That isn’t true…
This must be the month of getting muddy because everybody today had a covering of mud on their arms, legs and face (mostly being me with mud on my face.) This was our annual vegetation removal that is done in the ponds on the dragonfly path towards the Saltholme pools hide. Peter, Brian and Ian are on this photo below demonstrating how it is done.
The dragonfly pools are an area where the dragonflies gather to warm up, feed and breed in the different pools. The young dragonfly (nymphs) spend their first couple of years under the water as the nymph stage where they grow and eventually climb up a reed and emerge as a dragonfly from their nymph case. Once the dragonfly flies away the case will stay on the reed as my picture below shows one of the many migrant darter nymph cases we found.
Here is some other examples of dragonfly larvae on the left and on the right a damselfly larvae below.
We took out sections of the reed and sedges that are in the pools because without any management of the reeds then over time the reeds will create a network of roots (rhizomes) and fill the whole pond leaving it dense and slowly drying the ponds up – this wouldn’t be a pond anymore and could easily push the dragonflies away from using them.
One bird I will mention is the marsh harrier, I haven’t seen one for a while but today I saw two juvenile marsh harrier, one in the morning flying around the Wildlife Watchpoint hide and the reed beds surrounding it. The other marsh harrier I saw was in the afternoon flying around the entrance and over the car park of the reserve.
- Josh McGowan