Our warden team are busy throughout the year, but at this time of year they are particularly busy making sure the reserve is ready for spring, when most of the wildlife here will be using Fairburn Ings to raise their new families. Lots of animals breed on the site, so there’ll be a lot of new families that will call Fairburn Ings home.
The team have been planting hedgerow plants like hawthorn and blackthorn, which make a great home for all sorts of smaller wildlife including birds like tree sparrows, dunnocks, robins and wrens as well as mammals including shrews, voles and mice. Later in the year the berries on these hedges provide plenty of winter fuel that birds like blackbirds and song thrushes, as well as some winter visitors like redwings, fieldfares and waxwings. Planting hedgerow plants like these is something you can do at home, you don’t need to plant miles of hedgerow to provide a great home for nature, just a few plants is all it takes, oh and a bit of patience, don’t expect a hedge full of waxwings for at least a few years.
Photo of Hawthorn by Andy Hay rspb-images.com
As well as doing some planting, the team have been cutting some trees down. The soil at Fairburn Ings is pretty poor and quite acidic, because it is made up primarily of spoil from local coal mines. Fairburn Ings was used to store spoil from coal mines up until the 1990s. The soil is ideal for trees like willow and birch which love these conditions, but we’ve got quite a lot of willow and birch woodland, so in some areas we have been taking the trees out to create heathland. Heathland is great for a wide variety of wildlife, including all sorts of butterflies and moths, such as the small heath butterfly and the emperor moth which like heathland plants like heather. The bare patches of heathland are popular with little ringed plovers, which create small scrapes in the ground for their nests.
Photo of little ringer plover by Ben Hall rspb-images.com
Over the winter we’ve been clearing willow from the reedbeds. Willow is a species of tree which loves to grow in very wet ground, and is often found in wet places like the reedbeds at Fairburn Ings. As more willow trees grow in a reedbed they start to dry out the ground, this is part of the process of a reedbed transforming it into a woodland, known as succession. Woodlands are great and provide a fantastic place to live for a whole host of wildlife. But reedbeds are also vital to wildlife in the UK, and are home to some really rare wildlife including bitterns. This shy, brown, heron was on the brink of extinction in the UK. Numbers of breeding birds were down to just 11 in 1997, but with a massive effort from a number of conservation charities, including the RSPB, numbers have recovered to over 100 breeding birds. Clearing willow from reedbeds was part of that conservation effort, and following the work over winter we’re hoping we’ll get bitterns breeding at Fairburn Ings this year.
Photo of bittern by Andy Hay rspb-images.com
So when you visit Fairburn Ings this year keep an ear out for the unusual call bitterns make. It sounds like someone blowing over the top of a large bottle, the call is known as a boom, and it is a magical sound when you hear it. Make sure you stop by the feeders outside the visitor centre and watch the tree sparrows scrapping for the best spot on the feeder. And as the weather warms up, look for the understated yellow and orange small heath butterfly flitting across the heathland near the top of Red Shale Road.
Our warden team do a fantastic job to make sure Fairburn is a fantastic home for nature, but they can’t do their work without the help of our wonderful RSPB members, who fund much of the work we do on the site. If you aren’t a member of the RSPB and are interested in supporting this work please feel free to talk to one of our team in the visitor centre or call us on 01977 628191