August 20th – 24th
Hi everyone,
We carried out some more hide maintenance this week. The latch on one of the doors of Island Hide wasn’t working from the inside, so we have put a new latch on the door. You can now get in and out through both doors. We also gave the hides, their weekly clean.
A bit more vegetation management this week, cutting the vegetation that was starting to encroach across the boardwalks around the Meadow Trail and the Fen Trail. We also brush cut the long grass in the picnic area. Next week we will be cutting the path edges along the East Trail
We did some more work at Snettisham this week finishing off the pulling of the Sticky Groundsel along the wader roost banks. We have completely finished the pulling now and just need so brush cut some smaller areas to completely clear the banks for the huge amount of waders that will be using these banks to roost on over the coming months.
We spread some more Turtle Dove seed at the bottom of the car park at the start of the week. The Turtle Doves are being seen more regularly now and are best viewed in the dead trees viewable from Fen Hide and the screen at Patsy’s Pool.
Water levels on the Freshmarsh have been a bit up and down over the past couple of weeks, we discovered that a small amount of saltwater was seeping onto the Freshmarsh as one of the pipes has moved preventing the other pipe from closing at hide tide. With a bit of adjustment we think we have solved this. The dry and now westerly wind has pushed a lot of water off the freshmarsh so we have opened the sluice from the reedbed ditch to allow more water back onto Freshmarsh, which the dunlin appreciate.
Lizzie attended Birdfair at the weekend delivering a talk to a full marquee on the 'Future of Titchwell', explaining all our exciting plans for redesigning our freshwater habitats. Watch this space for a blog post about this in the future.
Moth morning this week was a little lighter than previous weeks with 145 moths in total and 49 different species. Some of the highlights this week were; Maiden’s Blush, Poplar Hawk-Moth, Frosted Orange, Garden Pebble and Vapourer.