The club has received the following appeal from Sian Niblo of North East Lincolnshire Council:
It won’t be long before the cattle arrive back at Cress Marsh wetland birds mitigation site (near Stallingborough) for a fifth season of grazing management.
The cattle require daily checks consisting of a count and a quick look over to check for signs of New Forest disease (leaky eyes), lameness, and/or other issues such as lesions etc.
These checks are relatively simple and don’t take too long, and the volunteers we had completing them typically linked it in with their visits to see what birds were on site.
For the last four years we have had a faithful band of checkers, but as you can imagine it is quite a commitment to attend the site weekly and while others in the group were happy to fill in should someone not be available on ‘their’ day, most of these volunteers have requested to step down as permanent checkers now (one has a really exciting summer of birding abroad this year that I’m rather jealous of) so we don’t have anyone regularly checking for us.
I know a few LBC members used to visit the site, so I am wondering if any of your members would be willing to sign up as cattle welfare checkers for 2025?
Ideally we would have enough interest that we can attribute a day a week (Mon to Fr) to each person, or every two weeks if we had enough assistance which would make it less intense for the volunteers.
If anyone can help, please contact Sian at:
Sian.Niblo@nelincs.gov.uk
