As the days grew longer our spring began with the breeding bird surveys, conducted by our team of dedicated volunteers, who between them cover as much of the site as is accessible. The early mornings paid off as they found at least 30 nightingale territories, 8 turtle dove territories and a wealth of warblers and other small birds including grasshopper warbler, willow warbler, blackcap, cuckoo and many more. Juvenile turtle doves were later spotted on site this year giving us proof that their breeding was successful. Barn owls once again bred here and the highlight for staff and volunteers was a pair of long-eared owls raising two chicks on site!

As spring progressed the site came to life with birdsong, wildflowers and insects everywhere. Managing the site during springtime is a real treat for the senses whilst we enjoy the fruits of our labour from the previous winter season of scrub works. For a short while we put to rest our noisy scrub management tools, including brushcutters and chainsaws, and we take stock of spring’s bounty. Bird song abounds and the fresh scent from abundant blossoms assaults the senses. It’s the beginning of a more relaxed period of time for reserve staff when we undertake more low impact management activities so as not to disturb our nesting bird populations. We repair and install fences and gates, and maintain the public rights of way so users can continue to enjoy the site as the grass and scrub have a spurt in growth along the footpaths and bridleways. 

It’s also when we join forces to undertake more valuable monitoring on site as it is crucial we understand what we have on site in order to manage and protect it in a sensitive way going forward. We check in with our other volunteer surveyors who this year looked for butterflies and bats. We focused our butterfly surveys on one particular species this year - the purple hairstreak. Their caterpillars will only eat oak leaves so the adults are usually seen flitting around the crowns of oak trees, feeding almost exclusively on honeydew. Volunteers staked out a dozen oak trees around Strawberry Hill and discovered purple hairstreaks occupied most of them, with a peak count of 20 individuals in July.

After the early white of the blackthorn flowers was over the May blossom (hawthorn) took hold.  As the days warmed, newly created rides and glades came to life with abundant wildflowers such as common centaury, black knapweed, yellowwort and common spotted orchid. We were particularly excited to find that slender tare, a vulnerable plant that has suffered declines across the country, is thriving across much of Strawberry Hill. It was particularly visible on disturbed ground where scrub management has taken place. We are excited to monitor the range of this plant on site and learn more about its habitat preferences.

Taking advantage of this abundance of nectar, insects such as butterflies and the red-headed cardinal beetles also moved into these newly created niches, which offer a warm and sheltered habitat perfect for abundant insect life. Trail cameras, set up across the site in spring, also delivered images of the elusive woodcock. A species of bird which typically hides away in scrub during the day and comes out to feed and display in open grassy glades at night – demonstrating another wonderful benefit of creating open space within a dense scrub habitat. 

In the summer evenings we’ve had regular bat surveys, although the wet weather meant a couple had to be cancelled, as well as two evenings spent trapping bats under a Natural England project licence. The number and variety of bats heard during the transects were much lower than last year – just common and soprano pipistrelles heard regularly around the site, with a few Mytotis and a single brown long-eared bat call also heard in July. The first trapping survey in May was on a very quiet night where no bats were caught and only a few common pipistrelles were heard flying. In contrast when we returned to another part of the site in early August we found juvenile pipistrelles, both common and soprano, and adults who had given birth. The highlight was catching three whiskered bats – a species of Myotis bat that is often impossible to identify from echolocation call alone. Again, the two adult females had given birth previously and the third whiskered bat was a young male indicating a breeding population is present in the area. This brings our total number of bat species using Strawberry Hill up to 11, just one shy of all those found in Bedfordshire.

As summer came to a close, we also began searching for small mammals on site. Back in September we set 20 small mammal traps – each set up with a comfy nest chamber with plenty of bedding and food. Unsurprisingly we caught several wood mice, but also a pygmy shrew and the highlight was two water shrews – another new specie for the site’s list! Water shrews are rather elusive animals, slightly bigger than the common shrew and as their name implies usually found near water. We are planning to improve and increase the wetland habitats on the reserve which should benefit this and other species.

As the days drew shorter and cooler still, birds either began their migration to their over-wintering grounds or, for those hardy enough to see out a British winter, turned their attention to feeding and fattening up. This in turn marks the beginning of a new season of winter works on site. So far this season, we have created a new path which connects the central bridleway to the public footpath which runs alongside the stream (we like to call this the Willow Path), this then connects up with a new path that we created last scrub season (currently nicknamed Warriner’s Way, not sure how that came about!) allowing you to walk all the way up to the southern bridleway running southwest to east across the site. The southern end of this path offers far reaching views across the scrub and really gives you a feel for just how extensive Strawberry Hill is. Warriner’s Way is currently undergoing some scrub works to extend the flower rich glades along its edges and grass cutting to remove some of the nutrient and dominant plants from the system. This gives the less dominant plants space to thrive in the upcoming spring/summer season.

We finished off the year looking for harvest mouse nests in a joint event with the Bedfordshire Mammal Group where we found four nests to add to the four found previously by staff and volunteers whilst doing other work on site over the autumn. Harvest mouse numbers declined with the intensification of agriculture as they need the taller vegetation to nest in. There’s been a big push locally and nationally to get more accurate records on where we still have harvest mice and our data feeds back into this project.

One of our long-term aims for Strawberry Hill is for it to become an important site for research into rewilding and other ecological processes. We are starting from a strong position; last year we had many local and national experts out surveying the site, and this year we have had researchers from various institutions and at different stages of their career running projects on site. This summer we had two Master’s students investigating different aspects of the soils across Strawberry Hill and adjacent habitats. We’ve also had a team of researchers from the UK Centre of Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) collecting data for several projects looking at using technology to remotely monitor of sites which will increase the amount of data that can be collected. A major part of this was calculating the above-ground biomass (amount of plant material) of scrub at Strawberry Hill using drone imagery, scrub samples taken on site and computer modelling. Strawberry Hill was used as a field site for a few international MAMBO (Modern Approaches to Biodiversity Monitoring) projects that are looking into the automatic identification of moths, pollinators, and bats.

Lastly, we wanted to give a massive THANK YOU to everyone who has supported us at this wonderful site, be it through volunteering, fundraising, collaborations or spreading the word!

Chantelle Warriner Reserve Officer and Gwen Hitchcock Senior Monitoring and Research Officer