Hello,
It is good to be back after a lovely few days in Cornwall and it has been another varied week.
Christmas celebrations
As we head towards Christmas this year our Christmas celebrations turned virtual as is now the new normal for 2020. On Tuesday evening we had North West Norfolk gathering for staff and volunteers, reflecting on this year and looking forward to 2021.
On Wednesday afternoon we participated in the inaugural RSPB England Christmas get together, featuring scavenger hunts, cocktail making, a quiz and an entertaining talk by Mike Dilger.
Parrinder Hide
This week we had Houdini back on site to finish repairing the windows in Parrinder hide North, so we now have all windows working in both Parrinder Hides.
Our Team Parrinder volunteers have continued to clean and paint the interior of Parrinder North in preparation for reopening it.
With Parrinder hide south now back open, Ryan and Jim spent a day reinstalling the interpretation back up on the interior walls, which has included replacing the corroded wire
Disabled bays
Whilst our car park was operating at reduced capacity, we had reduced the number of disabled car parking bays. However now that we have reopened the car park back to full capacity, I spent much of Friday reinstalling these bays so the correct width and in accordance with the correct ratio of disabled car park bays for the size of car park.
Scrub removal
Whilst I was duty manager, Jim and Ryan headed back into the reedbed to remove some more of the willow scrub that is encroaching amongst the reed. Though this didn’t last as long as planned because they both managed to find a hidden ditch and took a dunking.
Roof demossing
In amongst falling in the reedbed and reinstalling the signage in Parrinder Jim and Ryan continued their mission to remove the moss from the visitor centre roof. There is still plenty more to go!!
Apple trees
Ryan began the week removing the chicken wire from the trunks of the apple trees in the far car park and also cut back the nettles and other vegetation from around their trunks. We’ll be coming back to these apples trees later this winter.
Snettisham
Another day at Snettisham was on the cards for Jim and Ryan this week as they continued repairing the fencing that exisits around the perimeter of the pits. Whilst here they also repaired some steps and installed a new fence close to rotary hide to reduce disturbance by people to the birds that use the pits.
Freshwater habitats project and admin
After being away for 10 days, the first day back for me was spent catching up on emails, checking any guidance updates that had arisen as a result of the changing COVID guidelines and other odd bits of admin work.
We’ll provide more details soon but we have now confirmed funding for the freshwater habitats project at Titchwell, this will allow us to rejuvenate our Freshmarsh for breeding and passage birds and to rejuvenate the reedbed for breeding bitterns and to create habitat for breeding spoonbills. This is a really exciting project for the team and I am really excited to be project managing it. Therefore I spent a considerable amount of time this week updating various documents which we haven’t looked at for a couple of years. 2021 will be an exciting year for the reserve.
That is about it for this week, next week we are only in for 3 days to it will be a much shorter update.
Best wishes
Lizzie