Hendre Lake Hay Rake Sat 25th January 2025 10:00am–12:00pm

It was a frosty and sunny morning for our first volunteer session of 2025. We met at Hendre Lake for a hay rake at one of the parks meadows. A great turnout of 16 volunteers, including 2 new people today thank you, plus our Park Ranger Rhodri, all giving their time to help our local environment.

With birds singing all around us in the sunshine, we cut back bramble, raked the recently cut grass and piled all that vegetation together, which will make a great habitat for wildlife like grass snakes. By removing the cut grass, it helps encourage native wild flowers to flourish as they prefer poorer soil (less enrichment by removing the cut vegetation).

Throughout the site, we left tufts of long grass, tussocks, as these are a perfect habitat for nesting bees, like the Shrill Carder Bee. As we are part of the Gwent Levels, we are one of the few lucky sites, not just in Wales but in all of Britain, to have these rare bumblebees.

We removed some litter from the site too; plastic bottles, food packaging and plastic bags. A buzzard was spotted which was great to see, along with Robins, blackbirds, magpies, sparrows and great tits. Our volunteers also spotted some fungi. Turkey Tail Fungus and a beautiful orange fungus on a tree, which after researching is Orange Jelly Fungus. It's interesting and great fun to learn all about the different forms of life that are part of our local environment.