Well I cannot BELIEVE how quickly this month flew by! It’s
been so busy!
The first week I was away from the Nature Reserve on a
fantastic course training to become a L3 Forest School Practitioner. IT was a
brilliant week where I learnt so much and got so many ideas on how to boost and
develop a forest school programme for Parndon Wood Nature Reserve. Huge thanks
to everyone on the course as well as to Lily from Kindling Play, you were
wonderful even if the weather wasn’t so great!
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| One of the crafts we're going to incorporate into our summer forest school programe! |
We also had our bat weekend scheduled for the second weekend
in June. This was a great experience for all the family and our wonderful
guests from Essex Bat Group had a brilliant display and were happily talking to
all our visitors. We also had some bat origami and bat –themed arts and crafts
available for the kids for free!
It’s not all been fun and games…well, nearly! June saw our
busiest month for school visits, with over 200 school children visiting us i 2 weeks alone!
Learning lots about the natural world and Parndon Wood, staff definitely earned
a cup of tea at the end of the day after walking around the trail several times
a day to talk to each group about the area. We also had some simply wonderful
fox and owl collages made from materials gathered on the nature walk, good
work!
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| One of the many beautiful fox masks created by the school children. |
Our wonderful volunteers have also been extremely busy this
month as the annual Green Flag judging approaches. This is something the
reserve has managed to hold since before 2009 and something we are all
extremely proud of! So off to work the volunteers went, painting fences, tidying
and clearing around the visitor centre, clearing brambles and bashing ferns
down. A few people have been asking why we bash the ferns down and the reason
is to stop them becoming too dominant (much like the brambles!) By bashing the
ferns, it doesn’t kill the plant but simply damages it. This means that all its
energy is then put into repairing itself rather than growing extremely tall.
Ferns can grow up to 2m high ad you can see the difference in the height between
the areas our volunteers have been working and where they haven’t. We even
encouraged school children to do this conservation work, by getting them to
sweep through a fern patch to bash them down.
Towards the end of June we also had our annual fathers’ day
event. This year saw families having a den building competition, collecting
fire lighting materials and having a go at building their own (small) fires to
toast marshmallows. To everyones’ surprise (obviously because it had rained the
night before, no reflection on the fathers’ outdoor skills…) everyone got a
fire going long enough to get a sugar hit!
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| Be freeeee little froglets! |
June also saw the last of our froglets released back into
the main pond, ready to start their new lives in the big outdoors!
It was also
the month that we ran our first bat walk! A beautiful, warm night greeted
visitors on their arrival. Essex Bat Group were wonderful as ever, doing a
fantastic Q & A session all about bats for our visitors. This concluded
with a very special guest, a constant-captive Pipistrelle Bat was brought around by the group for
all our guests to see this very special animal close up. Then it was time to
get outside with our bat detectors to listen and see the bats whizzing around
the reserve! A fantastic night had by all!
A Bat caught flying on our camera traps, ready for the bat walk!
