A little bit of everything

Some tricky chain sawing of fallen willow 

River Dickler, close to Rissington Bridge

Scrub clearing over water course which runs out of lake

Wednesday morning was spent at Sherborne with both Mike and James. James was on chainsaw,  I was on wood processor loading the cord wood {plus occasional axe splitting} and Mike was operating the wood processor. Should have been quite straight forward to build up the stocks of wood for the depleted wood supplies but not so. The main difficulty in achieving maximum efficiency was the quality of the cord wood we were using i.e. relatively small in diameter and not straight! This meant much more work for all of us and by the end of the morning we had only achieved one trailer load albeit an  extra large one. The only good news was we hadn't wasted any wood and the remaining cord wood pile for the next session looked to be much better 'quality'. Highlight of the morning, apart from my moans about the wood, was that a sparrow hawk which was hidden on the ground near where we were working flew right in front of us, clearly fed up with the noise we were making.

Today I made a comeback with the Wildlife Trust out at Greystones where a sizeable team led by Will and Richard were to carry out brush clearing close to the river Dickler near to Rissington Bridge on the outskirts of Bourton on the Water. The water course coming out of one of the gravel lakes, adjacent to Greystones reserve, which ran into the Dicker needed some serious scrub clearing. Once completed {more than one session would be needed} this would provide a better habitat for water voles connecting the gravel lakes and Dickler. Previous work in the past in this area already showed encouraging signs of water vole and hopefully this current work would improve on this and make sustaining it much easier. Although I only had a short time on brush clearing my 'sawing' skills proved not to be too rusty and the two fires for burning the large amounts of scrub were well fed.