Hello again from Exminster Marshes! I am a new volunteer here, helping to look after the reserves for the next five months. I am enjoying the work here so far, and should gain useful experience. Previously, I was volunteering with the National Trust in North Devon, based at Hartland (near Bideford) after completing my degree in Conservation. Work mainly involved maintaining public access on the South West Coast Path, and our other sites were woodland, parkland and costal grassland habitats spread over a large area. Something I like about being here is that we have 3 main wetland reserves close together, which makes it feel like we can really get to know them and enjoy looking after them more. I guess it sort of feels like looking after your own house or garden, just on a much larger scale, except your garden probably wouldn’t have cattle grazing it!
The work here seems to be more wildlife based, which I why I applied to volunteer here. So far, the work has included a variety of tasks, including installing new gate posts, Brushcutting scrub areas to open up the landscape to benefit ground nesting birds, who like to be able to see around them when on the ground, and helping to finish the new hide at Bowling Green, which is now open for you to enjoy. We have also maintained the predator fence around parts of the reserve a lot recently to protect ground nesting birds. Sometimes it gets a little boring, but it’s vital to improve the numbers of rare birds, so it will be worth it in the end. Hopefully there’ll be more birds this year than last, in our long term aim of improving their numbers and hopefully creating a sustainable population size.
I also applied here because I have little previous experience of managing wetland sites and would like to improve my bird ID skills. I find it particularly interesting how we manage the water levels here, something which is very important for the wetland birds that we want to encourage. Management of cattle is something else that I have found interesting, but most of the cattle will be moved off the fields in the next few weeks because the ground is starting to get too wet and the grass is growing more slowly, leaving less food for them. Access to the site is also becoming a challenge, since the quad bike and trailer that we normally use is more likely to damage the ground surface, so more walking will be involved in maintenance tasks as the weather gets wetter! It will be interesting to see how much wildlife will be out in the reserve as the water levels are rising though. We have had quite a bit of rain over the past few days and the water levels have shot up, so we shouldn’t be far off getting some more birds here.
That’s it from me for now, I’ll let you go out and enjoy the reserve!
Mark