Well, this is just about as good as it gets for now.

Ten wildlife superheroes turned out this morning, on what was the last day working on this section.

Andrew, Reece, Dave, Mark, Steve, Martin, David, Ian, Ram, and Paul made a last-ditch attempt to create a platform for wildflower-rich grass to grow and be the perfect habitat for butterflies, bees and other insects.

We have left some trees, which goes against Butterfly Conservation advice, but we are just a bit overloaded with cuttings, so we need to give nature a chance to catch up by rotting down all the brash from the last few weeks.

We will seed the bank with a wildflower mix at the start of March to get it off on the right foot.

We broke for coffee and biscuits at half-time.

And then cracked on with the job in hand.

I’ve tried to take follow-on shots to show the whole bank.

Basically it’s 30 metres wide. We could extend it in September (when the bird nesting season is over) but I think we want to keep a decent bank of scrub between clearings, so we will probably try to copy this one a little further north and leave a 20 metre block of bramble in between. It’s all about balance and biodiversity.

Looking southwards, the sun is behind the trees. It will be way higher in the sky in the spring and summer, but we will mark any trees that are causing dense shade and thin them out next year.

Hopefully, we have done enough to create the hot zone on the bank that we are looking for.

We had a tree come down in the recent storm, so Andrew and Steve took care of it.

Nature’s way of thinning out trees!!

We also reattached a couple of bird nesting boxes.

We have two new ones to put up next week.

A little gift from one of our sponsors…

And we drilled holes in the new tree stumps to help them to rot away.

I guess water gets in and helps the wood to break down?

Lastly, we got rid of a couple of bigger bits of timber that just seemed to distract from the overall flow.

This will be a wonderful dead-wood habitat for so many insects and is pretty much at the start of the food-chain.

We did the usual litter-pick to keep it a stress-free trail.

And that is pretty much it for January.

Dunchurch Bridleway

Four of us turned out last Friday to release more of the veteran trees.

Ian, Dave, David, and Paul.

We very quickly found that the ground was waterlogged.

A quick change of plan got us working around an old yew tree, and making an area for wildflowers to come up.

It was incredibly wet, and most of the trees that we took out were nearly falling over under their own weight.

Nothing perks us up better than coffee and chocolate biscuits.

We finished with a habitat log pile for insects.

Next week we move southwards to the connector path that keeps the two trails connected and the decent off-road path between the three communities that we cover, namely, Bilton, Cawston, and Dunchurch.

Until next time!

Paul