Yesterday

Yesterday is the most annoying day of the week. Yesterday there was a Barred Warbler here. Yesterday’s yesterday and that warbler was a Greenish. Today, and the birding at Blakeney Point was so dire that when the sub-adult Spoonbill woke up, it flew away…

There comes, bundled in with life and associated life stuff, an irresistible urge to compare and contrast and reflect. Compare this unending grey with the sun and sky blue of the same place a year ago. 

Contrast the airless atmosphere and birdless air with that of last year: last year had Whinchats, Wheatears, Yellow Wagtails and Lesser Whitethroats. This year had several Swallows kicking around the old lifeboat house and two summer plumaged Grey Plover on the mudflats that appeared to have walked straight out of a linocut. Reflect on the three miles of shingle and sand you walked to get here, and how much longer that feels without avian distractions.

Think about how nothing ventured, nothing gained is fair enough, yet something ventured, nothing gained is most unfair. It's out of your control like some cosmic unfairness hard coded into the grain of the world, yet the reality is that most un-cosmic thing, the wind. The wind that just happens to always be in the wrong direction at the right time.

Don't think about the Spanish Sparrow relocated at Landguard Point.

Too Close for Comfort

Guess I wrote too soon. Lazarus like, the summer reappeared, the winds still in the wrong direction. And I headed coast-wards anyway, as the lift was available. Not so far as a beach though, just a few miles inland by the Alde Estuary. Late summer visits to Snape Warren seem to have become traditional, but I don’t really know why. On this evidence I really don’t know why. An estuary mired in haze and glare and a heath encroached by sapling trees. You go where your lifts can take you and you go when you’re told. Today I was done early.

‘Did you see any birds?’ Mum asked.

‘Gigantic female Sparrowhawk’. She nodded. She’s been well trained. ‘And an Adder. First one for several years. It saw me before I saw it though. I only saw it slithering away under a bush several feet away from my own…’

And, in the spirit of life and (near) death, two days shy of a year ago I photographed this at the same spot. Apparently wasps only ever rarely attack freshly emerged dragonflies yet this is a fully adult Common Darter

 After some fight the dragonfly escaped.

Costa del Cambridgeshire

Irony: the whiteboard said the birding was slow, blaming it on summer floods; the blackboard said there was a Glossy Ibis, a Purple Heron and a Spotted Crake. Oh and a fifty strong flock of Garganey. If that’s slow then I imagine on a reasonable May day the RSPB’s Ouse Washes is like some kind of Fenland Hortobagy.

But I get ahead of myself: firstly, the weather. Grey again, obviously. Secondly: a bank holiday Monday, an afternoon, the atmosphere as airlessly lethargic as a vacuum. A vacuum through which caravans are towed slowly that is. Thirdly: you can see Ely cathedral shake in the haze from here. That’s to the southeast. Homewards. I’m hardwired to face north, so it feels weird to drive for an hour or so and turn to face home. But in between us and home is the floodplain between two raised banks, keeping the local area flat and free from reclamation by the sea. And although it stands in the way of nature, between these banks is a quite incredibly array of wildlife. And for me, right now, birds. The biggest spread of birds I’ve seen in far too long. Flock to flock, horizon to reedbed to open water. Ducks, everywhere, mostly asleep like students. Copious egrets stood considering the fish under the gently rippling waves. Waders scattered over the muddy fringes and a large dead pike slowly rotted on a bank between two gateposts. Sauntering past, a Glossy Ibis picks at the ground, as if it sees dead fish daily.

I’ve seen a few Glossy Ibises, but none as close as this and as with all these things, they’re better up close. You could see the delicate white flecking around the head, and the oily iridescent green to its otherwise dull, dark back. And as with all birds, they’re much smaller than you expect. They’ve also been turning up in Britain in recent years with much more frequency and in much bigger flocks than before. I don’t know why. I quite like it that way.

Then we spent roughly another hour sat in the hide, not seeing the Purple Heron or Spotted Crake. Instead, a few Greenshank - a wader that eludes me on some years and I can’t escape in others – stalked through the deeper water, stabbing with its bill.

It’s hard to make an eclipse duck exciting. Not even fifty-ish of them spread out across a marsh. But then I’ve only seen one or two per spring most springs since I started birding, seven years ago. So this monstrous, gargantuan, flock of small, highly contrasting ducks with funky faces, were also more Garganey than I’d ever seen in my life. That, is significantly more exciting to me that it seems in words written down. It was also a uniquely odd experience. It’s normally a duck you struggle to see. Here it seemed that every third or fourth duck amongst the Teal, Shovelers and Mallards, was a Garganey.

It’s tempting to see this one off afternoon as a glimpse of a globally warmed future for fenland birding and an excuse to burn your weight in carbon, daily, for more exciting birding in ten years time. This would be foolish: if melting polar ice knocks the gulf stream out, we’ll be as cold as Moscow. If it heats us up, that’s our exciting northern birds gone, forever. And, after all, fifty strong flocks of Garganey are vastly improved by their oddity.

Frack That

I've just read an article. Nothing unusual in that, but it's one I want to share with you. It's an analysis of fracking and the legacy of Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. There was a paragraph that I had to read several times in disbelief to make sure it actually said what I thought it said. It did:

"In 2005, fracking was granted specific exemptions from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Fracking is also exempt from key provisions within the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Chemicals used in drilling and fracking operations can be claimed as trade secrets; public release of their identity is not mandated by federal right-to-know provisions. The Environmental Protection Agency has limited jurisdiction over fracking." [Paragraph 9]

I guess you spotted the bit that struck me dumb with horror. So, tell me, what's the point of environmental law if what it legislates against can be made exempt from it? And tell me again, can you think of any other law that would so easily be ignored for money and fuel? And how do they get away with it? Why do we let them?

I think the only honest reaction is despair. You can chose anger if you'd rather.

This is, of course, American. Could it happen here? We've got precedent for what happens when the irresistible juggernaut of big money meets an irreplaceable environment, and they'll be fracking Britain too. With minimal regulation. And earthquakes.

Grey

This feels like the rotting corpse of summer. It’s warm but not hot, not dry enough either and as we peer at September, it’s hard to see it performing a Lazarus like recovery.

And grey is all around us. Grey skies, grey shifting seas. Grey ex-military buildings, grey concrete paths over the grey-green common over which dull grey Woodpigeons argue with the wind and gravity and the inevitable. Grey backed gulls fling their selves into the breeze and along the shingle beach; a shiny grey fish leaps out of the North Sea and flops lazily back in. Grey, not white, is the face of the House Sparrow sat in a bramble patch. Six Turnstone scud over, dark grey in this light, whilst two Dunlin flew more purposefully southbound offshore.

Landguard is the shingle tail to the Felixstowe peninsula, a faded, greying seaside town, notable only for the docks that stole jobs from Liverpool. I’ve no idea if it kept them, but away from the arcades and candy floss streets the cranes dominate the skyline. They’re the tallest things this side of the Orwell bridge. I was rather hoping something else might dominate the skyline: something looking a little less reptilian, but with a closer biological relation to the herpetofauna.

It wasn’t to be. It never is. Not in these winds anyway. At Landguard, or I suppose, the east coast in general, you want to be buffeted by an icy easterly sweeping up big flocks of small, brown and Siberian birds. You don’t want to have the common-to-omnipresent Linnet flocks being blown about your head by a stiff wind from the rest of Suffolk. There’s only so many Linnets one can take before you lose the will to bird. Or dog walkers with dogs off leads. That’s the reason why on this nature reserve, only one Ringed Plover chick has survived out of eight. It won’t for much longer, I imagine.

From the point you can see the clouds breaking over Essex and the wheat fields of the Naze glowing gold against the grey of Harwich. Eventually the sun even comes out on the north of the river too, heralding two Yellow Wagtails flying and calling over. A welcome (and far too late) first sighting of them this year for me. All of a sudden a small flurry of bird movement happened: a few Chiffchaffs and Willow Warblers in the bushes, and a Whinchat briefly scurrying between bushes. But as soon as it happens it passes again. And we’re left with a Whitethroat, and not its grey relative.

A Very Sound Approach

‘The drunkenness of things being various’ (Louis MacNeice)

‘When you come out of a meeting you’ve forgotten the contents in minutes, but see a good bird and you’ll remember it for the rest of your life’. (Catching The Bug)

I devour books. If a day isn’t spent in the field or in phrases than frankly it feels wasted. I also have cloth ears and bird sound was, still sometimes is, utterly mysterious to me. And then I read The Sound Approach to Birding. I’d never read a bird book like it: technical but not heavy, entertaining yet genuinely informative. Perfection, really. Nowadays it and its three iterations sit on the shelf alongside the Helm white jackets and the New Naturalists as one of the most recognisable series of books. Its brand, if you want to use that term*, exudes cool, as much as that’s possible for a Science-based bird book. It’s the awkward size that’s lap-wide and hand-high, the black background and Killian Mullarney’s illustrations. They work as objects, as well as books. And as books they work particularly well: Petrels Night and Day was a staggering work of ornithology that I will never ever have any practical use for and yet I still enjoyed and learned from it.

And now there is a fourth member of the family: Catching the Bug. Written by Mark Constantine and Nick Hopper, it describes itself as ‘A précis of the concerns, puzzles and conundrums set by the natural world to a group of amateur birders meeting over twenty years in a pub in Poole’. What that means, in much less seductive language, is that it is a (very) social history of Dorset birding, and that’s fascinating. It works by focalising the debates and controversies of ornithology, such as Siberian Chiffchaffs or climate change, through the lens of Poole Harbour. Poole is the constant thread that runs through an intoxicating array of the variety of birds, tying up all the loose ends. This I really like. As I tell anyone daft enough to ask, eclecticism is the best thing about birds. Birds are not the be all and end all; they’re a gateway to so much more, but also the most interesting and attractive gateway there is. This book, whether intentionally, or unintentionally, is a celebration of that.

The writing is solid but not spectacular. It suffers from the previous Sound Approach: Birding from the Hip, by that wizard of the written word, Anthony McGeehan. But as a friend reminds me, it’s not about the lyricism but the ideas. I’m greedy and I want both, but this will suffice for now. I don’t always want to be untangling syntax with a dictionary to hand. However, whereas Birding from the Hip wasn’t as uniquely Sound Approach as the first two titles, Catching the Bug most definitely is. Sonograms are liberally used throughout the book in a supplementary role to the text: it is possible to read it without them but you lose more of the immersive experience of the book if you do. If you haven’t read The Sound Approach to Birding there is a rudimentary explanation of sonograms at the start of Catching the Bug, but I recommend reading the former first if you want to understand the sonograms better.

So, as an idea-lead piece of prose it is certainly very good. But are the ideas actually any good? Mostly. It varies of course. The predictions of globally warmed breeding species struck me as mostly idle speculation. That Dartford Warbler could be an English endemic doesn’t last long, but the most interesting thing here is how they treat the idea: they realise it isn’t but still work on, learning as they go and contributing to ornithology through failed thesis, as much as successful ones. That’s a lesson I think birding needs to repeatedly learn: there’s no shame in mistakes. The ideas that do work are backed up with their own impressive results from intensive patch based work.

Poole is the kind of patch we all wish we had and The Sound Approach are the kind of birders we all wish were local to us. Catching the Bug is another high quality work from them, and one that had me checking the trains to Dorset as if it was the new Norfolk. I wonder where next for The Sound Approach? I’d love to see them tackle the thorny issue of redpolls…

*Apologies if you don’t. I strongly dislike that word.

Post Birdfair Blues

And whites. Stripy whites. Sychronised whites like wide sky vertebrae.

But while The Cloudspotter's Guide sits on my shelf waiting patiently to be read, their cloud classification shall remain unknown to me...