Welcome to our new Website!

We are delighted to launch this new FoSL website. A simpler structure accompanies a brand new look with more, higher quality images.

Videos are also now included. Currently there are three. Others will be added over time, e.g. when new offshore camera footage becomes available.

This new site is also much more ‘phone-friendly. It reformats automatically to optimise use of varying screen dimensions on different devices. Try it!

Plus some back-end enhancements will make it easier for us to keep the site current.

Our thanks to everyone who contributed photographs to the site. Particular thanks to Giles Lury who generously allowed us to pick images from his wonderful “A man, his camera and a lake” website.

So why not browse this new site and all its features? And don’t forget to come back regularly to keep up to date with latest FoSL news and events. Enjoy!

A disappointing year for Butterflies

FoSL’s 2021 Butterfly survey report is just in. Unfortunately it makes for depressing reading with the second lowest count recorded since our surveys began. Periods of sustained heavy rain on and off through the spring and summer were undoubtedly a factor, but worryingly at a national level across the UK there appears to be a continuing decline in overall numbers of butterflies and moths.

The full FoSL Butterflies report 2021 can be downloaded from here. Our thanks to Cliff Buckton and team for conducting the survey and producing this report.

Another Successful School Visit

In early November FOSL Wardens Russell Ball and Nicola Pazdzierska hosted a party of students from Hayes and their teacher for a visit to the reserve. Teacher Ros Massey (who also brought her lovely dog Achilles) later sent us a thank you note. Here is an excerpt.

‘Dear Nicola and Russell,

Thank you so very much for giving up your time to meet with our Year 11 students from De Salis Studio College yesterday, and for talking to us about the cattle, trees, hedgerows, mink, bats, birds and Stockers Lake in general. It was so very interesting and the students were chatting enthusiastically about it for the duration of the return trip!

I really hope that this visit will inspire them to keep in touch with nature and volunteer to get involved with some projects.
(We might like to think about a Green Gym working party for them next time for an hour?)’

FOSL were really delighted to hear that the young people enjoyed themselves and the visit has hopefully ignited a keen interest in nature.

Orchid found on Cattle Meadow

A Pyramidal Orchid has been found this month on one of our cattle meadows. See picture.

One swallow doesn't make a summer, as they say, but this could be an early sign that our Cattle project involving the grazing each summer of several Dexter cows, by rotation on three designated meadows, is starting to bear fruit. The main purpose of having the cattle on those meadows is to improve them as a habitat for wild flowers. It will be a further 2-3 years before we would expect to see significant results from that initiative but the discovery of this orchid, which has not been noted on the reserve in recent times, is an early encouraging sign.

We shall continue to monitor.

The Dexters are back!

Good news! The Dexter cows, so vital to our strategic aim of restoring wildflowers to several meadows on the reserve, returned for the summer season on Sunday May 30th. The accompanying image, taken on June 10th, shows them happily in place on  the reserve.

The cattle will now stay on the reserve until around October when they will be removed to their winter quarters. These timings reflect best conservation advice from HMWT on how to use the cattle to achieve the aim of encouraging wild flowers.

Updated Privacy Statement

At its recent meeting on May 4th our Committee approved an updated version of FoSL's Privacy and Data Implementation policies. For more details please visit our Privacy Statement page.