The Last Weeks of Summer

This week we've been carrying on cutting and raking round the edges of all the fields and, helped along by one of our Thursday volunteers, we are almost done. Soon all of the hay bales will have been removed from the reserve, and things will be ready for winter. We have also given the hedges a trim along the footpath going down to Turf.

Things are calming down on the butterfly front now, but in Stephen's survey this week there were still plenty of Green-veined whites, and a few Speckled Woods.

On both Powderham marsh and Exminster marsh there are large areas surrounded by electric fences. These are meant to keep ground predators such as foxes and badger out of the fields to stop them feeding on the eggs and chicks of breeding waders which the site is so valuable for. Through the summer though lots of foliage such as thistles, grasses, nettles and reeds have grown up around the fence. Since the cattle don't go near the fence to eat plants round it (understandably), we need to remove this ourselves. So Adam and I worked a hot sunny Friday applying herbicide along the entire length of the fence. It's a hard physical job - we carried around two hundred litres of water between the two of us. But at the end of the day I felt like I'd done a proper day's work.

Hemp Agrimony: "Koninginnekruid 16-08-2005 19.14.52". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Other wildlife we have spotted this week include a half-eaten grass snake and a dead herring gull. I also saw a lone specimen of Hemp Agrimony, a common pink flower that can also be seen in towns and cities.