With Spring arriving, I wanted to share some photos taken at Aston Rowant National Nature Reserve, from the start of what I am sure, will be a busy year for our team and fantastic volunteers. Some of you may have noticed over the Christmas period, we had some new arrivals on site – and not our typical woolly ones!

We welcomed ponies Bella, Millie, and Bertie, from BBOWT (Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust) on to site in November. The three have done a wonderful job on the south side of the reserve, grazing a paddock where we were seeing scrub encroachment onto good quality chalk grassland. It’s been interesting to see how and what they graze compared to our Beulah sheep flocks.

We have a wonderful surveying team, who are out regularly on site recording a whole range of species, including regular bird transect, summertime butterfly transects and fungi surveys in the Autumn. The team had a fantastic start to the year with one survey in January recording four species of raptor within 5minutes of each other.

More wonderful bird spots, including one of my favourites, the Green Woodpecker. They have a wonderful flight pattern, dipping and lifting over the chalk grassland when startled. On the ground, they’ll often be grubbing around in the Yellow Meadow anthills and frequently are heard before being spotted, with a very distinctive yaffling call.

A lovely collection of photographs, of a Stonechat. These photos are all male birds which we can tell because of the black head. Female Stonechats have a paler head with an obvious white throat.

With the cooler weather we saw at the start of the year, few fungi species were being recorded, however, we were pleased when Meadow coral, was recorded on Beacon Hill. It is a fairly infrequent find in Britain, so a great spot by the surveying team.

I hope you enjoyed seeing a small collection of photos from the NNR, from the last few months. Thanks to all our hard-working volunteers and surveyors, many of whom supply these fantastic photographs. I look forward to sharing some photos of the site as Spring sets in.

Steph Wilson – Natural England, Reserve Manager