Today I went up to the reserve with Becca, a good friend of mine and one of the on-site wardens from years gone by. We concentrated on square A1, where most of the Lady orchids & Lady x Monkey hybrids are located.
It was pretty obvious from just a glance that we have many more hybrids this year - possibly due to a genuine increase in numbers and also because we probably didn’t map-in all the tiny plants that came up last year. Sure enough, we found lots of small plants and seedlings dotted all over the same area where the hybrids have always been found but they don’t seem to be expanding their range much, though a few plants have been found over the boundary fence in the edge of the woodland.
 The day was really warm and very Spring-like, with Buzzards & Red kites overhead and butterflies like Peacock, Brimstone (including 1 female ovipositing), Orange-Tip, Small Tortoishell, Comma, Holly Blue & a potential Dingy Skipper. I say ‘potential’ because I saw a Burnet Companion moth a few minutes later and it could have been that. We were also treated to good views of a Weasel playing in the hedge next to where we were mapping.
We closed the day on 22 Lady orchids (3 will flower) & 289 hybrids - over 100 more than last year (of which at least 66 will flower). The total number of all rare orchids this year is over 700 - a new record by about 150 plants, mainly due to the hybrids.
We had an absolutely superb day on the reserve today, with glorious weather and a slightly chill wind. A few of the group went to continue cutting the taller scrub at the bottom of slope 3, while the rest of us divided into 2 groups and continued the orchid mapping.
Wildlife was abundant, with Brimstones, Peakcocks, Small Tortoishells & Orange Tip butterflies in the sheltered places. The first Gymnocheta viridis, a Spring-flying parasite fly, were seen sitting on fence posts and Osmia bicolor solitary bees were buzzing over the slope with their much larger bumblebee cousins.
The mapping was pretty successful but the closer you get to the end of the mapping the harder it becomes because you are trying to find all the difficult plants (ones that need tapes) or confirming missing plants, which requires longer searching or tape measurements. We closed the day on 524 plants, just 40 short of last year’s record of 564, with a good 4-5 squares still to finish. The Lady x Monkey hybrids look like they have spread a little further afield (a few seedlings were found over the fence, near the wood edge) and the clumps seem denser this year. So dense in places that we will have to produce special maps to help us distinguish each plant.
The scrub cutting party also did very well and reduced the height in a number of places, letting more light in but without reducing available cover and sheltering habitats.
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Gymnocheta viridis
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Harlequin ladybirds in their winter hibernation roost
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Lasius fuliginosus (ants)
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Marpissa muscosa (a jumping spider)
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Marpissa muscosa (a jumping spider)
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Blackthorn flowers
On the March workparty Beryl & I had a tentative look at the orchid slope to see if anything was coming up. The weather this winter has been very cold and we were worried that the plants might be very late this year.
Evidence on the ground showed that the orchids were definitely stunted, when compared to this time in previous years, but they were indeed coming up and were probably big enough to start counting. At the end of that session we had 78 plants but these were mainly hybrids & Lady orchids because they were bigger and easier to find.
Today (21st March) I went back to the slope and had a closer look at some of the busier squares to see if I could make a real dent on the mapping. The hybrids were very easy to find and I found most of them fairly easily - the only problem is working out which plant is which because they are packed quite densely into a relatively small area. There look to me a few more hybrids this year so we will have to return to this area and map them in later.
In the other squares where the Monkey orchids are found I had mixed results. Over on the western side the plants were fairly large and easy to find but as I moved around to the southern side the plants got much smaller and harder to locate so I decided to call it a day and let the sun and rain work its magic and bring the plants on more before returning to map those.
On the March workparty a week ago we saw a very nice male Brimstone. There was nothing as exotic today but I did notice the first Hairy Violet flower coming out.
We had a really lovely Spring day for this workparty - the sun was shining but the wind kept the air a bit keen, so I decided that we’d go to the bottom of slope 3 and finish off some of the scrub management.
The aim of today’s work was to continue the long-term project to make and maintain a variable-height scrub mosaic in the lower third of slope 3. In this area we want to have broken blocks of scrub of varying height with paths of varying width snaking through them. The overall effect should be to provide good cover and blocks of shelter for wildlife but also to have the ground exposed enough in places for grass and low, flowering herbs to grow.
So, today we concentrated on lowering the height of certain blocks of scrub rather than removing them completely. This is usually done by selecting the tallest bushes and removing them at ground level, or in the case of woodier bushes and trees we occasionally pollard them at waist height to promote growth at different heights above the ground.
While all this was going on Beryl also had the first good look on the orchid slope and at the end of the session we had found 78 orchids. Much more work to be done (there are approximately 590 ‘live’ plants to look for) but it is a good start, considering the lateness caused by the cold winter.
Buzzards & Red Kites were seen circling over us very frequently and a male Brimstone put in an appearance, fluttering around the scrub and making use of the sunny clearings we’d made. A drone-fly called Eristalis tenax was also seen.
We usually do quite well for weather of workparties but this one was a bit drizzly. It wasn’t too bad though and it was our official BBOWT yearly review where they send along a member of staff from outside our area and he spends the morning with us and finishes by asking whether we need more help/tools etc.
Anyway, the rain was coming in from the south-east and, although we’d normally work low-down in a compartment, this time I had in mind a nice job at the top of slope 5. Here we have been clearing back scrub from along the top fence line to open up access but also to create a sheltered belt of low vegetation for invertebrates. This is a big job and it will probably be another year before we have the scrub in the condition we are working to but we have made a good start this year. The aim of this first phase is to reduce the height of the scrub and to push a 3m path between it and the fence line.
All of the work today was in under the overhanging Yews and sheltered behind the bramble scrub - so now you see why I chose this part of the site! ;) We had a good crowd of volunteers who split into 3-4 groups and by the end of the morning we had finished the bulk of the work. The only part still to be worked on is fairly low bramble scrub and I hope that BBOWT can bring up a scrub cutter sometime in the summer and dice up this remaining scrub and start to push paths at right-angles to the fenceline, through the scrub belt. This will break it up nicely and we can just come back to it later in the year to finish it off.
This was a real novelty because we actually had to cancel one due to heavy snow! I think this has only ever happened once before and then it was just a light dusting. This time my car was stranded in my driveway in Tilehurst and I was told by friends in Goring that the lane up to the Hartslock was almost impassable … definitely Land Rovers and tractors only!
Every 6 months I have a walk round the site with Martyn Lane, the BBOWT Oxfordshire Reserve Manager and my main contact within the Trust. The aim is to look over the site and make decisions on which work will be done in the next 6-12 months. It’s also a good opportunity for each of us to catch us and exchange news that relates to the site and generally take a look at how everything is doing up there.
The day was superb - gloriously warm and sunny - and the walk round was very pleasant - marred only by the fact that I forgot to take my camera so I have no photos!! Harlequin ladybirds were swarming in huge numbers at the tops of the hills but it didn’t matter where you stood on the site, we were brushing them off our clothes and faces the whole time.
Despite it being very late in the season I took my net and managed to catch quite a few tachinid flies: Tachina fera (one of the commonest and most easily seen summer tachinids), Eumea linearicornis (a late-season species) & Sturmia bella (a parasitoid of Small Tortoishell and other vanesids).
We decided in the end to continue work in slope 5 but also to reduce the height of scrub at the base of slope 3, where we did some work last winter. If there is any time after that we will try to clear around the edge of the orchid slope in readiness for a large project to replace and extend the rabbit netting. 
I can’t pretend that it was a glorious sunny day - it drizzled heavily all morning, once we had actually got over to field 5. But we stayed there and it wasn’t heavy enough to be too much of a nuisance and we managed to clear several areas in a large belt of bramble at the top of the hill. The aim here is to break up a continuous line of bramble and stop it becoming a thicket by removing any large shrubs and trees. At the same time we will expose the fenceline to allow routine maintenance
We had a great evening of mothing last night, with plenty of species coming in to the many lights - both actinic and mercury vapour. I will post a few photos and a list later.
However, for me, the big find of the night was a rare tachinid called Eriothrix prolixa, which I noticed in Ian’s Skinner trap early in the evening. It is not uncommon to find tachinids at moth lights - they tend to get flushed out of the surrounding grass and then get attracted to the lights with the moths. But it was the only tachinid I saw that evening but it was definitely something unusual because it stood and behaved quite like the much commoner Eriothrix rufomaculata but was much smaller and didn’t have any red side patches. You occasionally find completely black rufomaculata but under the microscope it was clearly different - having the hairy eyes, projecting moth edge, long spine on r4+5 and long costal spine - but with no petiole on the median vein.
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Latest news Monkey, Lady & hybrid orchids all going/gone to seed - orchid slope closed.
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The day was really warm and very Spring-like, with Buzzards & Red kites overhead and butterflies like Peacock, Brimstone (including 1 female ovipositing), Orange-Tip, Small Tortoishell, Comma, Holly Blue & a potential Dingy Skipper. I say ‘potential’ because I saw a Burnet Companion moth a few minutes later and it could have been that. We were also treated to good views of a Weasel playing in the hedge next to where we were mapping.
