The week in pictures

You may have read last week's Blog about our plans to kill the invasive weed, Crassula helmsii, with saltwater from the estuary.  You may even have heard Huw Jones, from Environment Agency Wales, and me talking about it on Radio Wales Country Focus this morning. So, how did we get on?

Well, in the last couple of hours we switched the pumps off, probably for the last time, but the water may settle a bit over night, so there may just be a little to pump tomorrow.  We pumped for up to one and a half hours each day since Thursday, and on a couple of night-time tides too.  It all went to plan, save for a couple of hiccups when I broke the meter that measures salinity and the generator ran out of fuel, but neither of these stopped us from getting on with the job.

Here are some photos of how it's changed over the last few days, and one of BBC Radio Wales' Chris Dearden getting close to the action as 15,000 litres of seawater spurted out of the three pipes every second!

We'll keep this water in the lagoon throughout the next year, and hopefully this will be enough time to kill the Crassula.  If it works, with Environment Agency Wales and Countryside Council for Wales who helped fund this work, we'll decide how to tackle the problem in the much larger deep lagoon.  We saw some frogs and toads crawling out of the lagoon as the saltwater levels rose, heading for the other freshwater pools, hopefully to lay the first spawn.  And the birds have been pretty contented too, with more tufted ducks and shelducks outside the Coffee Shop than we've seen for a long time!  The estuary path will remain closed until Thursday while all the pipes, pumps and cables are removed, so please bear with us a little longer.

The February winner of our Photo of the Month was Jane Baker from Abergele with this wonderful blackthorn blossom picture, which we're now using as our March avatar on Twitter and Facebook. 

Blackthorn is the first hedgerow shrub to flower, and this year they started earlier than usual thanks to the mild weather in February, but there's still plenty of time to see this annual spectacle.

The picture now takes the second slot in our Photostream Conwy 2012 competition to choose the Photo of the Year.  Why not bring a camera to the reserve this week and get some shots for the March competition?  For full details, visit this Blog.