That title sounds a bit like my evening chores but in this case I am not talking about my flat but jobs I was doing yesterday with a couple of volunteers. It was a lovely sunny day, just like today...and the forecast looks great for tomorrow too – so make a trip down to Frampton Marsh for a walk in the sunshine as the reserve looks wonderful with all the autumn colours coming out!
First thing we did yesterday was get the ladder out – this invaluable piece of equipment is rarely used – but off we set down to Marsh Farm with it. In one of the apple trees near the barn which you can see from the Visitor centre is a little owl nest box. And our mission was to clean this out, so the little owl has a nice cleanest box for the next year! Getting it down took a little problem solving as we discovered how it had been fixed to the tree by a few different means – definitely a bit of a puzzle. As one of the volunteers’ climbed the ladder, the other spotted the little owl fly off (hopefully it came back once we’d disappeared). Once down the box proved almost full of feathers and ‘stuff’, and cleaning it not easy with only a little hole to get inside through – but the volunteers did a good job and I hope the little owl likes its clean bedroom!
Whilst, they were enjoying the job of emptying the box, I cut a couple of slices off some old black poplar logs under the trees. We took these back to the workshop, where after some drilling and screwing they became feeding stations! Off we set down to the reserve with a bag of apples in hand, keen to put them in to use. Wondering what for? Well, we have been trailling some water vole rafts and after some positive feedback from visitors and several sightings, we have decided to replace these with more permanent and natural looking rafts, our feeding stations! So with dinner made - well apples cut! - we returned to find our own dinners and a cup s of tea, hoping the water voles would enjoy the apples.
I took a look while in the area today, but the only thing I spotted making use of the water vole rafts was this...
Although, there is evidence of water vole activity further down the ditch, some nice droppings!
So come and have a wander around Frampton Marsh in the glorious autumn sunshine, and enjoy the dragonflies and butterflies and maybe you might even spot a water vole!
A few sightings from today were:
Grey plover, golden plover, little stint, kingfisher, stonechat, wood sandpiper, greenshank, ruff on the reedbed.
Bar-tailed godwit (1), sparrowhawk (1) on the scrapes.
Pink-footed goose (9), whinchat (1) on the wet grassland.
Peregrine (2), whimbrel (1), marsh harrier (1) on the saltmarsh.