Chair’s April 2025 Update

BECOMING INVOLVED IN PROTECTING THE FOREST

As summer approaches so do the summer shows as well as many visits to the Forest. The New Forest Association wishes to raise its public profile by attending as many shows as our volunteer forces allow and more importantly to support responsible Forest use by visitors. I thus wanted to talk about several ways you can become involved in protecting the Forest.

Pick it Up!

Our Byelaw Watch last year recorded a totally unacceptable number of dog faeces left on the Forest, so we are supporting NFDOGs campaign this year to bag and bin dog faeces. A group run by the Verderers, the New Forest Dog Owners Group, the New Forest National Park Authority and Forestry England are also keen to address the problem. Oliver Crosthwaite-Eyre, our Vice President and Chair of this joint group, has observed that whilst:

“we believe most dog owners are responsible, and part of that is picking up their dog’s poo … a lot of owners don’t, and you only have to look around car parks to see the piles of disgusting poo. It’s a health risk, it harms the forest and can affect the enjoyment of many people. The answer is so simple – pick up poo, bag it, and bin it.”

Dog faeces can cause Forest harm in several ways. Given a dog’s diet, it contains nutrients and chemicals which encourage unnatural herbage growth. It also can carry diseases that can be passed to humans, such as Toxicara, a roundworm infection as well as Neospora, which raises the risk of stock aborting prematurely. Finally, there’s increasing evidence that the currently high level of foxes is in part due to dog poo, which they eat when other food is short.

The campaign includes and leaflets to be given out to forest users and the purchase of 6000 bags to give away as well as small gifts offered to those who are spotted behaving well and picking up. There will be a stall at our Annual General Meeting to promote this campaign which I urge you to support.

Byelaw Watch

We continue our work on raising awareness and monitoring breaches of the byelaws governing the Forest. These watches do provide some evidence to support initiatives to promote responsible recreational use of the Forest and sits alongside other data collected for instance by Forestry England. This evidence will be necessary for example to support the renewal of the Public Space Protection Orders against pony feeding and petting and the prohibition on barbecues and fires. It can also support other compliance initiatives.

We are yet to confirm the exact form of the 2025 Byelaw Watch but it is likely to be monitoring at popular locations around the Forest on a busy weekend or bank holiday. What is certain is that we will need your help to keep up this important work and more details will follow.

The New Forest Show

The New Forest Show is the premier Forest event which provides an opportunity to showcase what we do. We have long had a stall at the show usually manned by willing trustees and council members, but we would welcome members to help too.

You can help us by assisting with setting up or dismantling the stall or by chatting to members of the public at the show itself. We can provide a crib sheet to help you know what to say and remind you of key facts and figures.  There will also be help on hand to deal with any questions or to assist those who wish to join the NFA. We are planning a get-together over some refreshments before the show to answer any queries and so volunteers can meet the team and get up to speed with ‘the knowledge’.  Usually, volunteers will help for half a day but just an hour or two is helpful. If you are willing to help, please contact Tracy Gribble, our secretary at secretary.fonf@gmail.com.

If we can build our ‘show team’, then we can attend more shows over the summer. We are already going to attend the Conservation Awareness Day at the Countryside Education Trust in Beaulieu on Sunday 11^th May 2025.

Sarah Nield, Chair New Forest Association