The Blean Woodland Festival 2013 is a week of events for all the family during half-term. It includes events at Bigbury Camp, walks at different times of the day and in different areas of the woods, a woodcraft skills workshop, a wild art drawing day, a family cycle ride and storytelling in the woods.

The main event is the Fête of the Blean on June 2nd , a free family activity day, to be held at Canterbury Academy…

Now that spring has finally arrived, there are lots of spring flowers in the woods, including celandines, bluebells and wood anemones. Wood anemones area among the first and form a beautiful carpet of white wherever they establish themselves. They are native plants, whose Latin name is anemone nemerosa and they are also known as windflowers, thimbleweed, smell fox and helmet flower. There are also a number of cultivated…

Blean Woods takes part in the United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS), which is run as a partnership between Butterfly Conservation and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. The scheme monitors the abundance and trends of butterflies throughout the UK via weekly ‘transects’.

A transect is a fixed route, split into sections, which is walked every week from 1^st April to 30^th September in suitable…

The British Trust for Ornithology reports this week that some migrant birds are now arriving - birds such as swallows, chiffchaffs and blackcaps have been seen in our area. On the whole the birds are arriving two to three weeks later than normal. However, now it seems that spring is finally here, hopefully that should encourage them to make the last part of their journey. Birds which generally arrive in the middle of…

The following information is from the Kent Reptile and Amphibian Group Treasurer:

The Kent Reptile and Amphibian Group (KRAG) have teamed up with RSPB to try and find out more about the reptiles found in the Blean National Nature Reserve.  Despite all of the things that are known about the history, archaeology, bird, tree and plant species of The Blean, relatively little surveying for reptiles has ever been done and our…

The birds that visit the woods in the winter are still very much with us  - the woodcocks, siskins and  winter thrushes. However, the migrants are getting closer as there have been reports from  central France of cuckoos calling and swallows being seen.

Earlier in the month, a volunteer who checks on the livestock once a week, Brian Bundock, saw four comma butterflies in the wood. A recent photograph of snow in the woods…

Gradually the first signs of spring are emerging in the woods, and birdsong is  increasing. The Warden reports that he saw his first butterfly, a peacock,  on the edge of the large heath last week. The volunteers are currently cutting down four year old sweet chestnut trees, whose stumps are then treated to stop regrowth, with the aim of reducing the tree’s  dominance in the woods.

Two volunteers left recently: Les…

This week has seen the beginning of the annual dormouse season with the clearing out and repairing of their nest boxes. This is done while the dormice themselves are hibernating, usually in the roots or boles of trees. As dormice are a protected species, they can only be handled by someone with the relevant training (which takes two years) and in the case of the Blean Woods NNR it is Dr. Martin Anderson. There are 70…

At this time of year, the volunteer workers you may have seen in the woods are usually coppicing. Trained chainsaw cutters take down the trees and the others follow behind stacking the logs and brushwood in neat piles. A lot of the trees coppiced in this way are non-native sweet chestnuts, which have been planted in woodlands across Kent since the 18th century, when they were used as hop poles, and later as pit props…

This is the first posting of what I hope will be a regular update on things that are happening in the woods, either reports of what people have seen (not just birds but butterflies, flowers or anything else of interest) or the work that’s going on there. I hope this will encourage other people to log on and contribute, either by contacting me or via the forum. In the future I also hope to add more information (like forthcoming…

Our rare butterfly, the heath fritillary, has broken all records by appearing on 12 May, my earliest ever sighting by ten days.  This is about five weeks earlier than was usual in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and represents an amazing response to the warm spring this year.  It's too soon to know when the peak is going to be, but it's bound to be markedly earlier than last year, when it was around 29th June.  So…

Heard the fantastic, fluty song of a golden oriole in the wood this morning.  I wasn't able to see this beautiful bird, but can only hope it will stay around for a while.

Hazel catkins have been out for some weeks already, but one of the key indicators of spring to look out for each year is the re-emergence of wood ants.  They spend the winter underground, but on the first day that warm sunshine strikes their domed nests, up they come.  This year I saw the first ones on 8th February, a small cluster of black bodies on top of the nest, basking in the warmth.

Winter tends to be pretty quiet…