Trumpington Community Orchard

The Orchard is now beautiful and pretty much in full bloom and attracting many butterflies including orange tips, large whites, small blues, brimstones and a few peacocks. The abundant apple blossom has been a bounty for the new wild bee colony that managed to enter the observational beehive despite our efforts to plug the entry points in order to clean out the hive with the view of modifying or replacing it with a more robust design. This will now be a job for next year.

With regard to the swift tower, we continue our battle of wits with the delinquent squirrel(s) which had chewed a large hole in one corner of the box. As squirrels had been seen on top of the tower, we lowered an adjacent hazel hedge and put up some rings of deterrent spikes only to find that the damaged corner of the box was actually the entrance to a DesRes that the squirrels were inhabiting!

Interestingly this did not seem to bother the sparrows who continued to nest in all the other boxes. However, fascinating as that was for Trumpington Springwatch, we cannot take the risk of squirrels predating the swift eggs and offspring. So we have evicted the delinquents and put up some more deterrent rings which we hope has solved the problem for now.

The current plan is still to build a bigger nesting box with around 22 boxes, essentially doubling the number of nestboxes as the Orchard has been one of the more successful nesting sites for swifts in Cambridge. It is intended to install the new larger box above some sort of baffle to prevent access by the squirrels; any suggestions on successful designs would be greatly appreciated. However, we have just tried to squirrel-proof the tower for this summer.

We continue to have termly class visits from Trumpington Park Primary and hope to extend this to the other local primary schools as the Orchard is a great way to educate our youngsters in nature.

The next Orchard maintenance session is scheduled for Sunday 14 June from 11am to 1pm. As always, please come dressed in weatherproof clothing and footwear and we will provide gloves and necessary tools.

P.S. keep an eye out for information about a midsummer event at the orchard.

Hope to see you soon! Contact us: email trumpingtonorchard@yahoo.co.uk

Visit: trumpingtonorchard.org or call Susanna on 07722 568020.