Explore Small and More!

Today we held the fourth of our weekly summer holiday activities for families – Explore Small! We looked for things on a walk around the reserve which we might not normally spot…

and then looked at them even closer with magnifying glasses and microscopes!

Finds included ground beetles

and lichens – looking closely we could see their fruiting bodies, or ascomata. On this lichen the fruiting bodies are the round ‘jam tart’ structures (as our lichen recording volunteer describes them!).

Elsewhere our moth recording volunteers did our weekly moth recording and a team set about brushing up on their tree ID.

A small team of our licenced ringers finished recording details of some of the nest boxes on the reserve so they can enter the data into the BTO nest recording scheme. We also did some maintenance work around the reserve…

It’s definitely been a busy day and there were wildlife sightings too; highlights from various members of the public were a kingfisher, peacock butterflies and a bird (maybe a pheasant..?) with a small crowd of chicks!