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.
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ONE: Though their typical nest site is a hole in a tree, blue tits have been recorded nesting in all sorts of places: letterboxes and street lamps, inside a crack in a wall or a drainpipe, under a cast iron drain cover and, of course, in garden nest boxes.
Continue reading “Five facts about blue tits”
by David Feather
I monitor a Scottish website called Paths for All, as it provides valuable advice to making and maintaining country paths. This site reports that researchers have found that there are 5 pathways to connect to nature: contact, beauty, meaning, emotion and compassion.
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Hazel has both male and female flowers. The familiar yellow catkins are made up of about 250 male flowers. They produce the pollen; if you tap a ripe hazel catkin it will release a cloud of pollen. The female flower is a minutely small red tassel, somewhere on the same twig as the catkins.
Continue reading “Hazel’s female flowers”
Julie Newblé has sent us a beautiful image of snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) flowering in the Village Green copse down by the decorated bridge. Thanks Julie.
This is the time when great crested newts emerge from their winter hibernation.
Here is a video following a female newt’s search for a mate and the ideal conditions in which to lay her eggs. We are hoping that our newly established pond (see here, here and here) will attract this rare and endangered species to breed in the reserve.
A work party report from Ian Bushell
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Long tailed tits are early nesters.
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There have been three named storms in a week, Dudley, Eunice and Franklin, and the reserve has taken a battering. Here are some of the pictures we have been sent.
Nesting time for our squirrels
Despite these ferocious storms, grey squirrels are building their nests at this time of year.
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Mail from friendsofscp@outlook.com to Ian Bushell 19.02.2022:
Good morning,
Julie Newblé has sent me pictures of a conifer blown down near the main entrance on the Lambrok Meadow side. She says that’s the only damage on the main path. Over to you!
Julie Newblé has sent us pictures of storm damage in the reserve.
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Celandine shine
Have you ever tried to photograph lesser celandine or buttercup flowers on a sunny day? The petals are so shiny, like little cups of mirrors, that the reflected sunlight flares and obscures the details of the flower; if you are trying to photograph a celandine in close up, you have to do it in the shade.
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Robins, male and female, sing all year round but the male’s spring song is louder and more confident as he prepares to do battle for territory and a mate.
Header image by Simon Knight
Audio: European Robin from xeno-canto by david m.
Pictures and a message from Clive Knight:
Walking round the reserve today, I saw this bright yellow fungus growing on an old Oak branch. I have no idea what it is. Can anybody help?
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Always among the year’s first flowers in the reserve are the hazel catkins in the copse near the picnic place. They are a familiar and friendly sign that spring is on its way.
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Goldfinches eat seeds almost exclusively. Even this late in the winter, they come to the park to find seeds in the dried heads of composite flowers like teasel and burdock.
There is a technical hitch which is making it unlikely that we will be able to post today. Sorry
Dog’s mercury (Mercurialis perennis) is one of those mysterious, usually nameless, plants that is hardly ever noticed. It forms dense carpets on the woodland floor and beneath old hedgerows but appears to most passers-by as just background for the bluebells and primroses.
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A lone clump of snowdrops in the copse between The Race and Sheep Field photographed yesterday by Ian Bushell.
From the picnic area, you can hear an early song thrush singing from the trees at the bottom of Sleepers.
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We discovered recently, to our delight, that the collective noun for goldfinches is a charm. How charming is that?
Continue reading “A charm of goldfinches”
There have been reports of motorbikes being ridden in the reserve’s fields. The tyre tracks are mostly in Corn Field and Village Green and seem to show that the bikes enter and leave by the bridge into Lambrok Close. The only motorised vehicles allowed in the park are those maintenance vehicles authorised by Wiltshire Council, and mobility vehicles.
Continue reading “Please: no motorbikes”
Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve 