New Ponds and Bank Erosion

Many of you will have noticed that there are a couple of new additions to the local nature reserve in the form of new ponds. Both of these are found on the site at the end of Juniper Crescent and were created as part of the South East Wales Wetlands Project in partnership with Environment Agency Wales and Ponds Conservation. Hopefully, in time they will be naturalised with plantlife (an area heavilly populated by sedges, reeds and alder), by insect life and hopefully for newts and to support more bats.

The ponds appear to be filling quite nicely, but management of Himalayan balsam here may be a problem, so we will have to wait until next summer to find out.

Recently, we did a trial bank stabilisation event with HSBC using coppiced willow into bundles. The good news is that the willow bundles are still there. The problem is that the drain is already fully blocked up and the water back filling again. It seems that this is a big part of the erosion problem. Moreover, it seems that there is a stream leading down to the drain from the oppisite direction to the stream itself and this will eventually undermine the concrete drain itself. We also found an area part the way along the the stream where the bank is being seriously eroded across the path and this is creating a really dangerous crevice. There are several pictures in the following slideshow showing all of these problems.



I met up with Jon the Woodland Ranger back in work after his sabbatical and we talked about some of these issues and we hope to come up with a proactive and reactive plan.

Don't forget the next event is this Sunday (27th Nov) at 10am meeting at the Car Park off Birch Grove performing more bankstabilisation and coppicing.