Morgan's Hill Reserve 360 Degree Virtual Tour

I freely admit that I haven't blogged for a while, but this little beauty is definitely worth the wait. Morgan's Hill is within Wiltshire Wildlife Trust's New Life for Chalk Grassland scheme, which itself is part of the larger Wildlife Trust's Living Landscapes scheme. Whilst browsing the Living Landscapes web pages today I came across this gem of a virtual tour which shows Morgan's Hill in all its glory. Check out the New Life for Chalk Grassland info page and tour here, or bask in the beauty of the full-on, full-page version here. Once you've done that get yourself up the North Wessex Downs, if you can, and enjoy it for real. However, some words of advice; winter might be over, but give it a month or so, everything is behind schedule this year.

Wiltshire Wildlife Trust - Morgans Hill Reserve

Common Spotted Orchid

Yesterday I took up a new role as Assistant Reserve Warden at the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust's reserve at Morgans Hill on the Marlborough Downs. Morgans Hill is a superb area of mostly north facing chalk downland. It has a stunning array of orchids, wildflowers and butterflies. Unfortunately I didn't see any butterflies yesterday because the weather wasn't great but I was shown a good number of orchids and wildflowers by Reserve Warden, Tony Coultiss.

We spent several hours walking round the reserve discussing the role and generally observing what was happening on the reserve. I was on the look-out for birds whilst Tony showed me round.

There were a large number of yellowhammers, meadow pipits and skylarks. I saw a couple of ravens flying away from the reserve, a grey partridge in the car-park and best of all I spotted a red kite on the slopes just to the north of the site. Absolutely amazing bird and really pleased because that's the first time I've seen one in my locality.

Fly Orchid

Yellow Rattle

Here you can see some of the plants that we observed. The fly orchid is particularly rare and Tony had never seen any kidney vetch on the site in the previous six years. However, he knew

Kidney Vetch

Horseshoe Vetch

that  it  was  present because of the presence of a particular butterfly that only feeds on kidney vetch.

As things progress and I become more and more involved I will return to this subject in the future. No doubt I will have other observations and photos to share.