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Moths, Cowslips, Buttercups and Orchids
Well it had to happen. Eleven successive dry Tuesday mornings and then rain on the twelfth. Fortunately early on it wasn’t too bad so Sue Davis and Marigold Oakley did their own wildlife walk....
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What a Place to Work
I can’t believe that the last blog I wrote was on 3 April. What happened to May?! I suppose there was Easter, then two other bank holidays and we were away on holiday for a couple of weeks so I guess...
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Wildflower day
This Tuesday, ahead of the Wild flower day on Sunday, we had decided on a bioblitz on the Trawscoed Meadow where the event was to take place. This week, as well as the usual group of Howard, Michael,...
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Voles, Mice and Shrews
Over the previous weekend Michael, with the aid of Iwan, Cameron and Simon, had been setting up Longworth small mammal traps in various places around the Garden. They were baited to start with but...
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Butterflies and Lakes
Last week we set out with the intention of monitoring Butterflies, as part of the Big Butterfly Count. However, although the weather was still quite warm and humid, it was dull and not only were there...
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Tree Bumblebees
The original intention last week had been to collect wild flower seeds from the Trawscoed meadow. However, after much discussion, consultation with the manual and advice from our curator, Simon...
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Grebe chicks, Fungi and Freshwater Surveys
The signs are that this will be a good year for fungi and during the past 3 weeks we have gradually been assembling a fine selection of photos, many of which we are uncertain as to their names. Last...
View ArticleAllt Goch
Nov 25th 2014 For once we were indoors – and the weather was still fine! Philip Jones had kindly agreed to give us a talk on Fungi, how to identify them and other tips. For this we gathered in the...
View ArticleConserving the Future
16th Dec 2014 As the last walk of the year Bruce suggested that we take a look at the ‘Conserving Our Future zone’, formerly known as the Energy Zone. This is an area where the Garden is developing new...
View ArticleHair Ice
Jan 13th 2015. At this time of year there is relatively little happening, but with the report of a record number of plants flowering at the start of the year, we thought we might see what we could...
View ArticleSnowdrops
Jan 27th 2015. When the Garden was first established a number of different varieties of Snowdrops were planted in Spring Woods. Over the years the labels have been lost or misplaced and Bruce had...
View ArticleVisitors Car Park
Feb 3rd 2015. Another beautifully sunny day, but very cold. Today we were exploring the area in and around the main visitors car park, so some of us walked down and the rest drove there, partly because...
View ArticleAmphibians and Reptiles
Feb 10th 2015. Cloudy, cold and misty. As followers of Iolo Williams’ Great Welsh Parks programmes will have seen, one useful method of discovering what Reptiles and Amphibians there are around is to...
View ArticleTwo Years on
Feb 24th 2015. It is now two years since John, Jan, Keith and myself started on the first weekly wildlife walk. Now we have about 15 fairly regular volunteers, many of whom are starting to ‘walk’ the...
View ArticleI-Spy – a ghost?
Mar 3rd 2015. Forecast windy, cold with the odd showers. Actual, hardly any wind, dry and sunny a lot of the time. For this week Bruce wanted us to try out his ‘I-Spy Wildlife on Waun Las NNR’. This is...
View ArticleSigns of Spring
Mar 10th 2015. A brilliantly sunny morning, but with the rain and frost overnight not quite good enough to tempt the Moths out. The only one Marigold found was a very frayed Mottled Gray perched on the...
View ArticleBadgers
Mar 17th 2015: A nice dry, mild day for our walk over to Pont Felin Gat to meet up with the Badger surveyor. But before we even got into the Garden Badgers were very much on our mind. The newly...
View ArticleLate Spring
Mar 24th and 31st. The mean temperature for the year so far has been less than 5C, with both February and March being cooler than January. So the grass isn’t growing, the Snowdrops are bidding us a...
View ArticleMoths
Apr 7th 2015: A gloriously sunny, warm day, in complete contrast to last week. And the Moth trap which John had set out worked so Marigold was able to show us all the first Moths of the year, including...
View ArticlePollinators
April 21st 2015. The recent sunny weather has enabled us to ‘collect’ the first Moths of the year – not many but always interesting. One Moth was particularly agitated and it took a couple of hours in...
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