Thank you to our assistant warden intern Mark for his update.
The pasts few weeks we have been concentrating on our regular weekly moth trapping and also completing the 'ditch scoring' of the whole of the Pulborough and Amberley Brooks reserves. One evening each week our moth trap lamp is positioned overnight in the visitors centre courtyard and the following morning at 08.00 we carefully unplug it and pour through the contents from the night before. It has regularly produced a significant number of new species which is increasing our identification skills and gives us more information about the moths that are using or passing through the area. Some notable large 'macro' moths found last week included a few fantastic hawk-moth species including poplar, pine, eyed and elephant hawk-moths.
Eyed Hawk- moth (Adrian Holloway)
These larger moths will often sit quite still on the old egg boxes within the moth trap and allow great photo opportunities before they eventually begin to start warming up by rapidly moving their wings. In fact hawk moths have earned their name because of their habit of beating their wings quickly and hovering into position when feeding over plants, I think maybe they should actually be called 'falcon moths' as this is more like Kestrel behaviour!
We have also found a wide range of medium sized and very small 'micro' moths which can be very challenging to identify. Some of these included orange swift, true lovers knot, mother of pearl, brown-line bright-eye, common plume and the fabulous self explanatory spectacle which appears to be wearing Biggles style flying goggles. The names themselves are fantastic and sometimes obvious. After identification is noted we carefully release the moths deep within the nearby undergrowth and out of sight of prying eyes. Our local colony of House Sparrows have recently realised that there is potentially a large food source just waiting to be had!
Ditch scoring involves a lot of walking with a clipboard and plenty of drinking water in the recent heatwave! Pulborough Brooks recently recorded a temperature of 34.5 Celsius, so it's been tough going. Basically we walk the entire Pulborough and Amberley Brooks reserves and look at each ditch and give it a rating depending on how much emergent and floating vegetation is present and whether the open surface water area is starting to become diminished. We also look at whether any willow is starting to encroach into the ditch and whether it is becoming silted. The rating from 1 to 5 where 1 is a very clear ditch and 5 being a very choked ditch then allows us to prioritise any clearance work that is required and get the ditches into the best possible condition for important species. One of these is the Little Whirlpool Ramshorn Snail which requires clear and unpolluted, marshland ditches with just the right vegetation. It is one of the rarest and most vulnerable molluscs in Britain and our reserve is one of its remaining strongholds, hence why maintaining the ditches is so important. We surveyed over 100 ditches in total and one of the bonuses is getting close up views of some of the birds out on the reserve which included some returning passage migrants such as Whinchat, Green Sandpiper and Wood Sandpiper.
Other odd jobs this week have included repairing some remaining stretch gates that allow us to make sure that the highland and other cattle are securely held and can be moved easily between different fields for grazing. We have also repaired a number of ditch pipe elbows. These are important as they can be adjusted at different times to maintain stable water levels within the ditches.
Green sandpiper (Gareth Hughes)
That's all from the warden team!