Our little Roe deer doe has delivered fawn(s) for the 5th year in a row.

I’m still not sure how many fawns she has had as I have only seen her with one fawn. Last year it was 6 weeks before I confirmed that she had triplets due to the way Roe deer hide their fawns in different locations and only feed them one at a time initially.

She appeared to have a fawn on Saturday at around midday, thankfully it appears to be fit and healthy.

While we still await the arrival of this years fawns we have had a new first on the reserve. This is the birth of our first ever brood of Coot chicks. We have a family of five chicks that arrived two days ago. I had never seen Coot chicks, so I wasn’t prepared for the exotic colour scheme, I’m not sure why the chicks have such a colourful head dress, when the adult is just black and white. My guess it it makes it easier for the parents to keep track of them?

I have also been expecting the arrival of our dragonflies and yesterday I was pleased to see my first pair of Broad Bodied Chaser dragonflies. These are the first dragonflies of the summer that emerge on Clarks Bog each year. They were mating, so it take them long to get down to the business of reproducing the next generation.

We also have our second brood of Moorhen chicks on the reserve at Woggle Water pond. I hope they fair better than the first brood, which was on Dunces Corner pond, they were all predated.

Our special visitor is an infrequent visitor to the reserve but a very welcome on. Its one of the UK’s most beautiful birds (in my opinion) it is the Kingfisher. I only saw it for about 5 minutes an it was off, hopefully as the ponds mature more we may see them more frequently.

Charles and Camilla have finally produced a family, we now have three cygnets. There were a further three eggs in the nest but I’m told by my bird experts that they will not hatch now, so we will not have any further additions.

Here are a few pictures taken over the last couple of days:-

Our young bucks from last years crop were out last night with mum having a good time playing among the Marsh Marigolds.

A strange squealing in the undergrowth stopped me in my tracks, further investigation revealed our local Stoat collecting his next meal (poor bunny). I watched this amazing little animal drag the bunny (bigger than itself) a good 100 metres. It even dragged it over a large log pile, across a road, to its larder under a brush heap.

Unfortunately I found out that the owner of the brush heap was due to burn it that evening. I had previously spotted another likely Stoat bolt hole nearby so I set up a camera to see if the Stoat escaped the burn. Thankfully as you can see below, it appears to be in rude health, so watch out all you little bunnies!

I have added gate building to my skills, I thought a 5 bar gate would look the part for access to the middle of the reserve. So why not build one from scratch!

There are just under 400 pairs of these birds in the UK and we were very privileged to receive a visit from one of these pairs yesterday and today.

A very fine pair of Marsh Harriers appeared over the reserve and then spent at least one night here. Last seen at 13.30 today.

My big pond birds all ganged up on one of the Harriers that landed near a Little Grebe nest. Amazing to see all these different species coming together to see off the Harrier!

Just a quick update, our Harriers are still around after 4 days which is encouraging and today there was evidence of possible nest building activity. See below:-

Well its that time of the year when something new arrives on the reserve every few days. Below are some pics of those that have arrived over the last week or so.

We also have both pairs of Swans and Canada Geese sitting on eggs, so fingers crossed.

It looks like our resident Doe is pregnant again, so fingers crossed we will have the pitter patter of tiny hooves!

Its about this time of year that she parts company with (or more accurately spends a lot less time with) her youngsters from last year. I have picked them all up on my trail cameras so here are a couple of short clips of ‘the family’.

I also have a clip of a very handsome mature buck, maybe daddy!

Thomas and Josh, have done a fab job converting a kids toy house into a multi occupancy bird house. Lets hope the tree sparrows appreciate all the work that went into the conversion!

The house has six separate rooms accessed via the windows around the house, lets hope they can find the way in.