laughed like a drain. I’d just like to say, these things don’t occur to ME. It’s everyone else who thinks them.