Every year, at hay-making time, people ask why we cut the grass. They worry about the creatures that live in and on our grassland fields, and mourn the loss of the summer’s beautiful buttercups.
Continue reading “Hay making”Hay making
Light pollution
According the the Countryside Charity CPRE, light pollution is falling, dropping sharply during the pandemic lockdowns and continuing to fall as the cost of electricity soars. This is good news!
Continue reading “Light pollution”
Weekend photography
by Simon Knight
The weekend of May 21st and 22nd was pretty special for me in the reserve.
Continue reading
Great tit
Clive Knight has photographed a great tit at its nest site in one of the reserve’s oaks.
Continue readingEarth Day
Today is Earth Day.
Continue reading “Earth Day”Please don’t buy peat
A government consultation has learned that more than a third of the compost sold in the UK in the last year was peat.
Continue reading “Please don’t buy peat”Personal choices
Research has shown that making small changes to our lives can have a huge impact in reducing carbon emissions. Apparently, we can help avert climate collapse by making just six fairly easy lifestyle changes.
Continue reading “Personal choices”
Gardening for wildlife
Recent research has found that our private gardens cover an area bigger than all of the country’s nature reserves put together, an estimated 10 million acres. Our individual gardens may be small but there are more than 22million of them and together they create a system of green spaces and wildlife corridors that we must treat as an important part of the effort to increase our beleaguered biodiversity.
Continue reading
Living with wildlife
by David Feather
If you read my earlier piece about John Stimpson, who made nesting boxes for swifts, you might be interested in helping these little birds. Advice is available through https://www.swift-conservation.org/ and there is a Bristol and Avon representative.
Continue reading
Another activist working for wildlife
by David Feather
Some people have rare qualities that make them stand out from the crowd. John Stimpson is one of those people. After retiring he got very interested in helping swifts to recover their numbers. Thirteen years ago he started making nest boxes for swifts in his garage at home. Initially he was making three a day. Now aged 80, he is making about 30 each day.
Continue readingGreat Crested Newt Pond
by Ian Bushell
The original intention was to do the work on the Iris Pond on Friday 21st January, but the Water Team’s Connor Goddard contacted me on the Tuesday afternoon to say that they were ahead of schedule and could begin on Wednesday 19th. I let the digger in through the Allotment gate right away so that it would be there and ready to start work by 8.30am the next morning. The work would be carried out by Max and James of Ecolibrium Environmental Contracting based at Melksham.
Continue reading “Great Crested Newt Pond”Great Crested Newts: part 2
The Iris Pond is being restored with funding from Natural England’s new District Level Licensing Scheme for Great Crested Newts, which Wiltshire Wildlife Trust is helping to deliver for Wiltshire. Southwick Country Park Local Nature Reserve is more than happy to be involved.
Continue reading “Great Crested Newts: part 2”
Great Crested Newt
September 08 2021: Mail from Ian Bushell to the Water Team at water@wiltshirewildlife.org
Continue readingThe last of 2021
by Ian Bushell
We met on Wednesday morning, the 29th of December, in the car park but those third helpings of turkey and plum duff had depleted our numbers sadly. No Joan or Patrick, Simon, David, or Trish.
Continue reading “The last of 2021”Inspiration
by David Feather
We, the Friends of Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve think we are doing well with our tree planting etc, but just read this article about an environmentalist in India. It is inspiring.
Continue reading “Inspiration”On the ninth day
We can’t find nine ladies dancing. Come spring, we will have daffodils fluttering and dancing in the breeze, as per Wordsworth, but feel that the link is tenuous. We will also have ladies’ smocks flowering in the meadows but we used them up yesterday by calling them eight milkmaids.
Continue reading “On the ninth day”
Reindeer
There were reindeer here in Britain in large numbers around the time of the last ice age, 35,000 to 50,000 years ago. There were wild herds of reindeer in Scotland right up until the 13th century when, like so many of our large native herbivores, they were hunted to extinction.
Continue readingTree number 5552
This is tree number 5552: an old pollarded oak standing in the eastern-most corner of Sleeper Field.
Real or fake?
A lot of people buy artificial Christmas trees in the belief that it benefits the environment, but environmentalists and energy analysts disagree. We need only look at a single element of the hundreds of thousands of artificial trees that will be put up and decorated this Christmas: they are all made of plastic.
Continue reading “Real or fake?”Red list
In its latest review, the RSPB has added four more names to its red list of Britain’s endangered bird species.
Continue reading “Red list”
Lambrok Stream by numbers
David Feather’s post yesterday highlighted the problems that planning application 20/00379/OUT will create for Lambrok Stream. The access road for the planned development will have to cross the stream and, no matter how many changes are made to the design of the bridge, we do not see how that can be done without damage to the Lambrok’s biodiversity.
Here are some relevant numbers:
Continue reading
The return of neonicotinoids
On 1st September 2020, the EU’s ban on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides came into effect but investigators have found that eight EU countries and the UK have since exported neonicotinoids to other nations with weaker environmental regulations. These are unacceptable double standards: the companies that produce these dangerous chemicals are prioritising their profits at the expense of our environment.
Continue reading “The return of neonicotinoids”Winter moths
The Winter moth (Operophtera brumata) is one of the few moth species that can cope with winter’s freezing temperatures in its adult stage. They are endothermic which means that they can produce heat internally by biochemical processes, just as warm-blooded creatures do.
Continue reading “Winter moths”House sparrow
A study by scientists from the RSPB, BirdLife International and the Czech Society for Ornithology has found that there are 247million fewer house sparrows in Europe than there were in 1980. This is a loss of almost half the house sparrow’s European population.
Continue reading “House sparrow”
Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve 