MINSMERE BIRD RESERVE H . E . AXELL
it was established by the R.S.P.B, in 1948, the reserve has maintained its basic importance to birds in providing a diversity of protected habitats. Management work on a large scale has been done to sustain and develop the different feeding and breeding sites, improving their value at a time when the countryside is being whittled away with increasing rapidity. T o augment the existing variety of freshwater marsh, woodland, heath and shore, an entirely new habitat of forty acres of shallow, brackish water, with many islands, has been constructed in the past decade. Now widely known as " T h e Scrape", this project has added some 1,500 pairs of breeding birds to the population of the reserve. SINCE
In its first season, Minsmere was found to be supporting eightyfive different breeding species. By 1971 this number had risen to ninety-nine. In the meantime, however, as well as these gains in variety and the increases which had occurred in the densities of some species, the reserve has also experienced several losses. Some species have apparently ceased permanently to breed in this area and populations of others are continuing to decline. While some of the local changes, both losses and gains, can be seen as the direct result of man's activity, others have no obvious cause. T h e wide-spread effects of the slowly-changing climate upon plant and animal life, including the distribution of bird populations, may be partly responsible for some losses; at Minsmere, these losses are occurring mostly on the dry heaths. In these areas and in the woodland-edge zones, a more obvious factor contributing to bird changes has been the modern scarcity of rabbits. Since the advent of mvxomatosis in 1953, large areas of scrub and young woodland of oak and pine have developed, to the temporary advantage of some birds but to the detriment of more which are dependent upon heavily grazed and partly bare ground for their feeding and nesting sites. Loss of habitats elsewhere, through reclamation for farming or building or through degradation by pollution or disturbance have caused birds to seek new sites. Some of these will have been attracted to Minsmere by the improved and protected wetland habitats which have been made available in the freshwater and brackish areas. Of obvious benefit has been the diversification of plant life and thus insect and other animal life which has been achieved by the control of large areas of reed and exposure of more mud and shallow water. A healthy ecology is maintained in the marsh; in the woods, all of the resident species recovered successfully from the effects of the prolonged arctic weather of 1962/63 but on the seashore and dunes and near the public roads and paths, many bird species are being adversely affected by the relentlessly