Hiatus

I’m sure it will come as no surprise that our monitoring and colour-ringing projects of breeding birds at Dersingham Bog NNR are now on temporary hold in these intensely difficult times.

Along with many other conservation organisations and reserves, our staff and volunteers are not currently carrying out any surveying or ringing, in line with the Government’s guidelines on social distancing during the Coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic. So, currently all monitoring of our key resident species, Stonechat and Woodlark, as well as our incoming migrants, Nightjar and Tree Pipit, is suspended for the time being.

Like everyone else, we are all missing working at Dersingham Bog on this fascinating project which has absorbed our staff and volunteers for years. We will review the situation as the season progresses and to ensure we continue to comply with Government guidelines, and we’ll keep you posted whether we can resume work on the project later in the season, most likely on our Nightjars and later broods of Stonechats.

In the meantime, we hope that the reduced numbers of visitors to the reserve will result in less disturbance this season and that all four target species, as well as the Dersingham Bog’s breeding birds in general, will do well in their breeding efforts. They will no doubt still have to contend with predation, both mammalian and avian, the unpredictable weather which had such an impact last season, and a certain level of human disturbance on site and the threat of eggers may still be an issue, but overall we hope they have a bumper year.

With the two Beasts from the East decimating our Stonechat numbers a couple of years ago, it would be good to have something positive come out of this challenging time.

So we hope that all our followers on Twitter and those who follow the website stay safe and well in these troubling times and we’ll see you on the other side.

We look forward to seeing bumper numbers of Stonechats on Dersingham Bog in future – albeit many of them will be unringed!

Best wishes from the project team – staff and volunteers.