November Blog

The Aspect Nature Reserve logo is a picture of a Stoat. Their smaller cousins are the Weasels. They are both part of the mustelid family, which also includes polecats, otters, and badgers. We don’t see them often at Aspect, and when we do, it is usually only fleeting glimpses because they are superbly fast. This month, we captured not one but two weasel videos. It was hunting small rodents in the badger sett.

  Weasels are smaller than Stoats and don’t have a black spot on the end of their tail

You don’t often see them in the daytime. Their fur changes colour with the seasons

We have had lots of exciting badger activity this month, and I think the chances of us having baby badgers in the new year should be high. Here are two badgers playfully frolicking.

It is not clear if this is a male and female or two females, but it is clearly just play rather than an attack.

Different badgers have very different approaches to our cameras.  Some are unperturbed, and others get spooked by the red light that appears when the camera activates.

You can see clearly the moment when it spots the camera

Note how the first badger is unperturbed, yet its companion gets spooked and decides to climb the steepest part of the bank to avoid the strange light

On subsequent nights, that badger really committed to climbing the steep bank (it did eventually get used to the camera)

In this video, the stream was in full flow (following a recent storm), the badger was none-the-less determined to cross, come what may!

A couple of years ago, we installed a Tawny Owl box. Over the past few years, it has had both Tawny Owls and Squirrels living in it at various times. This year, there appears to be a bit of a competition for ownership...

Here, a male and female squirrel are assessing the box for its suitability (far nicer than their usual messy drey!)

·        And here is a Tawny Owl initially assessing it…

·        …and then calling his mate to come and visit it

·        And then they are both checking it out.

However, as November rolled on, the Squirrels seemed to take the upper hand and actually started moving in, gathering nesting material, and generally taking ownership.

Here you can see the squirrel gathering nesting material

  Watch to the end, you'll see the two squirrels cuddling each other. Very, very, cute. They are happy new homeowners!

However, the Owls had not quite given up their claim. The following videos are from AFTER the squirrels had moved in.  

Here you can hear the owl calling its mate, and then it looks into the box and obviously sees the squirrels and panics, departs, and immediately returns.

Squirrels rarely appear after dark. This video is shortly after the scary Owl visit. You can sense its shock and panic.

One of our big summer projects was the creation of a couple of scrapes on either side of Mans Brook, which runs through the reserve. Our goal was to create two temporary/seasonal ponds which would fill during periods of wet weather and would, over time, become part of a much larger (~2-acre) area of ‘wet woodland’. The following few photos show how brilliantly the scrapes are performing, providing not just wonderful new habitat but also flood protection for people living downstream.

Two recently captured crayfish (both male, one adult, one juvenile). Being invasive, we were obliged to cull the m, and so I have preserved them in Isopropanol. As they are exoskeletons, they are being added to my skull collection.

In November, we had another visit from The Gatwick School. This time it was the Year 3s (last month was Year 7) and included a number of younger siblings who arrived having already heard stories about Aspect. We did similar tasks, and they took great delight in destroying/rebuilding the dens that their elder siblings had made in the woods.

They particularly loved the ‘pickled’ crayfish, mainly because it was something their older siblings had not seen and was thus a story they could claim all of their own!

Here are the Year 3 pupils drawing what they think is inside a beehive. My key takeaway was that Year 3 pupils have, if it were possible, even higher levels of unfettered enthusiasm than the Year 7s!

We finish with an amusing story of hubris. Over the summer, we constructed a 12m x 6m marquee to provide shelter for schoolchildren should they visit during a torrential downpour or a blazingly hot summer's day. We fitted it out with haybales for seating. It looked perfect.

Interesting side fact: Marquees are sold based on the size of the wedding you can hold inside it. This is a 120-person wedding marquee. Apparently.

I was told by various people (all with experience in these matters) that the marquee would blow away if I didn’t take it down during the winter. I disagreed. Not my marque. MY marquee would stay standing come what may!

Unfortunately, Storm Amy put paid to that idea. I arrived the day after the storm to find the £2k marquee in an unsalvageable condition. I have chalked it up as a learning experience…

We will be replacing the marquee with a different designed shelter (so perhaps I have still not quite learnt my lesson).

See you next month!

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