A note about our recent weather by Michael Walter, the Reserve’s former Warden:
This autumn and early winter have been remarkable for wind and rain, but I’m afraid the sun hasn’t featured very much, although it has been generally quite mild. Writing on 11th January, I can say that it has rained for the last thirty consecutive days, so the reserve and its paths are exceptionally wet. A waterlogged soil and high winds make a lethal combination for trees, and root systems have been tested to their limits (and beyond, in some cases) with rather monotonous regularity in recent weeks. The first of the big storms was in the early hours of 28th October but, despite all the hype in the media, this failed to cause significant problems in the wood. The next one, also in the night, on Christmas Eve was, perhaps the most ferocious since the Great Storm of 1987, with huge numbers of fence panels blown down locally, but again the reserve escaped quite lightly, so the wind was surely far less fierce than on that memorable night over 26 years ago. Worst hit was a small Norway spruce plantation, where I counted 76 mature trees blown down or snapped off – about 8% of the total number of conifers. As the management plan prescribes a gradual elimination of these alien trees, RSPB staff didn’t shed too many tears.
With the main heath so soggy, it was no real surprise to flush two snipe there on 5th January. Very definitely not a woodland bird, the snipe does nevertheless turn up from time to time in open parts of the reserve in winter, mainly during spells of severe weather. Most memorably, a flock of 16-40 birds was present on the heath for over a fortnight in February 1988.
Had the weather been sunnier, there might well have been a few butterflies around, but I did count four rather torpid wood ants crawling over one of their nests on 29th December.