It’s something that is tremendously exciting and tells us if the birds are happy, sort of.

It’s an app on my phone that cleverly recognises birdsong and tells us what we have. This is super-important because we can kind of judge how much wildlife we have and tells us that we are on the right track in terms of creating a wildlife corridor, which is one of our three main pillars of why we do what we do.

The good news is, we have loads and loads of different birds identified, and now the automatic photo carousel thing is working again, we can sit back and see what they are.

It’s super exciting to think that we are creating an environment that balances the needs of nature with the needs of humans.

And with that in mind, we carried on with maintaining the path width so the humans can enjoy walking side-by-side whilst having a conversation, which is really good for mental health, another one of our three main pillars of why we do what we do.

As you can see, we keep the entrances nice and wide, too. And also create a good buffer around the benches so nobody gets stung on the bum whilst sitting at them.

We’re starting to get a decent margin between the path and the scrub, but we do need to manage the tree canopy to allow the understory to really come alive. What we need is really healthy ground flora under the trees, which means getting sunlight onto the ground.

We got as far as “Wiggers” bench which is called Bethel, which was about 400 metres, so about 200 metres left until we get to the underpass.

This is a photo of the wildflower meadows outside of the railway path.

If we can get more of that inside, and we are doing in parts, it will look really good. But not having the usual vegetation flopping into the path is making it feel so much better already.

The way I am visualising it, is path – six to 12 inch short-cut margin – a metre or so of wildflower rich grass – scrub – edge. I’m not sure how this will pan out in September when we start to cut it all back, but looking at it this year, compared to previous years, I cannot see any pitfalls.

We filled up the bird feeding station with my young assistant (school holidays).

So that should keep everyone happy, and we also litter picked all the way to the furthest northern point.

Lastly, we have a few things in the pipeline for the benches. I have taken the pedestal benches off the map and just have the picnic benches on there. You will have to wait and see why. We have very subtle railway stickers for all but one of the pedestal benches. All will be revealed in a couple of weeks.

We have the triangle of benches to put in near The Bear pub, thanks to the buy-me-a-coffee donation from Rich. We also have the two benches to put in on Dunchurch Bridleway, thanks to the support from The Kitchens Inc.

Probably before that happens, we need some rain-free weeks so everything can dry out and the ground can regain the ability to absorb water.

Next week we meet at Wiggers Bethel bench and push onwards towards the nightmare that is Berrybanks!!

Here is our YouTube of a bit of today.

Join us for coffee at 11am or just join in on the workdays. It really is good fun!

Until next week!

Paul