Yesterday we woke to snow. The radio broadcasts are full of dire warnings of congestion and mayhem, but here the snow brings quiet and a sense of community. The birds have laid aside their spring posturings and squabblings and focus together on the more pressing business of staying alive. Even the black swans, whose territorial feelings have been running so high they could not tolerate one another on the pond, now strut together on the ice and feed almost amicably in the little open water that is left.
Out in the meadow, one of the ewes has given birth. Michael spots the lamb when he takes the sheep their barley before breakfast. Later I find the mother guarding a spot tucked under the hedge near the gypsy caravan and sneak a distant photo. We are anxious not to disturb her as all seems well. But when I inspect the photo more closely at home I can make out another tiny black form in the snow - she has twins! As the day warms, the snow begins to melt. 
I take out more barley and this time I come close enough to see that the lambs, though sturdy, are soaked with drippings from the branches overhead and the weaker one is trembling. Time to move them. Michael tucks one under each arm and, with the ewe trotting at our heels and bleating continuously, we begin the trek to the Shaker smallholding where they can take shelter in a hut filled with dry straw. The Jacobs ewe has been here before and as soon as she has her babies restored, settles in contentedly. So far so good. 
Heavy frost is forecast tonight, but if they can keep dry, the lambs will take their warmth from her. I am minded of the Spartans, who exposed their newborn infants on the mountainside overnight to see if they were fit for the harsh life that lay ahead. Those that survived would make good warriors! Well our little Spartans should be safe now. Let's hope they are soon strong enough to go back to their flock.
At the other end of the smallholding we have a new resident, a wee bonny Shetland pony, called Pebbles, who walked all the way here from her former home in Hassocks, with young Mike on Saturday! She has moved into the long pen where she has a good shelter from the north wind.
Until this sudden blast from Siberia, we had been enjoying the mildest winter we can remember, with primroses blooming since, November,and red campions, stragglers from last summer, flowering amidst 
the snowdrops and aconites! And despite the snow,the woodland bulbs are still visibly growing, and hazel catkins, capped with ice, are lengthening into proper 'lamb's tails', that waggle in the wind. I wonder what town children make of that folk-name if they hear it now. Some footpath walkers who stopped to chat the other day, were surprised to see our sheep 'undocked'. 
Their children did not know that they could have long and bushy tails. But you have to see a proper lamb's tail to appreciate how the hazel catkins mimic that distinctive kink at the end! When I was a child, I had a book called 'Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare', which caused me no end of confusion and I still cannot break the connection between catkins and the Bard! At any rate, spring seems unstoppable! And thank Heaven for that!
Stoneywish reopens on March 1st. Michael has been busy coppicing hazels in the Reserve and weaving new wattle fences out of the long poles for the herb garden beds. There's fencing still to do, and he and Mike have plans to re-build the tepee in the Play Area. And we have been busy putting together a programme of talks for the History Mornings, which begin again in April. First up, yours truly, with a History of the English Artisan Hand-Press: Puritan Pamphleteers to St. Dominic's Press here on the Common, via some rather famous and eccentric exponents of self-publishing, including William Blake, William Morris and a pirate-loving consumptive and his twelve-year-old stepson who set up their print-shop in a Swiss Hotel!
Today, a windless, sweltering day, of the sort you remember from childhood summers: white clouds adrift in azure overhead, the whirr of grasshoppers, gorse pods popping, I set out on an insect safari through the Reserve, to see what I can find in a leisurely hour, walking and stopping for photographs. My sightiongs follow the contours of meadow and woodland, with the greatest concentration of species, as always, in the open, sunny grassland of the Bog Pond.
Where insect numbers are highest there will be the greatest choice of food for predators, so these numbers matter for us and the national statistics, which show a widespread, dramatic decline in insect populations, carry grave consequences for British wildlife as a whole. After all, though it is gratifying for us to help garden
birds through the winter on offerings of nigella seeds and dried meal worms from China, we cannot pretend that this is truly a sustainable solution. We are told that cuckoos are dying out for lack of moths to eat. How many of us know which plants are good for moths? I admit to real ignorance here, hoping that the big oak trees, the birches, willows and poplars at Stoneywish give enough scope for a range of species, but these invisible lacunae in the food web, may prove to be just as critical as the more recognised problems of pollution or predator imbalance.
Butterfly numbers for us seem to be down on last year. Perhaps the cold early spring affected them, but I find gatekeepers, common blues, the last of the skippers and meadow browns in the long 
grass, where over 20 species of wild flowers are immediately visible. Red admirals and commas are beginning to appear in the apple orchard, while speckled wood have been abundant, under the trees, since March. Early dragonflies are about too. And the flowers with far and away the most insect guests? Apart from the herbs in the herb garden, they are dreaded hogweed, thistle, blackberry, 
teasel and the greeny-white, waxy stars of white bryony, all with clouds of eager hover flies! Gold finches are busy already amongst the thistledown.
will move on to teasel seeds as they ripen in turn. Who will eat the great biscuit-like fruit of the hogweed? Or the poison-bright berries of the bryony and cuckoo pint, which bejewel the woodland floor?
At the end of my safari I followed a family along a path to the Play Area. Two little boys, four or five years old, were trailing behind their mothers, recalling the highlights of their trip last summer. Ice cream? Swings? Friendly pigs? Not a mention! This is what I heard instead: "Yeah, this is the place with the Doctor Who plants.
I remember." "Yeah, the Dr. Who plants." Do they mean the giant himalayan balsam, which can catapult its seeds 6 feet when the pods explode? Another weed loathed by all, though punch-drunk bumble-bees think they have found paradise when they reach the blossoms. "Yeah, this is where the grasshoppers are!" "Yeah! The grasshoppers!!! .." Ah, those summer days of childhood ... Forget the latest stress-busting courses. All you need to do is step out of time and get down on your hands and knees!
The cherry tree outside our door is laden with ripening fruit and a blackbird has taken up residence bang in the middle of it. When he is not positively gorging himself, he stands guard to ward off approaches from all others, especially humans. Now I am more than happy to share, but the blackbird considers the fruit to be exclusively his and becomes extremely agitated if he sees us steal any. which gives a touching insight into our place in the order of things. According to the bats, foxes, squirrels, moles, rabbits and toads who rightly think the nature reserve is theirs, we must be little more than trespassers with annoying habits!
The young creatures here are growing up very fast while the world around them signals the arrival of high summer. Long grass in the pinetum resounds to the churr-churr of innumerable grasshoppers, and the bog pond is dappled with butterflies: skippers, meadow browns and marbled whites. Overhead, comes the screech of swifts as they hunt for flies, and today,a flash of blue indicating a kingfisher on the black swan pond. Every honey bee for miles seems to have found its way to the great lime tree near the old farm yard, which is now in bloom. We should harvest some blossoms too, for fresh lime flower tea is one of the treats of summer and a soothing tonic for the nerves.
Everybody seems to know about elderflower spritzers, but linden-blossom tea remains a delicious secret. In fact it is hard to keep up with the successive harvests of the season: sorrel for soup: chive flowers, marigolds and nasturtiums to enliven a salad; blue borage flowers for summer drinks (delightful frozen into ice cubes); and rose petals in sandwiches! All have beneficial herbal properties too! Other seasonal plants inspire different uses: astringent southernwood to drive away clothes moths, and tutsan, a member of the st. john's wort family, whose leaves were traditionally pressed into Bibles as fragrant bookmarks. All can be found in the Reserve at this time of year.
These summer mornings Michael rises at 5 or five thirty and goes out for a few hours, cutting docks and thistles with his swaphook before breakfast. Apparently haymakers traditionally worked early, partly to avoid the heat of the day, but also because, as the dew dries, grasses become tougher to cut, and the same is true of weeds. The trick is to catch your them just before they flower, for then all the energy of the plants is concentrated in the leaves and they will be less likely to come back in strength. Working by hand is laborious, 
but this way he can trim round the meadow plants he wants to conserve and this year we have a wonderful profusion of wildflowers: meadowsweet and birds-foot trefoil, hardheads, clovers, vetches and in the Bog Pond, drifts of lady's bedstraw, agrimony and sticky mouse-ear. His cutting blade is honed to a lethal edge and regularly re-sharpened and this particular tool is now wafer thin, but Michael insists the vintage steel is better than anything you can buy new.
Michael remembers assisting bug-hunters and beetle-collectors in his boyhood and our Bog Pond now gives an idea of what the countryside at large must have been like. 
This area, which is left virtually to manage itself, teams with insect life in a way altogether different from the rest of the reserve. Perhaps the proximity of water helps. Soon there will be dragonflies and damselflies and the red-spotted burnet moths which fly by day. At any rate there should be enough critters about this summer to keep naturalists, young or old, happy this summer!
Here are some details about camping at Stoneywish. If you would like to make a reservation, please telephone our ticket office during opening hours (Fri-Mon 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. during school term time and every day 10. a.m. - 5 p.m. during school holidays March to October inclusive). You can also book through www.grasshoppers-uk.com
Facilities
That country saying about not casting clouts in May has certainly proved wise advice this year. (Gardeners and farmers know that frosts here, even in the south, can catch early strawberries, so I reject the recent reading of 'May' as whitethorn blossom. No one would 
The last few weeks have seen a mass fledging of baby birds in the Reserve. The vegetation resounds all day long with their high-pitched 'tseet-tseet-tseet' and we have been lucky enough to see little flocks of blue tits and great tits venturing from tree to tree and still fluttering their wings for gifts of grubs from their parents. The collar doves, which nested above our front door, have successfully reared two young and we have blackbirds and wrens busy guarding nests nearby. The dense tangle of undergrowth here gives them a chance against marauding magpies, though it is not always easy to explain this when Chelsea still sets the model for gardening! A visiting maintenance engineer recently popped his head over the fence and stared in wonder at the long grass and rampant rambler roses:
"What's this then, 'The Darling Buds of May'?" We took it as a compliment for, honestly, it is such a joy to step out into a Baby Bird Garden, I feel certain we could convert even the diehards of the RHS! Yesterday, on my way to feed the chickens, I heard more high-pitched juvenile voices and spotted 10 or more goldcrests in a pine tree, hopping about like jumping beans and making the same fluttering petitions for food. And other babies abound here too, rabbits and squirrels and fox cubs, harder to see. 
Wild roses and foxgloves are now in bloom in the Reserve; the Apothecary's Roses in the Herb Garden merit a visit for their heavenly scent, and everywhere still looks remarkably lush, despite two months of drought. The Austrian scientist and naturalist Victor Schauberger, claimed that trees could create water, deep underground, through the chemical action of their roots, and considering how much water a single willow transpires in a day, I can think of no other reason for them surviving so well. 
We are so often burdened with a sense of responsibility for maintaining everything in the world, I like the idea of such invisible processes which sustain us without fuss or fee.
As for the goslings, they are now great lumping adolescents, difficult to distinguish from their parents at a glance, but still rather downy and squeaky on closer inspection. The ducklings too have gained their feathers, just as all the big birds are losing theirs, for the great summer goose moult is now 
Anyone who wants to make their own Warrior's Headdress to wear at the Wild West Fort in the Play Area, should hurry here while stocks last!!