Shuckborough Woods Wind

The great heavy hand of earth blowing upon the land is enough to set the stirrups of any hardened handler flailing out into the emptiness of space. This mad season is stirring the forest into an uproar of movement, and yet an eerie stillness descends upon all the creatures that once made a wild noise in this fair forest and not even a flutter of movement beyond that of the wind is heard. Ancient woodland is a term used in the United Kingdom to refer specifically to woodland that has existed continuously since 1600 or before in England and Wales, or 1750 in Scotland. Before those dates, planting of new woodland was uncommon, so a wood present in 1600 was likely to have developed naturally. The analogous American term is "old growth forest". Britain's ancient woodland cover has declined greatly. Since the 1930s almost half of ancient broadleaved woodland in England and Wales has been planted with conifers or cleared for agriculture. Only 3,090 square kilometres (760,000 acres) of ancient semi-natural woodland survive in Britain – less than 20% of the total wooded area. More than eight out of ten ancient woodland sites in England and Wales are less than 200,000 square metres (49 acres) in area, only 501 exceed 1 square kilometre (250 acres) and a mere fourteen are larger than 3 square kilometres (740 acres). This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=117307