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.
This week the Thursday group did some vegetation management at Severn Trent's Tittesworth Reservoir and built habitat piles for wildlife. Some of the group coppiced some Hazel stakes ready for future hedge laying in the next few weeks.
Skills Builder out in any weather!
Skills Builder is a brand new project funded by the Big Lottery that has started this January. It means that groups, supervised by the rehabilitation service 'fit for work', will be getting lots of practical work done in the Churnet Valley over the next 18 months.
