With the temperature rising and light rain over the last couple of days the snow and ice are now starting to melt. This of course just replaces one problem with another! Instead of having ice everywhere as we did have on Monday and Tuesday we now have flood water everywhere. We have been closed for a couple of days as the entrance track was frozen solid and now if we are not careful we might have to close again as the track disappears under water!
Away from these minor issues work on site continues as normal. The team went out to try and find some lost sheep yesterday - we started grazing Mosstown Fen just before Christmas. This is the first time on roughly 40 years that stock have been out on this section of the reserve. We currently have 32 shetland cross sheep on site as they are small and quite light so will not be getting stuck in the boggy conditions. The down side of this is that as they are small they disappear very easily and for the last couple of days we had not been able to find all of them. So yesterday afternoon the team set out expecting a long slog through the marsh to try and find them. For once they decided to be helpful and as soon as they got to the marsh all the stock came out of hiding to say hello, all 32 are looking well and the Fen is definately benefiting from their prescence.
Whilst out sheparding Duncan saw the 95th species for the year in the form of a short eared owl. As the weather has improved (well got warmer anyway) the concentrations of farmland birds have dispersed.
Dom