It's been another busy few weeks at Beckingham Marshes, with some good wildlife sightings and plenty of work going on with our volunteers. Breeding waders were not monitored as thoroughly as they usually are due to the Coronavirus situation, however we are pleased to report that we had plenty of lapwing and redshank around in the main part of the breeding season. We hope that there were at least 25 pairs of lapwing on site and ad hoc sightings in the latter part of the breeding season produced at least 13 fledged young. There were also several pairs of redshank on the wet grassland fields, their young are harder to find, but we are hopeful that they were successful.
Redshank. Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)
Some good records from the reserve in recent weeks include 2 roe deer, hobby, 2 green sandpipers and a common sandpiper, yellow wagtail, grey partridge with young and a nice flock of around 50+ goldfinches.
Yellow wagtail. Ben Andrew (rspb-images.com)
Our volunteers have been busy in the last few weeks ragwort pulling ready for the hay cut and fixing our cattle corral, that is used for taking our living lawn mowers on and off site by our grazier.