An Indoors Day

Today has been gloriously warm and sunny. However, it also somehow turned out to be an indoors day with lots of catching up on emails, making plans for the coming weeks and doing some preparation for the forthcoming nest box checking. Sometimes these days just happen, and it seems a shame to be inside on such a nice day, but we got a lot of necessary tasks completed.

Later in the afternoon, we managed to escape the office however, for a wander out onto the reserve to complete a few tasks. Roger spent some time modifying the dam that he and the volunteers had created on Thursday. We had given it time to settle down to see how well it is working. The dam was working well but water was sneaking round the edge of it, so small modifications were made. Hopefully this should now raise the levels by another couple of inches, bringing the water level high enough for the school visits to use the pond dipping platform there.

With the last few days of warm weather, Foxglove has been looking greener every day. Before, the reserve looked quite bare, and in places you could see quite a distance, but now the footpaths are starting to become tunnels of green winding through the trees. This Birch tree is showing its upright female flowers and drooping male catkins.

The Blackthorn bushes are also blooming well with their pretty white blossom. In the Autumn these bushes will be covered in small sour Sloes.

Dandelions are plentiful around the reserve at present, and this one looked particularly bright and summery growing down in the scrapes.

Attracted to the warm sunny boardwalks, the first few Damselflies are starting to emerge. This Large Red Damselfly settled long enough for a photograph.

The Toad tadpoles have re-emerged in the last couple of days. These had all disappeared during the cold spell over the last couple of weeks and we were worried that they had all died. But today they appeared clustered in good numbers at the bottom end of the Scrapes.