What a beautiful day it was yesterday, with warm sunshine, no cold wind and April’s volunteer Sunday. Everyone who attended definitely picked the best day as we worked out on Phases 1 and 2, it definitely felt like spring.
Our volunteer birders John, Graham and Julie were up before dawn to do the annual water rail survey on site, covering all the likely areas where the birds might be residing. In total they found four squealing rails across the site, a definite improvement on last year's two. They also picked up a red kite over the southern end of the site - great record.
At a more sensible hour(!), we then started the day by reinstating the fence around the flood damaged sand martin bank, which has now been repaired and looks great – just in time for the arrival of the birds! We then made our way out onto Phase 1 for the first time since November. Here we worked on dismantling some old reed protection cages that were damaged in the flood and rebuilt them around some exposed reed on the central island. The area now looks so much better and we have some extra reed growth protected from grazing geese and coots.
Next on the list was an interesting and novel method of reed propagation. The floods left a ‘strand line’ of debris around most of the site, much of it vegetable matter consisting of lots of old reed stems, many of them dormant but still very much alive. On each stem are several nodes, or growth points, which when given the right conditions (wet, muddy/silty substrate) will form roots and stems giving rise to several new reed plants from just one old stem. We have already seen this happening on Phase 1 last summer.
So, we collected up these old reed stems from the strand line and scattered them onto our old silt lagoon reed creation area. Over the summer, these stems will indeed send out roots and shoots, providing an extra boost to our already developing reedbed.
Little ringed plovers, redshank, oystercatchers and small tortoiseshell butterfly provided the wildlife entertainment throughout the day.
And a huge thank you to everyone who attended for a productive and very enjoyable day.