Good afternoon! Its been an interesting week here and the reserve team have been up to some interesting things. On Monday, some collages from RSPB Headquarters at The Lodge came with an interesting piece of technology: a drone. It was used to try and find marsh harrier nests in the reedbed. It took a photo every second and I have posted some of the pictures that it took below. Although they take some finding, each nest that I refer to resembles a very different roundish hole with bare ground within the reedbeds!
A nest with eggs in it:
A nest with either an incubating female or a single chick:
A nest with four chicks in it:
Image credits: The RSPB's drone!
As you can see, these images suggest that our marsh harriers are at a variety of stages at the moment!
One of the nests with chicks in them was visited by local ringer Simon Evans and Emma, one of our Wardens on Wednesday so that the chicks could be fitted with wing tags. This is a project that is being co-ordinated by the Hawk & Owl Trust. Three chicks were tagged and here is one of them after it was tagged:
Image credit: Simon Evans
Hopefully, this chick and it's siblings will be seen out on the reserve and further afield. Two of the birds that have been tagged here in the past have been seen quite a distance away from here. One was seen at WWT Martin Mere in Lancashire and one was even seen as far away as Spain! This is all useful data about where the marsh harriers that fledge here go in their lifetimes!
The reserve team also did a bittern survey yesterday morning and there was plenty of activity. Dave, our Site Manager was based at the far end of the reserve and he saw 15 flights during the survey! It is still a bit too early to tell how many nests we have on the reserve but there seem to be at least three as things stand.
It has been very warm today but local photographer Matt Walton still managed to see seven bittern flights at Joist Fen viewpoint. He also managed to photograph this individual:
Thank you very much to Matt, Simon (and the RSPB's drone) for sharing their pictures with us.
We hope you have a great weekend and I will return with some recent sightings at some point over the weekend.