Plenty to see down at the pond!

The pond has really come alive this week with many sand martins returning from West Africa to breed in our sand martin cliffs. I walked down to the pond today to see the hive of activity there. It is simply amazing to see them darting around with such speed and agility particularly after making the journey back of around 3000 miles from Sub-Sahara Africa. I spent quite a lot of time watching these fascinating birds in flight and I turned around to notice that many other visitors were also enjoying them!

Earlier in the week the pond was also alive with many families and children coming to have a dip in the pond (with a net!) and explore life under the water. It was fantastic to see such a variety of pond life and the children thoroughly enjoyed the activity too. I was really impressed with the interest taken in the pond life by many of the children. They were fascinated by the strange looking creatures that emerged from the depths of the pond and spent a great deal of time observing them and identifying them using our resources. Some children were simply astounded by the number of living things they managed to find when they emptied their empty looking nets into our observation tanks to take a look at their “catch”. Throughout the day we added all of the really impressive finds to a special tank which we called our “catch of the day tank”. At the end of the day I took a photo of this tank and was impressed by how many different species we had found. Smooth newts, phantom midge larva, water fleas (daphnia), flatworm, leach, water louse, freshwater shrimp, mayfly nymph, alderfly larva, damselfly nymph, dragonfly nymph and my favourite the caddisfly larva to name just a few! It wasn’t just myself who liked the caddisfly larva the most, the children loved watching them scrabbling around in their protective cases made out of tiny twigs and other debris.

"Catch of the day tank"

It has not only been busy down at the pond this week with the return of the many sand martins but it has also been busy across the reserve with so many sightings that our sightings board in reception was the fullest I have ever seen it and by the middle of Saturday afternoon there was barely any room to add any further species! Island Mere had sightings of bittern, bearded tit, marsh harriers, cetti’s warbler, little grebe, great crested grebe displaying, two common buzzards and an otter. Bittern Hide had two red kite fly over and East Hide was popular for gull sightings with nine Mediterranean gulls and one Iceland gull. Two male black redstarts and one female black redstart were also seen beach side near the sluice. Three male adders came out in the sunshine to warm up and were “pancaking” along the adder trail. Two of the adders were identified as our males from last year Victory and Bentley! Bentley was named so because of the shear speed at which he can move, covering the distance of the adder trail last year in 40 seconds! I think our guides are going to have to go out equipped with a stop watch this year to see if he can get a new personal best!