Week 2 of the WOW development
We are now into week 2 of the WOW development and below is our latest update of how the work is progressing:
Welcome to the new development of the old Australian area here at Martin Mere. As you can see there is quite a bit of work going on! This whole area will be re-themed to showcase the diversity and adaptations of certain species of our birds and encourage visitors to take a closer look at their sometimes striking and sometimes quite weird features or behaviour.
This information board will be updated regularly so you will be able to keep an eye on how things are progressing.
The cleaning out and de-silting of our ponds has been completed now and some very rough landscaping has gone on. It almost looks like some of the exhibits are taking shape! The old Crowned Crane exhibit has also been cleaned out, this area will eventually become a reed bed which will help to clean the waste water from our exhibits.
We have put in some plastic sheet piling to help with anti-erosion. This is a product we have never used here at Martin Mere before and we have been very impressed with it so far. The individual sheets are a metre wide and four metres long and interlock together to form a waterproof seal. Despite initial doubts, they proved very easy to push into the ground, fully three metres went into the peat bog. This barrier will help us have deep water right up to the front of our exhibits without the problem of viewing areas washing into the pond!
The next job which you may be able to watch this week is knocking in the base support posts for the bridge which will cross the middle of the main lake. These are very long posts as we were not sure exactly how deep we would need to knock them in until we found the solid base underneath the peat. As it happens, it has not been as deep as we first suspected and so there may be a little cutting down in size required.
Once these posts are in, it will be down to our very own buildings department here at Martin Mere to construct the actual bridge. The heavy plant contractors will be moving on to dig trenches for the new water pipes and electric ducting and then the minor job of pushing in even larger poles than the bridge for the new aviary. These have just been delivered and the two central posts are fifteen metres long.
