Friday 15 February 2008

First signs of Spring

I've been visiting the reserve quite a bit the past few days for stress relief and to work out some pain while i recover from a car accident last weekend. It has been good, and there's definitely some signs that Spring is in the air!
We've got snowdrops in bloom down at the car park right now, and some of the birds have started singing. It's a real cacophony of bird noise along there right now. I could sit at the screen all day and just listen to the bird noise!
We've also had quite a few birds added to the species list in the past week or so, taking the total up to 35 for the year so far. I'm pretty sure that figure will double before the year is out, too!
I've modified the species list a little to include the date of last sighting of birds (I haven't done it for the other species - butterflies, mammals, insects, plants, etc) since i suspect the majority of visitors to the reserve are there for the birds. I think it may be best to have a last sighting date so that people can see the chances of seeing any given bird species currently. I've also tried to sort it in date order, with most recent sightings first. If you take, for example, the Jay. I only saw one in the whole time i was visiting last year, yet i saw one just a couple of days ago. I wouldn't expect to see them anytime soon, but people might be under the impression from the species list that they can be seen all the time.

Just a reminder that we will be having the local air cadets on site doing some work this weekend. The forecast looks good, so for a rare change, we might actually get a decent amount of work done!

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