Wildlife
Bats
The Old Lodge attic is a bat roost and bats are a protected species. This fact was highlighted in the paperwork when we purchased the property. We invited the The Wildlife Trust to come and visit and an outcome was an introduction to the British Trust for Ornithology based in Thetford who were happy to loan us specialist audio recording equipment they had developed for their bat survey project. We made recordings over five consecutive nights over two locations, one by the trout stream at the bottom of our lawn, and the other in an area of woodland well away from the house. The recording resulted in thousands of small audio wav files which when processed through the BTO Acoustic Pipeline tools produced a spreadsheet of classifier results identifying species with the degree of accuracy.
Barbastelle (Barbastella barbastellus) 99%
Brown Long-eared Bat (Plecotus auritus) 99%
Soprano Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pygmaeus) 99%
Common Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) 98%
Noctule (Nyctalus noctula) 98%
Natterer's Bat (Myotis nattereri) 91%
Leisler's Bat (Nyctalus leisleri) 90%
Daubenton's Bat (Myotis daubentonii) 87%
Brandt's Bat (Myotis brandtii) 86%
Badgers
There is an historic badger sett in one area of the woods but we have seen no recent activity here. However on several occasions we have noticed fresh digging throughout the woods and in the autumn this exposed several wasp nests where badgers have fed on the grubs. In this video taken at the end of June we placed our wildlife camera over a freshly dug scrape at the edge of the meadow and sure enough we captured a video of three badgers that very night.
Heron
We have a heron who comes and visits the trout stream occasionally so we placed the wildlife camera near the little foot bridge to see if we could capture our visitor.
Tawny Owl
Friends bought us a Tawney Owl box as a moving in present which we mounted near the cart shed, visible from the house. So far only pigeons have used the box, but in the summer a Tawny Owl visited the garden several times at dusk. It perched on the fruit cages and hammock support close to the raised patio area, and flew across the garden near the trout stream and into the woods. It is going to be quite a challenge to capture a video or photograph this impressive bird, but we do often hear a Tawny Owl hooting close by.
Greater Spotted Woodpecker
We have had a pair of greater spotted woodpeckers visit our garden bird feeders which is a nice variation from the large number of blue tits, great tits and long tailed tits we have.
Muntjac Deer
We often hear the barking of muntjac deer around our woods and have seen individuals several times quite close to the house and boardwalk. This video was taken near the trout stream.