Scorchio!

Whiskered bat with water crystals attached!

Lesser Horseshoes, no flash allowed

 A day to savour and for once our weathermen got a prediction right, with sunny cloudless skies dominating. Morris beat me to Sherborne, fresh from his Barcelona break, and with Mike we headed up to the bat cave for the delayed April bat count. As ever my predictions on numbers were wide of the mark but none of us expected the overall numbers found at the bat roosts we survey at Sherborne. So the bat cave winter roost still had 126 lesser horseshoes plus 1 whiskered, the Kennels had an impressive 45 lesser horseshoes, the bothy still 0 but the Cellars in the nursery a magnificent 40 lesser horseshoes : A grand total of 212 a new record for Sherborne. In the Cellar summer roost there was even evidence of mating so we may have some little bats flying around soon, so all in all excellent news for our bat population. For once the temperature inside the bat cave was cooler than outside which was quite pleasant given the increasingly warming weather outside. Another bonus during the morning was that the excellent weather brought out several butterflies {peacocks, cabbage white, brimstone and a large turquoise } and not to be outdone the birds got into the act with swallows, house martins, raven, buzzards, tits and linnets amongst others enjoying the day.

Unfortunately had to 'earn my keep', so in the hottest part of the year so far,  the afternoon had me splitting wood in the nursery followed by a rapid trip up to Lodge Park for the first mowing of the lawns for the coming bank holiday, Mike operating from the Kubota. Not much life discovered in the Lodge pond yet but hopefully the warmer weather will soon remedy this with more of what we saw last year to come.

Ended the day with a quick visit to the newly planted hedges at Sandy Hill and Clarks Close and was pleased to see some 800+ hedge plants all in place and protected from the local wildlife to enable 2 healthy hedges to develop over the next few years.

Hedge 2, with Sandy Hill at one end

Hedge1, alongside Sandy Hill with Clarks close in the distance