Beautiful Butterfly

Yarner Wood, Bovey Valley and Trendlebere Down, located within the East Dartmoor Woods and Heaths National Nature Reserve, are fabulous hotspots for butterflies! Yarner Wood was one of the first sites to take on the annual recording of butterflies back in 1976, when the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme began. https://ukbms.org/methods Volunteer butterfly surveyors walking the Yarner Wood transect The ‘transect walk’ is quite an undertaking, requiring surveyors to walk a fixed route, in good weather, on a weekly basis betweenRead more

NESTEGG: You reap what you sow

Dr Malcolm Burgess explains the value of long-term nest box monitoring primarily at Yarner Wood In 1955, soon after Yarner Wood was designated as a National Nature Reserve, 50 nestboxes were put up in a small area near today’s office. These were for an experiment investigating whether Blue tits had any height preference for nesting, with two boxes put on trees at different heights to test this. The addition of nestboxes to Yarner Wood had an unintended consequence. In theRead more

Yarner Wood: Open Air Laboratory and Conservation Gem

Natural England are linking up with external contributors in our blogs to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the declaration of Yarner Wood as a National Nature Reserve (NNR). Yarner Wood, made ancient by the crucial relationship between trees and fungi, has seen many shifting attitudes towards it across it’s long past. In recent centuries, up to 1952, these beautiful woodlands were owned as part of the Yarner Estate. During this time, Yarner Wood was not a place of particular conservationRead more

Children Celebrate the Granite Railway – 200 years on   

We are in the 200th year since the Granite Tramway from the Haytor Quarries to Ventiford Basin on the Stover Canal was opened as Devon’s first railroad on Dartmoor. It was an incredible engineering achievement rolling 7 miles across the landscape and, unusually, its rails were hewn from the granite rock of Dartmoor in 1820. In 1813 George Templer inherited Haytor Quarry as part of the family business empire. One of his tenants, John Hatherly was working the Haytor Quarry onRead more

BioScan Flying Insect Project at Yarner Wood

Insects are of major ecological importance playing an essential role in ecosystems, pollination, nutrient recycling, and pest control. 1 million species have been described worldwide, although scientists believe the number could be 10 times higher – the UK alone has approx. 24,000 recorded species. https://www.royensoc.co.uk/entomology.  Recent declines in the biomass of flying insects have serious ecological consequences, affecting human and ecosystem health and it is recognised that this needs to be urgently addressed. Comprehensive data is crucial to informing effectiveRead more