Success!

Another busy Tuesday with an amazing list of achievements from a great team of volunteers – thank you all! We started the day with most of the volunteer team helping us blitz the last of the gorse on the wetland before it sets seed and creates more! (It’s flowering now).

Elsewhere some more modest jobs were being tackled by smaller teams: filling bird feeders, giving the lawn in the back garden its first proper cut of the year,

bagging bird seed for sale and filing ringing recoveries – we’ve had quite a few recently. Some of the more interesting ones are now on a new map on our interesting recoveries pages and include a swallow ringed in the south of France.

Jobs continued with more removal of gorse – this time on the heath;

pollarding along one of the bird ringing net rides;

repairing a dam, ensuring water continues to feed one of our ponds;

and continuing the saga of the very muddy hole… For those who have been following this as we try to find the cause of the excess water on the path (broken pipe vs. spring). We think we have the answer – three holes in the pipe AND two springs! Some repairs and newly engineered drainage later and we hope all that’s left are finishing touches. A special thank you to John G. and Brian for braving a LOT of mud today (and to Jade, Brian and John G. for doing so last week).

The tools took some cleaning up…

…and so did the people!

However today wasn’t all hard graft: We had a bring-and-share lunch to celebrate all the hard winter work and especially getting to the end of this year’s coppice block.

Thank you again to all who helped with the coppice block – it was a big task and has made a huge difference, even just from during (we don’t seem to be very good at ‘before’ photos…)...

...to finished!