Over the past few months staff and volunteers from Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB (part of Suffolk Coastal District Council) have joined forces with staff and volunteers from the RSPB to transform areas of the North Warren RSPB reserve. Over the course of three days in January and February, the joint work party has tackled scrub in the fen, cut back reed from around an open pool, cut back areas of gorse on the heath, had large bonfires and enjoyed meeting new people who share an interest in wildlife and the countryside.
Gorse fire at Aldringham Walks by Nick Marsh
At Aldringham Walks, young gorse has been cleared from areas of colonising heather to allow it to become established. Some areas of mature, leggy gorse have also been coppiced to give a varied age structure of gorse across the heath. This work should hopefully benefit species such as Dartford warbler, yellowhammer and linnet, and also butterflies such as grayling.
Haven fen, an area to the south of Thorpeness, is important for wildflowers (including orchids), and a colony of Adder’s tongue fern. Silver birch and willow have started to encroach onto the area so they have been cut back to restore the fen and protect this valuable habitat. The two days spent working in this area has changed the landscape dramatically, it is looking fantastic!
An old pool which was choked with reed has also been opened up again. It has been great for wildlife in the past, so hopefully dragonflies, damselflies and passage migrant birds will make use of it again.
The wet woodland is another important area in Haven fen, this has been coppiced in places around the edges to provide a varied age structure in the woodland and encourage scrub which will in turn benefit nightingales.
Cutting reed at Haven fen by Nick Marsh
Cutting and burning birch and willow at Haven fen by Nick Marsh
Other highlights from the reserve so far this year have been the presence of a couple of rarer visitors – an American wigeon (see Ian’s blog from the 4th Feb), and a Greenland white-fronted goose (distinguished from our usual white-fronted geese from NE Europe and Siberia by a darker head and a more orange bill). It can be seen amongst the regular white-fronted geese in the picture below.
Greenland white-fronted goose by David Fairhurst
A surprise visitor was spotted at North Warren on Wednesday. Grazing among the hundreds of wigeons on South Marsh was one of their cousins from across the Atlantic. American wigeons are scarce visitors tot he UK. A few turn up every winter, among their European cousins. Some of these return to the same place year after year, presumably migrating east to Siberia with the European wigeons, rather than trying to relocated west across the ocean. However, it's a few years since we've seen one at any of our Suffolk coast reserves.
American wigeons are the same size and shape as our wigeons but they lack the pink breast or chestnut and cream head. Instead their head is mainly creamy-white, speckled darker on the cheeks, with a prominent bottle green patch around and behind the eye. The body plumage is pinker, rather than grey. However, they can be very difficult to spot among several hundred other ducks and geese as they graze in the tussocky grass, or loaf around at the edge of the pools. These ducks include teals, shovelers, pintails and shelducks, as the plentiful wigeons.
I tried unsuccessfully to find this lovely duck this morning, but as it was snowing quite hard at the time I probably gave up a bit too easily. It was certainly showing well this afternoon. I hope it stays long enough for me to try again in a couple of weeks when I next have a guided walk at North Warren.
The tundra bean geese were present first thing this morning before flying south to feed. There was, however, a large flock of dark-bellied brent geese on South Marsh. Interestingly, with much of the open water frozen, both pochard and tufted duck, as well as little grebe, were diving in the few open patches of shallow water.
As forecast, this morning dawned cloudy and windy, with rain threatening but the skies were clearing by the time I reached Aldeburgh to welcome ten visitors who were joinng me on the first of this winter's three Winter Wildfowl guided walks at North Warren. It was great to see several familiar faces among the crowd, including Steve and Angela who used to run the nearby Blaxhall Youth Hostel but were returning to Suffolk on holiday from Scotland. I met them at Minsmere on Thursday, where they admitted to having brought the wet weather with them from the Isle of Arran. We need the rain, but we could have done without the wind this morning as the ducks and geese tend to stay low when the wind whistles across North Warren's marshes.
Thankfully, while the wind was to prove a bit of nuisance, it was at least a westerly, with temperatures remaining much more bearable than those associated with easterly or northerly winds. The sun valliantly battled through at times, highlighting the vivid colours of the ducks and resulting in a shimmering rainbow arching across the northern sky. We did, however get caught by a particularly squally shower as we began to head back towards our cars!
As ever at this time of year, the marshes were packed full of ducks, although unusually they were all clustered onto the pools and islands. Clearly the wind was a factor in detering the wigeons from grazing on the adjacent fields, but a bigger issue was the presence of two female marsh harriers constantly quartering the marshes. With each flypast, flocks of ducks would dash from the sheltered banks to the safety of the pools, while waders would wheel around before dropping back to feed or roost around the water's edge.
Among the ducks, wigeons were as expected the most numerous, with many teals hiding alongside their larger cousins. There are excellent numbers of elegant pintails at North Warren this winter, while shovelers, gadwalls and mallards mixed freely in the throng.
Lapwings were the most numerous waders, but up to 300 black-tailed godwits and 200 dunlins swirled around North Marsh in flickering flocks and several curlews strutted through the grass, probing casually for worms. At least one ruff hid among the lapwings, being seen only when the flock flew. There were several hundred starlings among the lapwings too - presumably part of the flock that is roosting in the reedbed here. There were two little egrets on South Marsh too.
North Warren is perhaps best known in winter for its geese, but these were not performing today. We did have excellent views of several very close flocks of barnacle geese, sheltering close to the old railway path, but there were fewer greylag and Canada geese (all feral geese) than normal and the only "wild" goose was a lone brent on South Marsh. There have been up to 350 white-fronted geese at North Warren recently, but they were obviously feeding elsewhere today - perhaps at Sudbourne or Hazelwood Marshes on the Alde Estuary. This is not unusual behaviour when it's windy at North Warren. The tundra bean geese seem to favouring Minsmere this year, with few sightings at their usual stomping ground of North Warren. Perhaps they'll come back in time for my remaining two walks on 4 and 18 February.
Marsh harriers weren't the only predators seen. A fox patrolled stealthily around one of the drier fields in search of rabbits, and a gorgeous male kestrel posed in a nearby pine beofre giving several examples of how to hang in the air, head into the wind, wingtips barely twitching as it searched for hapless vole or mouse. A peregrine has been regular at North Warren recently, but we didn't manage to see it today.
With the wind, it was not surprising that, starlings apart, small birds were limited to a calling skylark and a single meadow pipit on the marshes, a few blue tits and great tits in song along the railway line, and a flock of chaffinches and linnets in fields west of South Marsh.
Gadwall (below) by Jon Evans
Autumn and winter are busy seasons at North Warren with much work to be done on the heath and in the reedbed in preparation for next year’s breeding season. The volunteer winter work parties have started up again and tasks so far have involved gorse coppicing and birch clearance on the heath as well as building a bridge over a ditch into the reedbed to allow easier access for the Truxor (see picture below).
The Truxor – an amphibious reed cutting machine – arrived on the reserve yesterday to begin work in the reedbed. Each year it maintains the reedbed at North Warren by clearing the ditches from encroaching reed and keeping the open pools of water from becoming choked with vegetation. This year, thanks to a grant from SITA, we are able to carry out extra work on top of the routine maintenance. This will allow us to cut some reed plots in the wetter areas of the reedbed that cannot be accessed and cut by hand.
This is fantastic news for the bitterns as it will vary the age structure of the reed, providing good feeding areas in the short term and hopefully good nesting conditions in a few years time.
A couple of rare wildlife highlights from the autumn included the Sandhill crane which paid a brief visit to the North Warren grazing marsh at the beginning of October, only a lucky few had the opportunity to see it here before it moved south to Boyton marshes where it was photographed by Jon Evans.
The dusky warbler stayed around for a few days giving birders tantalising snippets of call from time to time whilst remaining well hidden in the scrub by the footpath accross the grazing marsh. Some people caught a glimpse of it as it flitted along patches of bramble but it wasn’t until the last day of its stay that visitors were treated to a good view of it.
Why don't you head down to the North Warren reedbed at dusk for a wildlife spectacle? At the moment we have between 7,000 and 10,000 starlings and up to 12 marsh harriers roosting in the reedbed - well worth a visit!
It's not often that people get excited by spiders, but one particular species attracts admiring glances every autumn at RSPB Minsmere, and now it has been found for the time at North Warren. The species in question is a stunning black, white and yellow striped spider that has earned itself the perfectly apt English name of wasp spider.
Wasp spiders are relatively recent colonists on the Suffolk coast where they can be found in long grass from mid August. Their webs have a distinctive thick zigzag from top to bottom, and the spiders themselves are unmistakable.
The North Warren wardens discovered this spider on the grazing marsh on Thursday - the first time that one of them had ever seen the species. Sadly, it's location means that visitors will nto be able to see it, though the spider could easily be found elsewhere on the reserve. If you want to see one, they are relatively easy to find on the dunes at Minsmere, close to the sluice, where Jon Evans took this photo last year.