Firstly, I’d like to introduce myself, I’m Luke Boyle, the Ranger for the Walthamstow and Leyton marsh areas. Switching scenery from the East Sussex seaside to the marshes of east London has been a joy for me since starting here last year. I feel very lucky to be able to spend the majority of my time out on the marshes. Ambling through North Marsh on a crisp, cool morning, heavy with dew, there’s nowhere I’d rather be. I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time getting to meet and greet many of the local faces who are as foundational to the feel of Walthamstow Marshes as the landscape features and the plant and animal communities. Having found my feet it seems a good time to get the newsletter up and running again given how important a role the community plays in the upkeep of the reserve.
The team have been working incredibly hard over the past few years protecting and enhancing the site all the while maintaining the high standards which afford the site its Green Flag status, as well as Gold award winning London in Bloom sites.
As a consequence we have a huge amount to share with you all in terms of what state the site is in, how things might have changed since you last visited, what the outlook is as we move forward and how you might be able to participate in protecting this beautiful space we all are so lucky to benefit from. I hope you enjoy.
The day to day
It’s easy to forget, as we crash headlong into spring, that the marshes don’t always appear the most hospitable place. If you walk the marshes at the time I’m writing this in May, the air is perfumed with elderflower. Your field of vision swims in the seasonally lush, lime green of early spring. Purples and whites from Cow Parsley and Honesty, Comfrey and Borage are the palette for what remains to me, a surreal environment squeezed between Zones 2 & 3 on the London underground. And by remembering the depths of winter, the surreal nature of the marshes is brought into even sharper focus.
As we all know it has been wet this winter. Seriously, seriously wet. Outlines of the ephemeral streams and rivers have wrought their history on North Marsh and remained filled with water for months now. Much of the work we wanted to carry out on this marsh was oriented around enhancing the grassland by reducing patches of scrub. We were able to clear large areas from across the site but not as much as we’d have ideally liked. The beauty of a job like this is that we’ll be able to have another go after the bird breeding season is over. Whilst bramble is valuable habitat for much of the wildlife that uses the marshes, it’s aggressive. Left unchecked it would reduce the whole site to scrub over a matter of years. In order to maintain and enhance the equilibrium and range of species across the site we have to battle it continuously.
In January this year the green was muted and the trees were bare. The two ponds in Horseshoe Thicket had been left overgrown for rather longer than was optimum. Over the course of a few (freezing cold!!) sessions in waders, our honorary wardens and some of my colleagues were able to reduce the levels of reed, creating some interesting structure for the vegetation in the ponds. We also created some barer patches in the south facing margins that hopefully would attract amphibians and reptiles later on in the year. And in the areas where we cut, we can see now growing Cuckooflower in abundance.
Across the site as a whole, the areas adjacent to ditches or ponds where we carried out winter cutting have seen a strong number of Cuckooflowers. As the larval food plant for Orange-tip butterflies, we can only hope that this will be a bumper year for both.
On the South Marsh this late winter we have had the ongoing presence of Snipe. Given that this area isn’t accessible to the general public, the Snipe, which are Amber listed on the IUCN species list, have made home from (we think) February onwards. Impossible to see as a ground nesting, wading bird, Snipe are becoming rarer and rarer in wet grassland areas and lowland generally. It feels like a positive place to be when you see them scatter into the air, swing round and regain their composure on the sopping wet marsh.
The prominent row of native Black Poplars that dissects Leyton Marsh and the South Marsh has been standing proud for around 100 years. Whilst this type of tree can live to around 200 - 250 years, there’s significant risk of their demise once they reach their current size and age. Balancing the conservation of the site as a whole with the very real pressures that come with managing such a public site is a tight walk the Ranger team often having to traverse. We’re using the scrape as a nursery for a succession of Black Poplars which will one day hopefully reach the heady heights of their forebears right next to them.
We planted over 100 tree on the margins of Leyton marsh this year with a view to planting very many more in the next available season. It’s an area of the marshes where we have more freedom to experiment than the SSSI and where planting trees will both provide habitat for a whole suite of species and increase our capacity to capture carbon.
Bees and other such buzz
This year we’ve given particular notice to the bees which forage across the marshes. In the summer of 2023, all three Carder Bee species were sighted around Lee Valley Ice Centre during a survey undertaken by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. Research being carried out on site (more details on which we hope to share in our next issue) suggests the Coppermill meadows are some of the most biodiverse areas on site for bees and other winged invertebrates. In its current state, awash with Garlic Mustard, Cowslip and Nettles in flower, it’s easy to see how a bee might find riches enough to make a suitable home on the meadows. It’s a huge boon for the site to boast this type of diversity even outside of the boundary of the SSSI.
Volunteers
Our volunteers have been as dedicated as ever in assisting with the management of the sites this year.
In September and October we cleared a couple of big areas of reedbed from both the South and North Marsh. Once these are cut, we’d be lost without the help of our volunteers to help remove the spoil from site. We remove the reed to halt the nutrients from returning to the earth. This prevents the more adventitious plants from crowding out the reed as it grows back up over the winter and into the spring. This is common approach for reedbeds and wet meadows and the timing is crucial. Too early and we can interfere with the habitats of communities within the grasses and too late, the site will become waterlogged and make cutting nigh on impossible.
Ox Bow Island
This joint project on the Canal & and River Trust owned island has been running since before COVID and is now virtually complete.
New paths and dead hedging orchestrate a proper woodland walk. Trees and bulbs have been planted. Coir rolls have stabilized the bank within the inlet and we have been able to get on top of invasive non-native species especially Floating Pennywort.
We’ll continue to make little improvements where necessary but as of now Ox Bow Island is a lovely place to spend a little time when out and about.
Plans for the year
Here’s a taste of the projects we have planned in for the next year on the marshes, many of which you’ll be able to learn more about in our next edition:
Black Poplar succession planting nursery
Leyton Marsh Yellow Rattle regeneration
Ox Bow Island meadow management
Coppermill bulb planting
Leyton Marsh carbon capture tree planting programme
Haystacks community event
Replacing fencing on South Marsh
This summer all of our focus turns maintenance and surveying. We’re hoping to complete an invertebrate survey for the site as a whole in line with the ones carried out five and 10 years ago. We’ll welcome the return of our small herd of cattle to site and wonder whether we’ll have another unexpected calf appear mid-way through the season. And we’ll continue to learn how the marshes change over the course of a year, unfixed as they are, and all the more special for it.
We look forward to seeing you all on the marshes!
Leave no trace!
We love to see people using the marshes and would ask everyone to respect this beautiful green space by ensuring they clean up after their dogs and take any rubbish away with them.
New Instagram channel!
Follow us online and on our new Instagram to see what we get up to @walthamstowranger
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