Woodland camp

There is always a gang of children, sometimes junior schoolers, sometimes older, playing somewhere in Village Green woods. The personnel changes as one by one gang members lose interest in sitting round a damp campfire, drinking mix-up or smoking what somebody sold them as top quality weed. But new arrivals come to fill the empty places and the gang continues.

What have they been up to?

Pictures from Simon Knight of the new wetland pond in Lambrok Meadow and the two new backwater scrapes. They are slowly filling in this rain. As the weather warms, keep an eye out for the pioneer plants that will move in and provide cover for the our wetland creatures.

SET-ASIDE

Some years ago, an area at the top of Kestrel Field was set aside from the rest of the field and its agricultural calendar. The reserve would be unmanageable without the help of our tenant farmer, but we also recognise that the twice yearly grass-cut does damage the habitat of some of our wildlife species.

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Ice free drinking water

Birds need clean water for both drinking and bathing whatever the weather. We know you put out clean water for your garden visitors during the drought but please don’t forget they will need the same support as the temperature falls and natural sources of water freeze over.

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Christmas tree

Which is the greener option when it comes to Christmas trees: real or artificial? A real Christmas tree is a beautiful and traditional addition to our commercialised modern Christmases but it comes with a frisson of guilt. Should we be cutting down trees at a time when our struggling planet and its biosphere need all the trees they can get? Fear not; the news is good.

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Lambrok wetland areas

Clive Knight has sent in pictures of the wetland scrapes in Lambrok Meadow. Now that the rain has refilled Lambrok Stream and spilled into the scrapes, we can see how they are intended to develop.

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Habitat loss

People think of an uprooted forest when they think of habitat loss: orang utans starving in a palm oil plantation, the rabbits running from the machinery at the beginning of Watership Down, or the man-made desert of a dust-bowl. But habitat loss is, in the majority of cases, a lot less dramatic and much more ordinary than that, and often a great deal closer to home.

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Insect losses

In the UK the populations of our more common butterflies have fallen by 46% in the last 50 years while the rarer species have declined by 77%. We have lost 60% of our flying insects in just 20 years. We have entirely lost 13 species of our native bees since the 1970s and fully expect more to follow.

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