Water Water Everywhere!

 As was alluded to in the last post there has been a degree of flooding, and by degree, I mean a lot. There is always some winter flooding in January and December but this New Year it was exceptional. Floods and storm events can often characterised by their frequency the last time the river rose this much was in perhaps 1998, making this a once-in-25-year flood event.

This therefore is the largest flood in the time that I have been managing my patch. Flood water before New Year had already brought down a holly-weakened Alder and flattened my northern fence. This time the extent was much worse. 

I haven't been able to check on Otter Cam there is no way I can get anywhere near its location and given the height, the river rose to I am fairly sure the camera is no more. It rose so far that even the main cam was interrupted, it stopped recording on the 2nd January when the deluge reached its peak. You can see how the river rose in the following time-lapse video below.

Main Camera location showing much of the top soil stripped off revealing the stony base and the debris left by the floodwater.

To put it in context the camera is located over 80 metres from the main river channel. To look at the situation in more detail I did a little analysis on QGIS starting with a Digital Elevation Model of the area. This shows the height of the terrain from sea-level in meters. I would have preferred a more fine-grained set of data, perhaps height in 25 centimeters but beggars can't be choosers.

My patch runs along the main river channel which I believe is deeper than is shown here. It was canalised and actually runs higher than the backwater shown. The backwater is I think the original river channel that was diverted to feed the mill. Normally flooding barely reaches the hedgeline where the Main Cam is. Otter Cam whilst closer to the backwater and river is actually on a tree at least 1.5 metres up, unfortunately I think the river rose more.

I used the DEM to create a profile across the river showing the normal water level and what looks like to be the height of the flood water on the 2nd January.

Patch Profile over 140m - Showing normal water height in the river (far left) and back water (centre). The hedgeline with the main camera is on the far right.

Estimated Flood Level - 140m cross section

So what does this mean for the wildlife? Well, it has thrown up one interesting fact. Normally the dominant rodent recorded on the camera is the Wood Mouse with the very rare sighting of a Field Vole. This is because the vole prefers more undergrowth than is present where the camera is, but when the water rose more voles were recorded as the water drove them from the vegetation and up the bankside.

Date	Number of Wood Mice Recorded	Number of Field Voles Recorded
28th December 2023	14	0
29th December 2023	29	3
30th December 2023	4	4
31st December 2023	4	0
1st January 2024	6	1
2nd January 2024	3	0

This devastation of my camera trapping will allow me to reassess how to move forward with the research and think about what cameras I will use and where. In some ways, this could prove costly but not as costly as it has been for the Saxon Mill pub. It was flooded out, something that has happened many times before but this time it was exceptional, you can see in the following photo how high the water rose by looking at the wet stone mark on the wall beside the entrance to the Riverside Bar.

 

2023 - A patch round up

 So another year has been and gone, they are really starting to add up now. I started patch recording in 2002 and started getting good data in 2004. It means that I can start to see trends and patterns. 

I have so much data it takes time to process it all, it's taken me two days to process the Bird data from visits let alone my camera trail data. That project is on hold because Otter Cam is currently inaccessible due to flooding.

So how can I evaluate this year's recorded survey session on my patch, how about a series of numbers.

Number of Surveys: 49

Average length of survey: 77 minutes

Total time spent on the patch: 60.5 hours

In that time I recorded:

63 species of bird bringing my patch total to 93 species.

4 species of mammal

12 species of dragonfly

15 species of butterfly

Number of Bird Species each month

Number of Bird Species each year

Highlights this year are obviously the new species spotted namely Firecrest, Red Kite, and Great White Egret. 

Several species were not recorded at all but were relatively common:

Little Grebe (for the third year in a row)

Fieldfare

Kestrel ! once a breeding species

Mistle Thrush

Of course my Roe Deer have provided me with endless enjoyment

Roe Deer

 Grey Squirrel

Sadly foxes seems to have become scarcer and I no longer think the Badger sett is occupied but I will no more once I have analysed the trail camera data.

So 2023 was a mixed bag, with some gains and some losses. Over the next few months, I will dig into the data a little more to explore more of the trends, starting probably with the Little Grebe that used to overwinter here.