Larking about in an oasis for birds (From The Northern Echo)

Larking about in an oasis for birds

7:59am Saturday 7th March 2009 in News

TV’s Kate Humble yesterday opened the region’s newest nature reserve. The Echo reports.

KATE HUMBLE looked out across the region’s new £7m wildlife haven yesterday morning, gazing over the water meadows and lagoons, and declared it an “oasis”.

The Saltholme reserve may be perched on the edge of Teesside’s petrochemical complex, but you’d never know it.

Kate, who is vice-president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said: “It’s so easy to feel you are escaping the real world. You can come here and enjoy the natural world.

“Here you are in a little oasis. You can forget all about the bad news and all the doom and gloom.

“I think people tend to think of wildlife as something that should be kept in isolation, but this fantastic nature reserve is easy for people to visit and on their doorstep.”

The presenter of BBC Spring Watch and Autumn Watch officially opened the reserve, near Billingham, yesterday – an event which realised a 20-year-dream for site manager Dave Braithwaite.

“I used to come here as a teenager to birdwatch,” he said. “We used to travel up from York.

“This was always a fantastic place and it was a bit of a pilgrimage for us to come here birding. And the birds have got better and better.”

The idea of a Teesside International nature reserve was first discussed in the Eighties as an idea of the long-defunct Teesside Development Corporation.

But, it was not until 2005 that the project began to take shape as a result of a partnership between the Teesside Environmental Trust and the RSPB The Government agency in the North-East, One North East, came on board, as did a raft of other partners.

The reserve opened in part on January 21, with the twostorey visitor centre and one of three observation hides opened.

Today, the remaining two hides are open to the public, following the re-laying of a network of footpaths, first installed with a wrong choice of material.

Cameras covering the 1,000-acre reserve are linked to large screens installed around the visitor centre, giving visitors close-up views of wildlife activity, across the reserve.

The cameras have already proved their worth with the filming of a recent visit to the reserve of a red throated diver.

It is a rare visitor to any inland pool and the first ever recorded for Saltholme, although they can be seen at a distance, through the winter, at Seal Sands and off Hartlepool Headland.

Some 12,000 people have already visited the reserve.

And the RSPB predicts 100,000 people a year will be visiting the reserve by its fifth year.

The wildlife haven boasts a varied range of habitat, including water meadows, scrub, lagoons and ponds, scrapes, hedgerows – and 30 acres of reedbed. Visitors are almost guaranteed seeing a peregrine falcon, a short eared owl and perhaps a merlin.

“It’s just going to get better and better as we make more improvements,” said Mr Braithwaite, an expert on countryside management. He jumped at the chance of applying for the job of site manager, after the vacancy was spotted by an old school friend.

Symbolic perhaps that an avocet – the RSPB’s emblem – flew in yesterday, Teesside’s first of the year.

Graham Wynne, the charity’s chief executive, said: “There is a magic about this place. It’s in a class of it’s own.”