… as usual, it seems quite a lot when I start to look back!
I say Spring, but we start this blog in Winter so here’s a roundup of the reserve team’s activities since last time.
Water lilies
Loading up the boat at the pond-dipping platform.
January is a good time to stick your hands in water, get muddy and … no maybe not, but that’s what we did. Repotting water lily rhizomes, weighing them down (they float), taking them out to the middle of the pond and putting them overboard. Water lilies are planted as a haven and shelter for fish – lovely food for the bitterns of course. They also promote biodiversity within the reed beds providing shelter for lots of fishy food!
Interns Abbie and Callum. Callum showing how to paddle a boat? Sadly both have moved on from Old Moor to pastures new.
Planting water lilies has continued into May, most being planted at the back of the reed beds.
Lily holding pool round the back of the workyard.
At the back of this pond, Dave the Digger cleared some of the dikes of vegetation around the Wildlife Ponds area.
Bridge maintenance.
The footbridges around the reserve have mesh stapled to the boards as a non-slip surface to walk upon. After a while the mesh wears out and holes appear creating trip hazards and so has to be replaced. In January we replaced the mesh on all the bridges that were worn.
Replacing the mesh near the froggies.
Newly replaced on the bridge to the Bittern Hide.
Blacktoft
Occasionally our staff and volunteers help out at other reserves and a group went to Blacktoft in January to help cut the reeds and burn them. A warmer job than planting lilies in at this time of year!
They had great weather on the day.
In the foreground is Stu the assistant warden at Blacktoft.
Sluices
Of course! These are the heart of controlling the wetlands at Old Moor and satellite sites and so crop up in most (every one) of my blogs.
Compacting more hard core and earth round a sluice at the back of Wath Ings. It’s February so wet, muddy and cold!
Shuttering on a sluice at Little Houghton to increase the height of the existing one.
After removing the shuttering.
Green Lane
Also in February we started to remove some of the dead or intrusive vegetation along Green Lane.
Bryony and Megan on Green Lane. Note the thick welding gloves! These are an attempt to ward off the vicious thorns on the blackthorn and gorse!
Pete with interns Bryony and Louise. Bryony is now working at Ouse Washes and Louise at Eastern Moors.
Smiley Steve, Megan with interns Callum, Bryony and Abbie.
Callum is now a National Trust ranger at Thetford Forest, and Abby has a job with TCV (the conservation volunteers) as a project officer. This is another group of interns with 100% employment rate. Most Old Moor interns quickly find employment and some go on to greater things with Wardens at RSPB Middleton Lakes, St Aidans and Titchwell, to name a few, have previously been Old Moor interns.
Cutting the scrub tends to be the easy bit, getting rid of it all tends to be more problematic. Normally we transport the brash to a burn site near the Reservoir. This is difficult from Green Lane so we burned some of it by the Field Pools.
Louise didn’t stay with us for very long because she very quickly got a job at the Eastern Edges project.
Here she is installing a gate with Smiley Steve.
A couple of other things from February, showing activities that the general public don’t see …
Round the back of the Farmhouse a moth trap is regularly set up (when the season and weather is suitable) and records are kept of daily catches. The photo shows a new moth trap made by Steve (he was probably smiling and singing while he was making it!)
Also, ringing of birds takes place on a regular basis (again when the season and weather is suitable) Here is a kestrel that was caught and Heather has put a ring on its leg.
Rabbits!
You may have noticed, as you walk round the reserve, small holes dug out around the edges of the paths; these are the work of rabbits!
In March we went into the Tree Sparrow Screen and found this …
Our first thoughts were that this was also the work of rabbits, but then we looked at the amount of hard-core that had been removed and thought … it can’t be rabbits, it must be a fox. We filled the hole back in and the next day it was back! This happened several times until eventually, to find the culprit, a camera was installed overnight.
Yes, it was a rabbit! It dug the hole and jumped through the gap underneath the bench having a whale (rabbit) of a time! After filling in the hole and it being dug out several times, the floor was now very uneven and a trip or stumble hazard. So the decision was made to take up the granite dust and some of the hard-core and concrete the floor. Try and get through that Mr Rabbit! (Probably was a Mr)
Starting to take up the floor.
The floor area was partitioned so we could fill one area at a time.
The finished floor.
You can see we laid some more granite dust on the path to level up to the new floor. The tractor brought this round and dumped in on the path overnight to be spread out the following day. When we walked round the next day, this is what we found …
The rabbit had decided to make its own adventure playground and made several holes through the pile!
We also found some tracks that had been made in the wet concrete (not rabbits!) that had a little story to tell! See if you can tell what happened before reading what we thought …
We thought that a slug had slithered across the wet concrete (the line), a blackbird (or thrush) had spotted it, hopped onto the wet concrete and taken the slug (the line comes to an abrupt end!)
Meanwhile at the Wader Scrape hide we had this hole keep appearing …
We figured it was a rabbit tunnel rather than an entrance and so to help support the roof of their tunnel, we inserted a piece of pipe hoping they would be happy running through the pipe.
… and it seemed to work, the hole didn’t reappear. Until a few weeks later…
It was obvious now that the rabbit Clapham Junction was underneath the concrete slab, so Dave lifted it up and filled in the space underneath. So far no new holes have appeared – fingers crossed!
Little Houghton.
Quite a bit of work has taken place at Little Houghton. You saw the enhanced sluice earlier but also fencing was installed and many, many trees were planted to create a mini woodland.
Fencing being installed.
The future woodland.
Unfortunately, there is no public access to either Great or Little Houghton reserves but, as you can see, a lot of work has gone into both places over the past few years.
Reed Bed Hide
One of our monthly tasks is to check the site(s) infrastructure, whether any maintenance or health and safety work needs to be done where the public has access. This has brought up a host of jobs over the last few months.
The flaps in the Reed Bed hide were in a poor state, with some of them the plywood was delaminating (Karen’s favourite word!), so we made some more and replaced them.
The old flaps that we took out were refurbished and used to replace the ones in the Bittern Monitoring Hide.
For those of you that have used the hide, the look-out holes are now wider so you can see more.
The fascia on the Reed Bed Hide was also rotten so we replaced it.
Field Pool and Wath Ings Hides
We also found that most of the disabled bays in the hides needed the roofing felt replacing …
Field Pool East hide.
Wath Ings Hide.
Gutters and drainpipes quite often slip through the maintenance net, due partly to them being outside and round the front of hides and so out of sight – unless it’s raining hard. This downpipe at Wath Ings had obviously been missing for several months with the consequence that the floorboards inside the disabled bay had remained wet and were rotting. So we had to replace them; unfortunately the disabled bay itself was sitting on top of the floorboards so we had to take the whole bay off …
Remove the floorboards …
And put new ones on …
We also spent a lot of time trying to locate and fix the leak in the Wader Scrape Hide with only partial success. In the end we decided that the roofing boards had probably come to the end of their life, having been there for 20(?) years, so they will need replacing probably sometime before next winter.
Other things you may have noticed … Wader Scrape and Wath Ings door handles are not as wobbly, it is intended to replace door handles, especially the sliding ones of the Bittern and Reed Bed hides. The flap catches in the Bittern Hide have been replaced by wooden turnbuckles. The catches have proved occasionally to be less positive when the flap is opened; you can’t see them and has resulted in the flap being released when it shouldn’t do. The turnbuckles are more positive and can be seen, you can tell when the flap is properly fastened. It is intended to replace all the catches in the other hides, this will take a while ... there are a lot of catches!
And finally …
Round the back of the work yard we have a wood store. This has been mainly for used wood or left over pieces or wood that is meant for outdoor use. It has been mainly left open to the elements because of this but we haven’t really anywhere to store new wood or plywood, so we put a roof on it …
Slatted top shelf and roofing timbers.
Finished roof.
That’s it for now, ‘til the next time!
Derek