On a misty day in the middle of October I was lucky to be able to spend the day with Henry who is the Wildlife Trust BCN’s Monitoring and Research Officer based at the Great Fen.
The Great Fen is large expanse of fenland being restored, it includes three Nature Reserves (Holme Fen, Woodwalton Fen and Ramsey Heights) and several farms, some still being worked and some being returned to a more natural state.
We met up with Henry in the morning on one of these farms and headed out to undertake a water vole survey in the 'Beast' - the electric off-road vehicle. We got down to the water level to look for signs of water vole activity, this included;
· runs where they run along the same path repeatedly
· latrines where females poo on the same place to attract males
· the odd dropping
· feeding remains
· water trails (tracks in the water)
· active burrows, and
· in-active borrows
We saw all of the above, and recorded all the information on a spreadsheet so the team can look at the data and work out how many water voles they think there are over the whole fen.
While we were out, we visited an area of woodland to see the giant puffballs – they were bigger than I thought about the shape, size and colour of a football!
Afterwards, we headed out to a different farm location where there were trail cams and a bird song recorder. After checking the footage and bird song, we took a slight detour to the where another trail cam had been setup to hopefully try and see ‘Gandalf’, the pale-coloured Buzzard. We were lucky and saw it sat on a fence post nearby. We collected the memory cards from the cameras and headed back to the farm buildings to have lunch and review the footage, where we joined by Jasmin who showed me a cool photo of a spider – a Marbled Orb Weaver!
After we had replenished our energy, we went to survey another ditch for water voles and removed the water vole platform before work was done in that area.
The water vole platform is a floating platform where the water voles can climb on and take the food. My job was to wash them down, because they were covered in Water vole poo, but I’ll spare you the detail!
I loved my day on the Great Fen, I learnt loads, had lots of fun and saw lots of cool things. I really about the science and monitoring projects and learning the skills to do surveys.
Thank you Henry and Jasmin
Sightings List
Marsh Harrier
Reed bunting
Crows
Linnet
Snipe
Meadow pippet
Cormorant
Kestrel
Goldfinches
Mute swan
Red kite
Starlings
Egret
Magpies
Grey heron
Buzzard
Stonechat
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