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It is getting to the time of year where we start seeing the marsh looking like everyone supposes a marsh should look like.....very wet. With all the rain we have had over the last couple of weeks it is not surprising that the water levels have risen and all the rills and scrapes have filled up. This...

With 60mm of rain falling in just 4 days last week you can imagine that the marsh is looking extremely soggy right now! I have really noticed the wildfowl numbers starting to increase. A passing Marsh Harrier sent hundreds of Teal up into the air today from off the reservoir. It was an amazing sight...

You might notice that the pools on the flood are looking quite low...don’t panic, this is only for a short time as staff and volunteers are undertaking the enjoyable task of walking out to the islands, getting stuck in the mud (and sometimes falling into it) to complete the annual management of...

A friend of mine came over to the island today to do a bit of winter birding. The recent cold snap has frozen the reserve, with the result that most of the bird interest stays outside the seawall on the Swale. As a result, we decided to head elsewhere today. First stop was the beach at Minster, on the...

Well, here we are again. After a lot of investigation & loads of techy stuff waaay over my head, the bottom line is that I am now able to get onto the RSPB website from Elmley. So hopefully, normal service has been resumed. It's been about a month since my last update and in terms of water...

Time for another of my rather infrequent updates, as I STILL can't access the RSPB website from Elmley. We're still trying to fix the problem, but it's a slow process. Highlight of the month so far was the discovery of a grey phalarope on the Flood reservoir on Saturday night. It was still...

I've spent the last couple of days fairly intensively scouring the reserve for broods of lapwing chicks. In the end, we found a total of 22 broods, totalling 42 chicks - not great, but better than last year & considering the way the water is disappearing, I'm quite pleased with the total...

Can't believe it's been almost 2 weeks since my last blog - time just seems to zip past these days! Going around the reserve today checking the livestock, there were numerous familiar faces: there's still one spoonbill hanging around the pools east of the Flood, although the strong wind today...

You never can tell. Down to the reserve mid-morning to do various pump-related jobs and I paused on the counterwall at Wellmarsh and scanned the Flood. It wasn't an especially high tide today, but the pool in front of the hide was covered in waders. So I detoured briefly to get a count. Half an hour...

Well, they've been a while coming, but finally today they arrived! Out this afternoon in beautiful sunshine to check the livestock. The grazier & his vet had been in y/day to see how many of his cows were pregnant and we were pleased to learn that they all were, which is quite a rare occurence...

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 It was still quite snowy on the reserve when I arrived this morning. There’s been a big thaw over the weekend, thanks to a splash of rain as much as the arctic temperatures lifting...

As the highest tide of this series was yesterday, I sort of expected that the wader roost at Wellmarsh hide today wouldn't be quite as good. Funny how things are: there were more waders and a much better variety today. There are increasing numbers of juvenile curlew sandpipers (28) and little stint...