Back to Foxcombe Hall - and again we were greeted by glorious weather, the sun shines on the righteous!
I went armed with hardhat, steel toe-capped boots, hi-vis jacket and saw.
My first job of the day was to get stuck into a bit of coppicing under Alan's supervision. To find out how I got on 'click here'

Here are myself, Alan and Tom getting to grips with some of the poles we felled.

Then we decided to count the rings on some of the larger trunks to try and work out the last time this tree was coppiced.


And finally, this is what a finished coppiced stump should look like.

So not quite as simple as it looks - but a good way to spend a day in the 'green gym'. Next job was to check the habitat piles we created on our last visit, and a chance to look at some we had 'prepared earlier'!

Not much activity in the new log pile, but I found these enormous grubs of the violet ground bettle in a much older habitat pile.

The Foxcombe Hall site usually changes slowly with the passing of the seasons, and spring is definately springing. However, there has been at least one radical change since we visitied

Finally, I went off in search of Patricia, do find out how things were developing at our Quadrat Suvey site. This is an area that has lots of invasive small balsam, and we had a couple of tricks up our sleave to help to keep it down.

If you want to keep up with changes at Foxcombe Hall over the comming weeks - don't forget to keep checking Patricias blog.