Cotswold Diary

I’ve done a few work parties in Box Wood with the Wildlife Trust, but I didn’t know there was a separate volunteer group as well. Vicky had forwarded me an email about a session to build a bridge, so I signed up to the group and made my way down this morning. The group is very friendly and passionate about keeping the woods maintained for both wildlife and the public. The first job was to get the kit and the materials down to the area where we’d be constructing the bridge. Securing the bridge…

It’s been a fun few months helping with the construction of a part of the new Dursley Escape Room game for when it opens at the Chantry Centre in a week or two. I’ve been working with students at Rednock who designed the puzzles and wrote the initial code, and also with Pete who helped with the hardware design. So today was the day to finally deliver and get it installed. This would be the last time I’d be able to easily plug it into my PC, so I spent a final morning making surely that…

A leisurely day today. I wasn’t due in town until later in the afternoon, so spent the morning watching the snooker and putting in the final software updates for the escape room. At the library after school, I held the regular Dursley Code Club. A good attendance today with 6, and a few trying out python for the first time. In the evening I went down to the annual Dursley Town Assembly held at the Chantry Centre. This is always a good opportunity to catch up with a few people I know around the…

A beautiful sunny day, and headed over to Pete’s house with all the equipment to finally assemble the traffic light hardware for the escape room game. I had picked up the wooden box yesterday from Adrian, so we were able to start placing the various components in the optimum places for airflow and stability. We started with the light itself where a hole had already been pre-cut. Once that was securely in, we fixed the hub and the pig tail and drilled holes for the power cables. The final piece…

First event of the year for the Stroud Wildlife Survey Group, and Jen was leading a bird walk around Doverow Hill. We parked in Westrip, and approached the hill from that side rather than Stonehouse. The main skill in bird spotting is to listen for them, something which I possess zero skills at. But we have the Merlin aop to assist and Jen is able to tell us how to distinguish the various sounds and also short cut hints for remembering them. The birds we spotted straight away were the green…

It’s been a few weeks since the last Fromebridge work party with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust, so was good to catch up...

Now that grassland winter habitat management is over, I was free to spend my first Wednesday this year with Stroud Valleys Project....

Woke up to another pleasant and sunny April morning and decided to go for a two hour walk to stretch the legs...

Hard to believe it’s already April, and time for the next round of riverfly counts after we got started with a bang...

Having spent the last couple of days couped up on a major coding project, I was definitely ready for a long walk...

I stepped back from the admin team of Stroud Wildlife Survey Group earlier this year, but am still very much a member...

The annual Club and Society fair was held at the Chantry Centre in the morning, so I took the opportunity to go...

Today was the last winter habitat management task of the season with Glorious Grasslands, and it was my seventh year in a...

Seven volunteers from the Uley Trees & Meadows group met in the morning by the bench on the Millennium Green to do...

Water vole displacement activity continued this week with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. The translocation will happen over the weekend and next week,...

A large delegation from the National Lottery visited the Cotswold Canals Connected project today to review progress on different aspects. The Gloucestershire...