The dark knight rises

Alien lands on Lodge Park roof?

After the torrential rain, view over deer park

Toad of Lodge pond, courtesy of Andy

Last week was a wash out! but today Andy {work experience}, myself and Mike hit Lodge Park for some mowing and strimming. One or two surprises before we began the mornings work. It was sunny, we witnessed the bee keeper remove a few thousand wild bees from the Lodge chimneys and Andy captured a picture of one of the resident toads in the Lodge pond. Pleased to say the tadpoles and newts also continue to do well in this surprisingly well stocked habitat.

Our luck didn't last as the heavens opened as we started the mowing but we had to carry on since this weekend an Opera was to be staged at the Lodge so everything needed to be in good presentable shape. As the above image above suggests we did finally get some respite as the sun broke through late in the morning to allow us to complete the mowing and dry out.

The afternoon was spent in the Pleasure Grounds at Sherborne in the vicinity of the ice house and 'round' seat where during my mowing I encountered a large {6 children!}, friendly family all the way from Idaho! The day was not quite over as we made our way over to the bat cave to meet up with Morris, our dark knight!,  at the quarry.  Before we could make our way to the bat entrance Mike had to carve his way through dense vegetation, yes there had been quite a growth spurt since our last visit. The objective of this visit was to see if any of the lesser horseshoe bats were still in residence. I lost heavily on my guess on the numbers still present, with Mike winning with his zero entry! So the planning for the work needed to be done on this bat habitat can proceed with suitable haste and hopefully later in July should see start of implementation without impact on the bats.

Quite a day and marked with a return to what seems to be normal weather as my return trip home was hit by a violent thunderstorm.