Features
Before the fire, the reserve was of particular importance for its educational work with visiting school parties, and still supports these trips with advance booking.
A bird hide, on stilts in the lake and reached by a drawbridge, allows close views of birds on the lake, its shores, and its islands - one of which has been situated directly in front of the hide. There are also a number of substantial screens, which are available at all times and afford good views of birds on the wetland areas surrounding the lake.
The site, formerly a landfill, has been carefully planted with a wide range of native trees and shrubs, to provide a rich and diverse habitat.
The reserve has a pair of entrance gates by the artist Tim Tolkien.
Read more about this topic: Sandwell Valley RSPB Reserve
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“These, then, will be some of the features of democracy ... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, particolored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)