Tesco Bags of Help
25th August 2017

Friends of Par Beach would like to say a massive THANK YOU to everyone who voted for them in Tesco during May and June. As a result, we came first in the voting so have won the grant we asked for of £3500 which is for habitat management work in the alder carr at the pond.

Alder carr, which also contains willow, is a wet woodland habitat which colonises marsh and in past times would have been carefully managed to produce coppice products for housebuilding, hurdles and so on, in a similar way to hazel in drier places. Our pond edges are getting too filled in with saplings and so we will be coppicing a proportion of the alder and willow to start of a 7 or 15 year cycle of coppice which provides a more complex structure that benefits all wetland wildlife.

Details of the work are now in the planning stage and you should see something happening in the next few months. We will also be removing some sycamore from the edge of the marsh and constructing 1 or 2 artificial otter holts which will act as safe laying up places for otters passing through (and yes, there is evidence that they do!).

A proportion of the money is also set aside for upgrading our tool stock and educational activity about wetland wildlife and any left-over will contribute to the removal of other invasive species in the other habitats in the reserve.

We have a year to spend the grant but the coppicing is due to start taking place in September during which time the bird watching path will not be open for access.

We are enormously grateful to Tesco for initiating this scheme and to Groundwork South who promote it on their behalf.