This year I’m using the two days volunteering my company gives me to spend time with Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire Wildlife Trust.

Today, I’ve been out with them at their amazing Strawberry Hill reserve. This is the rewilded farmland site they took over recently and one of the most inspiring places I’ve ever visited. Taken out of agricultural production nearly 40 years ago, the site has been allowed to return to nature. When I visited in spring, the dawn chorus was perhaps the loudest and most intense I’ve ever heard it in the UK.

Today, at the far end of the bird breeding season, I was helping with work to maintain a wildflower meadow. The rangers had already cut the long grass, and cut some more today, while the volunteers spent the day raking the cuttings and piling them up in large stacks of hay at the edge of the open area.

At first it did seem slightly odd for management techniques to be reapplied to an area where nature had been allowed to take its own course over the last few decades. However, without some intervention, the whole site would eventually be taken over by scrub and then succession woodland. The alternative is to have a richer and more varied pattern of landscape with woodland, scrub, open areas, meadows and water. We were, essentially, acting as large herbivores who, in truly wild areas, would help to create that diversity of places. As much of the site is presently unfenced, these animals have been missing during that rewilding period. While traditional breed cattle are now in parts of the site, to do that work, much of the site remains unfenced, so there’s still a role of us to some of the clearing.

Given the temperature was well into the mid-20s today, it was hot work but by the end of the day we had cleared the whole area. Tomorrow, I will be at another Wildlife Trust site, possibly doing something similar but also cutting willow. I’m hoping I don’t wake up too stiff tomorrow!