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July/August 2018
News
Flaming June in the Three Brooks nature reserve By Sara Messenger of the Three Brooks Nature Conservation Group
Green Gym
We’re always quite busy at this time of year, but this time I think we’ve surpassed ourselves! Our Green Gym ate a lot of cake as we’ve had several birthdays (Geoff, unlike me, doesn’t look a day older) and we had our annual garden party hosted by David and Hilary Baker. Sadly, it was also a farewell party as they are upping sticks and moving away. They will both be greatly missed – Hilary as a wonderful hostess and David for his immense knowledge of the reserve. However, we did manage to work off some of the cake, as we were told that a tree had fallen over the path by Campion Drive, and although SGC had been notified, it was still there. We headed down and
SGC and their contractors arrived just as we had finished cutting it back! We bribed, sorry rewarded, them with cake and they chipped all they could and drove the chippings down to the lake so that we could cover the muddiest parts of the lake path to make it safe for the 10k run. We know the run is billed as ‘multi terrain’, but the state it was in would have done neither the runners nor our paths any favours.
Lake life
I’m known for jokingly telling off people who call our lake a pond, but I think at the moment it couldn’t even aspire to be called a pond. There are great swathes of unsightly mud stretching from one side to the other and I would be greatly concerned if anyone fell in. The water is not deep, but the mud is, and I know from experience how easy it is to get stuck and how unnerving
it is when you do. However, on the plus side, I spotted on the other side of the stone bridge two very large schools of sticklebacks and by the other stone bridge, leading to Juniper Way, one of the Green Gym members spotted a single very large fish. Although I’m told fisherman are prone to exaggerating, he assured me it was almost a foot long! We’ve long suspected we have some larger fish as our resident heron does not look particularly undernourished, although, perhaps like the otters, he has been supplementing his diet with fish from our back garden ponds. We were told last month that the late Roy’s pond had lost all its fish and that otters had been identified as the culprits by the muddy paw prints left at the scene. It was hugely pleasing for us to know that the otters had returned, although I’m not sure Roy’s widow or the fish would agree!
But their return is another solid argument for getting the lake desilted and stocked with fish and also gives me an excuse to make some proper holts on the reserve. Wessex Water should by now be completely finished and the sewer monitoring box operational. They have assured us that they have seeded the areas with a mixture of grass and wild flowers, and although I’m yet to see anything other than wild rape seed growing, I’m sure that’s more to do with my eyesight than them just using cheap grass seed. SGC are talking to them about reinstating the path behind the lake. There was a concern about the number of stones in the ground as it was thought when the grass is cut they could fly out. However, each time we go past, we take a bucketful with us to the ‘path pond’ to lay around the edge as this creates a better edge for
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21/06/2018 11:00:40