17 January Monks Wood

Saturday seemed like a good day to check out Monks Wood,an ancient wood a short drive from Abbots Ripton. Jeff had scouted out this area earlier as a possible site for up to 5 caches. He had spoken to the ranger in charge and had a tentative go ahead.
One of the things that I enjoy about geocaching is the discovery of new and interesting places. In Kingston, Ontario I discovered areas and sights in the city that I didn't know existed. In placing caches in Monks Wood, Jeff hopes to introduce the ancient wood to other geocachers.
Our aim was to find a few spots where Jeff could establish caches. This mainly involved finding a hollow tree or tree stump, taking a picture and entering the spot into the GPS receiver so we could find it again. Caches must be at least 100 metres apart so we saw a good deal of the wood. One other use of the GPS receiver is to record our journey as a track, which can be later viewed on a computer and compared to the map of the wood to see what areas we had travelled through. We found we had covered about half of the major trails in the wood.
Flora and fauna were almost non-existent, save for a few starlings and the odd squirrel.
The wood has resident populations of rabbit, hare and fox, but we saw none of these, although J.J. would frequently pick up the scent of something as we walked along.
"One of the biggest influences on the wood over the last 20 years has been the enormous increase in the numbers of deer. Muntjac deer are extremely common and cause great damage to flowering plants, shrubs and trees, especially saplings. Muntjac were introduced to Britain from Asia in the 1920’s, and have since spread over most of Southern England. They breed all the year round and have few natural predators. The deer are controlled by culling, and two large areas have also been fenced off to protect the vegetation from deer and to monitor their long-term impact on the wood."
We found a few deer stands along well defined pathways and Maeghan just had to try out her climbing skills.
We were able to find six possible sites for caches in about 1-1/2 hours of wandering. Jeff will present these to the ranger for approval and if all goes well we will return to place the caches.
All agreed it was a good day's outing.