Next week we’ve got a digger back on site to carry out some work on the Deep Lagoon to improve the area for breeding and roosting birds. It's going to be messy - here's why we're doing it.
The islands directly in front of Carneddau Hide have had fewer and fewer waders nesting on them in recent years, and are very rarely used by roosting waders at high tide. The islands stand very tall above the water and have become surrounded by steep cliffed edges due to winter erosion, and we’re hoping to reprofile them, “scalping” them by lowering them with a digger and hopefully shaping them into low gentle domes which will be much more suitable for waders. This will also involve removing all the vegetation which, despite annual winter cutting, has started to become quite brambly, which also deters waders from nesting.
We’re hoping to take the island closest to the hide down to a level that will become washed over in some winters, when the water levels are high, to keep the vegetation permanently at low levels, and then the further two islands will be slightly higher, to allow good views. The spoil that we take from the top of the islands will be used to create gentle slopes leading away on their western sides, which will provide nice shallow muddy edges for waders to feed on. We’re hoping that once this work is complete, it should improve the islands for breeding birds and also bring wading birds closer to the hides for better views. However, until the digger starts work we’re not quite sure what we’re going to find beneath the surface – as “created” land, whenever you dig a hole at Conwy you’re not quite sure what surprises will await! If the islands turn out to be made of rough coarse rubble beneath their tops, which can’t be easily shaped, we may have to think again.
Whilst the digger is here, we’re also going to have a bit of a tinker in front of Benarth Hide. Each summer, as the water levels drop, a muddy shelf appears which is great for feeding waders. However, this area can be very large and featureless in summers with low water levels, and as the waders always feed at the water’s edge they can become quite distant. We’d like to put in a few pools and channels to bring the water and birds in closer to the hide in summer, but we’ve had a look at the mud and it’s quite sloppy, so we’re not sure any features that we put in will last over the winter.
The water in the lagoons can get surprisingly choppy in strong winds over the winter, which will churn the mud up below and may mean that any features we put in get filled in quite quickly. So rather than invest lots of time and money in creating a new wader landscape that may quickly disappear again, we thought that while we have a digger on site we’d have a bit of a play, putting in some small pools, channels and islands and seeing whether they are still there next summer. If they survive, we can then look at doing some proper landscaping of this area to make it more suitable for birds, birdwatchers and photographers. So if you come in one day to find that the area in front of the Benarth Hide looks like a digger’s playground, now you’ll know that’s exactly what it has been!