Nine wildlife warriors turned out today (Kerrie, Marcus, Reece, Dave, Matt, George, Steve, Martin and Paul) and cleared off the last wildflower glade.

If we don’t rip it all out it becomes scrub, and the scrub will eventually give way to trees as it becomes dense unmanaged woodland. We are giving it yet another year of wildflower glade to keep the biodiversity as varied as possible.

We rebuilt our habitat stack made out of an old pallet and then covered it over.

It’s too much of a temptation for naughty squirrels if we leave it as a visible stack, and I’m sure the wildlife won’t mind an extra layer of warmly decomposing brash as a roof.

The phrase “Active Travel” is thrown about quite a bit at the moment. What it means is travelling from one location to another in an active way, like walking or cycling. Obviously, this only works if there is kinda somewhere to travel to, and is massively useful if the routes are traffic-free.

Here is a map that shows where we are, and the bits that we look after (in yellow) and the connecting Public Rights of Ways and Permissive Paths (in red) that connect Cawston with Dunchurch.

I’m not sure if this is helpful, but it kinda shows the bigger picture. We are about 300 metres away from connecting the two yellow bits up, thanks to people simply walking and cycling on the paths to keep them open and usable. Watch this space.

We broke for coffee and ginger crunch cookies at 11 o’clock. If you want to get involved but are not sure how to approach a bunch of, in some cases, tall and burly blokes (not me…) just get over the anxiety and come down with biscuits. We’re a nice group and just rub along.

Reece did the honours with the coffee…

And if it was me and I saw a large group of people standing around slurping coffee and scoffing cookies, I would probably leg it, so I get how it might feel intimidating, but honestly, we are not going to hold you upside-down by your ankles and shake you until the biscuits fall out of your pockets.

After filling our faces, we finished off and made it ready for winter.

It’s going to be full of wildflowers again next summer. As the brambles start to shoot up we will dig the roots out with our mattocks. The more we disturb the ground, the better.

Our YouTube just showing our progress is here.

Notice the path edge nicely greening up.

The wildflower meadows next to us have been cleared and really churned up. This will be so good next year and maybe we need to open up more windows in the path edge.

See how everything is interconnected with different groups adding to the mosaic of biodiverse habitat.

Tool Talk Wednesday

We actually managed to clean down our tools today (thanks to Steve for the suggestion) with our new brush. Our new tool for this week is a third hedge-trimmer, so we are able to really get into the scrubby bramble and release more trees.

And lastly, I put up a few of the bird nesting boxes that had come down.

And moved a box that our good friend, Andrew, made for us. It’s a robin nesting box, but for some odd reason that didn’t register with my tiny brain last year.

Robin nesting boxes need to be about 2 metres high and hidden with ivy and other vegetation.

Dunchurch Bridleway

We re-worked about 120 metres on the Dunchurch bit. We probably could’ve done a lot more, but we were too busy chatting when we had coffee.

Who cares, it’s all good and it will get done on our next session. The whole point is all about having a laugh, chatting, and just enjoying the moment.

One before and two after photos. We will keep pushing the width as we go.

These are the views as soon as the farmer cuts the hedge.

Next week we are down past The Bear pub putting our triangle of benches back in. A naughty squirrel somehow managed to kick them over despite them being set in concrete. I hope your squirrel foot has recovered!!

Until then!

Paul