August; last few weeks of the summer holidays!

Parndon Wood Honey on sale now!

August has absolutely flown by for us! Maybe it was because we were so busy! The first weekend in August saw our annual bee weekend alongside Harlow Beekeeping Association. This was a great weekend, with honey tasting, candle rolling, live demonstrations, honey cake for sale in the café and bee-themed arts and crafts for the kids to be occupied with. We had some excellent bee bags made, which went home filled with lovely was candles! With all things bee-related going on this weekend we also released our own honey for sale! It was by far the most popular honey of the weekend, so make sure you pop into the café to pick a jar up (Jut £5!).

Live bee hive demonstrations

Getting crafty with our bee crafts!

Following the good weather (at least it didn’t rain all the time!) we had our dragonfly weekend! We managed to find a few nymph cases from emerged dragonflies from our ponds. We snipped these off and had them available for our visitors to see. We also snapped a few, with our favourite snap being of a female Southern Hawker. The dragonfly weekend saw our visitors learning all about these incredible insects with our trail hunt and also gave them the chance to make their own lollipop dragonflies too! We have a funny feeling these will be making an appearance in our visitors’ school scrap books!

Southern Hawker Dragonfly

Bug Eyes

When the sun shone, our animal sightings went up too! Lots of deer have been spotted from our ‘Deer Hide’ throughout this month, along with several sights of grass snakes and lizards appearing on the spotters board in the visitor centre. Lots of visitors have also been spotting our toadlets as they walked around the trail, so keep an eye out for these and make sure you don’t stand on any! They’re quite small, only about the size of your little finger nail, so look a bit like hopping pebbles.

Towards the end of the month we held our final bat walk of the season. With nearly 80 of you turning up, we were certainly busy but all of you had a great walk! Lots of bats were spotted once again, so a special thanks to the experts from Essex Bat Group (Steve and Frances especially) who have helped us with these great walks. Keep an eye on the calendar next year for our next bat walks!

Hammer pictures

Forest school village making

As many of your probably notice, the clock is ticking down until the kids head back to school (is that a sigh of relief from tired parents we hear??). Some of you have been at ‘school’ already this summer by participating in out Forest school! We’ve had an excellent set of sessions this summer, which saw our students developing their identification skills, social skills and self-confidence. Some days the weather was kinder to us than others though! But regardless of weather, there were smiles all around! We’ve made some fantastic leaf pictures and managed to get a fire to make hot chocolate and toast marshmallows on in our final session! (Accompanied by biblical amounts of rain…who doesn’t like a challenge?!). A huge thank you to all the participants! The success of this school is such that we are planning our next session as an after school activity, so keep an eye on our Facebook, twitter and website for updates on this!

Toasting marshmallows in the rain!

We’ve had such a great year that we started looking for an extra member of staff, so step forward Kathy as our new Café Assistant! Kathy is a brilliant addition to the team here, so next time you’re in, pop in and say hello to her! 

July; Let the school holidays begin!

Stick man made in Forest School

This moth has seen the introduction of our new forest school programme, with the feedback so far being extremely positive. Forest school is an idea that children learn through play and through interactions with the great outdoors. We aim to encourage learning through play in a safe and secure environment, whilst also developing individuals’ social interactions.

Forest School Arts and Crafts

So far on the programme, we’ve made forest crafts such as beautiful 5 - point stars, and learnt about tool use and knots. We’ve also learnt how to tell the difference between tree species by looking at leaves, shapes and bark patterns and lots more! Very much looking forward to the next few sessions and we’re hopeful that this is something we can roll out on a regular basis as an after school event.

Learning through play

At the start of the month we also conducted a plant survey of the edges of the nature reserve. Some fantastic plants were recorded, including a Wild Service tree (which has fruit called chequers, previously used to flavour beer!), Wild Honeysuckle, Betony, wild strawberries and lots more! Some of these species we are looking to re-seed into the centre of the reserve, so a project our conservation volunteers have been working on this month is preparing a plant nursery for these species.

A house for a Twiggle

July also saw us run our 2^nd bat walk of the year (with our final one being on August 20^th). Once again this was a very popular event, with lots of bats being spotted on the walk, along with some other animals including some deer and rabbits! It’s not just bats we’re focusing on this month but also our bees! They’ve been hard at work since they were installed in April and we are already taking off honey! Just in time for our bee weekend at the end of the month, which is where we also hope to launch our own honey for sale in the shops and reserve. Can’t wait to try it all!

Smiling!

As most of you will have noticed, July also saw the start of the school holidays (aaaah!!) Luckily, the weather has been reasonable too, which has encouraged our visitor numbers to grow, especially during the week. Lots of people using the reserve and learning through activities such as pond dipping and bug hunting is a lovely sight to see! Great to see young explorers earning all about the natural world!

We’ve spotted lots of wildlife on our camera traps too! This months’ top spots include a Doe with two fawns trailing after her and a pair of foxes too! We’ve also had our visitors spotting the fox cubs frequently throughout this month and it is probably about time the cubs move out of their dens and away from their parents if they’ve not done so already!

Fox caught on a camera trap in July

June Update

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!

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!

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!

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!

May 2015...Better late than never!

May has certainly been a busy month for school visits, with over 240 school children coming through to learn all about the natural history of the reserve! Although the weather hasn’t always been the best this month, when the sun did shine, we wasted no time in getting the kids active outdoors. We even had a den building competition between classes from Tany’s Dell Primary School, with some spectacular results! Brilliant work!

We had a great pond life weekend too, with visitors working out the order of a frog’s life cycle as they walk around the trail. Our tadpoles were on show, allowing kids to get up close to them in our tanks.

Our chicks too have grown up! Towards the end of the month they were taken home to the warden’s house where they were put into a bigger house with other chickens to live with. They’re now enjoying scrapping about in her garden.

Happy Chicks in their new home

 Our conservation volunteers have also had a busy month, working on clearing away plants to start making the new footpath which is due to open in the reserve later this year. This was difficult work, with the brambles being unforgiving but they have done an excellent job as always!

May seems to have been a busy month for everything in the reserve, including our bees! The reports from the beekeepers is that they are loving life in the reserve and are starting to produce honey. Keep an eye on the café as later this year we hope to sell our own Parndon Wood honey! 

Towards the end of the month we held our minibeast weekend. The few weeks beforehand had been rather dry, so we were a bit worried our minibeasts had hidden themselves up but luckily (or not so, depending on your thoughts of rain!) it rained beforehand which encouraged our bugs out for all to see! Our favourite spot of the weekend was a bright red cardinal beetle and a sawfly caterpillar.

Cardinal Beetle

Sawfly Caterpillar

We couldn’t write a blog without noting down some of our more notable spots by staff and visitors. During May, we spotted a Tawny Owl several times, which is excellent to see! Owls are top predators and their presence within the reserve indicates to us that everything in the food chain below the owl, e.g. mice and other rodents and their food, is doing well also! The warden spotted the owl once too and managed to get a picture of it!

Look close and you might spot the Tawny Owl

What will we see in June?!

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. .

Wintry Wonderings

February has been an odd month weather wise, with snow and sunshine appearing throughout the month! Temperatures seem to be on the rise though and giving us a sneak peek into Spring. All around the reserve you can see lots of bird activity, with the tits scouting out the bird boxes for nest sites and I have also started hearing the Great Spotted Woodpeckers drumming on the trees within the reserve to establish their territories. Green Woodpeckers too seem to be more active, calling frequently to each other, especially when the sun is out.

In light of this increase in bird activity, this month saw Parndon Wood Nature Reserve running the build a bird box event and make your own fat balls before and during the February half term. These were a huge success, with lots of visitors walking home with fabulously decorated houses to pop in their gardens (don't forget to varnish them before you pop them up!). We even had a few gifted to us for the reserve, which we shall pop into a suitable places. Fingers crossed they all have new inhabitants before not too long! We have also taken on board a special bird house ourselves, complete with a camera! Hopefully we will get this up and running in the visitor center ASAP to see some of the reserves birds making a home inside!

One of the painted houses donated to the reserve.

Our new bird house, complete with camera!

The snow which fell at the start of the month proved a fantastic way for visitors to see the tracks of some of the animals living within the reserve. Squirrel, fox, rabbit, mouse, deer and crow were just some of the prints identified by visitors along the trail. I love seeing the prints in the snow as it really allows you to imagine the animals as they go about their business and shows visitors’ sights they may otherwise miss.

 We also had some very interesting visitors to the reserve, including a kite and a rough legged buzzard, who stopped over for a spot of lunch! Other species spotted this month include a tree creeper, who has been spotted several times on the Oaks surrounding the center, sparrowhawks and kestrels by the centre and in the reserve, Green Woodpeckers by the outdoor theatre and Great spotted woodpeckers on the feeders around the reserve and also drumming on numerous trees too!