Summer round-up

With the mornings turning chilly and the nights drawing in, autumn is definitely on the way. But before we look forward to the highlights to come – leaf-crunching, fungi-hunting, migrant-spotting and many more – here’s a round-up of the summer on the reserve.

The delicious blackberry-picking season is here

Thanks to the dry weather we’ve been able to catch up with our ever-long list of habitat management tasks. In recent weeks we’ve done as much work as we achieved over the whole of last winter when we were set back by the flooding and wet weather; this puts us in a really strong position for the coming season. Among other projects, we’ve started creating a dragonfly pond at the NE corner of Moore Lake, next to the Busway. It should become a lovely place to sit and watch these brilliantly colourful insects in future years.

We’ve enjoyed good numbers of both dragonflies and butterflies throughout the summer, despite fears that the heavy winter floods might have washed all the eggs and larvae out. Another highlight for visitors was spotting the great white egret which spent most of August on or around the reserve, generally on Ferry Lagoon and Mere, easily visible and providing a great contrast with nearby grey herons and little egrets.

Great white egret on the left, little egret on the right

Once the school holidays started, we ran a series of events inspiring visitors to give nature a home back where they live, as well as enjoying the wildlife out and about on the reserve. Each weekend you could create a different thing to take back to your garden or local park: butterfly feeders, bee homes, bird feeders and pots of wildflowers to attract moths to support bats (I accidently got stuck on the theme of wildlife beginning with ‘b’!)

Add overripe banana and you have a butterfly feeder!

If you’d like to give nature a helping hand where you live, have a look at rspb.org.uk/homes – you can download instructions on all kinds of backyard wildlife projects from creating amphibian hibernacula to hedgehog boxes to beetle buckets.