Upcoming Crossness Nature Reserve events – enjoy, learn and help manage one of Bexley’s finest wildlife sites.
This Saturday afternoon (15th July), there is a Kids Go Wild event on the nature reserve, where your children or grandchildren might like to try out pond-dipping, mini-beasting and bird watching from 1-2.30pm. If you can’t make this one, feel free to book onto the midweek Kids Go Wild which takes place during the summer holidays on Wednesday 9th August.
Reserve Manager Karen Sutton at Crossness on a previous children’s event.
Next week there is a conservation task day whereby we’ll be pulling up Ragwort from some of the horse-grazed paddocks on Crossness Southern Marsh. This is taking place on Wednesday 19th July at 10am, where supplied refreshments will be had in the field after all the hard work.
Then there are a couple of site walks, taking in the southern marshes as well as the reserve. There’s a midweek walk, week after next on Thurs 27th July (lunch provided), and a weekend walk on Saturday 5th August whereby you’d need to bring your own lunch/refreshments. Both of these events start at the slightly later time of 11am and will involve approximately 3 hours of slow, steady walking.
Watching Dragonflies and Damselflies at Crossness (Photo: Karen Sutton)
Some bat/nocturnal walks will also be taking place in Aug (Southmere Lake area) and Sept (Nature Reserve).
It would be great to see you at these events, so do book on if any sound of interest.
Things go a bit quiet on the wildlife front at this time of year, but nevertheless, we’ve had juvenile Bearded Reedlings in the Protected Area reedbed last week, which I’m really hoping is indicative of them having bred here. As you will know from previous communications, we have had Bearded Tits in the reedbeds since last year and the hope was that they would stay and breed, and while we can’t say absolutely categorically that they did breed at Crossness (they could have made their way over from RSPB Rainham), I think the likelihood is pretty high. This is a site first.
We’ve also had Cuckoo on the Southern Marsh for the first time. We are used to seeing them on the nature reserve in the summer, but not on the southern marsh. The warblers are still around and singing away in the reedbeds, and the Swifts are still screaming away during their feeding frenzies.
Ffi/booking – Karen Sutton, Biodiversity Team Manager, 07747 643958, karen.sutton@thameswater.co.uk
