Summer arrived in July and so did the insects! We still aren't seeing the numbers we would expect, especially butterflies, but there is more on the wing and the cacophony of the black-headed gull colony has been replaced by the clatter of dragonfly wings. We're living up to our reputation as a Dragonfly Hotspot for the British Dragonfly Society! If you go to Railway Pond in a sunny spell the surface of the water is alive with dragons and damsels. We've had a lovely visitor too as a lesser emperor has dropped in to spend time on our lakes.

In mid July our attention turns to managing our grasslands, and you may have spotted us out and about on the reserve with various bits of kit. Each has its place - the big tractor-mounted mower is great in the meadows but finds smaller areas a bit of a problem, the industrial lawnmower is great for small areas but struggles with tussocky grass, and our strimmer is great for all those hard-to-reach places but can be very noisy. We're very grateful to the Lincoln Area Group, who recently bought us a battery-powered strimmer. This piece of equipment fits in with what we already have and makes cutting around the path network much quieter, disturbing less wildlife and not impacting as much on visitors. We're impressed with its capabilities so far and look forward to using it more as we go into autumn. Some of our smaller meadows have already had their summer haircut and you can expect to see us tackling the bigger meadows in the coming weeks.

We moved our cows to their late summer grazing, and from the look of it they like what they've found! Some areas are not possible to mow so we use our livestock to keep the grasslands in good condition. As they munch through this year's growth they are removing lots of energy from the coarser plants and making space for the more delicate flowers to grow next year. As we use hardy breeds of livestock on-site they also have the advantage of keeping bramble and scrub in check as they find this very tasty too!

Our path network has had a little bit of TLC in specific places this month, as the very wet spring has made the pathside vegetation grow enormously. We normally don't cut back the verges until September as we have a number of orchids growing in them, some of which are nationally scarce, and these need to go to seed before we can cut them back. We've targeted the areas where it would become difficult to get past and will continue to monitor the path network to keep access open. We also came across a surprise - some of our wildlife tunneled under the path and managed to break through three inches of compacted limestone! Whilst we're seriously impressed by their capabilities we hope this was a one-off and won't happen again!