April 2026

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We start this month with this deliriously delightful video of two baby badgers having their first foray out of the Sett. Clambering over their mother, they are hungry to explore the outside world.

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Ten minutes later, their confidence has clearly grown (although the smaller one is still not quite up to walking properly and needs a nudge from mum!)

The mother badger was very diligent, often spending long periods outside the entrance of the sett (this is the same mother we saw last month gathering nesting material). However, a drama was about to unfold…

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The following night, these two young males came blundering over the hill. The mother is taken by surprise and initially defends the sett but is chased away by the bigger male. The other male backs into the sett, but thankfully remains unaware of the two young pups deep inside.

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It takes 45 minutes before the mother returns. She is clearly nervous about what she will find. Are her babies alive? Is there an aggressive male badger hiding inside?

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  Fortunately, both pups are safe. You can’t help but share their relief, and they greet their mum, and the smaller one comes in for a ‘comfort suckle’.

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  A few days later, here is the mother again, still guarding the entrance (but this time in the daytime) and having a jolly good itch!

We now have regular school visits to the site. The pupils from ACS in Crawley found this rather large dead grass snake at Mount Wood.  

I have included the penknife to give a sense of scale

When I turned over the snake, I found it was already teeming with maggots. Unable to resist the opportunity to add a snake skeleton to my growing collection of skulls and bones, I have retained the snake in a box, which I regularly check. Despite what you (and all my friends and family) might think, this really, really, isn’t weird behaviour (all the school children who visit want to see it!)

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When I turned the snake over, the maggots were already doing their job

2 days later… I am hoping it will be a clean skeleton by the end of May. Watch this space!

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Here is the site mascot, the Stoat. Look at that muscular, sleek, groomed body. Such an awesome animal. Elusive but beautiful.

Staying with the Mustelid family (which includes stoats, badgers, weasels, etc.), we have this month installed a ‘smart’ Mink Trap. Previous readers of this blog will recall we spotted two mink last summer.

Mink are an invasive species that are decimating the native water vole population. Through careful trapping, they have now been removed from parts of East Anglia (and the water voles have returned). 

Working with the Waterlife Recovery Trust, we now have this specially designed trap to hopefully capture and remove our local mink. The trap is ‘smart’, i.e., it sends a signal when activated, thereby ensuring the animal is not kept trapped for longer than absolutely necessary.

One of our bigger projects over the past 8 months has been the creation of a ‘Haha’ (an 18^th-century landscape feature often used in posh stately homes). A Haha is basically a sunken fence with a vertical wall on one side and a sloped bank on the other. The design ensures livestock are kept out of areas you don’t want them to be in, yet it appears invisible from a distance.

Here is a Haha at the National Trust property Keddlestone Park.

And here is our Haha. Not quite as impressive. However, when it was first constructed (in September 2025), the firm clay meant we had a really neat edge…

However, over the winter, the edge collapsed, turning my Haha into an ugly ditch.

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This month, we installed pallets as the retaining wall. This stop-motion video makes the work look easy. It wasn’t!  I know the Haha still looks ugly, but give it 2 years, when the grasses and weeds will be growing through the pallets, and it will look glorious.

I recently gave a Careers Talk at The Gatwick School. A 15-year-old pupil called Bella Fry approached me afterwards, saying she was keen on becoming a wildlife photographer and asked if she could visit the Nature Reserve during Easter. Some of her photos are in the Aspect Nature Reserve gallery, but here are three of my ‘Bella Fry’ favourites:

This is a female slowworm. Bella has perfectly captured it’s lizardyness!

Here are two photos I took (not nearly as good as Bella’s) of the Pied Wagtail diving across the newly created pond.

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Sitting watching the swallows dip and dive over the water is currently my new ‘happy place’, but this video of the pond in the evening, with the Canada Geese gently swimming, is hard to beat for calming mindfulness.

   I mentioned previously that multiple schools now regularly visit the site. This group (from BPS in Surrey) was using the field to map out the solar system. Impressive!

Our 1954 Ferguson tractor has finally been repaired and is now back on site. It is an absolutely wonderful piece of engineering and, bizarrely, doesn’t require an ignition key (you can make it start by just following a sequence of button-pressing and lever pulling). Quite how people stopped someone just sitting on their tractor and stealing it 70 years ago is beyond me. Anyway, I reckon it’s got another 72 years left in it!

Sadly, we experienced some fly tipping at the nature reserve this month. I feel pity rather than anger towards the culprits. Thank you to our neighbours who promptly reported it, and thank you to the local council who acted quickly to remove it.

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And finally, (and continuing the litter-in-the -environment theme) here is a young male deer who has managed to get litter stuck on his antlers. Thankfully, it doesn’t appear to do him any harm. He looks like a walking Christmas tree.

Hope you enjoyed this April 2026 update. See you next month!

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