The week for me began with being sent off to Powderham on a bright and sunny day to get on with some more willow coppicing and crafting willow stakes for the upcoming hedge laying work. I ended up being so hot I was down to just a t-shirt (and trousers obviously) within ten minutes. That shouldn’t be happening in January surely!
The weather has been more like I’d expect the rest of this week with cold crisp days causing me to crack out my thermals. Tom and I spent a nice couple of days putting up the wildlife area signs as part of the mitigation work for development from Teignbridge District Council. We almost had them finished too.....until an unfortunate incident involving the new vehicle and soft rain drenched mud halted the whole operation. Yep the new vehicle got stuck and it took us some time to release the beast. By the time we’d freed her the day was at an end and, frustratingly, we still had one sign left to be installed.
I got to experience my first high tide count on a cold crisp morning on Thursday as I took a scope and clipboard over to Powderham. Keeping warm whilst trying to count vast numbers of ducks, geese and waders who insist on moving around in an unruly fashion was a challenging but enjoyable task. There were large numbers of dunlin, teal and widgeon, one lonely looking redshank, a pochard, who wasn’t so lonely as he’d seemed to have made friends with some widgeon, a little egret and a handful of shoveller. I was happy to find my wetland bird ID skills up to scratch after putting them into storage during my year in a woodland habitat!
I’m sure you’ll all be sad to hear I have had no luck spotting the great white egret or american widgeon since the last blog but I was very excited later on Thursday. We met the work party to begin the preparation work for the hedge laying on Turf Path and Steve kindly handed me his binoculars and pointed me in the direction of a peregrine hunting from one of the pylons. Thanks Steve! That was something I’ve been looking forward to seeing since my arrival, hopefully next time I’ll get to see some hunting success. That lovely sight put me in a good mood and I was all too happy to grab some loppers and a pruning saw and jump into the middle of a bramble ridden hedge. The rest of my day was spent pulling bramble and brash from the hedgeline whilst balancing precariously on the wet muddy edge of a ditch and thankfully (despite a couple of close calls and some goading) my wellies were the only part of me to end up in the ditch. After a lot of hard work from the team we have a nice section of the hedge ready to be laid. Another day or two of clearing and we will be ready to lay the whole hedgeline. Thanks to Dennis you will be able to see some before and after photos of the hedge once we have it finished in a few weeks.
Interesting blog Ryan. Exminster Marsh looks really good at the moment particularly when the sun is shining and the waders are on the marsh at high tide