Yorkshire Water Otter Holt A Success!

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Last year we supplied an otter holt to Yorkshire Water for their reserve at Tophill Low – I got this email today with some great news:

The otter slide at Tophill Low Nature reserve.

“Hello Chris – you had mentioned before you were keen to demonstrate any proven success with the artificial holts; well here you go!

“We installed the holt in April 2011 for BBC inside out with our volunteers and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust - here is a youtube link:

Otter Holt Installed by Yorkshire Water and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust – BBC Inside Out
 
“We subsequently felled all the trees and landscaped the area (including dumping around 2 tonnes of poplar roots on top of the structure in October). We haven’t had the trail cam on it yet and hope to when the vegetation grows up a bit. However in the snow last week you will see a spectacular otter slide (above) all the way down the river bank into the ditch and the tracks lead straight into the pictured left hand hole of the holt pipe (right).Hope that’s of use!
Richard
Tophill Low NR”

 
It certainly is Richard, and thank you so much for your feedback. We have always been confident that the holts were being successfully used in the wild after their use in the captive trials undertaken by the British Wildlife Centre, but getting the evidence has always proved elusive. I can’t wait to see the pictures from Richard’s Trail Cam! We are hoping to install a holt locally with inbuilt CCTV cameras which we can monitor to establish breeding success, but we are still talking to the landowner…watch this space! 

Mink Raft Feedback

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Mike Sharp from Aylesbury Vale DC who recently bought a few Eco Mink Rafts from us sent us this picture:

Otter Spraint on Eco Mink Raft

He said “We have deployed 2 rafts and both have been sprainted on by otters within 5 days, see photo. Will keep you posted with any interesting developments. Really pleased with the rafts.”

I have helpfully ringed the otter poo for those who are interested!

RSPB, Otters and Mink

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Alex Pigott, the warden at the RSPB Marshside Reserve in Southport has just sent us these great pictures of their new Otter Holt being installed.
 

Installing the otter holt on the Marshside reserve

Covering the otter holt with soil

The entrance hole is made from polypipe and the ventilation holes can just be seen where the holt is buried in the bank.

Meanwhile the RSPB’s newest reserve, Pagham Harbour LNR on the south coast have just ordered 21 of our new EDGED ECO MINK RAFTS . Pagham Harbour (formerly managed by West Sussex District Council) have been a long standing customer of ours having purchased walkways and signs from us over the years, and we are very pleased that they are continuing their relationship with us their new management.

National Nest Box Week

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To help to celebrate National Nest Box Week, Filcris will be offering a 10% discount on all our Recycled Plastic Swift Nest boxes until the end of February. No need to fill in complicated forms, use voucher codes which might not work or accept a life time of marketing spam. We have just dropped the prices until February 29th. You can see the products here.

 

Made by our own fair hands

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I have been looking at some other recycled plastic product sellers’ websites this morning researching a couple of jobs we have been asked to tender for and I am struck by how many of them have the same terrible pictures of products they have obviously got from another supplier. I know they don’t stock them (in fact I know that a couple have recently gone bust) and certainly do not make them.

Which is why I am glad we have taken the decision to only show our own high quality photographs, and why we make it clear when products like planks and and posts are sourced from abroad. We respect our customers and think that treating them like idiots is an unwise strategy for any business. Of course there are some products (the Disabled Fishing Platforms for example) which we don’t have photographs for yet, so we need to use a Sketchup drawing to illustrate them, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. So we urge any potential buyers of recycled plastic products to ask searching questions – we do not flinch from telling the truth and we have done so for over twenty years.

Filcris products used to help save rare sandpiper

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The rare and beautiful Spoon Billed Sandpiper being brought back from the brink of extinction at WWT Slimbridge. (Image reproduced courtesy of C Zöckler / ArcCona)

Filcris recycled plastic sheet is being used in a project to save one of the worlds rarest and most endangered species. The Spoon Billed Sandpiper, a type of wading bird from the far east of Siberia is now down to 100 pairs and is on the verge of extinction. A pioneering captive breeding project at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Slimbridge reserve hopes to increase the population and reintroduce them to the wild. Whilst in captivity, the birds are effectively quarantined and vulnerable to pests and diseases so WWT used Filcris Ecohoarding Board to line their enclosures.

Filcris Ecohoarding Board used to line the rearing pens

 

The sheets of plastic are rigid enough to make a secure surface and since they are not made of wood (normally plywood is used for this purpose) they will not rot or decay.

 
 
We all hope that the project is success and have made a donation to their fund. You can do the same by clicking here, or to find out more about this enigmatic bird, click here.
  
 

No more otter tube!

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We sold the last of the special tubing we had got in to use as entrance tunnels for our otter holts to Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust today. We have been trying to find a suitable replacement for over eighteen months, but so far have drawn a blank. We will keep looking however, so watch this space…

260mm diameter tubing being fixed to otter holt in Chris Matcham's workshop

New Eco Mink Raft Launched

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After a lot of development we have now brought out the ECO MINK RAFT, a lighter, lower cost mink raft which has many of the benefits of our top of the range Deluxe model but at over 40% lower cost. This means that it is comparable to the wooden products available on the market, but it will not rot, absorb water and can be easily stored, transported and inspected in the field:

See here for more details.

Product country of origin added our website

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The recycled plastic industry has come a very long way in the 20 odd years we have been involved in it. When we first started selling recycled plastic a lot of the suppliers were frankly pretty dodgy and the products were sometimes atrociously bad. We got through a lot of saw blades wrecked by lumps of plastic containing buried nails and no one coudl tell anyone where there products came from.

Things have improved enormously since then of course, but some people will always prefer not to be honest with their customers, particularly when it comes to where their products come from. We think that our customers welcome honesty, so we have amended our website to show them where the material we are selling has come from.

At the moment we are only including recycled plastic profiles and assemblies built by us with a with a single country of origin. These all come from either the UK, The Netherlands or Germany and are indicated by a simple flag:

Hopefully this will be helpful to our customers, and when we figure out a way to improve the transparency of the more complicated products in a range we will add these to the range. We would encourage all customers visiting our website to ask us where the products come from, and do the same on other recycled plastic supplier’s websites. You might be surprised by the answers, if they will tell you that is…