Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust’s Ellen Winter reflects on a month of activity in and around the Stroud Valleys.

EVEN keen wildlife fans don’t often venture into the woods at night.

But picking your footsteps along a shadowy path, the windy trees discussing your every move, stumps and trunks looming, gives most people a glimpse of more primitive times and heightens their senses.

Ears strain for strange sounds; smells of dewy leaves and mould are more vivid, and the night-scent of honeysuckle flowers is unmistakable.

I often take night walks around Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust’s nature reserves for a few hours. But this year we are doing something we’ve not done before.

We are spending the whole night recording the wildlife at our huge and ancient Lower Woods nature reserve near Wickwar and you can join in too.

The wildlife we find will produce data on lots of different animal groups.

We will start our night-time ‘bioblitz’ by putting out moth and small mammal traps, and footprint monitoring tunnels for hedgehogs.

Then we’ll go to the bat roosts to do a count of the different species bats as they emerge to feed for the night.

We might be lucky enough to find the earliest babies of the year taking their first flights – they tend to blunder about quite comically – it’s a tricky thing learning to fly while navigating by sonar!

We will spread around the wood for a couple of hours to survey the roe, fallow and muntjac deer as well as badgers and owls that live in different parts of the wood.

As the sky begins to lighten we’ll take in the dawn chorus while checking the moth traps and we will see what small mammals we can find.

Finally, after a busy night we will head for a hearty campfire breakfast and check the trail cameras for footage of foxes, deer, badgers and squirrels.

If you can’t make it to this event you can have your own after dark adventure in your garden or walking in the woods.

You should see gorgeous moths and hungry bats, hear owls calling and snuffling hedgehogs if you are lucky - and if you are quiet and still enough a fox or badger might come past.

If you would like to join us in Lower Woods for an after-dark adventure there is more information and a booking form on our website gloucestershirewildlifetrust.co.uk/whats-on