Dawn chorus walk

On Thursday 20th of April we had our annual dawn chorus walk, this year led by Steve Piotrowski. Despite it being a cold and grey morning we saw or heard a total of 40 bird species during the two hour walk.  The bird of the morning was an early Hobby, a summer migrant raptor which feeds on dragonflies and small birds.  We also saw two buzzards, four little egrets and good numbers of linnets. The full species list is below.  Many thanks to Steve for an interesting and entertaining morning.  An adder was seen basking, later in the day when the sun appeared.

Easter foursomes course update.

Greens, tees, aprons, approaches, fairways and semi rough have been cut today and we're ready to go for the Easter weekend.  The new 1st and 6th tees will be in play and the 8th hole will be played from the championship tee.  The newly turfed area behind the 7th green is also in play.  All of the newly turfed areas are still quite delicate so please keep practice swings and traffic to a minimum.  Over the weekend the greens will be cut and rolled daily if weather conditions are suitable (frost is still a possibility).  We'll ease off on the rolling if green speeds get too high, they were 9ft 8in today with no roll and if it stays dry things could get silly!  There is rain forecast for Friday night which the course desperately needs as we've gone three weeks without any rain.  The holes will be changed on Friday, Saturday and Monday and the bunkers will be raked every morning.

Spring wildlife

A pair of mallard duck have nested by the pond on the 7th hole on the river course.  There were five ducklings present today and also a pair of teal and a pair of moorhens.  Teal is another first for the golf club to add to the green sandpiper seen a few weeks ago.  Very good numbers of linnet and yellowhammer are present on the course with at least two woodlark singing and several skylark present.  The number of summer migrant birds is increasing daily, blackcaps have been around for a week or two and our first nightingale of the year was heard yesterday.  Our first grass snake of the year was seen on the 15th of March.

Mallard

Teal

Green sandpiper

Grass snake

April course news

The mild march weather gave us some good grass growth to work with and most of the playing surfaces are quite advanced for the time of year.  Grass growth is about two weeks ahead of last year, a month ahead of 2015, about the same as 2014 and six weeks ahead of 2013.  The new tees on the 1^st, 6^th and 8^th holes are growing in well and could be in play in a few weeks if the weather stays mild.  During March we top dressed the greens twice and the green surrounds once.  We’ve been topping up bunkers with sand and cutting fairway bunker banks and removing the cuttings.  As with rough cutting, removing the cuttings takes away nutrients and helps us to develop wispy rough.  Lots of brambles have been cut back around the course and this work will continue over the next few weeks.  Our programme of work to improve the green surrounds will continue over the next few weeks and throughout the season.  The first phase of this work was the application of a weed-killer that selectively kills ryegrass and other coarse grasses last Autumn.  In areas that had the highest percentage of coarse grass, particularly if they were areas prone to drought stress and wear, the gaps created by the loss of coarse grass will take a while to recover.  We’ve made some changes to the maintenance regime for the surrounds and approaches this year with the intention of improving turf quality.  We’re using a hand mower for the first cut around the greens and an old greens triple for mowing the surrounds and approaches, this will give us a better quality of cut and reduced wear.  Some more sprinklers have been fitted so that we can irrigate some of the weak areas of green surround and we intend to do more hand watering where the pop up sprinklers will not reach.  Weak areas will be over-seeded with a fine but hard wearing seed mix and more aeration and top dressing work will be done.

April work programme

Hopefully the warm spring weather will continue to provide good growing conditions but this is by no means guaranteed.  The average temperature for this March was higher than the April average for four of the last five years.  The frequency of mowing will increase for all areas as growth rates increase and the height of cut on the greens will be reduced from the winter height of 6mm to the summer height of 5mm.

The next top dressing of the greens will be after the ladies’ spring meeting.  Work on topping up bunker sand and cutting back brambles will continue and it’s likely that we will need to apply selective weed-killer to the fairways as clover appears over the next few weeks.

Twitter

A Twitter account has been started so that we can keep members up to date with course activity and anything of interest.  The user name is Greens_AGC.

https://twitter.com/Greens_AGC

Weather summary for March

The dry start to the year continued with only 25.5mm of rain in March, well below the 36.7mm average for the month.  The total rainfall for the year so far is 79mm.  It was the warmest March since we installed a weather station in 2000 with an average temperature of 9.1°.  This was warmer than the April average for four of the last five years.  The lowest temperature was 2.8° on the 7th and the highest was 18.3° on the 30th.