Firstly, I’d like to start by apologising about the lack of management posts on the blog since Ali left. Being one man down has meant we’ve all been a bit busier than usual! Luckily our fantastic Thursday volunteers have stepped up to the plate and helped us get lots of jobs jobbed. These jobs have included building a rather fabulous extension to the bug hotel (thank you Phil and Roger), which the Wildlife Explorer’s group furnished with lots of grass, leaves, twigs and anything else they could get their hands on that bugs and beasts would use to live in.
Bug hotel before (photo David White)
Bug hotel after furnishing (David White)
Nigel, Su, Richard, and Dave M have been hard at work in the Fen pools near the visitor centre. Nigel re-discovered his strimming moves (after first removing lots of regenerating birch and willow – we’d have a proper thicket if we’d have left them there), while the others had the glamorous job of raking up all the cut vegetation.
Fen Pools after their annual haircut! (Photo by Katherine Puttick)
I took Rob and Darren further down the reserve to Mere Hide, where we strimmed and raked some bays around the pool in front of Mere Hide. This does look a bit drastic but we do have a reason for doing it! It can be quite hard to see wildlife in a reedbed during the autumn and winter, especially as reed fringes all of the ditches and pools and doesn’t allow very much room for anything to roost or feed on muddy edges. So to try and create this edge, we drop the water levels (easier said than done in some years), and cut areas of reed to give views into ditches and up channels. By doing this, we hope to encourage wildlife, such as otters, bitterns, water rails and snipe to be a bit more visible. This has certainly been the case in the past few years by doing vegetation clearing at both the New Fen and Joist Fen viewpoints. In fact, very soon after cutting the reed at Mere Hide, a pair of stonechats were seen looking for insects among the reed stubble. And a few days later, an otter was seen emerging from a channel that was previously choked with reed.
New view from Mere Hide (Photo by Katherine Puttick)
We will be doing some more cutting would like to encourage feed back about what we are doing at the reserve, so if anyone has any good ideas that they’d like to share, what we could do to improve views of wildlife, and where, please do get in touch either by email or on the forum, or by responding to blog posts. Your thoughts are important to us! Thank you!