A local wander round the village and surrondings was a little disapointing bird wise, plenty of redwing and fieldfares aling with a buzzard and two red kites the highlight, but I did find over a dozen species plants in flower. I found a bank vole in the house probably brought in by the cat and took a few photos before safe release.

A roundup of the week, a nice woodcock flushed in my little nature reserve, incidental sightings of brown hare, red fox, muntjac, buzzard, red kite on my commute. The camera traps in my little nature reserve had badger, red fox, brown rat, muntjac, roe deer, grey squirrel and a few birds but only jay of note.

Finally able to get out again after my illness, I took a local walk to the next village only 2 miles, it was bitterly cold and very boggy underfoot. There was very little about apart from large numbers of fieldfare and redwing and a nice green woodpecker. A few common plants were found groundsel, white and red dead nettle, sweet violet, shepherds purse, creeping buttercup some nice fungi and a 7 spot ladybird rounded off the walk.

The usual suspects on the nature reserve camera trap, several jays were new to the camera trap area but they are present in the reserve. But the best capture was an otter, fairly regular on the reserve but alway nice to see. I have added another camera to replace the Little Acorn which did not survive being submerged by the floods at Christmas.

Finally after 18 years a brambling has shown up in my garden I get lots of finches and have had siskin and lesser redpoll but never brambling, I was very happy to have this visitor. I get some nice birds in my garden yellowhammer, reed bunting, tawny owl. Some garden visitors have now gone such as turtle dove, corn bunting and tree sparrow so it is nice to get some new additions.

For the past month I have been testing a home made camera in my garden, and it has performed well, with just a couple fo tweeks during its first month of operation. It is a Wifi camera that runs of rechargable batteries, ideal as I did not want to put power up to the top of the garden and being battery powered I can move it anywhere in the garden. I placed the camera in a waterproof box and added a solar pack to help charge the camera so I can leave it in place for longer, and although these are inside the case reducing effeciency, so far it lasts for a week before it needs recharging. It communicates with an app on a smartphone.

Camera features
The camera send alerts when battery is low
The camera send alerts when it is triggered
It records video to a micro SD card and these videos can be viewed via the smartphone app
It is sensitive enought to detect mice and sparrows close foucs is about 15cm from the lens. But best of all you can watch the camera in realtime via the app, I have even watched it from work.
There are some downsides the app is pretty basic and I get quite a few false trips but apart from that I am pretty pleased with the result.

I have been waiting for alerts from the comfort of my armchair then watching live on my phone and sometimes going to see the visitor in person. It works both day and night and the total cost to build was less than £ 80.

I have mentioned my little nature reserve quite a bit but have never really described exactly what it is. It was good to visit during the lockdown and I spent quite a bit of time there. It is a small private reserve (approx. 1 hectare) on the site where I work near Newmarket, there is no public access. The site is a mixture of wet woodland and marsh, it is surrounded on 3 sides by a river which loops round the site and the final side is a flood defence bank from where the site is accessed. There is a circular path round the site and a clearing near the entrance. The site floods regularly in the winter as the photos show from Christmas eve. I have run a few moth traps, run camera traps and this winter a bird ringer who works on site and I have set up bird feeding stations in the wood and he has been doing some bird ringing. But it is the mammals of this site which is my real interest as I have recorded 23 species in this small area and more bat work to do . It is quite diverse with over 170 moth species, 17 butterfly species, 10 dragonflies and I started a botanical list during lockdown with over 100 plants currently recorded. Plans for the future are to install more bird and bat boxes, do more moth trapping and do more bat detecting.

I was woken at 6am by noises in the house, it was the cat that had brought in a wood mouse. I rescued the mouse and put in a tank with some food and released it a couple of hours later.