When the planets align, Marshians get busy!

The marsh itself has stayed wet all summer, bucking the trend of drought.

One way or another a lot of the winter flood water has been preserved as the drainage channels have become less effective.

As a result the wildlife has really thrived. Marsh plants once rare have become abundant.

As the water drained away we noticed how it flowed. Many of the drainage channels are relatively modern, dug with machines in straight lines draining the marsh into the ancient old channels that existed before the canal was dug.

The canal itself has taken all the water that flows down the valley. In order for boats to navigate the shallow waters the river was deepened by building the banks up and now the river flows several feet higher than it used to, bypassing the marsh.

That helped make it drier and good for grazing. Not so good for wildlife, nor for flooding. The marsh could hold back a lot of water which otherwise flows through town. Sometimes the canal carries too much and people’s homes flood. Slowing it down would help.

Although we’ve held back some we want to hold back more. One of the reasons is frogs.

And Toads.

In spring hundreds gather in the marsh and spawn, but the herons and the egrets feast on them. Fortunately they lay so much spawn that many tadpoles emerge after the birds have gone elsewhere. Sadly though the water the tadpoles swim about in dries up, and they die or get eaten. Even Robins eat them! Well, they used to.

We figured that if we kept some of that water through the summer the tadpoles would grow into frogs. The birds would be able to get food next year, and many more frogs would survive.

But there’s a lot more that lives in the ditches that stay wet. These fish are young and getting established in ditches that were once bone dry in summer. As the water gets held in the marshes for longer they’re beginning to find places to live.

Which pleases among other things, Kingfishers.

The fish feed on the rich insect life. As do our friends the bats.

One of the main culprits for the marshes draining away is a deep channel that eventually flows back into the river. Building a dam across it won’t make flooding any worse, when the marsh is really flooded it’s all underwater anyway. When the flood waters recede some of it will linger behind the dam. And that is going to preserve water for quite a lot of the other ditches further “upstream”. And with it a lot of wildlife.

We’ve done this before.

The dam we built in May has held back the water that makes our marsh stay wet all year round so far, and has provided homes for grass snakes and otters among other things.

So by using the rubble left behind after our last litter pick we built a dam.

A small posse of Marshians spent an hour ferrying stuff and building a little wall across the ditch.

All we have to do now is wait, and see what happens!

While we’re waiting there’s more to be done. The next day we went back on to the marsh and cut back some of the Reedmace and stomped the margins to make mud.

While we were at it we built little haystacks, which will hopefully become refuges for life on the marsh when it floods.

I can imagine frogs and toads and snakes hiding away inside, always able to move above the water level without having to leave the marsh.

Birds will no doubt use them to sit on too.

It was pretty hard work, we only stopped when we’d run out of energy but seeing the results of our handiwork over the last two days soon reenergised us.

It was a long walk home but I felt sprightly as I dreamed about our busy weekend and the results our efforts would bring.