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.