Week of Mon 5th May 2025

First task of the day was to complete the small mammal raft checks for the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. On the way to the sites, there was a wall of birdsong, where I picked up Song thrush, blackcap, greenfinch, chiffchaff, wren and blackbird all competing.

Although we’ve had little rain in the last fortnight, there were no signs present on either raft (sometimes they get washed away). So just a reset of the cartridge to see what happens in the next fortnight.

The next appointment was with Mike to discuss and co-ordinate all the various river related activities in the local area. He is the GWT community representative, but also takes part in Dursley Green Drinks, where there has been a particular community interest over the last year or so.

The main activities are riverfly, water quality testing and water guardians, but there are also a few other habitat and outflow mapping exercises that could be done. I think there’s a case to use the Dursley Green Drinks to start to put together coherent information about the different things, and act as a point of co-ordination for anyone who wants to get involved.

It’s a slow burn thing, but definitely a good idea to get together and swap notes.

Spring has arrived and all the plans for summer activities starting to take shape:

• Launch a new community website called Discover Dursley, with some basic tourism information and a process to collect content from the community.
• Start up sections on the Dursley Green Hub for digital, water and energy and see if some community action can form around them.
• Organise and lead a trip to Renishaw for the Dursley Code Club during half term.
• Botany survey app for Glorious Grasslands survey season in May and June.
• Management plan for Uley Common.
• Himalayan Balsam pulling and other tasks along the Frome and Canal with Stroud Valleys Project and Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust
• Seed harvesting with Glorious Grasslands in July and August.
• Getting out to other Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust reserves on Thursday work parties.
• Organise fortnightly Zoom calls for an investment group focussed on retirement and drawdown.
• Small mammal river monitoring
• Riverfly monitoring on three established sites
• Summer term coding club after school in the library
• Fromebridge Fridays habitat management with the Wildlife Trust
• Fromebridge Orchard monthly work party to keep the restored orchard managed.
• Work with Gloucestershire libraries on a county wide initiative to put a code club in every library
• Pop up code club in Tetbury to try and kick start the concept over there.
• Try and get Dursley Walking Festival website in a better shape so other people can manage it.
• Continue to interview people for the People & Money series on the blog

Quite a list when you write it down. There’s plenty of other admin type activities as well, so my calendar will be pretty full.

You can follow along in my diary to see how I actually get on with this list.

Then

Now is now.

Soon now will be then.

You can then see previous nows.

I usually do Ebley meadow riverfly sampling with Tony on a Monday, but yesterday was bank holiday so met up early this morning instead. The site had very low levels, perhaps the lowest I’ve seen here.

Still no mayfly. I’m getting concerned that we’re not seeing at any of the locations, and they were numerous this time last year. The blue winged olives were numerous again, and we also found one flat bodied stone clinger.

I find the blue wings and stone clingers very difficult to tell apart, so it was good to get this one and look separately. The stone clinger has gills on the side and the legs are a bit fatter, so we were confident in the identification.

Was also good to catch up with Tony on his activities. There’s some school trips coming up to show how to do river fly monitoring so they will be fun to assist with.

In the afternoon, I made a very successful batch of bread rolls, so up to date on lunch options for a bit.

Just completed another housekeeping on the 800+ feeds in my FreshRSS instance. There were about 30 links reporting errors. Some had disappeared completely, some just needing removing and re-adding and others just got removed if I couldn’t get them to work.

Feels good now to have a clean set of feeds again

A hedge maintenance task today with Stroud Valleys Project along the canal. A hedge was planted along the towpath about three years ago, and it’s time to remove the plastic spirals which were protecting the plants from rabbits.

Sometimes if spirals are left too long, they get brittle and splinter into pieces which leaves plastic pollution in the hedgerow. But luckily this was not the case here, and the spirals could be safely removed all in one piece.

It was a great team effort, and by tea break we had completed about half the hedge line. Mike supplied the cake, including a rather good chocolate explosion cake which his grandson made.

There were very few failed trees. They were a good height and look like they’ll survive any drought difficulty we might have. The species were excellent – hawthorn, spindle, dogwood, field maple and hazel.

The grassland at the far end of the hedge was amazingly species rich. I remember brush cutting there a while back when it was covered in bramble, but the grass has recovered well. There was Lady’s bedstraw, yarrow, field scabious, bird’s foot trefoil and many others. It really will be a great habitat alongside the hedgerow.

After lunch we were in the final straight and only had about another 40 minutes to complete. Mission accomplished for this phase of the tree establishment. We just need to return in another 5-6 years to lay it.

The recent drought has not been good for newly planted hedges this year, so Stroud Valleys Project put out a last minute call to help water one of the bigger ones that’s under a bit of duress.

We planted this hedge back in March and it’s over 1,000 trees. It’s been superbly stock proofed and will make a super hedge once it gets going. The eastern end is located on a spring line and is pretty damp, but the west side is pretty dry.

We met up with Stuart in the afternoon, and basically just filled buckets from the cattle trough at one end. Some people in between the stock fences doing the watering, and everyone else sherpa-ing buckets. I started off doing in the middle doing the watering, but then switched to carrying.

It was pretty hard work – the hedge line went uphill from the trough, and two 5 litre buckets gets pretty heavy on the arms. In the end, we did a relay system to carry buckets just half the distance and the empty ones back.

So after about one and a half hours, all the plants were thoroughly watered which should get them through the next week or so until the rains arrive (if the rains arrive ...).

In the months of May to July in the UK, you may come across teams of volunteers working on Himalayan Balsam control. Particularly near waterways, but also other places.

If you are not sure what Himalayan Balsam is, you can find more information and links below. If you stop and ask, they will tell you about the activity and give you insights into the situation in your local area.

Himalayan Balsam is a non-native, invasive species. It can grow to 2 meters, has distinctive large green leaves, with red tinges. The flower is usually purple, and very striking. It was introduced by Victorian gardeners, and has long since escaped to devastate the countryside.

The problems with balsam are many fold:

• It grows in dense clumps which shade out all other native plants in the area. It’s an annual plant which disappears completely after the summer leaving bare soil.
• Along rivers this means loss of riverbank structure. Native perennial plants have deep roots which bind the bank together. When the high water levels come in winter, the bare banks are eroded further causing more severe flooding in the area.
• The flower produces sweet, rich nectar which attracts many bees and other pollinators who gorge on the food. This causes them to produce copious seed again next year. Also, the pollinators are then visiting fewer native plants in the area, making them less likely to produce seed. The combined effect can make balsam a dominant species along big tracts.
• The plant can “spit” it’s seed up to six meters away (often to the other side of the bank). If left unchecked, it can spread very quickly.
• The seeds are transported downstream to areas that do no have balsam yet, causing it to sprout all along the catchment.

In short, it’s extremely pernicious. Don’t be fooled by the pretty flowers that this plant is good for the environment.

For all the chaos it causes though, it does yield extremely easily. Their roots are shallow and can be pulled with little effort. If you pull it, the stalk looks a bit like celery and can be snapped with a satisfying crunch.

It can then be laid to one side and it will disappear very quickly. The plants are mostly made of water and will literally evaporate in a few days in hot sun after pulling.

This is what the volunteer groups you see are doing. Usually they are acting in a strategic manner, starting at the top of the catchment and working their way down year after year.

If you’re not sure what they are, ask someone to show you. Once you get your eye in, your see them everywhere. So pull them yourself when you are out and about.

You’ll be making the world a slightly better place.

The surveying season with Glorious Grasslands kicked off today with a training session in the Windrush valley. There were a lot of new faces in the team, so it was a good chance to go through how the survey app works, and also get a refresher from Anna on how to spot the main herbs and grasses we’re likely to come across.

The location was a stunning spot where we had done some habitat management late last year, and I always like to see what effect the work has had during the growing season.

The site today is not typical of a recipient site survey, since this was highly species rich, whereas the recipient sites by definition haven’t been restored yet. But that made it a great training site – the first 1m x 1m quadrat had 11 indicator species in it, and perhaps 25 altogether!

There were some rare grasses like sheep’s fescue and also grasses which Anna had never seen before. And there were the old favourites that even I managed to spot like bird’s foot trefoil and germander speedwell.

These are woodland plants that would have thrived under the shade of the tree before the management, and now they are unable to survive as the grassland takes over. This again is a really pleasing result from the (very) hard work of clearing scrub on the steep slope.

I met a lot of new people today and heard about some really amazing projects being worked on: community outreach, river ecology survey, water quality in the Evenlode and nutrient testing of hay. Some of these overlap with other projects I work on locally, so a really good chance to swap contact details and hopefully build connections between all different activity networks.

The regular monthly Orchard work party this morning with Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. The focus was on the ground, rather than trees as the pruning season is now over.

The management plan is to create a species rich meadow in the orchard. We’ve spent a number of years removing scrub and brambles from the main grassland, and there is now a planned cattle grazing regime in place. But patches of larger leafed vegetation such as docks and nettles still persist, as well as creeping thistle.

I took my scythe today, which is the ideal tool for this task. I had the ditch blade fitted, which is a bit more robust than the grass blade. It was then a case of trying to pick out the denser patches, and cut them before they go to seed. We raked off the arisings, and when the cattle come back in, they will probably be able to finish off the job nicely.

It was a beautiful sunny day, and we took a coffee break in the orchard shelter out the sun.

A large amount of human endeavour is undertaken in the form of events. An event is simply an activity with a defined location, start and end time.

There are broadly three ways to participate:

• Spectating. You witness the event, but the outcome would have been the same if you hadn’t been there.
• Contributing. Your presence influences the outcome of the event.
• Organising. You undertook tasks before the event, without which it couldn’t have taken place.

There is overlap between these of course. Spectators of football often claim they are “the twelth man” by contributing encouragement. As a spectator, you can also contribute in small ways – for example if you are attending a talk on a topic, you can ask a question at the end.

I believe though that the most satisfaction comes from attending events where you make significant contribitions, or indeed, organise them. That’s what I’ve focussed on since stopping work.

My calendar usually has around 25-30 events per month, probably in the proportion 5% spectating/75% contributing/20% organising. I document most, but by no means all, in my online diary.

You sometimes hear the phrase “I’d get bored in retirement”, which I think people use to signal that they have a fulfilling work life. But it could just as easily be a cover for people unable or unwilling to contemplate another way of living life.

If you truly are a person who thrives on “being busy”, then you’ll find literally hundreds of events each week in your local area that you can contribute to if you no longer work. At least one of those will align with something you are passionate about.

Sometimes you want a particular kind of event, but none exists in your area, so you become the organiser. This can be very rewarding – I currently organise three different events (and am extricating myself from a fourth). The downside to organising is that it can become a burden. You quickly discover that no-one really likes organising, and quite often you’ll be left alone to do the tasks.

Time is the only important asset we have really, and it’s dwindling before our very eyes. When you no longer work, you can allocate time however you choose, and having a diary full of events is an excellent way to maximise return on available time.

Kathy organised a late afternoon trip up at Stinchcombe hill to continue the survey of the grassland started a couple of weeks back.

This time we went for the steep sided bank below the walker’s car park which was mown with robo mowers during the winter and raked off. This is then a good opportunity to see what was lurking under the dogwood and other scrub, waiting to spring forth when the shading is removed.

There were a few new faces joined the group which was good to see, and the weather was pretty sunny when we started. We quickly discovered many good indicator species, including common milkwort and burnet saxifrage. There was still a fair bit of scrub starting to pop through, but this survey will provide good evidence to keep the ongoing management going.

We stopped after an hour for a water break and the weather had turned more ominous. This rain that we’d be promised might finally come down. We managed to get a couple more grid squares done after that, but the heavens opened and we just about managed to get back to the cars without too much of a soaking.