The week began with some Lapwing monitoring, things were a tad cold and despite there being some birds about they were not as active as last week. Today is looking warmer and hopefully when we go out to monitor later we will find Lapwing displaying again in earnest.
Most of the rest of this week has been spent at Labrador Bay eradicating Ragwort from some of our fields there. We use ponies at Labrador Bay as a kind of living lawnmower but Ragwort is toxic when eaten by livestock so we must remove it before we allow our ponies into those fields. Once the plants have been removed they can go about munching on the grass to keep it short, safely maintaining an important aspect of the Cirl Bunting habitat we have created there. We had a little impromptu picnic with the ponies on Tuesday as well, when we chose a more sheltered field in which to have lunch we grabbed their attention and they became just that little bit too interested in grabbing my sandwich and eating Steve's beard! FYI all traces of Ragwort were removed from Steve's beard before lunch.
The work party on Thursday began with continued hedge laying but our forces had to be split after tea break (yes we do have occasional break!) with me dragging Dennis over to Labrador Bay to help finish the Ragwort work there and a couple of our brilliantly helpful volunteers Barry and Patrick delivering some leaflets for our upcoming Easter Eggstravaganza event, further information about this event can be found on our events page or you can contact us on 01392 833311 or exe.estuary@rspb.org.uk. The rest of the work party stayed on turf path to continue the hedge laying, which I’m pretty sure will be completed by the end of the month.........
There was some exciting bird news earlier this week as the first Sand Martin of the year was seen over at Bowling Green Marsh. Sand martin overwinter in Africa and then undertake their long distance migration of well over 2000 miles to end up here in early spring where they look for suitable banks in which to nest.