A few brilliant pictures from the recent Big Bear Challenge! Well done to everyone involved!

The hedgelaying on the Devon Ride has continued this week with a massive amount of help from all our volunteers! We are aiming to undertake over 100m this month which is quite a challenge! Many thanks to volunteers Phill, Dave, Ant, Rob, Karl and Fergus for all their hard work!

A very productive day hedge laying on the Devon Ride. A real team effort with staff, volunteers and placement students alike all working hard! Regular volunteer Dave S gave Rob some tuition on the fine art of 'pleaching' (cutting part through the stem so that it can be laid into the hedge line). The rest of us divided up the duties of facing up the hedge and producing stakes from suitable cut material. The weather may have been crisp, but hedge laying is warm work so the perfect task for the weather.

Despite the forecast cold snap almost upon us, spring is very much only round the corner! The signs are beginning to appear, with Cuckoo Pint leaves breaking through in the coppice and the aptly named Spring Usher moth turning up in the traps recently! What signs of spring have you seen out in the park?!

Work on the coppice continued on Friday (nearly there now!). Bramble regrowth was removed from between the remaining coppice stools. We are allowing the hazel stools to grow on this year but we were pleasantly surprised by the diversity of tree species growing there. Willow, Blackthorn, Oak and Field maple stools were all coppiced back to favour the hazel. There is something deeply satisfying about working on a coppice. Perhaps it is the ancient pedigree it holds in woodland management, coupled with the bona fide conservation benefits. In any case, we enjoyed it! This work also has the much more prosaic benefit of looking great from the main entrance as you drive in!

***NORDIC WALKING*** We are considering introducing a Nordic Walking Course into our events program led by a professional trainer. Nordic walking is a great activity for increasing general fitness through moderate exercise. This would likely be a four week course of 1 hour per week where you would be taken through all the essentials of Nordic Walking as part of a small group. Equipment would be provided. At this stage we are just trying to gauge if there would be sufficient interest in this activity before we introduce it to the program and confirm details. To help us make a decision we would be grateful if those of you who may be interested would Like this post (needless to say you are not committing to anything if you do, it is purely for us to get some idea of how many people this might appeal to). Thank you in advance.

*****PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS THE AFTERNOON SESSION RUNNING BETWEEN 1:30pm-3pm***** Come and make a magic Willow wand and discover what things the naughty goblins have been up to! Use your new wand to help with the quest to find the key to the magic kingdom and use some wishing magic to see if the fairies are about in Fairy Forest. You have to believe it to see it! An event for children aged 3 years + (Under 5's will need extra supervision). Cost is £4.00 per child and booking ESSENTIAL on 024 7630 5592.

Did you know our regular weekly Toddler Trundle runs almost every Wednesday of the year?! This event is suited to toddlers up to school age and designed with a wide variety of outdoor activities to keep then entertained! See the information and yearly programme see below for more details. Just turn up on the day in time of the 10am start!

We began another of our Higher Level Stewardship winter tasks last Wednesday with the help of ten Coventry University students. All were members of the University American Football team, and really got stuck in! They helped coppice some blackthorn saplings and clear some bramble at the base of a hedge as part of our management for the Brown Hairstreak butterfly. As well as being hard working the team kept us entertained with friendly banter and their competition to see who could clear the most! Our thanks go to everyone for their hard work.

A massive thank-you to all our volunteers who have been helping out recently in getting Drive Coppice back into shape for the new growing season. Regular Volunteers Steve and Karl had already been busy strimming and raking the left over ground cover on Thursday. Subsequently, Fergus along with Rangers Ben C and Simon moved in to have a fire and harvest some of our willow to repair the woven fencing around the courtyard. The area is a working coppice, manged on rotation. All the cut material is processed and either used in the park for fencing or hedgelaying or sold in the shop as various products from pea stick bundles to washing line props!

In connection with the previous post, the work continues! Mike Slater and his dedicated team of willing volunteers from Butterfly Conservation Warwickshire have been busy helping out with the Butterfly Management Plan! They have had achieved an astonishing amount in the four days they have been in so far this year! Thank-you all for your hard work!