April...without too many showers!

April started with a huge BANG!

A Tawny Owl from our Bird Weekend

Our Easter weekend saw over 3,000 visitors through our doors in the hunt for chocolate eggs! Although the weather wasn't always the driest (especially Good Friday!) everyone had a wonderful time and went home with a chocolatey treat. We had lots of Arts and Crafts on for the kids too, with the Easter Bunny our most popular craft over the weekend!

We also ran a story book for sale over this period, based on Parndon Wood and about one of our resident trolls, Grumps. Hand illustrated and written by a visitor, it was perfect as a gift for the kids over Easter, and at £2.99, a complete bargain! We even had an order from a local school, so hope to see the students using the maps in the front and back covers of the book to find their way around the reserve on their next visit.

We were open on Easter Monday too (Bank holiday) and although we didn't run the chocolate hunt, the weather had perked up by then and so it was lovely to see our regular visitors enjoying the sunshine! We were happy to see over the weekend too that there wasn't huge amounts of rubbish thrown around the reserve, so would like to thank you all for being so thoughtful! There will unfortunately always be some which gets left behind, but it does seem that most of our visitors are very aware of the impact litter can have on our wildlife.

Our Chicks popped out this month too!

One of the main events in April, after Easter, was our Bird Weekend. We teamed up with Harlow Museum to borrow some of their stuffed birds for our display and also invited members of the RSPB down for the weekend. In the visitor center, we had a feather to look at under the microscope, Owl pellets to dissect, an incubator with eggs inside and also a bird hunt around the trail for the younger children. At 3pm each day, we also held a guided tour around the reserve, identifying birds to our visitors through their song and plumage. We were even able to show the RSPB members a Treecreeper, something they had not seen before too! (Luckily, we regularly have a pair of these delightful birds on the Oaks outside the front of the centre, which can be seen alongside a cup of tea!)

A few days after our Bird Weekend, our classroom eggs began to hatch, allowing our visitors the chance to see the stages of a chicken, from the egg, its development right through to hatching.

 

Hard at work!

Our wonderful volunteers have also been hard at work this month protecting our newly coppiced area with some beautiful dead hedges. We have also put up some signs explaining to visitors what coppicing is and why we do it. Check out their handy work next time you’re in! This time of year we also had some tree surgeons in to check the safety of the trees surrounding the nature trail around the reserve. A few questionable branches were spotted, as well as a few questionable Oaks in other areas of the reserve. These were then removed, with the Oak trees removed being milled to use for future projects within the reserve. Incredible work the tree surgeons do and will definitely give spider man a run for his money with their climbing skills!

The wonderful dead hedge protecting the coppiced area.

The sunshine has brought out lots of our wild flowers throughout the reserve, and towards the end of April saw the Bluebells poking their heads up. There is a patch of Bluebells by the visitor center, which we have surrounded with a mini dead hedge to save them from being trampled on.

With the sunshine comes life it seems. The trees are all popping with fresh green leave and the weather has been so warm that we've had sightings of the Grass Snakes basking and even swimming in the pond dipping pond. Wonderful sights! We put out camera traps around the reserve on occasions and have been lucky enough to spot some of our night time visitors, including the foxes, something visitors don’t regularly see during the day! Another notable achievement for this month was the permission granted by Natural England for us to work with Harlow Beekeeping Association to place 4 bee hives within the reserve. This is wonderful news and a project we are really excited about! 

A selection of the camera trap photos we've collected this month.

March..ing into Spring!

Well March has certainly been a step from Winter to Spring!

In the first few weeks we have had some tree work done within the reserve, removing old Oaks and replanting lots of new ones in the cleared area!

We also went along to Rum Tum Tuggers nursery group to help them build a beautiful bug hotel in their garden. The children were fantastic and made lots of beetle and lacewing bottles, using cleaned plastic bottles they had collected and filling them with a variety of things including corrugated cardboard and wood and leaves. Although the weather was against us at times, we all got stuck in, filling the hotel with straw, flower pots, canes, logs and twigs as well as creating a frog and toad hole at the bottom with some old masonry.

The Nursery are also going to cover the top part of the hotel with flowering plants and ivy to attract bees and increase the shelter offered to the inhabitants. Can’t wait to hear who’s moved in!

Rum Tum Tuggers Bug Hotel

We were lucky enough to have a really lovely bit of weather for the joint event with Harlow council, for toddlers and parents. The sun was shining and this really brought the families out, who enjoyed a story themed treasure hunt around the trail, followed by arts and crafts on the picnic benches outside the front of the visitor center.

Towards the end of the month we had out Amphibian weekend! Displays went up in the classroom to show the species of newts you can find in the UK (with special attention on the Great Crested Newt, of which we have present in the reserve!), It wouldn’t be an amphibian weekend without mentioning the frogs and toads and as the sun had started poking its head out, we managed to collect some frogspawn and the tadpoles had hatched. Children were also given instructions to find the life cycle of the frog and put it in order as they worked their way around the trail too. The frog and toad spawn in the ponds within the reserve still hadn’t hatched for this weekend, which at first we thought was a shame. As our tadpoles had hatched though, we were able to then direct visitors to the pond dipping pond (without nets unfortunately) to see the frogspawn floating on top and, for the quieter visitors, they were able to spot lots of smooth newts swimming amongst the pond weed. Proof to show you don’t always need a net to see the life in a pond!

Frogspawn

Smooth Newt having a mooch

We've seen quite a bit of wildlife too now that Spring is showing its head. Top spots for this month include a pair of Muntjac, Nuthatch, Sparrowhawk, Treecreeper and a few Buzzards, as well as lots of Great Tits, Long-Tailed Tits and Blue Tits, Wrens, Blackbirds ad Dunnocks. .