​​Very friendly Robin meets me each day for a snack.

After a bit of a saga I sent in my pre planning application to Morpeths planning department on the 11th November. I had been told that they had a 10 day backlog so i left it until yesterday and as I had not heard anything decided to give them a ring. I was well cheesed off to discover that due to some unknown issue my application had not been forwarded to the right department, so was not ‘in the system’. So now it is ‘in the system’ and i should get a response by the 9th December, great I’ve lost 2 weeks!

So no pond digging or hide building, very frustrating as the weather is good at the moment so i could have built my shed/hide.

60m x 4m of reed cleared to create a corridor across the reed bed. Speaking with my reed bed experts they recommend to increase your ‘edge’ you add corridors. The wildlife tend to feed along the edge so I will be adding another couple of corridors at so stage. It also allows us to do some bird ringing across the reed bed and lets me check the health of the reed bed right across it.

I thought I would use some of my donated pipe work to make a couple of hedgehog houses. Let’s see if anyone likes my handy work.

I’ve just submitted a pre planning form to see if my scrapes need planning. Let’s hope they can give me a answer quickly!

Some elevated seating added overlooking the wild flower meadow. Also included is a couple of rodent drive thru’s! 

Many thanks to Steve Porter for allowing me to play with his Tonka toy and also to Vince for being the trucker who delivered the digger.

Such fun ploughing the furrows that I’m calling paths, what I lack in ability I make up for with enthusiasm!

Now preparing the site for Veras shed.

Well Veras shed is now dismantled, now comes the job of moving it to the reserve and putting it all back together.

Thanks to David Dungait for lending me his tractor and operator to move the shed components.

Reconstruction to follow.

David Noble-Rollin and I did our second session of bird ringing today. Up at 6am 😴(I’m not a morning person). It decided to ☔️ for the first 2hrs then the sun came out, better late than never.

2 wrens

2 blue tits

2 black birds

2 Robins

2 long tailed tits

Should I be building an ark😲, but then we only got one reed bunting. So it was a reasonable haul considering the weather.

Fate has dealt me a lucky break! ITV have just completed filming an episode of Vera (the detective series) on the farm that I live on. As part of the set used for the episode was a large shed. I had discussions with the Art Director for the series and he has agreed to donate the shed to the reserve. Great news as its a large shed much bigger than the one I had planned on my limited budget.

This is the shed prior to dressing, I’m not allowed to publish a picture of the finished set due to image rights issues. It has just been dismantled and I will now relocate it to the reserve and hopefully put it back together.

Big thanks to ITV and particularly Philip for making this happen.