Once again, we had a very successful volunteer Sunday last weekend, with 16 people arriving for a day’s work – excellent turn-out! With the site still very much flooded, we were able to concentrate on some woodland and scrub management on the woodland blocks at the site’s main entrance. This area was planted up about 20 years ago and has remained unmanaged since. We have started taking out some of the smaller shrubs from the edges, creating a ‘scalloping’ effect and removing some of the poorer tree specimens from the centre of the woodland blocks. All this work has generated plenty of brash and log piles too. The benefits of our work are numerous, including creating space and reducing competition for the remaining shrubs and trees, enabling them to grow on healthily, letting more light into the herb and ground layers of the woodland, enabling floral and invertebrate diversity to increase and the brash and log piles created provide excellent habitat for fungi, invertebrates and nesting birds.
The group made excellent progress throughout the day and by the end you could really see where we had been! A huge thankyou to everyone who attended.
Also on site in the last week, I have been busy checking all our equipment and infrastructure after the Trent burst it’s banks again over Christmas (everything is still intact!), keeping our bird feeders full and we even managed a work day here on Friday last week, burning much of the cut brash on Phase 1, tidying the place up nicely!
Wildlife sightings on site since the holidays include 2 whooper swans, 3 shelduck – the first back on site since the breeding season, kingfisher on the silt lagoons, green sandpiper, peregrine, water rail squealing, singing Cetti’s warbler and a female red-crested pochard last Wednesday – the first on site for nearly three years. And the starlings are still performing well, with up to 15,000 still roosting in silt lagoons 4 and 6.