While there is evidence of many creatures calling the copse home in the past, there is not as much living there now as we would like.

We certainly have deer who do a lot of damage and grey squirrels who eat all the nuts that the hazel trees do make!

But we would love to see dormice return to the woods and the badgers setts appear to have fallen out of use in recent years too, sadly.

We are told there are foxes, but so far have only seen one or two. 

The bird life is good with a wide variety of woodland birds feeding on our feeders, woodpeckers drumming, owls hooting and, of course, the buzzards and kites flying overhead. Over the past three years, we have also seen spotted fly catchers which is also really exciting.

The cuckoo numbers have sadly dropped year on year sincewe have been here and there are fewer swallows and house martins flying over the fields around us, which is a sad reflection on what is hapenning world wide.

There also seems to be a good number of insects here which we are keen to encourage. We hope that the range of butterflies will increase and as you walk, watch out for the dung beetles which rely on the deer droppings! Rabbits appear to have disappeared as well, probably due to the fatal HVD. We hope they may come back.

On Monday 13th July 2020, we had a local moth enthusiast come to do a moth survey overnight. He set up a trap and spent the following morning identifying the moths he had caught. In total, he found nearly 80 different species, including three sorts of Hawk Moth. Very exciting! At the last trapping session, we had recorded 403 species on site.

We have repeated this regularly since. We now know we have in excess of 400 species of moth in the wood behind our house, so who knows how many more further in?

On 10th July 2022, we saw our first purple emperor butterfly AND a rare speices of silver washed fritillary valezina butterfly. Very exciting! Pictures are below. Sadly, the Butterfly Conservation Trust declared a national butterfly emergency in 2024 as the numbers of insects generally and butterflies in particular have been very low, probably due to bad weather conditions over a number of years. This is a worrying trend.

But as an antidote to that bad news, we are delighted to have made links with Kelly from Hampshire Bat Group. She and colleagues have been here doing bat walks for us and recently set up traps under a special license, to look for myotic species of bats for a research project. What they did find were pipistrelle bats, long eared bats and the rare barbastelle bat! We think we have had noctule bats as well, so it seems we are offering these amazing mammals a home too. This does mean we have to be really careful about felling any trees which could hold roosts, and as they like dead  trees or those with bark peeling away,  we will be wanting to retain these. But they may be at risk of dropping limbs etc. So yet another good reason to remain on the official footpaths, please.

You may see blue spots appearing on trees and these are ones which have been identified as potentially good bat habitat so will not be felled unless really necessary for visitors safety.

We have also added some 'scrapes' to catch water as ephemeral ponds and hope these will increase biodiversity in the copse even more.

Finally and not strictly in the Copse,  our volunteers were given permission to do a harvest mouse survey in the SSSI for the British Mammal Society and they found three nests! We understand this to be the first recording of harvest mouse in this area, the most local being on Tadley Common in 1975! What a place this is!

Please, do let us know any of your sightings as you wander along the public footpaths. We plan to put up a blackboard as you enter the Copse from the Wolverton Road end, so that species seen can be recorded there.