Beddington in the news 2

below is an excerpt taken from the November edition of Birdwatching magazine. Written by David Lindo ' The Urban Birder '

  The next day I was in Hackbridge, deep in south London, at the invitation of Beddington Farm’s patch birders Peter Alfrey and Roger Browne. The farm is a working site with gravel extraction, landfill and sludge spreading. It also contains flooded marshy pits that are

good for passage waders and the landfill site can attract hordes of gulls that can contain ‘white-winged’ scarcities including the mega Glaucous-winged Gull that seemingly

commuted from Gloucester in 2007. Walking through, I couldn’t believe the transformation

the site has gone through, though it looks very much like a work in progress, as the area is clearly in need of some good habitat management. At nearly four times the size of

the London Wetland Centre, Beddington Farm really is a sleeping giant in London’s ornithological world. With more than 250 species on its list, of which more than 150

are seen annually, few sites within London’s boundary can come close. Amazing birds like Killdeer, Spotted Crake (that also bred in the 1960s), inland Sabine’s Gulls, Tawny

Pipit, Rustic and Little Buntings are among the avian glitterati to have visited the area over the years. It is also home to one of Britain’s largest breeding populations of Tree Sparrows with some 300 youngsters fledged in 2008. These were some of the facts that I gleaned from the guys whilst strolling around the farm. Until fairly recently it was a really sludgy and smelly sewage works with restricted access. It was the lack of access that was the major bugbear for many London birders and this issue ended up giving the place a bad name. All that is about to change. The site is now allied with the futuristic and nationally important Hackbridge Sustainable Suburb Project and the farm and environs are also a hive of

recycling activity. Access, although still restricted, has now been made easier for the general public, with several organised open days throughout the year. It was clear to me that the more well-known Beddington Farm becomes among the birding fraternity,

the more chance this area has of being the premier urban nature reserve it deserves to be.