Nigel Middleton is a raptor man.

Specifically, he has a passion for the marsh harrier.

‘Marsh harriers and I are .......’ His voice trails away in a shrug of affinity. In which case, he now has a dream of a job and it has all come about quite quickly.

The train of events started less than two years ago. He had long been a volunteer for The Hawk & Owl Trust, a charity active in the UK and to some extent overseas which strives to ensure that birds of prey survive in the wild for future generations to enjoy. It was founded in 1969 amid concern about population decline through the use of pesticides, egg robbery and other factors and today it works to conserve all raptors and their habitats in the face of mounting human pressures. Known originally as the The Hawk Trust, it added the Owl in 1988 to reinforce the point that owls are also birds of prey and one of its main concerns.

In his study of marsh harriers, Nigel had for years being treading the paths and river banks of the Wensum valley where a string of small moors and fens make appropriate habitat far enough from the madding crowd to support a modest population of these large but shy creatures. He studied their habits, their terrain and their diet.

He spent time particularly in the area west of Fakenham, walking the embankment of the old railway line which once ran to King’s Lynn, where it passes close to the river and the fringing wetland. And he began to see that marsh harriers were nesting in small reed beds within a mostly wooded area called Sculthorpe Moor.

Not knowing where to start to gain access, he knocked on the doors of the nearest houses and one was answered by a man who turned out to be a trustee of the Francis Beckham Trust which administered the 15 hectare (37 acre) Moor on behalf of Sculthorpe village.

Sculthorpe Moor, like several patches of moor and common along the valley, had been given to its parish as supposed compensation for the Enclosures in the 1700s. It wasn’t much good agriculturally of course because it was so wet but the villagers had to make the most of it, digging peat, cutting reed and sedge and coppicing the ancient woodland.

That all gradually faded away in modern times and although in the mid 20th century there was still some reed cutting - and hardly any trees on the site according to aerial photographs - scrub gradually crept into the reed and sedge over the following decades as cutting and maintenance ceased.

But as the doorstep conversation continued, serendipity dropped by because Nigel was then told that although the land was let for shooting for another year, the tenant had that very weekend asked if he could relinquish the lease a year early.

Immediately, Nigel rang the chair of The Hawk & Owl Trust and suggested that the land become a nature reserve.

‘She thought it was a wonderful idea’ he says.

The Trust didn’t have any bird reserves at all but if ever there was patch of land with the credentials to be the first, this was it. It was already part of the Wensum Valley Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and had barn owls in some numbers. More particularly, it was and remains the only place in the Wensum Valley where saw sedge occurs in any quantity.

Now, saw sedge is important and not only for its use in making the ridges of reed thatched roofs (reed, though more durable, is too inflexible for that role). Its other importance is that its sharp and abrasive leaves make ideal defensive habitat for ground roosting hen harriers. They were still to be seen on the Moor in the 1980s though by the early 1990s, they had gone, giving up on the place as surviving sedge became degraded and encroaching scrub reduced the protective area. But with careful management, that habitat value could be revived.

The upshot of the chance doorstep conversation was that The Hawk & Owl Trust firstly tendered for the shooting lease without, it would be fair to say, any intention of shooting anything, and having thus got control of the land, they negotiated a 25 year lease which gave them a base from which to attract funding.

And the Trust would need plenty of that for capital items such as boardwalks, bridges and an education/information centre to go with the habitat restoration work if the nature reserve was to reach viability. But first and foremost, the reserve would need a warden to orchestrate the work and plan long term management.

Nigel of course was their man. Not only did he have Norfolk’s wetlands in his blood - his great and great great grandfathers were part of the Cox family, reed cutters and wherry owners of Barton Broad; he has also studied countryside management at college and university.

‘The only way the Trust could employ me was to create a project which could attract funding’ he says. ‘But they still had to start without even that, employing me for six months using Trust funds in order to get things going and in the hope of then securing long term funding.’

It was in October 2001 that he took the leap of faith, packing in his job which at the time was agricultural fitter and starting work at Sculthorpe. Not long afterwards, funding of his salary for three years came through from the Walter Guinness Trust and the H B Allen Trust.

One of his first tasks was to write a management plan which he did with Cambridgeshire-based raptor expert Dr Roger Clarke, a long time friend and colleague. The plan was submitted to English Nature who accepted it and then funded a five year wildlife enhancement scheme which paid for continuing works including scrub clearance.

By February 2002, an acre of sedge had been cleared - and burnt because it wasn’t much use for anything else. Thereafter Nigel started working on more grant applications. A further £25,000 - the maximum permitted for any single cause - came from the Countryside Agency’s Local Heritage Initiative and that triggered another application to Nationwide Building Society from which Sculthorpe also received the maximum award, of £5000, which helped pay for the production of a video on the reserve which is now available.

The first section of boardwalk went down on August 25th. 2002 and within a month 200m had been completed. Since then, it has snaked further through the woodland on the northern side of the site, built by volunteers from the Fakenham Area Conservation Trust (FACT).

A central part of the plan of course is the restoration of those reed and sedge beds. The sedge will be harvested on a three year rotation to provide young, vigorous and saleable growth - and habitat - while the reed, which here has little commercial value because of its limited area, will probably be cut sufficiently often - and again in rotation - to keep it free from scrub, though it will have some on-site uses such as making screens around the hides.

The on-going plans - for completion of the boarding, the education centre, a tower hide, wind turbine, compostible toilets - will be the subject of an application to the Heritage lottery Fund and EU Objective 2 funding. A wader scrape with observation hide, funded by the Internal Drainage Board, King’s Lynn Consortium, will be created and there is already a dragon fly pond. There are also schemes available through The Hawk & Owl Trust for individuals and companies to support this reserve. Once everything is in place, revenue raising educational courses will be run, including such things as dawn chorus tours, moth hunts and the skills of fen and woodland management. The whole project will get the Royal seal of approval on 10th September when it will be officially opened by the Princess Royal.

But this will not be any sanitisation of a wild place so much as the restoration of a condition to which wildlife had already taken. Sedge and reed beds are two of Britain’s man-made landscapes and have been around more or less since man first needed permanent accommodation. As is the case here, and in the Broads further east, the wildlife has taken to it on that basis.

The Moor will certainly retain that slightly primeval feel of wetlands in general and carr in particular with alder and birch standing in water for much of the year. Even the marsh harrier’s wing beat, with a bit of imagination - and upturned wing tips or not - has something of the pterodactyl about it if cinematographic recreations are to be believed. The thick nettles on the riverside fringes, though probably more a product of man’s intervention than historical feature, add to the sense of wilderness while at the same time making fine habitats for damsel flies, dragon flies and butterflies. There are water voles in the river and otters, too, although the chances of seeing them are slim.

And already, the boardwalk has had a wildlife spin off, attracting voles who use it as a shelter under which they build their nests, only to emerge and make instant meals for the barn owls - tough for the voles maybe, but then it’s a jungle out there.

But it’s also a jungle which is open to the public. Go and see it.

Contacts:
The Hawk & owl Trust, local organiser, John Lee 01485 528088
FACT - Geoff Fletcher 01328 86164
Nigel Middleton:

* available from Edgar Spelman, Booksales and Publicity Department, Round Tower Churches Society, 105 Norwich Road, New Costessey, Norwich NR5 0LF, price £18.40 inc p&p. A booklet, East Anglian Round Tower Churches is also available, price £1.20 inc p&p.

Reproduced by kind permission of John Worrall © 2002