On Saturday 22 May, International Biodiversity Day was celebrated at Fleet Pond. The weather was luckily excellent! There was a very good turn-out and here are some photos of visitors enjoying the event.

Do You Know Your Trees? Handy info provided by the OPAL project

Joanna Lawrence, the Countryside Ranger for Fleet Pond, gave guided walks around the pond

On the way to see what’s going on at Sandy Bay

Children finding out more about what’s in the pond, helped by their parents

Happy owners of a recently made bird’s box! Everyone distracted by something…

Making a bird’s box – mind your thumbs!

Photos: David Pottinger

Update: Five additional photos from the OPAL stand here, including:

Photo credit: Kevin Whibley.

The Small Tortoiseshell

Last year Peter Martin wrote a fascinating series of posts on a number of butterflies that can be seen at Fleet Pond. You may wish to reread them:

April: The Brimstone

May: The Orange Tip

June: The Small Heath

July: The Small Tortoiseshell

August: The Gatekeeper

September: The Red Admiral

The Orange Tip

Picture credits: Wikipedia, full details are on the relevant posts above.

Chris Packham Being Filmed At The Conair Building

On Monday 17 May, Chris Packham paid a visit to Fleet Pond to take part in a video shoot. Chris is the Patron of Fleet Pond Society (FPS) and is regularly seen on BBC TV in wildlife programmes such as Springwatch.

The video, being produced for FPS by the local company Big Yellow Feet, will be part of the Clearwater Campaign and will be available shortly on this blog, YouTube and the FPS web site. For information on the reason for the Clearwater Campaign please see the brochure ( Clearwater-Side-1 and Clearwater-Side-2 ), various posts on this blog and here.

Stunning View Of The Pond From The Top Of The Conair Building

There were two main shooting locations – one on top of the Conair building on Waterfront Business Park, near the railway station, that borders the pond and allows some spectacular high-level views and also the popular location, Sandy Bay.

Kelly, The Very Friendly And Helpful Conair Receptionist

We’re very grateful to the Finance Director of Conair for allowing us to shoot the video from the top of their building as well as to Conair staff for being helpful and welcoming on the day.

Discussing The Shoot At Sandy Bay, Together With Three Countryside Rangers

After filming at the Conair building, we moved on to Sandy Bay, where we were joined by three of Hart District Council’s Countryside Rangers. In the photo above we have from left to right: Byron Vaisey (video), Chris Packham, Terry Austin (FPS and script) and Rangers, Tim, Leigh and Joanna.

At the end of the shoot, when Chris was saying his goodbyes, there was an amusing chat between Chris and the Rangers Joanna and Leigh as it turned out that they had been inspired by some of Chris’s earlier programs on the TV, including the ‘Really Wild Show‘, to take up a career in conservation, wildlife and the environment!

Shooting At Sandy Bay

The video will be available for viewing in the next few weeks.

Photo credits: David Pottinger

The Bishop of Winchester, on reading the latest Fleet Pond Newsletter, decided to reinstate his claim to the fish in the pond.  Here, one of his monks is gathering the Bishop’s breakfast 🙂

For some more background, see here and here!

Jim Storey writes:

We’ve got a fantastic, free event for the public to celebrate International Biodiversity Day on 22 May. It’s in conjuction with the national, Lottery-funded OPAL Project and will be an exciting ‘hands on event’. The many and varied groups attending will be showing visitors what they do to help look after the environment. We hope this will inspire more people to enjoy and care about their local environment.

There will be activities to enjoy from

• Fleet Pond Society
• Hart District Council Rangers
• The Environment Agency
• Imperial College
• University College London
• Hampshire Wildlife Trust
• Blackwater Valley Countryside Partnership
• Fleet to Aldershot Wildlife Watch
• The Friends of Brickfields Country Park
• Hampshire Ornithological Society
• Butterfly Conservation
• The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)

Activities are centred around the Picnic Area but there’s also stuff to do at Sandy Bay and Boathouse Corner (see map here).

At 2pm there will be a guided walk from the main car park in which visitors can find out about the exciting happenings at the Pond over the past thousand years.

The event runs from 11am to 4pm at Fleet Pond Nature Reserve which is next to Fleet’s mainline station and 5mins from Junction 4a of the M3.

The reserve centres around Hampshire’s largest freshwater lake which has important reedbeds, marshes as well as lowland dry heathland.