Hello again everyone
Well, I had the most wonderful start to my second week of volunteering! If you read my previous blog you may remember that I mentioned about grass snake being the species I was particularly keen to find during my seven weeks at the reserve. Guess what – I saw one last Monday!
My sighting was all thanks to conservation intern Scabz, who very kindly let me know that he’d found a grass snake whilst checking the water levels (the team here all know I’ve been desperate to see one) and then drove back to the visitor centre to collect me so I could go and have a look.
In my state of uncontrollable excitement even simply locating the camera on my phone was too difficult a task for me - I couldn’t take my eyes off the creature for long enough! However, Scabz managed to capture this cracking shot!
We’ve had another great week of events. An impressive dragonfly larva was caught during a pond dipping session on Wednesday, as well as many interesting insects whilst bug hunting on Thursday. I loved the fact that one child arrived for the session carrying a plastic tub containing two carrion beetles! They were found in his garden before the event and I was delighted that he’d brought them along to show me.
The Big Wild Sleepout took place at the weekend, where families camped overnight at Frampton Marsh. A guided walk, making dream catchers, the scavenger hunt, playing ‘duckett bucket’ and toasting marshmallows were among the activities on Saturday evening. Having never camped before, therefore not owning a tent, and forgetting to bring my sleeping bag resulted in spending the night back at my accommodation, but I was back on Sunday morning to find out which moths had been caught at the reserve overnight.
The moth trap at the office has been up and running this week too (because you can never have enough moths)! Some of my favourites included canary-shouldered thorn, gold spot, mother of pearl and setaceous hebrew character, to name but a few. Another highlight was this beautiful poplar hawkmoth – it’s always a treat to see one of those!
I’ve been told that elephant, privet and eyed hawkmoths have also been recorded in the trap previously. The latter two would be firsts for me so I was hoping for one or both of those, but no luck so far. It’s probably just as well – a grass snake and a couple of new hawkmoths during the same week may well have caused me to faint!
Looking forward to another five weeks at Frampton Marsh!
Lauren