NERD Club February meeting.
NERD Club are ‘Naturalists and Ecologists Recording data’ – a group for young naturalists held at Upper Woodburn. Thank you very very much to Lyn Jones who led such a brilliant session on mosses in the morning. We used an ID sheet of a few interesting mosses and did a bit of a moss scavenger hunt. It was amazing how good the young people were at managing to find the mosses on the sheet and pick them out from all the other mosses around the place.
Please do put any moss pictures with your IDs on inaturalist. I hope that now I have worked out how to add you all properly, your observations will come up on the group.
After the moss walk, and the microscope exercise, we headed back out to hang the nestboxes on the proper hangers that eventually arrived. This will keep the nestboxes hanging free from the tree trunks and help keep them dry. We saw evidence that birds were already roosting in at least 5 of the nestboxes which is a good sign. We also popped in to see the dipper nest under the bridge and saw it had built a new nest! I hope they breed again this year – we can keep an eye on them to see how they progress.
After that we had a productive couple of hours pulling our rhododendrons and making a huge fire to burn the ones we took out at our December meeting.
Upper Woodburn 