It was midday, but already the sun was low to the alder-fringed ridge of Dryhowe Pasture. A buzzard passed above the skyline, its underwings and tail stained like December’s landscape: peat-dark, and the paler patches like snow-remnants on winter bracken. A kestrel swerved elegantly into view, then dropped into the top of a birch tree, sunlight filtering through its fanned wings.

With nowhere to park and two miles back to the main road, Bannisdale is usually a tranquil place, but today the buzz of machinery echoed around the valley. An all-terrain vehicle tracked around the fellside, dumping bundles of stakes at intervals. At Dry Howe farm, bristling bundles of stripling trees were being loaded into a pickup ready to be zipped up to one of these planting sites.

Thousands of birch, holly, hawthorn, rowan, oak, alder and aspen are being planted, to create habitats of indigenous wood-pasture – of tree cover and open grazing. A kestrel flickered along the prickly spine of the new fence built to separate the sheep from the trees.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The infant river Mint and behind it the fells. Photograph: Karen Lloyd

Further on, beyond a bank of glacial moraine, the infant river Mint disappeared behind a drystone wall above what was once a tarn but has become a dry ochre basin of Juncus grasses. Canalised in a previous century, the Mint is to be re-meandered to its original course through the valley bottom, and Dub Ings will become a tarn once more. Like the new trees, this work – done in partnership with Natural England and another local farm – is intended to lessen the effects of flooding on communities further downstream; the memory of Storm Desmond is never far away.

A raven slid a parabolic glide above the valley, then the kestrel, higher still, like a floater on the iris. Peregrines used to nest in the crags, the farmer had told me, but last summer had been too wet. I felt the thrum of anticipation at the increasing wildlife the new woodlands will generate; how in helping communities, nature is given a helping hand too.

To order Karen Lloyd’s The Blackbird Diaries, recently published by Saraband (£12.99), at a special price go to guardianbookshop.com