A few very warm days this week and the reserve is humming with life - butterflies, dragonflies, grasshoppers, crickets, hoverflies, bugs, beetles and innumerable other beasties can be encountered around the trail. The two photos that I posted on the gallery today are of a short-cloaked moth, a tiny but beautiful visitor to our moth trap at this time of year and a variable damselfly, one of the scarcer species of odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) that can be found on the reserve. Late June and early July is a great time here - a few passage waders are appearing on the pools on the north brooks (6 green sandpipers today), butterflies such as meadows browns, ringlets, skippers and gatekeepers appear in their hundreds around the trail, brown hawker dragonflies cruise the hedgerows and dtiches, many of the small birds are still feeding young, and the first fallow deer fawns are starting to appear alongside their mothers (nettley's hide and little hanger hides are good places for seeing them).