What’s all that noise down at Boyton Marshes?

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For the last few Thursdays if you have been lucky enough to visit Boyton marshes during the day you will have noticed and heard an awful lot of banging, drilling and construction work. This is all for a reason.

The work party hard at work!

The winter work party has been busy constructing two things for use on Havergate Island. Firstly, constructing a screen for use at Doveys lagoon, the idea for this is to hide visitors, volunteers and staff from the birds as they approach the lagoon. At the moment the sea wall which protects the lagoon from inundation and holds the water in is not high enough to completely shield the approach of people to the hide and therefore quite often the nearest ducks and in the summer the breeding birds will fly away. This new screen should effectively raise the level of the sea wall and break up the silhouette of people approaching the hide and prevent disturbance.

The second construction is to rebuild one of the bridges that link the salt marsh track to the main path that runs the length of the island. This has started to show a sign of age and like the screen down at Doveys no longer adequately prevents the birds on Belpers lagoon from seeing visitors approaching the lagoon. This is of particular importance as during the breeding season, the Terns and Avocets use this lagoon to breed on. By improving the bridge it should prevent any unnecessary disturbance during these crucial times, increasing the likelihood of a successful season. Also, Belpers lagoon is the favoured spot of the large 800 plus Avocet flock and many other passage waders which hopefully will suffer from reduced disturbance and allow better views to paying customers.

Once the October storm is back in the water these large wooden fences will be taken out to the island and completed in situ, hopefully some time in February.   

Unfortunately, the open water at Boyton Marshes has struggled in the cold conditions, nearly all of the major water bodies are frozen including the flash but a walk around the site the other day did bring a nice selection of birds including a peregrine, marsh Harrier, buzzard, a distant short eared owl, a flock of around 20 bewick Swans, several snipe, curlew, black tailed godwits and an aberrant sanderling.  

I was recently down at Grove marshes at Hollesley despite the ground being frozen there is still a good selection of wildfowl and waders on the site, including high numbers of wigeon, teal, shoveler, black tailed godwits, curlew, snipe and Lapwing.  In addition whilst on site a Pink footed goose and a Greylag goose flew over. There is always the possibility of a marsh harrier and a peregrine on site as well.