Happy Monday! Not a usual sightings blog, but filling you in one some recent comings and goings on the reserve.
Starting with the koniks. You may (or maybe not) have noticed our herd of konik ponies has decreased in number. Five of the boys have headed up to the RSPB reserve at Loch of Strathbeg in Aberdeenshire to join their large herd of konik ponies (23 of them). Here they are looking out onto their new 100ha grazing area!
Photo by Richard Humpidge
Koniks cope wonderfully in wetter habitats, which is why they do so well on wetlands reserves. At Middleton, we as yet, haven’t got the correct amount of fencing and means to move the koniks about, and to reduce the grazing pressure on the field they are in, we had to decrease the herd size. The herd we have left are made up of 2 boys (Winston & Bob) and 4 girls (Lilly, Daisy, Holly and Poppy).
Sticking with the livestock theme, another notable absence will be the cows on Jubilee wetlands. We have moved them to a different grazing compartment for the rest of the Winter, which is grassier and lusher than Jubillee at the moment. They have done a fab job of creating different vegetation heights, bashing willow scrub, creating micro-ecosystems with their hoof prints and added natural, (organic),fertiliser back into the system!
Photo by Marion Parnell
Moving on to a new addition to the reserve, we have been working, behind the scenes of pulling together a project to tackle our footpaths (lack of them) at Middleton. This week will see start of contractors on site, for about 10 weeks, putting in nearly a mile of footpath. We have had to prioritise the area we want the paths to go, as our funding for this project doesn’t stretch to cover the whole site, but a mile of path is a decent part of the site covered! The path will first be going in the canal meadow to bridge the muddy gap between the robin bridge and fishers mill bridge. We will then build a path from fisher’s mill view up the western side to the look-out. The aim is to keep the site open as much as we can, but there may be occasional closures of parts of the site while the contractors do what they do best!
We will endeavor to keep this blog updated on a weekly basis, but to keep your finger on the Middleton Lakes pulse check out our RSPB Birmingham, Black Country and Warwickshire facebook page and follow us on Twitter @RSPBMiddleton. If you enjoy taking photos, we would love for you to add them to our Community page.