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Rye Harbour Nature Reserve
East Sussex
Directly beside Camber Sands lies one of Britain’s most ecologically significant places. Rye Harbour Nature Reserve covers 465 hectares of coastline, including shingle beaches, saline lagoons, salt marsh, reedbeds, and flooded gravel pits. They all work together as an assembly of interconnected habitats. The reserve is home to more than 4,355 species of plants and animals, including many that are rare or endangered. It is managed by the Sussex Wildlife Trust.
A Refuge for Rare Birds
Rye Harbour is most famous for its birdlife, specifically its breeding colonies of Little Tern, Common Tern and Sandwich Tern. In recent years, populations of these terns and other ground-nesting birds have been able to grow and flourish thanks to careful habitat management in the reserve. Many of these birds migrate thousands of miles to reach Rye Harbour to feed and nest.
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How the Biobeads Entered the Reserve
The tides sustain the saltmarsh habitat at Rye Harbour. Saltwater floods the marsh at high tide and drains away again at low tide. It was these tidal movements that carried biobeads into the reserve, spreading them across precious habitat, vegetation, and depositing them along the strandline.
Removing beads from the saltmarsh can be more complicated than from the beach, as beads can become tangled in vegetation and debris. With the habitat being very fragile, machinery and large numbers of volunteers could cause further damage.
An Extraordinary Outcome
After trialling our vacuum methodology and confirming it would cause no damage to the reserve’s protected features, Nurdle’s team moved in. Over 16 intensive days of operations, the results surpassed all expectations.
In just a single pass, we removed 93% of the pollution from the affected areas of the reserve, a remarkable result in one of the most ecologically sensitive environments we have ever worked in.
We are now unable to re-enter the reserve until the nesting season has ended, as the presence of ground-nesting birds means any disturbance could cause more harm than good. We will return in September or October to reassess the reserve and determine whether any further work is needed.