What an exciting week we have had! Our Peregrine Watch Site opened on Saturday with our launch event. It was really nice to meet all our new volunteers and show them the birds. Since then they have been nest scraping and mating which is a really good sign that they are looking to ‘start a family’ this year. I am currently sitting in our peregrine shed at the watch site and there are hailstones outside. It is freezing! I just hope this cold weather is not detrimental to the birds breeding successfully.

The past few days have been really warm and sunny so other wildflowers have been making an appearance including lesser celandine and golden saxifrage. Golden saxifrage is an ancient woodland indicator species. There is a list of these indicator species and if you have a certain number of them in an area then you can definitively say that it used to be ancient woodland. The seed bank should still be in the soil so if you have a site like ours that is very conifer dense, once you chop them down and favour native broadleaved trees those wildflowers will begin to reappear!

We have also been lucky enough to see the otter again outside the visitor centre and the kingfisher was recently spotted along the boardwalk. If you have a nest box in your garden, I am sure like me you will have been seeing birds scouting it out. I was delighted to see a very eager blue tit looking closely at one of our nest boxes on the reserve. I am going to go back in a week or two and see if he has taken up residence!

Laura Preston – Scottish Wildlife Trust, Falls of Clyde Ranger
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