Just got back from a couple of hours walking around Swinemoor Common, Beverley. It wasn’t really a birdwatching walk, I was with three friends from college and we were inspecting the place for our management plan assignment. We came up with ideas like retaining the surface water through spring and summer, and grazing the grassland through late summer and autumn to manage it for wetland birds. The idea is to keep horses off of it through the breeding season to allow Lapwings and Snipe to raise their chicks without the threat of trampling. None of this is actually going to happen of course, it’s purely hypothetical.

Other idea we had were a bit of selective tree planting, nest boxes for tree sparrows, roosting boxes for bats and managing visitor access by encouraging them to use an interpreted trail.

However, there’s always time to look for birds and we saw quite a good number of Golden Plover, a couple of hundred in total, 40-50 Lapwings, 2 Snipe and 5 Redshank. Alongside were about 40 Common Gulls, 10-20 Black-headed Gulls and 2 Herring Gulls. A Grey Heron flew over too and a Kestrel hunting kept disturbing the waders and gulls.