Abberton Ranger Blog – June 2018

Abberton Ranger Blog – June 2018

June has so far been a pretty dry month. The warm, sunny weather has brought out the butterflies, including Ringlet, a lovely dark colour butterfly with ring shaped patterns on the underside of the wings.

Our grassland areas have lots of other butterflies about at the moment including Common blue, Small heath and Small skipper. We have lots of foodplants in our wildflower areas which should help them along. Our newly planted trees may well start to suffer though if we do not get some rain soon. The clay soil cracks open which can expose the roots. Hopefully they are planted deep enough to manage until rain comes. I gave a guided walk to a group of 16 who enjoyed looking at the maturing nature reserve and hearing about our future plans for it including an area of reed bed. The reserve volunteers are busy looking after the reserve, keeping it well maintained and doing work around the wider reservoir site.