A cigarette butt is suspected to have caused a forest fire that is believed to have killed thousands of young trees.
Nests and charred wood have been found after flames ripped through thousands of trees in Harrow Hill in the Forest of Dean following a “short hot spell” in May.
Leoni Dawson, community ranger for Forestry England, said they were worried “this whole place is dead and gone”.
It is thought no deer or boar were harmed due to a deer fence enclosing the area, but concerns remain for insects, reptiles, small mammals and bird nests.
What an odd way of describing a bog-standard minuscule-scale forest fire.
I mean, only thousands of trees? How is that news? That sounds like only a few hectares burnt… something that might hit the local/neighbourhood-level news over here in Canada, where we have seen individual conflagrations consume many billions of trees in 2023 alone, even in regions that are classified as temperate rainforests.
And a “short hot spell” lasting only a few days? This is enough to raise alarm, and/or cause dangerous conditions? Wow.
Honestly, this article reads very, very oddly. As if it happened in a place which has never seen a forest fire before. The breathless reporting of such exceedingly minor “devastation” sounds more like something that had come out of the Amazon or the Congo during the monsoon season, where any forest fire at all during a torrential deluge would be equivalently notable.
In the UK we have a lot less unspoiled woodland and a much higher population density than Canada. We have to be careful that we don’t let a few people ruin it for everyone else by being careless, hence the focus on the cause in this case.
And yes you’re right, this hasn’t historically been an issue, but climate change means we are much more likely to have forest fires now.
It has been estimated that there are approximately 3 billion trees in the UK in total. The UK has been assessed to be one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. Any fire that consumed ‘many billions’ of trees in the UK, would leave no trees left at all.
This is a local new story - local to the forest of Dean. It is unusual, however, in that it was a fire that affected (relatively recently planted) woodland at all. Typically in the UK, native woodland is a mixture of broadleaf species - pretty resistant to burning compared to conifers - and are often too wet to burn at all anyway. Even significant forest fires in the Forestry Commission’s extensive conifer plantations are uncommon.
We do have much larger wildfires than this in the UK - but they are typically heathland or moorland fires, not in wooded areas. Species such as gorse and heather, which tend to dominate on heathland, are adapted to periodic fires and will recover relatively quickly. The main issues with those - as is mentioned with this incident - is death of the fauna in the area.
Maybe it reads oddly to your North American-centric viewpoint, but frankly that’s more of a you problem than one with the article.