It seems to me that a lot of the work we do out on the reserve involves cutting things down or mowing things, from mowing all the grass paths through the summer to the large scale reed cutting that Dave talked about a few blogs ago. Some of the mowing we do to try and improve wildlife viewing opportunities for visitors, for example the annual strimming of reeds at the viewpoints. This generally works quite well as it opens areas up and can make viewing of more secretive wildlife a bit easier. Take the visitor centre pool for example. Below is a photo of it as it looked in October. It’s all surrounded by reed with no open feeding opportunities for birds like grey wagtails or wading birds like lapwings and curlews.
So over the last few weeks, we’ve been cutting back the reed around the pool. Last Thursday, Dave had the underwater brushcutter, cutting reeds in the pond, while Phil carried on from the strimming I started a few weeks ago. All was raked up by Nigel and Roger, and now the pool looks like this…
which from reading David’s blog at the weekend, seemed to provide a perfect opportunity for one of the local bitterns to strut his stuff!
Further down the reserve, we tend to do things more for ecological reasons. This is especially true in Botany Bay, where visitor access is a bit more limited. A few years ago we had diggers in to create some stock proof ditches so that we could extend the area for grazing across two more dense sedge beds (now named Middle and South marshes). The aim was to lightly graze these areas to break up the dense structure of the sedge and allow fenland plants to flourish, which in turn would benefit some of the rarer species of insect that make Botany Bay their home, such as the yellow loosestrife bee, Macropis europea, and marsh carpet moth, Perizoma saggitatta.
Little yellow bee Macropis europea
Our grazier, Granger, let his hardy cattle loose in Middle marsh in the early part of 2013, and they had a lovely time munching their way through the tough vegetation. Unfortunately, they turned their noses up at South marsh, probably because they had so much to eat where they were. As it turns out, this was just as well, as a tiny but very rare snail (Desmoulins whorl snail, Vertigo moulinsiana), which doesn’t like being grazed, was then re-found in South marsh.
So onto Plan B…Emma and I, with back-up from Phil and Darren (putting their brushcutter training to good use) spent a day or two strimming an area of just over an acre of very dense sedge. This was all duly raked up into heaps by Nigel, Roger, Dave M and Rob, and then burnt on tin sheets. The plan is to do this annually on rotation, strimming different small sections each year. We may mix it up a bit and have one plot that we strim every year, and another every two years, etc. This will provide a slightly different effect on the vegetation than grazing, so it will be interesting to see how it develops.
Botany Bay South marsh sedge before
Emma and Phil taking a well-earned pitchfork break whilst burning heaps of sedge!
All finished, just a wee pile of ash on a tin (still to be removed!)!
Just a quick update on the great white egrets two bird theory. There are definitely two because I saw both of them yesterday evening in Botany Bay!!
Images all by Katherine Puttick