June got underway with the third and final snipe survey of the summer. It was quite a wet day, so a lot of wildlife was hunkered down, but the usual meadow pipits and reed buntings were whizzing about the fen. Snipe numbers, as is always the case in the final visit, were low as adults and fledglings leave their breeding grounds for their feeding areas, where they will remain for the winter. The year’s breeding record…

May’s work parties kicked off with the planting of 500 devil’s-bit scabious plants. This species (pictured) thrives in damp environments such as wet meadows, marshes, and on riverbanks. It is also exclusively the foodplant of the declining marsh fritillary caterpillar, a priority species under the UK post-2010 Biodiversity Framework, which has been found on the reserve recently. Over the last few years, hundreds of this…

April started with a workout in the shape of fence maintenance in the Kennel Fields, an outpost and the southernmost part of the reserve. This is a bog-edge field being wetted up and transformed into fen to create a more natural transition from bog to grassland. The field is grazed throughout the summer to keep the vegetation from becoming too rank for birds such as snipe, meadow pipits, and skylarks, and to give space…

For our volunteers, March marked the beginning of the survey season with two willow tit surveys at either end of the month. The willow tit (pictured) is a specialist of wet, scrubby woodland but has seen huge declines due to a combination of habitat loss (land drainage and deforestation), nest predation by woodpeckers, and competition from other tit species. Willow tits create their nests by burrowing into decaying tree…