Welcome to another blog from Greylake, West Sedgemoor and Swell Wood. The main question on everyone's lips at the moment is: will the rain ever stop?
Although, being a wetland reserve, we quite like a decent bit of winter rain to keep our ducks and waders happy, even we are starting to pray for a few dry days. To illustrate how much rain has come down in the last week or so (if you needed reminding), here is a photo taken from Red Hill on Thursday. Compared to Fiona's from last week, you'd hardly know it was the same place. We check the rainfall each day here at West Sedgemoor. Last Wednesday (the 12th) we had 26 mm in one day. And there was another 35 mm over the weekend. Quite a lot.
In this one you can see the rain clouds rolling in. They gave us a good drenching a few moments later.
One good thing about the weather is the mud it creates. I mean, no one loves trudging through it, but it gives me a great chance to check out some of the different species that have been on the reserve and practice my tracking skills.
The first is clearly a deer footprint, with the two parallel, slightly curved indentations. The size can tell us it was roe deer, but I knew because around here, that's the one it's likely to be. The second is a swan, with its three large toes and a slight indentation for the webbing. The third was a bit more tricky. I'm going with badger, as the toes are all at the front, even if you can only really see four and not five. Fox or dog tend to have a more diamond shape to their pads. But please feel free to comment if you disagree. My tracking hasn't yet reached expert status.
On Thursday morning, I went up to Swell Wood with some bird food to fill up the bins and the feeders. We try to do this (with the help of a few volunteers) as often as is sensible, given that our office isn't on site. The birds can empty a feeder in less than one day, so we can't manage to keep them full all the time. Still, the birds were grateful and immediately swarmed the feeders. I saw blue tit, great tit, coal tit, marsh tit, nuthatch, robin, dunnock and chaffinch with a few minutes. We had a report of great spotted woodpecker later on as well.
Nuthatch on feeder, dunnock on ground
Coal tit on feeder
Otherwise this week, things have proceeded much as usual. We finished off putting up a section of deer fencing in Chilly Copse. This stops deer getting to the freshly coppiced hazel and eating it all before it can regrow. Let me tell you, rolls of deer fencing are very heavy. It took four of us to carry it from the truck to the work site (maybe 200 metres). We also continued coppicing another plot in Chilly Copse, which we will fence off later. On Red Hill on Thursday, we were removing bramble scrub to prevent it taking over. We like to have some areas of bramble as good cover and nesting areas for birds, but if we didn't control it, it would out-compete almost everything else.
And of course, through all this work, the rain continued to fall. Our thoughts go out to everyone affected by flooding.
See you next time,
Kathryn
(All photos taken by me)