September 10th – 14th
Hi everyone,
Ben here,
We were carrying out some more repairs on the hides at Titchwell this week. We have reattached the handle to the inside of the door into Fen Hide, so this door is now usable again. We were also fixing up the doors on Island Hide. We had to sand the top of one of the doors, to stop it sticking against the top of the door frame. We also had to reattach both outside handles and latches as they had come loose through wear and tear.
We did some more vegetation cutting this week. We stated early one morning to get the West Bank cut before the crowds arrived. We also cut rest of the East trail around Patsy’s Pool. We also reinstalled one of our memorial benches along the Autumn Trail as well as install a new bench looking over East Pool (the small pool between Patsy’s Pool and the Autumn Trail).
The Turtle Doves are still being seen in the usual places and so we are still spreading some of the seed we have to attract them to the reserve. The Turtle Doves won’t be around for much longer so do come down and see them and do keep letting us know if they are around!
There was a Norfolk wide Spoonbill count on Wednesday this week (12th). We counted 18 Spoonbill at Titchwell and 6 were counted over at Snettisham. Over 100 Spoonbills were counted all along the Norfolk coast which is amazing! Over on the Nature Reserve at Holkham there have been 28 breeding pairs this year and we hope that breeding numbers will start to increase all along the Norfolk coast in future years.
On Friday this week (14th) there was a beach cleaning event at Snettisham organised by the Marine Conservation Society. We had 50 people attend the event and it was very successful. Lots of plastic packaging, fishing rope, paper and string was picked up along the beach and we filled several bin bags. This was as much a survey as it was a beach clean, so we got the participant to fill out survey sheets as they went, writing down what they were picking up and how much. All this data will be sent back to the Marine Conservation Society to be assessed. There is another beach clean on the beach at Titchwell on Saturday (15th) so if you have some spare time please do come along.
Moth mornings are getting a little quieter as we move into the autumn and winter months. This doesn’t mean we won’t be catching moths it just means they won’t be in the numbers they were earlier on in the year. The number of species shouldn’t change drastically but the total will start to drop. This week we had 458 moths in total and 53 different species. Some of the highlights this week were; Orange Swift, Brown-Spot Pinion, Garden Pebble, Poplar Hawk-Moth, Centre-Barred Sallow and Pink-Barred Sallow.