The Bridge Pond is a pond again!

This week has seen big changes in the look of parts of the reserve – a digger has been in and in just a few days has transformed the area between Tal Y Fan and Carneddau Hides. There’s open water again in the Bridge Pond, and he’s also opened up several of the old pools that were here originally but had become choked with reed. John the Digger Driver, who also created the island in front of the Coffee Shop last summer, has done a fantastic job with landscaping the pools. Although it looks a bit muddy and messy at the moment, we can’t wait for summer when they all start to get a bit of vegetation growing round them again and hopefully a few dragonflies take a liking to them. Teal have already been seen using the new ponds, and pochard have been diving in the deeper water we created around the Coffee Shop island, so the birds are certainly benefiting already from John’s work!

Out on the reserve today everything is hiding from the wind and rain, but over the last week we’ve seen a few bits and bobs. The Wildlife Garden has been busy with 20+ siskin and up to 4 lesser redpoll, and a marsh tit, unusual for here, was spotted on 30 January.  The reserve also seems to be alive with bullfinches – everywhere you go in the scrubby areas seems to have a small party of them moving through the bushes. Wader-wise, up to 6 black-tailed godwits are regular visitors at high tide, along with a bar-tailed godwit on 4 February. A golden plover was seen on 5 February in front of the Foel Fras screen, and up to 20 snipe are feeding in the cut reed areas near the Coffee Shop. Glyn, one of our wildlife guides, watched a kingfisher sitting on the old sluice on the Deep Lagoon for over an hour on 5 February, but unfortunately there were no visitors to show it to with the terrible weather.  A drake red-crested pochard was seen briefly out on the lagoons on 1 February, but not seen again. A peregrine has been a regular visitor (and I suspect it was responsible for the neatly decapitated starling’s head I found outside the back door of the Visitor Centre one morning last week!), often sitting on one of the islands in front of Carneddau Hide, and a merlin was seen on 5 February too.

Next week, the changes continue – the shop refit is cracking on apace, and we should be ready to open as normal on Saturday 12 February. We’ll be upgrading some of the windows in the Tal Y Fan Hide to improve them for wheelchair users and children early next week (if the wind every stops blowing!), so the right hand side of the hide will be shut for a couple of days whilst we do the work. Come along and see all the fabulous changes soon!