Happy New Year everyone! I hope it brings you lots of special encounters with nature.
2014 marks an incredibly important year for Leighton Moss as we are celebrating 50 golden years of giving nature a home! We first became an RSPB nature reserve back in 1964 and we are planning a whole year of celebratory events to mark our 50th anniversary. Today kick starts this special year, and we are open, so why not come along, we'd love to see you!
The reserve has a very interesting history which we will be looking back on throughout the year. If any of you have any old photos of Leighton Moss, the wildlife, the people or even the site before it was an RSPB nature reserve, we would love to see them! If you could email them across to us at leighton.moss@rspb.org.uk or drop them into the visitor centre for the attention of Jacqui Fereday, that would be grand.
So how exactly did Leighton Moss come about? Well Leighton Moss would have originally been a reedbed, but the sea would have been able to come in and out of it so it would have been salt water. The land at the time belonged to the Leighton Hall estate. When the railway embankment was built in the mid-1880s, this prevented the sea from coming in and the land was drained for farming. You may have noticed that our address is Myers Farm which gives a clue to our history. The area was known as the 'golden valley' or 'golden bowl' because it was so productive for growing crops. However, towards the end of the First World War, when fuel was short, it was becoming too expensive to power the pumps that drained the land. There was also a shortage of man power to work on the farm. The pumps were stopped and the land quickly re-flooded, returning to the reedbed it once was, only now it was freshwater. The main input of water into the site is from Myers Dyke (you walk over the little bridge over it when you go from Lilian's hide towards the causeway). Leighton Hall then used the area for wildfowling.
The RSPB first leased the site from Leighton Hall in 1964 and at the time we had just one Warden-John Wilson and a handful of volunteers. John is still a volunteer on the reserve today monitoring bearded tits and carrying out our ringing programme.
The site would have looked very different than it does now. There was no visitor centre. A 10ft by 8 ft hut was installed to provide a tool store and reception building. There was also no hides and no paths apart from the causeway. The first spring and summer was spent monitoring the breeding birds and coming up with a plan of how to manage the site for wildlife, and what visitor facilities were needed. The first hide to be built was on the site of what is now Public hide. Money was tight so it was built for just the cost of the nails as the rest of the materials were kindly donated. Hides on the sites of what are now Lilian's and Lower hides followed later that year. A local member donated 75 railway sleepers that formed the paths out to the hides!!!
Leighton Moss opened to visitors in April 1965 and 375 people came that year. In those days, you had to apply for a permit to come into the reserve from our head office at The Lodge in Bedfordshire. We purchased the reserve in 1974, 10 years after first leasing it, along with an area of Morecambe Bay around 2000 football pitches in size. We also took on the rights to a further section of the Bay that was 800 football pitches in size. This then made us RSPB Leighton Moss and Morecambe Bay nature reserve. It wasn't for another 10 years after this though, in 1984, that we bought out the shooting rights to the reserve from the Hall and it cost more to buy them than the land had in the first place.
Today we get around 100,000 visitors a year and have 160 dedicated volunteers along with 30 full and part time staff. The Leighton Moss you know now is the result of 50 years of hard work by staff and volunteers, and it is all only possible thanks to the support of our members-THANK YOU!
Can you spot the bittern? (by Colin Spencer)
Over the coming year, we will regularly be looking back into our history, giving you further details of how the site developed as a nature reserve, so watch this space. If you follow us on Twitter (@Leighton_moss) then we will be doing a 'tweet of the week' with an interesting fact or story. Check out our website for all the fun events we have coming up too!