There's definitely the feel of change in the air at the moment, with more signs of spring being seen daily. A chiffchaff has been singing away, cowslips are starting to peek above ground, yellow coltsfoot flowers speckle the grass, and the leaves on the wild privet bushes are unfurling along the edges of the Wildlife Garden. If you peer in the waters of the Bridge Pond you will see the bottom of the pond covered in frogs and toads at times, and the first queen bees of the season are on the wing. We've yet to see a wheatear or a sand martin, but they can't be far away.
Many of our winter visitors are still here though, the most obvious of course being the starlings. We've been treated to a real spectacle most evenings over the past month, with tens of thousands of birds swirling around in the twilight murmurations, the biggest numbers we've had for several years. We don't expect this to last for much longer, as the birds will be moving back to the Continent to breed soon, so if you've not yet been to see this spectacular display, come along just before dusk on a still evening and prepare to be amazed!
Other winter visitors still with us include a regular water pipit on the lagoons, kingfisher on several dates, a firecrest on 6th and 16th March, jack snipe feeding in front of the Coffee Shop, a Cetti's warbler in the reedbed on 14th March, up to 8 coal tits, 2 redpoll, and a fieldfare on 12th March. We've also seen treecreeper and a collared dove here too over the last fortnight, less usual sightings for the reserve.
If you've been to the reserve over the last week, you'll have noticed a big yellow diesel water pump on the causeway between the two lagoons. The electricity supply to our usual pump, which moves water from the Afon Ganol to the lagoons, has a fault which we are endeavouring to fix, but with time running out to get our water levels right before the lapwings start breeding in the next few weeks, we needed to hire in a portable pump to move water from the Deep to the Shallow Lagoon. We needed to pump an extra 17 cm of water onto the Shallow Lagoon to get the water levels spot on by end of March, ready for the summer - doesn't sound too hard a job until you realise that we needed to move 9,000,000 litres of water to do this! But a few days pumping sorted us out, and we're now nice and ready for the summer ahead, when hopefully the water levels will slowly drop to provide us with lots of damp muddy edges in time for autumn wader migration. Seems a bit odd to be thinking about autumn already when we're only just moving into spring, but in conservation the trick is always to be planning ahead to make sure everything is just right for the seasons to come.