SWOG Butterfly ID day

Yesterday we hosted a butterfly ID day in our wood, run by Steve Wheatley from Butterfly Conservation and attended by about 10 SWOG (Small Woodland Owners Group) members.
We started with Steve giving us a talk about butterflies, and why identifying them and keeping centralised records is important. He needs lots of people like us to note down what we see and send records to him periodically, so that they can keep track of species numbers and use the information in scientific research and also in planning permission issues and other stuff like that. He also gave us some tips on how to ID butterflies, including the differences between the various white species, and using knowledge on which months the butterflies can be seen to help narrow down the choices.
We took a walk along the wayleave and also along our wildlife corridor, stopping at various points to talk about what we were seeing.
There was patchy cloud, so it wasn't a perfect day for butterfly spotting, but we still saw quite a few. Here's the ones I got pictures of. A Peacock, looking a bit ragged:A Speckled Yellow - actually a day-flying moth rather than a butterfly:
A Brimstone - this is the first time I have ever seen one of these land so I could take a picture! A shame it wouldn't spread its wings out, but at least I now know a potential spot to go and try again.
We also saw some other interesting things as we went around, such as this bird nest up a pylon. Any ideas what it might be?
and in the wildlife corridor, where we were felling just a few months ago, as well as several butterflies we found an adder, which had probably been basking in the sun:
It didn't like the attention, and slithered off to a hole in a coppice stump - it certainly seemed to know exactly where to go and hide!
Mike

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Butterfly Conservation volunteer day

This morning we went to help at a volunteer day for the Butterfly Conservation Rother Woods Project. The location was Beckley Woods, about 7 miles out from Rye, and the task was coppicing trees to widen a ride, in order to create a better habitat for butterflies (and incidentally other insects and birds too).

There's a short piece about it on the Butterfly Conservation sightings page.

Here's a few pictures:
It was strange going back to using a bow saw - no chainsaws allowed on volunteer days, as it's a bit noisy for the people not using them! We'll certainly appreciate our saws when we get to the woods tomorrow!

As well as getting a bit of conservation work done we also got to meet lots of people, including John, a retired forester who lives near our wood - we're hoping he'll be able to visit us this week to see the work we're currently doing, and give us some tips from his years of experience!

When we got home we found that our cockatiels had deserted their expensive cage with all its ropes and toys to go and sit in a branch we brought back from the wood...
I suspect the millet hanging in it was an attraction though...

Mike

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Update on wayleave felling

I wrote yesterday about the work we'd seen going on in the wayleave. We've since heard some news about what's going on. Apparently this is the periodic clearance of the wayleave, but thanks to the efforts of Steve Wheatley of Butterfly Conservation, the company doing the work has agreed to minimise damage to the valuable habitat there. This explains why they're been felling individual trees and chipping them, rather than coming along with a forestry equivalent of a combine harvester.

We're really pleased about this, and very grateful to Steve for the work he's put in.

Mike

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