30 Days Wild – Day 22

A busy day of path cutting and planning for the “New normal”, more accurately looking at what we can safely do and exploring new possibilities for education when site visits are more difficult.

Access to the reserve is now improving, the car park on the south side of Ellingham Drove is now open during the normal hours 09:00-16:30, seven days a week. The Education Centre, bird hides and toilets remain closed. The circular routes have been laid out as one-way, with signage, this makes social distancing easier as do the step-asides, which will make it easier to pass people. Cycling is not permitted in any case, but I would also urge that running is not really appropriate as it does not make it easy to access the step-asides in time to avoid getting too close. These measures will remain in place even if the social distancing is reduced to 1m, a sour paths are typically only 1.5m wide at most.

Some paths, such as that between Ivy Lake and Rockford Lake are too narrow to allow more than one or two passing points along their entire length and I would urge that people consider carefully if they should be using these.

Most of my wildlife encounters happened once I had returned home. In the mini-meadow the crow garlic heads are opening.

crow garlic

They are remarkably similar, at a glance, to the unopened flower heads of wild carrot. There were a couple of meadow brown catching a few late rays of sunshine, as was this female, low down in the grass.

meadow brown (female)

During the spring I made a bee hotel with I hung on the front wall of the house. Although it has not attracted lots of bees, there has been a wide variety of species. The mason bees have mostly sealed their holes, but now there are leaf-cutter bees.

leaf-cutter bee (male)

Where there are nests there are parasites, such as this rather intimidating looking wasp Gateruption jaculator.

Gasteruption jaculator (female)

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30 Days Wild – Day 28 – Beyond Nature Reserves

At Blashford Lakes it was volunteer task day and nine volunteers braved the heat to work on the reserve for the morning. We did try to keep out of sun as much as possible, doing a number of tasks, fixing the door to Tern hide, trimming the sight lines around the main entrance and making up 19 bat boxes. Our volunteer team are vital to the successful running of the reserve, there are many tasks that I would never get done at all working alone.

All this effort makes the reserve a haven for wildlife, which is as you would expect. However what makes Blashford Lakes so good for wildlife is location. It lies between the New Forest and the Avon Valley two areas that are very good for wildlife. More than that they are in active management for wildlife. The New Forest has many ongoing projects aimed at maintaining or improving habitats. Less well known is the work that goes on in the Avon Valley. There are large projects such as the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust’s Waders for Real and more local action taken by landowners such as the nearby Somerley Estate. The important thing here is that on our own we cannot achieve very much, doing work that meshes into a greater whole makes every part more robust and likely to succeed.

The lapwing that breed at Blashford form part of the same population that breed on Somerley Estate, the New Forest heaths and greater Avon Valley. Birds may do better in some habitats than others in different years so a variety of breeding sites is important for the population as a whole, each site supports the others.

To say that nature reserves are important for nature conservation may seem like an obvious statement, but their role needs to be understood. If nature lives only on reserves it will be lost. Reserves can act as hotspots of diversity, places of long-term management continuity and are good places to easily get people to see wildlife up close, but the survival of wildlife is dependent upon the wider environment. So enjoy visiting your local nature reserve but look to the management of the wider countryside to save wildlife in meaningful amounts and for future generations.

After an afternoon of paperwork, something that seems to take more and more time as I get older, I think because there is more of it rather than that I am slowing, but who knows, we had planned to go out to ring some more black-headed gull chicks. However it was too windy, or the wind was in the wrong direction, so we called it off until next week.

What’s in My Meadow Today?

Lots of plants in the meadow are going to seed now, some plants take a slightly different route though and one such is crow garlic, which produces bulbils rather than true seeds. These fall and develop into underground bulbs from which the plant grows. It is a common plant of road verges and rough grasslands and I have several in the meadow, although this is the first year I have had plants producing bulbils.

crow garlic bulbils