Shapwick Heath Newsletter – April to June 2019

As April arrived survey season began in earnest and as our second landscape-wide booming bittern count racked up 42 booming males across the Avalon Marshes, with 13 of them on Shapwick Heath alone and 47 Somerset-wide, we could feel it was going to be a good year. Marsh harriers were displaying well, there was plenty of great white egret activity, the passerines flooded in, cuckoos began to call and a nightingale was regularly heard singing its heart out along the Discovery Trail. Butterfly, bumblebee and dragonfly transects began and the RoAM Thursday surveying group got going on its mission to explore Natural England’s lesser-known sites across the Somerset Levels.

To read the full April to June newsletter open this link to the PDF