Following our frog antics of last weekend it was time to initiate my frog incubator which worked well last year. So after a good spring clan and a reload with fresh pond water it was time to add the frogspawn.

We have a larger batch of frogspawn this year than last. I’m going to claim that as a success of adding our protected batch last season😜.

Once again I have only transferred a small amount of frogspawn, about 15%.

Hopefully we will raise a successful batch of froglets for release back into the pond!

We had a our first moth trapping session of 2025, which is the earliest we have tried it on site. It was a nice surprise to catch 10 moths of 4 different species. Thanks to Brian Harle for doing this.

Pale Brindled Beauty

That bit of sun and warmth yesterday brought out my frog population in force! They were croaking away in the sunshine and I could count at least 20 visible with a number more out and about.

Soaking up the sun

They have also produced a quantity of frog spawn so I hope the freezing weather is over. Difficult to see how much as they sensibly were right in the centre of Woggle water pond.

There were some quite big frogs on show.

I hope the Heron doesn’t take too many!!

Our whole swan family disappeared last week and I was not sure if they had gone for good! I was relieved to see them arrive back on Thursday afternoon.

I took a call today from a pond owner in Hepscott, I think where the swans came from 3 years ago. He was asking if I had seen the swans as they had been on his pond for the last three days, and he had been feeding them. He was relieved to hear they were ok and back at the reserve.

It looks like they just fancied a trip out😜

We had our first group visit of 2025 on Thursday. We welcomed Pumpkin pre-school from Felton for their first ever visit to Clarks Bog. We had two teachers Kate and Abi and nine 3-4 year old pre-schoolers.

They had a bit of adventure getting to the reserve needing to get two different buses to get from Felton, very brave teachers doing that with nine pre-schoolers😃.

They had a good wander around the reserve and watched the birds being fed, they particularly liked the ducks and swans.

Due to parental permissions I cannot post any pictures, sign of the times I’m afraid!

They appear to have a good time and have asked to come back next month.

Many thanks to Ron, one of our bee keepers, for the very kind gift of a bee suit. I can now get up close and personal when they are opening the hives.

A cute little killer visited the reserve today.

You have to watch the video clip a little closely as I did not have my camera with me just my phone. If you look closely we have a weasel picking up a vole, it had previously dispatched, and it carries it off.

Our bird ringers caught a new bird for the reserve. We have seen them before but never caught one. It was a Lesser Redpoll, a very pretty little bird.

I’m happy and sad to say Tiddles our young swan has left the reserve. It’s now 2 weeks since she was last seen so I’m pretty sure she has gone. Thankfully I have not found any piles of feathers so I think she was still alive and hopefully is off finding a nice safe home.