Hard at work on Tameside

We’ve had two successful work days, the “Wild About Tamworth” event and a visit from the Tamworth in bloom judges and I almost forgot the newt survey.

The grass has been growing fast and wild I don’t think I’ve seen it so high, the wild flowers have been stunning much to the delight of the bees and butterflies who seem to have had a good year.

The pathways have been quite a task the mowers have been out both months, we just manage to do all paths with three mowers on a Sunday work day. Our old friend the Himalayan balsam is back with no mercy, just loving the weather conditions warm and wet spells. The group have also been balsam pulling over the two months, but there is just so much of it, it’s hard to see where we‘ve been. The old dipping platform has finally gone; the ground’s now ready for the new viewing platform to be installed. This platform we hope to build out into the lake in a T shape, we’ll probably plant around it with a few extra reeds. Other jobs included boardwalk maintenance and the regular litter picking. Sadly our bench by the aqueduct was lost to vandals ending its days in the river, it was retrieved thanks to Ron and Chris, and we’ll be installing a new bench as soon as we can.

We had results from the newt survey done april/may this was looking for the great crested newt sadly we didn’t find any this time but we did get the smooth newt. The weather conditions were not particularly good for the survey with water levels rising and affecting the traps, it’d be good to repeat this at some point in the future.

The reserve had a visit from the judges of the Britain in bloom competition; this has a category for project like our reserve. It was a lovely sunny day when the judges came unfortunately they didn’t walk around and see the flowers only spending a short time on site, but they had visited before and have the background on the reserve as well as our group, so hope we do ok. We will know in September.

The “Wild About Tamworth” event this is a day when wildlife groups come together and promote wildlife in Tamworth. Our group comes under the umbrella of Wild About Tamworth, its a project that helps create local nature reserves out of green spaces locally. It was a quite day the event had moved position slightly and we didn’t get as much through traffic this year, in saying that we had a lot of nice comments and spread the word that Tameside is an excellent reserve to visit so in that respect it went well. Unfortunately the last hour was a little wet in fact things just floated ways and the poor guys with the PA system blew away as well getting wet. Thanks to all who came along and to Nadia the Wild About Tamworth project officer who took over the running of the event.

The pictures are from both work days and the event.