2023 Heritage Week Event
Book now to join us later this month! 🙂
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/study-visit-to-shannon-town-wetlands-tickets-687238106677
Walk through the Wetlands
Lovely to see so much meadowsweet and dragonfly but sobering to see how dry our wetlands have become over the last few years. I also walked back on the second less used path to the car park. Enjoy the video 🙂
May Dawn Chorus
I got down to the Wetlands soon after 5 am the other day to record the dawn chorus.
I then ran this audio through the excellent Merlin free Android app that identifies bird from their songs.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.labs.merlinbirdid.app&hl=en&gl=US&pli=1
I haven’t got a clean audio recording of the above video but I did take a recording on my phone as I walked around. Here’s the analysis from the Merlin app.
You can try this for yourself by downloading the Merlin app and the importing the following audio file in the My Recordings section of the app
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XYJxv8nNztGwnru9bNjO8cS8rIZFaLSK/view?usp=drive_link
The cool thing about the app is you can click on the bird it has identified and it will take you to the time in the audio file it heard it! 🙂
The dry spell has really emptied the two ponds as you can see from these photographs though the yellow flag irises look lovely 🙂
Monthly walk through the Wetlands
Summer is underway but the days are pretty cool still. The buttercups are beautiful in the meadow areas and the trees are fully leaved. The large pond is overrun with bull rushes and the smaller one is pretty churned up. Lots of dog prints.
Community Crossover Special – Sun 12th March 2023
I had noticed last month a shopping trolley in one of the ponds. So I made sure I had wellies to retrieve it this month and my Shannon Tidy Towns litter picker and rubbish bags. So a community group crossover!
And here’s a longer video as I collect cans and bottles around the ponds
Sun 23rd Feb 2023. Monthly walk through the wetlands
Things starting to grow again and very mild weather.
Thurs 2nd Feb 2023 – World Wetlands Day
The weather held for us and we had a wonderful hour or so in the wetlands this afternoon. Pupils from both St Patrick’s Comprehensive (https://www.stpatrickscomprehensive.ie/) and Gaelscoil Donncha Rua (https://gdr.ie/). For me the highlight was when Ruairà from LAWPRO (https://lawaters.ie/) explained the sweet smell of otter (madra uisce) excrement! By passing some around 🙂
(PS. If you have photos and are posting them online please let us know and we will link to them. Thanks).