Weaving dragonflies

At the end of February our Young Naturalists worked with willow artist Kim Creswell to create three dragonfly sculptures that will form part of our new ‘Wild Walk‘. To those familiar with the reserve, the walk is the loop closest to the Education Centre that takes you past the Woodland Hide, Ivy South Hide, over the boardwalk and the bridge across the river then follows the path to the right, along the river and round to the larger bridge where we river dip with school groups and on family events.

The sculptures along the trail have been funded by the Veolia Environmental Trust and include the four chainsaw carved sculptures by Simon Groves as well as a number of willow sculptures by Kim. Kim is back with us tomorrow to work with a small group of children and young people from our local Home Educators group who will be having a go at weaving wasps for the walk, and will also be bringing some willow deer with her which we are very much looking forward to seeing!

Kim began by sharing her plan of the dragonflies with the Young Naturalists, before dividing them up into three groups and giving each individual a body part to work on, either the head, thorax, abdomen or wings.

Dragonfly plan

She then got them started with the willow, demonstrating how to create the basic shape of each body part before getting them started with the weaving.

It was then time to add a bit more detail by giving the dragonflies some eyes, Megan did a great job with hers, adding the willow until they became quite bulbous.

After creating between them three heads, three thorax’s, three abdomens and 12 wings, it was time to lie the parts out on a picnic bench and put them together.

The group were really pleased with their finished dragonflies and they did a great job weaving them. They looked great against a lovely blue sky!

 

Whilst we were finishing off we also had time for a bit of wildlife watching, finding a number of Alder leaf beetles on one of the posts behind the new pond, along with a frog.

Alder leaf beetle

Frog

Thanks to Kim for teaching the group how to weave a dragonfly from willow, we’re really looking forward to seeing them up along the trail. Hopefully some photos of willow wasps and deer will follow!

Thanks too to Veolia Environmental Trust for providing funding for the sculptures along our ‘Wild Walk‘, including the two workshops with Kim. I know they are already proving very popular with our younger visitors!

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A Record Broken

We have been very busy mowing and generally cutting back before the winter birds arrive. Today it was the turn of the western shore of Ibsley Water to receive a haircut. We have been working for some years to get this shore into a largely grassy state. Much of it started out as 1.5m high ragwort, then it became dominated by nettle and now, after many years of mowing and grazing it is mostly grass. As I was mowing I saw lots of bank vole, several common frog and a few common toad. The sun was out and it was rather warm for late September, although the many red admiral were not unhappy.

Out on the lake this afternoon there was a large arrival of cormorant, there have been good numbers for a while now, with a few counts around the 200 mark, but today we reached new heights, these extra flock took the total to at least 308! and I am pretty certain there were some I could not see behind the islands. I am sure this is a new record count for the reserve.

The highlight of the day though was a juvenile garganey out on Ibsley Water first thing in the morning. although it did not seem to stay, as nobody else saw it all day.

Of Moths and Men(& Women) visitors

For the first time in a while I’ve just spent two consecutive days on duty here and they couldn’t have been more different.

Yesterday was fairly busy, the pleasant weather and sunshine enticed several tens of visitors, including a couple of organised group visits. Today, however, the promising start soon deteriorated and only a minority of the stalwarts stayed on much after lunch time.

Bird wise there have been the ‘usual suspects’, although the two mealy redpoll have been elusive and its looking increasingly likely that the great white egret has flown to pastures new (France?). The red-crested pochard is still hanging around and at least one black-necked grebe was on show from Lapwing Hide. One of our regular watchers reported, yesterday, that the osprey platform was being investigated as a possible nest site. Unfortunately the putative nest builders were a couple of Egyptian geese – so not such good news!!!

Today’s ‘best bird’ was a firecrest, spotted by Bob Chapman, in hanging ivy near the woodland hide.

Two different observers reported a strange continuous  ‘trilling’/ ‘warbling’ sound from low down in reed beds close to the Lapwing Hide. Trying to attribute this sound to any likely bird species proved impossible, but the suggestion it might be a frog species (Bull frog??) seemed to fit, but, as Patrick Moore used to say, ‘we just don’t know’.

The mild conditions and predicted overnight dry spell, encouraged me to put the light trap on for its first outing this year. Not surprisingly for the time of year there wasn’t a massive number of moths, only seven in total.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures of the moths…

From top to bottom these are Oak Beauty, the rather seasonally named March Moth, Hebrew Character and Chestnut.