Conservation

Ever since the Club was founded it has pursued an active role in conservation. In the 1950s and 1960s members reared many thousands of Mallard ducklings in their back gardens before releasing them onto unshot waters. Times change and we no longer rear Mallard in that way as it is believed this might affect the gene pool and weaken the truly wild bird strain. We do however rear and release a small number of Mallard on a site within the Corus Works where school children are able visit as part of their nature studies.

Most of our conservation work involves management of the environment. We can hold up to a dozen work parties, usually in the Spring and Summer months, when we do such things as litter clearance, mowing to maintain the herbage in areas where the sheep can’t effectively do it, and damming and gutter clearance to keep waters levels at the optimum for visiting wintering waders and wildfowl.

It is part of membership that everyone is available for work parties and the turn out is usually very good.

In the summer months, after the nesting season and with the agreement of Natural England, CCW and landowners, we can get a tractor with a gang mower and a JCB up to 2 miles out across the marshes to carry out the annual maintenance tasks of mowing and damming.

Corus clean up.

It pays to be part of a club clean up! (£20 found at corus)

Heswall clean up.

Club Work Party - Fencing.

Club Work Party - Brush Clearance, to help the local bird ringing group.

Club Work Party - Brush Clearance, to help the local bird ringing group.

Marsh Cleanup - Corus.

Assisting a local conservation society by the annual clearance of Tern nesting rafts.

Blast it! – by John Graham

In 1972 we were thinking about how we could create some flashes off the front of Parkgate. Whilst Parkgate provided excellent tide shooting, there were no flashes to attract feeding Wigeon that would provide shooting on evening flight.

In the WAGBI magazine there had been an article on how a club had created a suitable area for Snipe and other waders by using explosives and I thought that we might be able to do the same in order to solve our problem. I made contact with the explosives expert involved and he was keen to try and help us.

He came up from Kent one Friday afternoon during a particularly hot period in the summer of 1972; we put him up in a local hotel while he left his open backed Land Rover on my drive with 250lbs of gelignite, detonators, wiring etc in the back just covered by an old tarpaulin. Health and safety – my arse!

Early on the Saturday morning a party of us with spades went out on the marsh, each carting 30-50 lbs of gelignite in our bags and we went out about one mile to an area we had agreed to try; it was a large bowl like depression surrounded by gutters so it would flood easily. We had told the Police what we were doing and notification had appeared in the local papers warning people to leave windows open to reduce possible blast damage.

The explosive expert cut the 5lb sticks of gelignite in half as he didn’t want to blow holes that were too deep, while we dug small holes to put the sticks in. The holes were 8-10 feet apart in patterns which, following the detonation, would hopefully create overlapping blast damage. The detonators were inserted into each stick which were then tamped securely into the ground, then all the sticks were wired together and the circuit tested. We retreated to a supposedly safe distance and then BANG.

The ground shook and a great plume of sand, mud and spartina grass rose more than 100 feet into the air. A few seconds later clods of earth and vegetation started to fall all around us quickly followed by a shower of fine sand and dirt as the wind blew back the smaller particles from the explosion.

We did this a number of times as we increased the size of the hole we were creating until we had used all of the gelignite. It was a tired but happy group of wildfowlers that returned from the marsh that day.

One of our members Bill “Bang Bang” Lloyd, the large bearded chap on the photo, who had dealt with explosives during his time in the Forces, was inspired to obtain an Explosives License and he carried out a number of flash creation explosions in various parts of the marsh over the next year or two.

We could never obtain permission to do such a thing these days due to the conservation status of the Estuary but it worked and was an imaginative way of solving a problem.

Happy days!