With one thing and another, including some hot weather and some hotter technical hitches, we have not done such a grand job of keeping you up to speed with the restoration, but here is the latest news...
The work in the meadow to the south of north hide is almost complete and the ditches are lookig wonderful, already attracting little egrets, water rail and grey wagtail to feed on the newly created edges and wheatears hopping along the spoil looking for a tasty morsel. Just to the edge of the north hide pool we have changed this...
To this...
And within the reedbeds in front of the buddliea loop viewing shelter we have restored ditches so that you can see down them from the viewing shelter (or will be able to when we have removed the bits of reed blocking the entrance - the 18 tonne digger started to sink right at the reed edge and we did not fancy it becoming a permenant feature of the reserve! The new view from the viewing shelter looks like this....
The view outfrom where the digger is looks like this (you can see the viewing shelter on the left of the picture and on the right one of the other ditches being restored...
Finally, a little further over the reserve, near one of the first pieces of work we did, we found this in the fresh mud....
It's an otter print, with a one pound coin for size comparison - exciting to find this in the early morning light, the first for a while - it was, of course, lovely to see the prints, imagine how much nicer it would have been to see the animal itself!