Where has all the water gone?

Howdy folks! 

No, this isn't an early edition of the sightings blog. Instead I thought it would be good to answer a question we are getting asked a lot recently. Where has all the water gone?

Visitors over the past few weeks will undoubtedly have noticed how dry the scrapes are. The pools have shrunk away to nothing. Middle scrape has been deliberately kept dry this year, in order to regenerate it, but now south and North scrapes are rather dry too. So what is going on?

Well, to put it simply, we have had an exceptionally dry summer. All those baking temperatures have evaporated off the water, and there hasn't been the rainfall to replenish them. Still hasn't in fact. At this time of year we are usually pumping water onto the site, out of the local drainage channels. But the level in those ditches is below that at which we are allowed to pump, so we legally cannot do it.

There is some water left in the reedbed, so why don't we move that over? Well the management of the scrapes is such that we actually need to put quite a bit in all at once. Certainly more than we can afford to move from the reedbed, which then would itself become barren and dry. 

So, that is the situation at the moment. We are hoping for rain. And preferably a fair amount of it. Luckily the birds are still liking the area of wet grassland behind the scrapes, and the reedbed itself. If you keep up to date with our twitter maps you will see that these are the areas being favoured. But more water would be nice. Anyone know how to do a rain dance?