CHANGES IN STRUCTURE SINCE 1878 AND THEIR IMPACT ON WILDLIFE
For a thousand years or more to 1878 the Forest was managed according to
Forest and manorial law. There have been variations in interpretation and
application throughout that time and certain enclosures persisted, but the
wood-pasture system predominated. The cycles of pollarding and coppicing and
the seasonal grazing maintained an ordered environment for the wildlife
adapted to it. By all accounts it was rich in wildlife, and this is verified by the
nineteenth-century accounts of naturalists such as Henry Doubleday and
Edward Forster.
I have no record of continuously monitored ecological change from 1878. A
number of helpful sources of evidence exist, the principal being the records of
thinning and felling held by the Committee, the annals of the Essex Field Club,
and the data now being built up by the Epping Forest Conservation Centre.
The earliest reflective account is by Buxton himself. He was a member of
the Committee on the Conservation of Nature in England and Wales and in
1948 wrote to the committee responsible for establishing the Nature Con-
servancy a year later:
Pollarding induces many more surviving stems to the acre than high forest
as suppressed trees are rescued from overshade by the next pollarding
cycle. Therefore when pollarding was stopped the next 20 or 30 years
produced close canopy conditions even more intense than in planted
woods. It is probable that more species have been lost in the shrub and field
layer owing to this natural reaction to artificial conditions than to the
supposed inroads of an urban population.
This awareness of ecological change is impressive: had he lived longer he might
have recorded other factors working against plant and animal life, and
recommended remedial action. As it is, few had his intimate knowledge of the
Forest and only now are we able to summarise the changes. Those affecting
major habitats are:
i. increasing shade
ii. loss of plains
iii. loss of wetland
iv. loss of heather heath.
The most obvious new ecological factors operating on the Forest habitats since
1878, and contrasting with the long period of stable management maintaining
diverse plant and animal communities prior to that date, are
i. instead of alternating light and shade every 10 - 15 years we now have
indefinite periods of shade
ii. the former dense, varied vegetation structure (herb, shrub, pollard,
standard) is now simplified to one of dead leaves, sparse herb, local
shrub and dense canopy
ni. the uneven-aged stands of pollards and trees are now replaced by a
dominance of middle to old age stands, except on the former plains
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