Back on the Roaches this week carrying on with footpath restoration. Some of the routes over the top have become very spread out so we were landscaping areas with natural vegetation and rocks to encourage walkers to stay on one path and avoid eroding wider moorland areas.
New groups started this week on the Skills Builder programme so we had the inevitable paperwork to complete but then did some tool maintenance in the work shed to get active.
The last week of the first Skills Builder group today! We had to cancel last week due to the weather so finishing off this week instead.
This week the volunteers and I conducted our first riverfly survey of 2018. We visited 3 sites in the upper catchment of the Churnet and kick sampled for riverbed invertibrates.
All about the Rot boxes this week!! We spent Thursday and Friday putting Rot boxes up in the beautiful Cotton Dell Nature Reserve owned by Staffordshire Wildlife Trust. You may have seen some of these boxes - there's some at Deep Hayes and Tittesworth so far too.
After a lot of murky wet weather the sun came out and so despite the mud I took a short walk from Cheddleton, along the canal to Consall Forge, via a wander around chase wood, then up the steps (rather tiring) and over the fields to Consall.
Busy this week helping to manage a woodland on Thursday by thinning trees to let sunlight reach the woodland floor. This should mean there are lots more plants able to grow because of increased light levels and this will be good for wildlife such as insects, small mammals and birds.
Very cold this week up on the Roaches but the groups still got stuck in to footpath regeneration with Jon and Pete from Staffordshire Wildlife Trust.
We started off in snowy conditions this week constructing a post and rail fence with a Peak District National Park ranger.
For the past few weeks the volunteers and I have been constructing artificial rot boxes. This is an innovative technique to encourage dead wood loving insects to breed.
