Yarner Wood

I recently spent a very enjoyable day exploring Yarner Wood NNR near Bovey Tracey on the eastern edge of Dartmoor. The wood is beautiful with gnarled sessile and English oak trees covered in moss, mixed with hazel and rowan completed with an understory of holly and a ground layer of bilberry.

 

I was particularly hoping to find pied flycatchers and lesser spotted woodpecker. I was successful in finding 5 male stunning and very vocal pied flycatcher throughout the wood, but there was no sight nor sound of the woodpecker unfortunately. I was slightly too early in the month for the other denizens of this habitat such as wood warbler and tree pipit, but did see a nice range of other woodland species and common butterflies.

(pied flycatchers)

 

Wood ant nest (Formica sp)

 

I also visited Hembury woods again a great example western oakwoods on the southern edge of Dartmoor earlier in the month to see the spectacle of hundreds of wild daffodils blooming in the oak woods there. I have never seen wild daffodil in these numbers before, there was a carpet of yellow in many places.

(River Dart)

(Wild daffodils)