Welcoming a rare visitor to Woods Mill

by Ryan Allison 

Reserves Manager, West

For over a week in October, the car park at Woods Mill was much busier than usual. A steady stream of birdwatchers could be seen making their way down the path to the furthest southern tip of the nature reserve, all for a very wayward bird. 

The visitor was either an Isabelline or a Red-tailed Shrike - they look so similar it can be hard to tell the difference. 

Either way, it's a bird more normally found in central Asia, with only a very few finding their way to western Europe each year. 

This individual spent its time flitting between thorny scrub in the flood plain of the Woods Mill stream, a tributary of the River Adur, backdropped with views of the South Downs.

To a bird’s eye the boundary of the reserve does not exist, and it moved freely between Sussex Wildlife Trust land and our neighbour's, grabbing Ivy Bees and other flying insects wherever it went. 

The area favoured by the shrike was part of a river realignment project back in 2010, when the steam that had been straightened centuries before to power the water mill was 're-meandered', and natural features restored. 

It now looks as if it had never been diverted. The edges have re-naturalised, willows and Black Poplar trees grow on the banks, and the flood plain is now reconnected. We have allowed scrub to grow up in the marsh and slopes, cutting back some sections every couple of years, to keep a mixture of different open and dense scrubby stages. Our cattle and wild Roe Deer help out by nibbling at the tender shoots. 

The varied niches this creates already benefit many species, including Nightingale, Turtle Dove and Whitethroat. We would hope that in the future our native Red-backed Shrike - potentially the subject of a reintroduction scheme in Sussex - might also take up residence here. 

Find out more about Woods Mill