The Upper Ray:  Wildflowers, Waders and Water  -  Chloe Bradford

Chloe Bradford, Reserves Officer for the Upper Ray, takes us on a tour of the sites and the many species they support, focusing on wildflowers and wading birds.

The Upper Ray Meadows are a stronghold for scarce floodplain wildflower communities and Chloe will describe some of the projects, past and present, which have helped to create and maintain an environment where they can survive and thrive.

Chloe has been with BBOWT since April 2021 as Upper Ray Reserves Officer.  Prior to that she was with the RSPB as Assistant Warden at Pulborough Brooks 2019-2021 and trainee warden at Otmoor 2018-2019.  She also did some work at Wytham Woods as Assistant Conservator 2018-2019. 

UK currently holds approximately a quarter of the global Curlew population, with estimates for England of about 30,000 pairs. National monitoring data show that this population has been in long-term decline since the 1970s and has almost halved in the UK over the last 20 years. In lowland southern England, the population has declined to about 500 pairs, with many colonies on the verge of local extinction. Read more ...

The Long Day Count is carried out by teams of observers in each of the twelve 10km squares recording the number of bird species seen during a maximum of 12 daylight hours on the second Sunday in May each year. Read more ...

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