The Carrs Wetland Project

This blog started life as a website for a wetland restoration project near Scarborough, in North Yorkshire. The Cayton and Flixton Carrs Wetland Project, as originally named, was an advocacy project working with farmers. It sought to establish farm stewardship schemes on lowland, floodplain peat soils in the Vale of Pickering. A wetland landscape would be restored, farmed less intensively to enhance habitats bring back breeding waders and protect the archaeological heritage associated with Star Carr. (Star Carr is arguably the most important Stone Age site you may never have heard of). The project employed a full-time Project Officer at Scarborough Borough Council between 2006 and 2013.

Although The Carrs Wetland Project came to an end, I sincerely hope that it has remained in people’s hearts as a cause, as the Vale of Pickering needs friends and advocates. It truly is ‘An Extraordinary Place’, as you can read in this blog. 

Keeping this WordPress site online, is one way that I have attempted to keep the interest in and awareness of The Carrs in the minds of local people and interested parties and its serves as a record of work done and knowledge accumulated in the process about wetland restoration on the lowland peat.

Tim Burkinshaw, (former wetland project officer and ecologist for Scarborough Borough Council). 

Wader scrape, Willerby Carr

String ’em up

A grisly line-up of stoats and crows taken out of the equation by a local gamekeeper

A gamekeepers ‘gibbet’ photographed earlier on this Spring is a gruesome tally of predator control on a Carrs Wetland farm. This one is strung with Stoats and Carrion Crows, both partial to a lapwing chick or two and a reminder of the pressures that ground nesting birds including waders face in the breeding season.
Whether or not active control by keepers is carried out on a farm can be an important factor in wader productivity. It can mean the difference between successful fledging of young or complete failure of nests; even if many other habitat and hydrological aspects are optimised on a wetland site. We must remember that a clutch of lapwing eggs numbers 4 or 5 and conservation managers consider an average of 0.7 chicks raised per pair to be pretty good going. Most of them get ‘knobbled’ in other words. See an earlier post on Lapwing productivity here and another post here from last year on these charismatic waders

We may not like the idea of someone trapping and humanely dispatching predators, but without doubt ground nesting waders can fare better on farms with shooting interests.

It so happens that a diligent keeper controlling foxes, stoats, crows and mink for the benefit of the pheasants and partridge they rear for the shooting season, can also improve the chances of other ground nesting birds, lapwing, curlew and snipe included, during the breeding season.
So now do we think that shooting and conservation can go together in wetlands? Is predator control distasteful to some people? – I’m sure it is, but next time you pass a line of corvids or mustelids hung on a fence, think about chicks that might have been chomped or eggs eaten had those predators been left to raise young of their own. It makes you see it a bit differently, doesn’t it?

Now, it may be an age-old tradition for gamekeepers to display their furred or feathered perpetrators for their employer to verify, no doubt with a tugging of forlock and doffing of cap, but in the old days they were paid at piece rates. Who knows maybe some still are. But it’s a country tradition, so let’s focus on the service they are performing for put-upon wildlife and not the grisly line-up on the gamekeepers gibbet – think of it more like an invoice for services rendered in the name of wetland wildlife.

If you want to learn more about the farm site where I saw this gamekeeper’s handiwork (this is not a spot on public view, if you were wondering) then I recommend the Potter Brompton Farms blog.

Flixton Island goes on the market

One of the parcels of peatland pasture put up for sale at Flixton Bridge, adjacent to the Mesolithic site of Flixton Island.

A piece of Stone Age real estate has gone on the market, offering a chance for someone sympathetic to its archaeological significance to purchase a chunk of ‘Palaeo-Lake-side’ property.

A number of parcels of pasture land near Flixton Bridge, Scarborough, including the heritage sites of ‘Flixton Island’ and ‘No Name Hill’ are currently up for sale.

Link to sale particulars on http://www.rightmove.co.uk  Link to the sale brochure (pdf download) from RightMove. The archaeology here ties closely to that of the more famous Star Carr Mesolithic site just a few hundred metres west. The renowned  Star Carr research project has focussed recent summer fieldwork investigations on Flixton Island, and indeed the field has been the location for filming by Channel Four’s Time Team and hosted public open days to show people the digs taking place. The Star Carr Team are hopeful that the sale of the land will not jeopardise the heritage of the site, which has no formal statutory protection, but is, for a few years more subject to an HLS stewardship agreement, including an undertaking not to plough the Flixton Island and No Name Hill fields. The HLS parcels are lightly grazed or cut for hay and they are managed to encourage wetland bird species such as Lapwing.

We do not have the funds or the expertise to buy and manage the land, but we are hoping that someone who is sympathetic to archaeology will end up purchasing it.

Flixton Bridge lies near the centre of the deep ‘fen peat’ soils left behind by the Stone Age wetland known as Palaeolake Flixton. Today it sits on the Hertford floodplain, the drainage cut of the same name slicing right along the length of the former like of 12,000 years ago. (Read more on the drainage of the Vale of Pickering landscape here) But in the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, as human hunter-gatherer societies were beginning to settle and exploit the natural resources around them there were some small areas of land that rose above the waters of Lake Flixton, where glacial gravels and sands gave them a modest elevation. These islands are still discernible today to the visitor to this pastoral landscape, and represent important Prehistoric sites which are still giving up their stories to modern day archaeologists.

Flixton village with the flat land of Flixton Carr beyond

Hertford gets the Wild Trout Trust treatment

Wild Trout TrustJohn Shannon from the East Yorkshire Rivers Trust inspecting the Hertford Cut channel before work begins.

A demonstration day on the Hertford Cut, organised for the Environment Agency and Vale of Pickering Drainage Board was deemed a success as two hundred metres of the drainage channel received the Wild Trout Trust treatment. (Read more about the Wild Trout Trust’s recent work on Pickering Beck here) The work carried out in May was made possible in no small part thanks to the willing help of Scarborough Conservation Volunteers who donned chest waders and took up brash bundles to learn about low-tech restoration techniques. They were able to install a decent trial stretch of in-channel features in The Hertford to show how simple intervention using local materials such as birch brash and ash stakes can enhance habitats for fish such as brown trout and grayling.

The principle is to create a two stage channel where vertical scouring and speeded flow in the centre make up for the reduction in width of the low flow channel. The narrower channel is better at regulating itself and should not be as prone to silting up. The ecology of the river benefits too from invertebrates to fish from the variety in the channel shape and flow regime.

The demonstration day was organised by The Wild Trout Trust in collaboration with East Yorkshire Rivers Trust and the Environment Agency on 22nd May. Thanks are also due to the landowner at Manor Farm Staxton, Mr Hill for accommodating the access and parking on the farm and of course to the Vale of Pickering IDB, who own and control the Hertford banks and are responsible for the maintenance of the drainage cut.

Volunteers constructed paired deflectors from brash bundles.The brash features are staked and wired firmly allowing flow over the top when levels rise, but in normal flows focus energy in the centre of channel to prevent silt and form some pools for fish.

Working on a paired deflector

The features installed include 5 or so ‘paired current deflectors’ – looking like upstream pointing V’s with a narrow gap in centre. They create pinch points and deflect current inwards to the centre.

Bundles after wiring down

Just below the bridge is an offset brash feature, which both narrows the over-wide low-flow channel and creates sinuosity.

Also there is a version of a ‘tree-kicker’, using felled or pleached limbs or bankside trees to create the same effect of pinching the channel.

Invited staff from the EA and IDB learn about the demo features and how the trial stretch may be monitored.

Three new gaugeboards were put in by the rivers trust, in order that one may monitor the impact over that stretch. All three boards were zero-ed to water level on the first day, so relative differences upstream and downstream of the demo stretch would be apparent. The EA will collate readings of the three measuring boards, collected at different flow states as the channel adjusts to the new features. More pictures of the event are on the Carrs Wetland Project facebook page.

 

An excellent starting point to find out more about river restoration is the Wild Trout Trust’s own website, and their resource library on river habitat improvement for fish such as trout