It always gives us a huge amount of satisfaction when we work with our young Duke of Edinburgh volunteers. George’s task is to create a clearing and get a bench put in, a bird nesting box up, and some wildflower seeds in the ground.

The bench, made by our friend Andrew out of recycled wood, came in kit form, so George and Reece had to assemble it. Luckily we had very comprehensive instructions to follow. The second part was digging the holes and post-fixing it in place. We used two bags because the bench sits quite high, so there will be a little extra flex in the legs. We checked and double checked to make sure it was level across the length and the width. The view is pretty magnificent, the bird-box is close, and Andrew had left a couple of uplifting messages for George on the bench, which we all thought was a lovely touch.

As you can see, I was doing all the supervising and taking photos. It’s a hard hard life!

It’s nice to go into boy scout mode and get our tarp up again, although the light drizzle stopped as quickly as it started.

The next stage for George is to clear the ground in front of the hedge and create a small wildflower glade.

This will create a pleasing foreground to compliment the gorgeous background, and create nectar to attract insects, which will provide food for the brood of birds that take up residence in the nesting box.

After all that hard work, we re-grouped at the recycled picnic bench for coffee, cookies and just generally chatting about god knows what…

We then pushed on southwards easing out the path edge by making scallops, and trying to work out where the sun will be at the height of the summer.

Our rudimentary hedging is beginning to come to life and bud up. This is going to be so beneficial for wildlife when it’s dense and full of berries.

The farmer has started cutting the hedges so the views over the heath are really good. I asked why it is done so late in the season and he said that cutting it early is simply destroying a valuable food-source for so much wildlife.

Our YouTube between the benches.

As you can see, it’s still very wet. According to the Met Office, this winter has been the wettest since 1890. What’s that? 130 years or so? All we can do is work around it until it dries out.

Our snowdrops are out and the path edge is looking good with loads of wriggles to create little micro-habitats.

In other news, we did a bird box audit and mapped them all with what3words. It makes it easier to observe them when it all greens up in a couple of months

We have 40 closed bird boxes, 7 open boxes and 5 bat boxes. It’s going to get very noisy probably late April/early May.

I also mapped the benches, we have 9 picnic benches and 18 pedestal benches.

We have just two more weeks before the bird nesting season starts and we’re in a relatively good place.

Until next time!