June

Its grass snake season and they can be regularly found under the reptile refugia sheets

My favourite woodland animals are Stoats and Weasels (look at our logo). Here is a Weasel sprightly running away from the camera, but keep watching because 3 seconds later he comes bounding back towards the camera. Beautiful.

And here is a Stoat (twice the size of a Weasel, and with a black spot on its tail). It is only on screen for 1 second (bottom right hand corner) and then a few seconds later a dog comes bounding through the undergrowth chasing it. The dog gets caught in the brambles which is probably just as well because Stoats can be vicious.

Its difficult telling male and female Buzzards apart (plumage is very similar) but this is probably a female because she is so much bigger. Note those BLACK eyes.

And this is probably the male (much smaller). Note the YELLOW eyes

At the start of June our Mandarin Duck family had 4 healthy chicks...

By the end of the month, only 2 chicks survived but they seem healthy and very companionable

Balancing on a log can be difficult. Pretty sure my brother didn't see me fall in though. Cool.

If you are wondering what happened to the other chicks, this is probably one of the likely culprits. Turn up the volume and you can hear the mother duck make her emotions clear

Fantastic Mrs Fox

Sparrowhawks are smaller than Buzzards but are another common UK woodland bird of prey.

A Heron hunting. It is standing on one of our crayfish traps. I am hoping to see it catch one of our invasive crayfish one day.

Sharpening that killer beak

This day old baby deer had been left under one of the oak saplings by its mother. Being 1 day old it had no fear of humans

It was a joy to get this close to such a beautiful creature. I had seen its mother earlier in the day and so left baby as it was and, sure enough, within an hour mother and baby were reunited.

———————

BAT SURVEY: Back in 2021 I was fortunate enough to attend a bat survey. It is hard to describe just how brilliant it. I swore that if we ever got to repeat the event I would make it open to others.

Over the next 3 months there will be three separate bat surveys (dates below). If you would like to participate please let me know (email piers.clark@aspectnaturereserve.com).

The night will include watching the bat specialists capture the bats (assuming they are around), measure them, sex them, record various data, etc. Obviously the actual handling of the bats needs to be done by specialist handlers (from the local Bat group) but it’s absolutely awesome seeing a bat close up. The format for the nights will be something like:

8-9pm : gather on site, set up the ‘traps’, get the fire going (we could cook some stuff)

9pm to 2am : regular checking of traps. Most of the time we will be gathered around the campfire chatting to be honest.

Obviously you don’t need to stay for the full night (and if the weather is bad we will postpone). You are happy to leave whenever suits you, especially if you are bringing children along. The three nights proposed are:

Friday July 18 (Sat 19 is the back up if weather is bad)

Friday Aug 29th (Mon 1st Sept back up)

Friday Sept 26th (Mon 29th back up).

Prior to each of these nights we will have had some static bat monitors in place for 10 nights so should have a fairly good idea of where the bats are, and what species. We can probably have around 15 people max attend each night, so it’s first come first served.

Here are some images from the 2021 survey we did at Mount Wood, as a taster of what you can expect:

We are now in discussions with 4 local schools about them using (for free) Aspect Nature Reserve. The first groups of students will visit in the Autumn term. With the bee hives, sheep, crayfish, bats, stoats, badgers, the arboretum, the orchard, our meadow grasslands, etc., etc., etc., we have lots to offer. Cant wait to share.

Our outside classroom -finally completed (it took months moving all those stones by hand!). Seating for 60+ students around 3 oak trees. The trees are just saplings currently, but imagine it in 50 years time!

Weasels and stoats like making nests in stone walls and I dream that one day they will make a nest in the gabion seating (we found a nest of an unidentified rodent in the stone pile as we filled the gabions). It might make using the outside classroom a little challenging, but just imagine being a child watching a family of weasels spill out of the wall. It would be brilliant.

I want to build a collection of skulls from various animals and was advised that the best thing to do was to collect road-kill. Somewhat bizarrely I found that there are whole communities of 'road-kill scavengers' - it is not as weird as you might first imagine.

The start of my skull collection - Sheep and Fallow Deer (this is purely for educational purposes of course)

Anyway, a few days after being giving this advice I found a dead badger on the roadside...

Hit by a car but its skull was still in tact. I decided to store it and let natural decay processes do their thing

Three days later it was 'alive' with maggots. Turn up the volume if you dare... (WARNING - THIS VIDEO IS NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH)

Unfortunately 2 days later the corpse had been scavenged by another hungry animal, leaving just some badger fur

However, all was not lost. I found the head (chewed!) and believe I can salvage a jaw bone at least. Not weird at all, huh?

See you next month. Please like and forward if you enjoyed this update.