I thought we had missed the opportunity for out Little Grebe to produce a family but I had a pleasant surprise on Wednesday when two chicks made an appearance.

My favourite looking youngsters of the pond birds we have.

This month we welcomed the Cramlington Academies Green Influencer group to the reserve. They came to help and they did so with enthusiasm.

They did a considerable bit of path maintenance that now looks very smart.

They also helped with some boardwalk maintenance and weed suppression around our seating areas.

I would like to record my gratitude to Laura and her volunteers from Northumberland Wildlife Trust for the hard work yesterday removing my unwanted sycamore saplings.

I had quite a dense little forest of saplings strangling everything else. They managed to make very good progress.

Some of the pictures taken during a busy June.

We had a visit from Blyths Bede Academy with 10 students and 1 teacher attending.

We did a tour of the reserve including a little moth identification and ended with the opening of our fossil pit, the first visitors to use this facility.

We had a tremendous thunderstorm on Friday evening that didn’t last long but deposited an awful lot of water. It was not good for the Woodchip paths, with a number suffering significant damage.

It also took its toll on our leaky dams, taking out the centres of dam 1 & 2

Fortunately our footbridges withstood the flood even though they were submerged, I estimate the stream depth increased by about 1 metre in less than 30 minutes. Kudos to Skillmill for their construction of these footbridges.

I had almost given up on our Mallards producing some youngsters. They are usually the first youngsters we see along with the Moorhen. So I had a pleasant surprise on Friday to see a female Mallard with a ‘magnificent seven’ ducklings. I’m happy to say that after 3 days we still have six surviving.

At this stage the ducklings are feeding on insects on the surface of the pond. They seem to be all fit and healthy so fingers crossed they avoid all the predators waiting to pounce!

A very beautiful first for the reserve, a butterfly that has not been seen (by me) in nearly 10 years of walking the reserve. The butterfly is called a Common Blue, not so common for me!

It has taken a while but our Roe Deer kids have started to appear. Over the last couple of days I have seen a set of twins and another which I suspect may also be one of twins. The vegetation is so long they disappear, so the only way they move is by bouncing through the undergrowth. Makes it tricky to get a decent photo!

I’ve only seen this bird twice in the last ten years, over the reserve. This was the third sighting, it didn’t stay long and I only got long distance shots hence the poor quality, but it was nice to see. I’m sure the bunnies and rodents were not as happy!