May saw the arrival of a long-awaited week of glorious sunshine. Out amid the Finemere Wood meadows the woodland workers soaked up the balmy rays. It is a welcome change to months of sloshing through mud and rain.

It was a day of destruction, which perhaps worryingly, seems to be everyone’s favourite kind of day. Fences, no longer required must be demolished. Posts and rails were attacked with hammers, as volunteers walloped and whacked to loosen nails. Bulging muscles were on show as wood was wrenched from wood. Like a trail of worker ants, these awe-inspiring labourers, marched back and forth across the field carrying arms full of redundant timber to the disposal pile.

I left my army to annihilate fences and wandered across the fields. Once farmland, the meadows are increasing in biodiversity year on year, and a couple of which now support a wide variety of wildflowers.

Come June these can be seen at their best. Other sections of this network of grassland are being left to “scrub up” naturally. This will create a varied mosaic of vegetation along the woodland edge attracting an extensive range of invertebrates, birds, and small mammals.

A number of ponds have been dug in recent years across the sward, by the Fresh Water Habitats Trust, as part of the council's great crested newt licensing work. These had been somewhat disappointing so far, failing to retain water, and thus newts. And so it was with great excitement that I discovered water and life in a few of these aspiring water bodies.

In amongst the pond weed was a profusion of tadpoles circling the ponds in a strictly one-way system, pond skaters and water boatmen shooting here and there, and on the bottom, the undeniable shape of a newt.

I returned to the sweating, melting throng of decimators, and watched astounded as two volunteers ripped out a line of stock fencing in a matter of minutes. The base had become so deeply buried that I envisioned mechanical removal would be required. I puffed and panted as I helped roll up the released wire, and regarded this energetic, fit duo with astonishment. These men are surely part-machine.

Fences dismantled, and debris removed, the volunteers drag their aching bodies back to their cars. And then we hear it, a sound not heard in the wood for two or three years, the call of the cuckoo.

It is so rewarding to have evidence that Finemere Wood is a place of sanctuary for this globally threatened species.

More than 1,700 volunteers help us towards our vision of more nature everywhere, on our nature reserves, at our visitor and education centres, in our offices and more.

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