It has been a very busy few months for the staff and volunteers at Barons Haugh with the wetland project making big strides, infrastructure improvements getting up and running and several successful events taking place
Reserve Infrastructure
First off, we have completed the section of path which was started in spring 2022 and replaces the old staircase making accessible again a lovely area of woodland in the western part of the reserve. This is the first stage of path work with further re-surfacing taking place on large parts of the path network through March, this will include the paths through the woodland near the viaduct, the paths to the hides and the path down from the car park. We have also secured funding to create a new path above our wildflower meadow which will begin as soon as we get the okay to start from the funders.
New footpath through the woodland
Fencing work on the Haugh has begun in earnest and this will involve replacing the fence along the north section of the wetland. This is a significant investment which will bring the infrastructure up to a good standard and allow us to make the most out of the NoFence collars which have now been purchased and will be used for the first time in the coming year. While these collars will be a huge benefit for habitat management (more on that below) they will also vastly reduce the instances of escaped cattle freeing up time for staff and volunteers to focus on other tasks.
NoFence Grazing Collars will be used on the cattle in the wetland this year.
Habitats
An important improvement coming this season for the wetland habitat will be the use of NoFence collars. Through the funding received from the Scottish Government’s Nature Restoration Fund we have been able to purchase 28 of these collars which will be placed on the cattle grazing the wetland. Using the collars and the associated app we will be able to ‘fine tune’ our grazing at different times of the year. For example, during the breeding season we can avoid grazing in important nesting areas, whereas during the passage wader season we can focus the grazing around the shallow pools to create the most beneficial habitat for waders. I have included two screenshots of the app below to show how this could work at different parts of the season (please note these are intended as examples, we are still working with our ecology team on how to make best use of the collars).
In the first of these screenshots an area of wetland has been excluded from the grazing pasture to allow breeding wildfowl, water rail, grasshopper warblers and reed buntings to nest there without disturbance. Other areas of the wetland in front of the hides are open to cattle to enable permanent wet edge for waders. In the second screenshot a boundary has been created around the wet features of the Haugh to focus grazing around the pools to create the best possible habitat for passage waders after the breeding season. We hope the use of these collars will have real tangible benefits to the wetland habitat as we go forward with our development work.
The success of our meadow work continued through last summer into autumn. By the end of the summer last year we had doubled the number of flowering species compared to 2021 and we hope to see continuing improvement in to 2023. To build on this success we spent time harvesting yellow rattle seeds which were plentiful in the meadows and sowing them in other parts of the reserve to add species diversity in these areas. On the meadows themselves, aftermath grazing took place into November last year which has helped kept down some of the dominant grasses ensured the seed from the increased variety of species had plenty of bare ground on which to establish.
Diversity of plant species in the meadows doubled last year, and yellow rattle from these meadows were sowed in other parts of the reserve by volunteers
Events
Our events programme continued to be a great success through the second half of 2022 with our largest ever attendance figures recorded. The most successful was our annual Christmas Wreath Making Event which sold out in September! We will be having fewer events in 2024 due to much of the staff time being focussed on development of the wetland project (see next section) but we will still be holding some of our most popular events including our dawn chorus guided walk in May.
Our wreath making event was a great success, selling out in September!
Baron’s Haugh Wetland Project
Last autumn we were successful in securing funding to deliver the Baron’s Haugh Wetland project which we have been working on over the past two years. We have now employed the company Aecom to develop detailed designs for the project to enable us to go for planning permission this spring. Aecom developed our options appraisal study so have very good background knowledge of the site and an excellent track record of designing projects such as this. They will be working with us over the next few months to develop the design and then, subject to planning permission, help us to deliver the work in autumn/winter of 2023/24.
Clyde River Flooding
Finally, we had quite significant flooding over the Christmas and New Year period leaving a large amount of debris spread around the site. Our volunteer teams have been working hard to clear this debris however a large area of waste is proving more challenging to clear. This area of waste seems to have been the trailer from a large truck and unfortunately is in one of the most inaccessible parts of the reserve.
A large amount of waste washed up by floods at the bottom of chestnut walk.
We are working with the council and talking to waste management companies to try to find a solution to this issue and remove the waste from the site. It is very difficult to get vehicles near the site especially in wet weather, but we do have various options we are working on and hope to find a solution soon.