The road alongside the reserve has a low spot that always goes underwater when it rains. So with having the digger close at hand I decided to address this problem, which has the benefit of creating a small pond, job half done so far.

To clear the site for the new portacabin classroom I had to do a bit of trapping to ensure no little furry friends were squished. 16 humane traps set but only 3 residents captured and relocated. 2 bank vole and a shrew.

Quite a decent haul from my scrounging activities yesterday.

I had 3 members of Hepscott parish Council visit the reserve on Wednesday as part of the planning approval process. They seemed to be pretty  supportive of the whole enterprise, however, they did express concerns that a ‘change of use’ of the land may, in the future make it easier to change it again to residential use! I hope I was able to mitigate some of those concerns by offering a statement from the landowner and a longer licence term for the reserve. They seemed pretty pragmatic with common sense so hopefully they see the benefit to the local community, we will see.

Started preparing the second wildflower meadow area.

To be kind to the rodents I may have displaced I am using the scrapings to construct an observation mound with built in rodent housing.

We have also built a wind break wall with pallets in front of hide 1, we are using cut reeds in the pallet wall to fill in the gaps. This also helps with landscaping, I intend to tie in reeds to screen the pallets eventually.

Another bird ringing session today down on the bog, not as many catches today but a good variety. The catches included a very fine Snipe.

My EcoNorth ecologist came a carried out a walk through survey as part of my planning application. There were no revelations or surprises, so hopefully my planning application will be painless. I still need some drawings done for the hide elevations before I can submit the application. I hope it doesn’t take too long otherwise we’ ll hit the bird breeding season and then I will have to wait until next autumn to do the ponds! Hey ho and Merry Christmas.

I did a little pallet boardwalk construction today for hide 1, not fully completed yet but we’re getting there.