We’ve dug some scrapes
In November, after nearly two years of delays due to floods and an unexpected permit requirement we finally completed digging a series of scrapes on our rewilding site at Athelney. Scrapes - which are simply shallow irregular ponds - are a common way of creating a bit of additional space for wetland wildlife in landscapes that have been smoothed out and drained over the centuries.
It’s taken us a while to get these done, and we would like to thank various donors and supporters who contributed to them - both in terms of the digging and also of the planning and surveying that went beforehand.
The four scrapes we’ve built down at Athelney are not huge, in fact they are pretty modest - around 100 metres long each, and 5 metres wide - and on only a small part of the site, but it's still an exciting step. As flood waters come and go over the land the idea is simply to create a little diversity in the water levels around these fields, and to let the wildlife find its way to them. At the same time we are disabling a couple of small field drains - agricultural infrastructure which is no longer needed.
How does this fit with our approach to be as hands-off as possible? Well it doesn't quite, but it's a small intervention in two fields which had previously been reseeded with rye grass and one which we hope will bring some big benefits. Longer term we'll allow them to develop as they will, but for now it is a quick way to add a bit of extra diversity to the area. Over time wetland plants and animals, such as our resident water voles, should be able to move out of the ditches and start using these scrapes.
Of course nothing runs entirely smoothly and on day two we managed to break the digger moving an enormous tree stump off the road (it fell down in a storm last year and was somewhere we couldn't really leave it). After a week of repairs though the digger was back, the scrapes completed and the stump dragged away from the road to somewhere it can now be left to rot for decades to come.
We’ll obviously keep you up to date with the changes we see on the scrapes in the coming years. Between these and the tree planting though it might feel as if we have really started to intervene in the sites - but this is not really the case. Both recent measures are very small in the scale of the overall projects and the aim of being as light-touch as possible is still very firmly in place.
