100 Days of Summer

John Loder has spent the summer as Assistant Warden at Conwy, finishing last Friday. We asked him to give us the lowdown of what he spent his time doing, and what he will remember of the place.

There’s a certain irony that a civil engineer who first worked in North Wales in 1987, building tunnels and bridges and suchlike for the A55, should, more than a few years later, end up working at a nature reserve created from the spoil created....by the A55. So much for a ‘career change’.

When I turned up in Conwy, they threw a party. Not for me, but that muddy spoil has now turned 20 and has matured into a fine nature reserve. Blossomed, you could say. In a cruel twist of fate, Sarah the warden was seconded elsewhere during the celebrations (although she was allowed to come back and do car park duty for the weekend). For 14 weeks I tried to fill her size 7s, but as the concise version of her ‘jobs to do’ list ran to eight A4 pages, single spaced, this quickly emerged as the Red Adair of fire-fighting exercises.

Conservation is a strange business: the vast majority of its workforce are very concerned, very knowledgeable people, who get paid absolutely nothing, but they get to experience the great outdoors and the wonders of nature first hand. Then there are very concerned, very knowledgeable people who are so good at their job that they are actually paid, but are stuck in an office. Between these two ends of the spectrum are those who are concerned and enthusiastic and get to experience the great outdoors and the wonders of nature first-hand, and actually get paid. That’s how I describe my job.

In order to stay outdoors I have concentrated on defeating the dreaded New Zealand Pygmyweed on our lagoons: if you saw something (from certain angles) white with a spoon-type bill it was probably me in my overalls, stirring herbicide with a big ladle. This summer's weather was very patchy, with lots of scattered showers – the worst conditions for trying to tackle the weed as you can’t treat when it is raining, has just rained or is forecast to rain, or too windy, if there’s dew on the leaves, rare birds on the lagoon, high tide....I could go on. Added to this I’ve lopped, chopped, sawn, and hacked all types of vegetable matter, and left lots of dead stuff – ‘How brown was my valley’ could be more appropriate. 

Then there’s the science part. The INNS survey unfortunately does not send me to local hostelries, but records Invasive Non-native (plant) Species. Nektonic and benthic sampling establishes how much food there is for our wildfowl and waders: our bin-sized sieve captured over 400 tiny shrimps in one go, so if that is factored up for the whole lagoon, there should be enough nosh for our winter influx of wildlife. I also assisted with a water shrew survey - as chief buyer I had to source shrew-food, and they like tasty live mealworms (the receipt just said ‘Pets £3.50’ and somehow got through our expenses system), but the mealworms also have to be fed, and they like tasty oat bran. 99p - who knows what our finance people thought of that.

But my favourite bit would have to be working outside with our army of volunteers, those concerned, knowledgeable types that turn up every week just for the joy of maintaining the reserve as one of the jewels of North Wales. Da iawn.