03/02/20 - World Wetlands Day

Yesterday was World Wetlands Day, which occurs annually on February 2^nd, and marks the date of the adoption of the Convention on Wetlands on February 2, 1971 when environmentalists signed an international agreement at the Ramsar Convention in Iran. Since then Governments around the world have designated and protected over 2200 Ramsar sites, identifying them as wetlands of international importance.

Wetlands and biodiversity is the theme for 2020, celebrating that wetlands are rich in biodiversity and are a habitat for a great variety of plant and animal species. Whilst we might all be aware of the loss of global biodiversity, wetlands are disappearing at an alarming rate, almost three times faster than forests, so we need action to reverse its loss. With thanks to your support, either by buying our logs, cards or calendars, booking us for talks and events, or making donations to the Friends of the Lower Derwent Valley, the Friends have been able to safeguard a little bit more of our international wetland resource. Last week they completed the purchase of 6.6 acres of lowland wet grassland on North Duffield Carrs – one of the last blocks of land there still in private ownership. This land is now secured for nature conservation, so that future generations can enjoy the thousands of wintering birds, breeding birds, mammals, plants and invertebrates which use the site over the year. There is still more to be done though - the land purchase cost £20,000 and the Friends, who are now a registered charity, are keen to crowd fund in order to replace their land acquisition fund to help purchase more land. If you’d like to help then please follow the link below to their Go Fund me page - https://www.gofundme.com/f/conserving-the-lower-derwent-valley.

Celebrating World Wetlands Day helps recognise the importance wetlands play in providing and safeguarding biodiversity, as well as a host of other wide-ranging benefits (carbon storage, flood storage, food production and public enjoyment). The Lower Derwent Valley is protected by numerous international designations and is of international importance – our ringing studies over the last 30 years have so far linked the valley with 28 countries around the world, and we’ve recently heard about a few of our ringed birds giving a flavour of this international flyway:

A Wigeon ringed at Bank Island in February 2018 was recovered in the Lebyazhevskiy District of Russia in September last year – 4317km to the east of the valley, making it one of our furthest Wigeon so far - possibly on or near its breeding site.

Last year during the autumn influx of Redwing from Northern Europe over 60 individuals were caught in the NNR base garden during November. Most of the them cleared out of the area over Christmas and we wondered where they might have gone - by early January one individual had made it 1730km to the south and into Portugal – a distance covered in just 53 days.

We’ve also recently heard about a Reed Warbler caught last summer at Wheldrake Ings with a Portuguese ring - it was ringed in August 2018 at Paul do Taipal, Coimbra as a juvenile. Many thanks to our team of volunteers who spend many an hour collecting data and then submitting it to the BTO and WWT.