Well it felt like we got a snatch of summer in June, for a few days anyway before it cooled again! Summer work is well underway on the reserve with survey season and fencing featuring heavily this month.

After a disappointing season for southern marsh orchids, the bee and pyramidal orchids have had a great year, the bees appearing in force beside the paths and pyramids breaking previous reserve records. Monitoring these populations of rare and interesting plants is a health check for our habitats, ensuring that our management is having the desired effect.

Fencing work continues, repairing and replacing where needed. On Thorpe Lake we’ve had to completely rebuild a line that had failed, along with the new gate from April that was floating in the middle of nowhere for a few weeks! Using special devices called monkey strainers (which look like implements of medieval torture) we can replace lines and ensure that there is proper tension on the wire so livestock can’t escape, although sometimes at the cost of a painful nip!

The reserve continues to throw up surprises and treasure; a grass snake skin was stumbled upon during one of the surveys and plants have been found growing in areas they’ve never been observed before.