Hello

And welcome to this weeks installment from the North West Norfolk Reserve Team.

Freshwater Habitats Project

Last week we were able to carry out a site visit with our reserve ecologists to finalise the details of the designs for the freshwater habitat. With the breeding season, a formal tendering process to go through to appoint contracts, it was essential to carry out this visit now otherwise we could risk delaying the project for yet another year!

Following the site visit we have spent this week updating the design tweaks on the maps and confirming conversations that were held on Friday.

Beach nesting birds

The arrival of March sees our attention switch to beach nesting birds. This week we welcomed a new member of the team, Wynona Legg. Wynona is our Ringed Plover Project Officer who will be with us for the next 6 months covering a section of beach between Snettisham and Heacham. You will hear more from her next week.

For 2021 this means our beach nesting bird monitoring and engagement work is conducted across three core areas. To ensure the safe nesting and chick rearing of these ringed plovers we advertised a number of volunteer roles to enable us to deliver more for conservation. We have had a great initial response but if you would like to know more and might want to get involved, follow this link: Ringed Plover Volunteers

Road to reopening

With the government’s announcement of a roadmap out of lockdown the whole team has been planning what that means for our reserves. We are still working through some of the exact detail but it will be following the governments approach. Following a very wet couple of months we do know that we have a lot of tidying up to do at Titchwell as much of the car park and picnic area is still trying to be a new wetland feature.

Odd jobs

When on the reserve we have also been completing a few small odd jobs including collecting beach rubbish, reattaching the kickboards to the side of the boardwalk and a couple of our volunteers have continued with the internal refurb or Parrinder North.

We’ll be back next week with another Behind the Scenes instalment

Lizzie