Promoting & Enhancing The Natural Beauty of the Sid Valley
The swallow, sand martin and house martin are collectively known as hirundines, which means swallow like flight, derived from the Latin for a swallow, hirundo. The first to arrive is the sand martin in late March, then the swallow in mid April and finallyRead More
Leave a comment Sometimes when we are sold a solution to a problem we have to make sure that the solution doesn’t become the next problem. We need to take a look at some of our chemical uses. DDT is an effective insecticide with low mammalian toxicityRead More
Leave a comment The Butterflies and Moths on display in Sidmouth Museum are part of a collection made in the 1940s by a Sidmouth resident. Most were collected locally. Other specimens have been provided by Sidmouth Library and members of the Sid Valley Biodiversity Group (SVBG). InformationRead More
Leave a comment Social wasps belong to the Hymenoptera, one of the major orders of insects which has the largest number of species than any of the other orders in Britain. The approximately 7,000 species of British Hymenoptera include, as well as the social wasps, the solitaryRead More
Leave a comment Summer hangs on in to September until the equal hours of day and night, the spring equinox on the 22nd September. After that it becomes the changeover month marked by the autumn migration of birds to and from Britain in earnest. On theRead More
Leave a comment Yellow Rattle is a wild flower that has for a long time acquired almost a cult status as the plant to introduce to a wild flower meadow to suppress grasses and so allow the wild flowers that grow with them, to flourish. Yellow rattleRead More
2 responses I had become so used to hearing Blackbirds singing each evening that I was taken aback when one evening in late June, their song had stopped abruptly, and I knew they would not be singing again until next spring. They have fared wellRead More
Leave a comment Late March to early April, when the dandelions flower en masse, is also the time for Red Mason Bees to appear. They will feed on many of the spring and summers flowers for the next 12 weeks, including orchard trees, which they successfully pollinate,Read More
Leave a comment Druids were the pagan priests of Ancient Briton, some 2,000 years ago. Druid means “knower of the oak” and for them, the oak, the apple and the yew were sacred trees. They observed the festival of Alban Arthen or Yule from which our termRead More
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