A labour of love is nearing completion for the Bermuda Audubon Society, with restoration work on Seymour’s Pond in Southampton to be finished this month.“We want to have a grand opening for our members when the work is finished,” said Society founding member David Wingate, surveying the newly-cleared land.Motorists on Middle Road slowed down to watch the backhoe digging up the pond, and Dr Wingate said bottle collectors have been a constant presence as the excavations uncovered old trash tips.“This project has come in a nick of time to save the best features of the pond,” Dr Wingate said.When completed, the Seymour’s Pond Nature Reserve will be “a visual access reserve, rather than actual access”, he said. Viewing areas will be set up around the three-acre site so that visitors can watch the birds without disturbing them.During last summer’s drought, the little pond dried up for the first time in recent memory, killing its population of minnows that had kept the water free of mosquitoes, as well as providing food for wildlife.Thanks to the Society’s contract with construction firm Bell’s Skyline Ltd, the pond is now double in size, and deep enough to remain permanent.Invasive plants have been cleared, and chipped with a machine on loan from Save Our Open Spaces.“It’s like the Discovery Channel down here for watching birds,” Dr Wingate said. “There are over 200 species that visit Bermuda on migration each year, and with the diversity of the habitat that’s been restored, most of them are going to be found here.”He pointed out the Least Sandpiper, the world’s smallest species of sandpiper, foraging on the mud flats left of the original pond.The project holds a special significance for the Bermuda Audubon Society: Seymour’s Pond was the first reserve acquired by the group, in 1963.Like many of the Island’s old wetlands, it was used as a dump for many years, and as old caches of rubbish come to light, bottle-hunters have occasionally overstepped boundaries in foraging for collectibles.Workmen reported seeing people swimming into the pond with digging tools.Dr Wingate said he was “very angry indeed” to find the pond’s small island damaged by aggressive diggers who came onto the site and hacked the carefully-shaped banks.Several areas of the reserve have been dug up by unscrupulous bottle hunters.“We are digging up the old dump sites and pushing them back to fill in the old quarry, and to build a berm of land on the old farmland behind the pond,” Dr Wingate said. “It’s very important that people do not disturb these.“We don’t mind people consulting us if they want to have a look, but these other diggings are a big problem for us.”Since leftover bottles will be crushed by digging machinery, there will soon be little point in digging in the reserve, he added.Project manager Victor Bell, who has modified many of his company’s light amphibious machines himself, said that when work began six weeks ago, “we didn’t know what was in store. The bottles were a hazard, because they could give way. It can look like an illusion with the soft ground”.The company has cut a deal with the Society to get the job done under a reasonable budget.“It really shows when you work from your heart,” Mr Bell said. “They have a vision of what they want for that place, and we’ve been shaping it and moulding it to get it back to nature. It’s shaping up well.”Useful web link: www.audubon.bm.