A View From the Field - by Ranger James

Recently the volunteers have been working hard in the community garden with many sessions planting, weeding and tending to the garden so we can produce a good harvest for donation to the Downham Gleaning Pantry. They’ve also been supporting the park gardening team in the wider formal garden area to help them keep it looking so lovely.

Volunteers have also restarted their beekeeping by checking the colony we had in our onsite hive had successfully over-wintered and are keeping their eyes peeled for any swarms in the park they can house in the other currently vacant hive.

Butterfly Conservation visited the park earlier this month and walked a surveying transect with myself and some volunteers, this is becoming a regular monitoring walk and we feed the sightings into a national database. We also talked about some of the woodland scallops (little clearings on woodland edges) which are good for butterflies and have since done some nettle clearing on a couple of them.

West Kent Badge Group visited the park last week, this followed reports of sightings of young badgers on the edge of the park, we walked round a number of habitat areas which would be suitable for setts and found some positive signs although nothing definite yet, West Kent Badger Group’s volunteers have been given permission to perform regular surveying on site with the hope of identifying any setts so that we can ensure they are protected.

Keep your eyes peeled for a sparrowhawk that has been seen taking dust baths on dry areas between the drive and the pleasure ground area, it’s delightful to watch!