finally i was able to:
1. use my highly specialised knowledge about oak coppice in Luxembourg
2. name a document "birbs.doc"
http://www.woxx.lu/schlechte-zeiten-fuer-luxemburgs-voegel/
Endlich konnte ich mal
1. mein hochspezialsiertes Wissen über die luxemburgischen Eichenniederwälder in einen Artikel einbringen 2. ein Worddokument "birbs.doc" nennen
there isn't a lot about oak coppice in the English wikipedia so I'm going to tell you something about it #forestry
Coppice (also called "low forest") is the practice of cutting wood and letting it regrow out of the stump. It was mainly used for firewood.
In luxembourg (and I guess in other parts of the world, too but I have no information about this), oak coppice was used to make leather
so the still quite young (15-25 years if I'm not wrong) oaks were cut down during spring.
between the wood and the bark, you'll find pink stuff that can be used for tanning. it has a sweet taste and it's edible (candy of this exists) and it can be used for ~medical~ stuff.
however, it was mostly used for tanning hides (= making leather)
this was done in the nothern part of Luxembourg, called Éislek (yeah I know it's ADORABLE that this small country has different parts) where the soil wasn't that suited for high oak forests anyway.
as other, cheaper methods of tanning evolved (and colonisation of south american countries with gigantic cattle farms etc), the oak coppice tanning industry vanished.
nowadays, most former low forests are just growing, as there is not much use for the specific product(s) it generated
now you could say "what do I care when the oak trees are cut down?"
well: low forests allowed for a special ecological niche to evolve, as they aren't so dark as normal (high) forests.
so some quite specialised species could live there, like the hazel grouse (Tetrastes bonasia). Now it seems the hazel grouse has vanished from Luxembourg
I find this fascinating because when most people think about "protecting the environment", they think "leave it as it is and how it evolves".
But if you want to keep species like the hazel grouse, you'll have to keep up the low forests, which means cutting them down every 25-30 years (of course not all at once, ideally you'd cut one part of the forest, next year the next, etc.)
and there is also a cultural, traditional aspect to this, which could get lost.
@Wolf480pl I think you could say the spectrum on environemental conversation is between the extremes "let evolution handle it" and "we humans decide what is good for the planet".
and I think it's a lot more compliacted than most of us realise (even me, as I'm not really an ecologist)
@jollysea yeah, I agree. I didn't understand that quote as "we decide", I understand it as "Once you started messing with something, you can't just go away and hope it'll live on its own. If it goes extinct 100 years after you stopped messing with it, it still may be your fault."
@jollysea
>you're forever responsible for what you've tamed
a quote from... Little Prince? I guess... don't remember exactly.