Eco Lodges in Devon
Wildlife at our Devon farm and in our Popehouse Moor Site of Special Scientific Interest. Guests are welcome to explore – or just ask us for a guided walk. If you’ve seen something good, please add it to the wildlife log.
I so feel for this robin – its chicks are running it completely ragged. It has at least 2 in different parts of the garden, hiding in bushes and squealing for food. The robin eyes me through the glass and practically begs for more mealworms, and who could resist?The chicks themselves, when you catch a glimpse, look plump and just a little bit smug, if that’s possible. Or am I projecting?
This amazing little stoat is peeping out of the Apex of the welly store room at Wheatland Farm’s Devon Eco Lodges. Seems like we weren’t the only people looking for Easter eggs in the garden this Sunday. Look at those eyes! This creature means business. The birds certainly know they need to look out. All hell breaks loose when the stoat is around, with blackbirds robins and great tits all shrilling their alarm calls and hopping around in the bushes where they think the stoat is. But sometimes they get it wrong, and an orange streak appears somewhere else leaping through the grass with the black tip of its tail showing. In fact, the stoats we’ve seen out and about look a lot more orange than this one, but probably the face is darker than the back – unless it’s a different individual. Â We saw stoats often in May last year, but never got a picture. These were shot from the ‘balcony’ of Euan’s new treehouse.
Fingers crossed for the nuthatches which are also using the garden – they mud up their nest entry hole to keep stoats out, but I reckon the stoat could get in at the moment.
We’re going batty at Wheatland Farm’s eco lodges… Or rather we’re checking out our batty-ness with a bat detector borrowed from the Devon Greater Horseshoe Bat Project.
April is when the butterflies start taking to the wing. This one is an orange tip – the males have the orange tips – and they are real heralds of spring. They are first seen about the time the cuckoo flower or lady’s smock appears – another early spring flower in the fields. Right now they are fluttering across Popehouse Moor and Lower Newland Moor (the turbine field). On Popehouse Moor we’ve been finishing up some work on a ‘butterfly friendly clearing’ recently, but that’s more for the speckled woods and hopefully fritillaries.
Yay! The swallows are back! George spotted one over Otter Cottage yesterday evening so now it’s time to bake the annual cake. That’s the first one on the farm for this year though they have been around this part of North Devon for a few days now.
Time to prune back the ivy so they can get into Ian’s workshop where they usually nest.
The pic is not this year of course – it’s only been a glimpse so far. These are young ones from a previous year’s nest in the barn. But if you want to play along with ‘spot the swallow’, test your skills on Geoge’s 20 second verification video…
Summer is on its way folks!
Here’s looking back to swallows last year, in 2015 and fledging in 2013.
These blackbird chicks are looking pretty perky now. They’re in the ivy in the old farmyard at Wheatland Farm. The parents are frantically busy gathering food for them. We’ve been putting out dried mealworms (lots of protein) and keeping the teacup fat balls topped up (lots of energy). Soon we hope to see fully grown fledglings pestering their parents for food and begging to be fed out and about in the garden. I always feel a genuine empathy with blackbirds…
Goldfinches are gorgeous! This clip is of one feeding on the lemon balm seeds outside the kitchen window. Amazingly, we filmed it through the glass. That new camera looks like it has some potential!
Do Daffodils count as wildlife? This one does, as we note when it flowers each winter. On 22nd Dec 2015 these daffodils were all out and flowering. This winter it’s into the new year at least – a bit more normal.
It’s winter and the days are short, but this Fox is up and about despite the frost. Here’s just a few seconds of view on the wildlife camera as the fox crossed our nature reserve Popehouse Moor SSSI. One of our New Year’s resolutions is to be out in the empty hours more. Dusk, dawn, and maybe starlit nights too. But if you can’t make it out, one of the best places to spot wildlife is from the eco lodge verandas, or even while keeping cosy behind the big south facing windows.
The new pond at our Devon eco lodges is filling up… Well, not that new. It’s part of what was the slurry pit system when Wheatland Farm was a working dairy farm. It was filled with junk when we first arrived, and after clearing it we let it get overgrown because we didn’t have time to make anything of it. Now we’ve dug the pond out a bit and sown some marginal plants around it. Next spring we’ll clear a better path. It’s just below the fishing pond and makes a lovely out of the way spot for people as well as wildlife.
There’s also an old circular concrete structure that we want to turn into some kind of bothy or folly… More on that as it unfolds.
Meanwhile, we don’t suppose the frogs and newts will need a proper path, so we’ll be keeping an eye out for new arrivals here. Frogspawn should be a near certainty.
How many ponds is that now then?
Well, there’s the fishing pond, the main wildlife pond, the woodland magic pond, the seasonal pond we hope to turn into a reedbed, a small pond below the withy, a pond in the gravel garden at the farm house, and the tiny ‘ironic pond’, complete with plastic duck and waterlilies by our back door. They do say that if you want to attract wildlife just add water.
The dragonflies are still on the wing. Cooler mornings can be a goood time to creep up on them and get close. Ian took this snap on his phone.
Ian snapped this small copper on a Devil’s bit scabious plant on Popehouse Moor SSSI. Beautiful isn’t it! We haven’t seen many of these this year so it’s good to spot this one. They live in small colonies in grassland with only a few adults seen on the wing at any one time.
Another fabulous beastie – a caterpillar of the Vapourer moth. It looks like it might even be starting a cocoon on the leaf. Euan found it on the wisteria – we’ll tuck it away again. The adult males fly at this time of year but the boring-looking females are almost flightless, and lay eggs on the cocoon after the emerging. The eggs overwinter this way, with a caterpillar developing in the spring. Stunning get up!
Thankfully Andrew and Fiona’s TB movement restriction has finally been lifted and they have been able to move some of their cows to Wheatland Farm. Just in the nick of time for us as we need to be grazing Popehouse Moor and Lower Newland Moor for 10 weeks over the summer. It’s this light grazing that maintains the flower rich grassland here, including the orchids in our earlier post.
So eight young cows arrived in two livestock ‘boxes’ pulled by tractors on Friday morning – just as Maggie was returning from taking Euan to school on the tandem. Often the cows are simply herded down the lane from Higher Punchardon Farm, but this time there weren’t enough people to manage that.
The summer task of ‘lookering’ begins now, ie checking on the cows everyday. They’re a bit skittish, but hopefully will soon get used to us. Apparently a handful of ‘cow cake’ is the trick.
Every year we get a carpet of heath spotted orchids flowering on Popehouse Moor SSSI. Here’s a short clip of some of them in early July 2016. The are such a delight, and confirm our conservation grazing is working. This is one of the highlights of our wildlife year, so if you’re staying in the eco lodges do take a stroll onto Popehouse Moor (or ask us to take you for a guided walk). As well as the orchids it’s a-buzz with pollinating insects and nectar sipping butterflies. And if you can’t be here right now we still thank you for your visit at other times of the year – it’s your stays that make it possible to manage our small Devon farm for wildlife.
Thanks also to Natural England and the HLS scheme for ongoing support, and the Devon Wildlife Trust for always being on hand to offer practical advice.
Just look at this mighty beast! We think it’s an Oak Eggar moth caterpillar. We spotted it attempting to cross the road as we biked down a nearby lane.
Continue reading “Oak Eggar caterpillar”
May and June are the months when we get the most from the ‘weeds’ growing in the old farm yard. These oxeye daisies have seeded themselves in the cracks and accumulated soil. They’ve been flowering outside Otter Cottage all month, and when they’re going over we’ll collect some of the seed and sow it in the meadow. Most of our gardening tends to be selective weeding these days. If it thrives and it’s pretty, then it survives – especially if it’s native.
And if you’re interested in mini-wildlife as well as flowers, the daisies are a great place to spot a stunning white crab spider laying in wait for an unwary fly.
Here’s a pic of one of the newts we found when dipping the pond. Isn’t it splendid! The wildlife pond is heaving with ‘damsels’ and ‘dragons’ right now. You can sit on the bench and hear the dragonflies clash in their aerial territorial battles. The more delicate damselflies are busy depositing eggs on waterweed – but that makes them easy targets for the birds, who perch in the reeds and nip out to snatch a tasty morsel for themselves and their young.
The bluebells are in flower in Popehouse Moor’s wood and along all the local verges. Gorgeous! They make a bike ride to the pub a real treat. Ours are always a little later than some places in Devon, like the Tarka Trail. I think often they come out earliest along steep banks that catch some sun, whereas ours are in deep shade.
George, our new chief video contributor, has made a little clip… There are some lovely local walks too – there will be a wash of blue in Timbridge woods.
Meanwhile, we continue to try to rid ourselves of the invasive Spanish bluebells previous families planted by the farmhouse. Luckily, those do tend to flower earlier, so there isn’t much overlap for cross pollination and hybridisation. But all the same we’d rather wait for the real thing in the woods.
Nuthatches are nesting at Wheatland Farm. They’re using a nestbox made by a guest who stayed in the eco lodges – Nuthatch Lodge actually. How appropriate! Thanks Huw!
Nuthatches are interesting as they usually nest in holes, which they partially wall in with mud to keep predators out. In this case they’ve ‘mudded up’ the crack under the lid. So there’s no looking inside for a peek. But hopefully that’ll keep the resident stoat out as well as curious people. The birds are frantically busy right now, hunting for grubs and caterpillars to feed their young. We see both adults fossicking along the windowsills looking for spiders. May is such a fabulous time – new life abounds.
Yay! It’s that time of year. The annual ‘swallows return’ cake had been baked. Ian and our guest Sue in Otter Cottage spotted the first swallows swooping over the farm yard. Brilliant – the world is still turning and summer is on it’s way. Sue and Ian have been awarded their spotters slices!
Spring is in the air at Wheatland Farm and the wildlife knows it. Well, OK, the weather today isn’t quite what it was yesterday when George made us this video clip, but the toads won’t notice – they’ll be in the pond laying those long strings of toadspawn that usually produce an ‘almost-plague’ of little toad-lets in June.
George wants a job so he can finance is new freerunning habit. So I think we’ll be hearing (viewing?) more from him over the coming months. Might was well make use of the younger generation’s familiarity with tech and social media!
Some more evidence of dormice around the cottage and lodges! On tidying up the garden in Otter Cottage we found a dormouse hibernation nest nestled in long grass. What to do…leave it? But would the next dog visitor find it before the occupant had a chance to wake up? With more dogs due at the weekend, and the nest partially revealed, we decided to relocate it over the fence to less disturbed undergrowth. But when we lifted out it was clearly empty.
We’re feeling partly relieved of the responsibility and partly worried – if it was this winter’s nest it is way too early for a dormouse to be out and about. But maybe it was from a previous winter? Hmmm. Time to schedule more frequent gardening…
And across the lodge field we’ve found other traces of dormice. A recent guest staying in Beech Lodge found this nibbled nut in the car park. She had had professional training on distinguishing nut nibbles by dormice from other mice and she was confident… though even a trained eye can get it wrong sometimes.
So overall, it’s encouraging news. Dormice should stay in hibernation for another month or so, but with spring on the way hopefully there will soon be abundant food when they do emerge. Apparently they are partial to a bit of blossom after waking up.
We’ve replaced the old barn owl box in the eco lodge field with a new one. Well, actually, and in keeping with our usual ethos, it’s a re-built owl box given to us by Maggie’s dad, who runs a barn owl scheme in West Sussex. The old one had been up almost 10 years and finally gave way in the winter winds. Fingers crossed for some occupants – we often see the local barn owls but they need a good year and expanding population for them to need new nesting sites. And good winters have been few and far between recently. Still – here’s hoping. And if we don’t get barn owls perhaps we’ll get tawny owls rather than stock doves!
We definitely have willow tits! Today Mary, a volunteer recorder from a new conservation project, came and did a challenge survey, where a recording of song is played to see if territorial birds will respond to the ‘intruder’. And they did – at least 2 pairs on Popehouse Moor came and investigated our loud speaker. That’s good news as the British sub-species of willow tit (kleinschmidt) has recorded a serious decline in the national Breeding Bird Atlases of recent years. In the first national breeding atlas (1968-72) willow tits were found in 1220 10km map squares across the country; in the second atlas period (1988-91) this breeding range had contracted to 1200 squares; and the most recent data (2007-2011) showed them only in 558 10km squares.
They look very similar to marsh tits (which we also have), and the best way to tell them apart is to hear their song – hence the survey technique. They both like wet woodland, and willow tits particularly like dead wood – where they can excavate a nesting hole for themselves. Finding a nest would be lovely, but I don’t think we’ve got the time for the stake out…
But the survey, which is happening across Devon, will help double check the population estimates an help inform conservation approaches and priorities. Meanwhile, it’s great to know they are here. Mary said ‘it’s made not just my day, but my week’.
(Photo by Tim Watts on Flikr)
The willow tit project is a partnership between Devon Birds, Devon Wildlife Trust and Devon Biodiversity Records Centre.
It’s that time of year – let’s hope it stays relatively mild or these soon-to-be tadpoles won’t get past the frog spawn stage. These are in the gated seasonal pond in the eco lodge field. For some reason the frogs always spawn there first, before the bigger wildlife pond. Fingers crossed for the end of winter!
It’s been wet in recent days, and there was plenty of rain on the forecast, but it ‘turned out nice’ and we went planting trees, moving some willow, grey alder and aspen from where they have sprung up to the rough grass around Beech Lodge. They should get established now before the the spring comes. And if they don’t take, well, we would have had to remove them from their original site anyway. Meanwhile, willow branches against the blue skies are showing buds already. So spring can’t be that far away.
Summer’s the time for damselflies around the pond, and when it’s a bit cloudy they even stay still long enough to see!
That appealing gape seems to be working – the dunnocks are looking plump and almost ready to fly…