Recently James the Senior Site Manager asked Mary and the volunteers to fix up one of Loch Gruinart’s nineteen sluice gates. Some of these gates have the job of diverting water and some hold it back. With these gates James can control the water levels in various places and as a loose description the flats are drier than usual in winter and the floods are wetter than usual and this is reversed in the summer. Having the flats drier in winter is beneficial to the thousands of barnacle and Greenland white-fronted geese that feed and overwinter here and having wetter flats and drier floods in summer is better for the many breeding waders.
The job was simple and involved replacing the old boards forming the walls of this particular sluice. It was great fun to be working in waders, knee deep in water amongst towering reeds and grasses with geese cackling overhead. It didn’t take as long as anyone thought and everything passed by without a hitch meaning that we had loads of time in the afternoon to help take down a long length of fencing across Gruinart flats.