Erik Paterson

This morning was my first friends of langlands Moss (FOLM) meeting, had a blast, although, please do excuse my lack of enthusiasm, i'm knackered!

The day started with a 6 am wake up, still dark!  Got up, and turned on the PC, checked my emails and got showered, by 10AM I was at the Moss meeting the guys from the FOLM team, all nice people!  Colin, George, Richard & myself headed over the board walk and on to the Moss, our duties for the day were to move the material used to build the dams to where they were to be used and, if we managed that quick enough, we'd put in some dams.  With a 3 hour time limit, we thought we would manage.  the material consists primarily of 3 meter long, 5mm thick corrugated plastic sheets which weigh a lot, and when you're carrying those around a half a kilometer on rough, marshy land - it takes it out of you.  Together We hauled a good 15 of those up to the desired spots for dams.

Now, I should explain WHY we need dams in the Bog.  The bog has long irrigation channels throughout it to keep water in the peat.  These need to be dammed at regular intervals to ensure that the water floods out in to the marsh keeping the ecosystem working.  They also maintain a high water level needed to sustain the marshy ecosystem. (That is a VERY basic explanation.)

So, we moved all the plastic up to the desired areas and realised we had used 2 and a half of our 3 hour time limit.  Time to head home, without managing to put in any Dams, saving that for Thursday ;).

Was a good day, saw a lot of Snipe flying off as we crossed the marsh (lifer for me), even saw a couple of Frogs, an adult and some juveniles.  Buzzard flying around overhead too, I think it sensed the fact I was ready to keel over! haha.

Anyways, apologies for this rather short blog, I had a good day today.

Below: The irrigation channel for the bog, this is the one we were working on today, photo taken from the Board Walk.