Author: Land Matters (Page 1 of 3)

The first three trees were planted for Lance Cousins on Friday in the Ram field. The planting team was Chris Gilchrist, James Peel, Cary Mandel and Francis Beresford. These trees are two small leaved Limes and a Rowan.

Eventually there will be a whole grove.

This is Will Lewis, the local otter expert, with a motion sensitive wildlife camera, by the lake at Greenstreete.

He says the Otters have been there every month recently and are attracted by the water.

Lots of Otter spraints have also been found all along the river.

This is Dan Westbury from the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust who is working with us on the management of the wetlands and is planning to construct ‘leaky dams’ later in the year.

Dan has also spotted a couple of Kingfishers down by the lake.

It is Radnorshire Wildlife Trust who put up motion sensor cameras and who sent us all the footage.

Wilder Lugg Project | Radnorshire Wildlife Trust (rwtwales.org)

We are involved with this project.

Please do come along on Wednesday.

Book here: https://www.rwtwales.org/events/2024-07-03-wilder-lugg-project-launch

Exciting news! We may have Otters on our Wetlands.

Radnorshire Wildlife Trust officers who have been surveying there for us think they have spotted signs of their activity.

We have agreed for them to put up motion sensor cameras in four locations – see photos. The cameras record a short video (around 5/10 seconds). A WT officer will check them after one month – camera trapping can sometimes be a long-term project, with otters sometimes not returning to sites for many months, but we hope to capture something soon.

(We have requested that all footage with humans in be deleted, which the WT will do. The cameras will be switched off for the upcoming Family Weekend.)

Let us know how you feel about the cameras.

And if you spot anything yourself, please let us know!

One of the newly made ponds, in the sunshine…

This brilliant collaboration is bound to be a hit:

As you can see in the photo, the land group Wetlands team meet up with Dan Westbury from Radnorshire Wildlife Trust’s Wilder Lugg Project, Sarenta King from the Wye Adapt to Climate Change Project and Tony Norman, Hertfordshire farmer intent on saving the endangered native Black Poplar. (We may be planting some Black Poplar on the land – you can expect a blog post about this at some point.)

Here is some of the Pondlife seen:

This tree was planted at Greenstreete in memory of Jon Riehl, a North American Samatha practitioner who died in August 2022 after a long and painful illness. Jon was a much-loved  member of the Samatha community. Prior to his illness, he had practiced with Nai Boonman both in the US and at Greenstreete. He died just as the 35 Year Anniversary of Greenstreete & Nai Boonman 90th birthday celebrations were coming to an end and shortly before the final transference of merit.

looking very good and watery! (photo was taken before the storm)

Wherever water collects, it creates opportunities for life.

In the field near the wetlands area, the ponds and scrapes that were created this year have been collecting water.

These man-made, temporary sort of features will naturally dry up in some weathers, but are a valuable habitat for creatures such as invertebrates, wading birds and plants that like boggy conditions. 

We were not sure how well they would fill up, but as you can see here they are encouragingly holding the water for some time.

For further wetland conservation info: https://www.wwt.org.uk/discover-wetlands/wetlands/ditches-and-scrapes/

…and looking even more watery now, after the storm…

Land Art from the recent Creativity Week at Greenstreete

Further explanations of how these came into being are given in the video in the next blog post.