After a very hard day in the fields yesterday (my FitBit told me I’d done 37,000 steps by bedtime, but I didn’t need it to tell me that, I knew by the way my old bones felt), I didn’t feel like getting straight out back to it today and so amused myself doing ‘special projects’ which was euphemistic code for avoiding doing hard work by busying myself with habitat creation.

First off, we had given an overgrown Holm Oak a hair cut and so I used some of the wood to create a woodpile down by the pond.

I was delighted to see a dragonfly basking on in within an hour of creating it.

Then I buried the Hedgehog house we’d had for sometime but hadn’t yet got round to putting anywhere – perhaps because we are yet to see a hedgehog, and the infrared trap camera has never caught one at night either.

I put some hay inside the house and positioned it in thickish cover down by the pond. Then I put a tarpaulin over it and covered it in a thick layer of wood chip from the Holm Oak surgery and sticks on top. I think it looks great and, maybe even if we don’t have hedgehogs, something else will appreciate it over the winter.