A Sunny Sunday

Yesterday had to be the best day of the year so far, cloudless and sunny all day and very warm during the afternoon. Apart from the drought, which looks like it could end up being quite serious, yesterday's weather gave rise to thoughts of the impending season, Spring migrants, butterflies, long daylight hours, one or two birdwatchers complaining about it being too hot, all the ingredients of another superb Spring and Summer.
I began the day just after dawn, walking round the RSPB fields at Harty and having a look to see if the Lapland Buntings were still there, and if they were they didn't show for me. There was one encouraging sight there though, three male Corn Buntings were holding territories in the fields and singing constantly, if you can call the "jangling of keys" singing. Another noticeable feature on both those two fields and the Swale NNR alongside now since the ploughing up of the neighbouring grazing fields, is the increase in Hares. Clearly the loss of their habitat has forced them to move on but hopefully it will see them safer in such places because the Beagle pack was out on Sheppey last week doing what beagles do best and chasing hares. I know its illegal now but if you deliberately walk a pack of hounds through hare countryside its quite clear what the outcome is going to be. Its really annoying at this time of the year because hares have, or are about to have, young.

After an afternoon enjoying the sun in the garden, Man Utd's win, City's loss and England winning the rugby, I went back to the reserve late afternoon for the 6th and last of this winter's harrier roost counts. They begun in the mists of October, went through the snows of February and ended yesterday as Spring was heralded in by a beautiful and sunny March evening. As I walked across the reserve in the sunshine, Skylarks were singing, Lapwings were wheeling and diving in their courtship displays, I had a spring in my arthritic feet and a mole had clearly started off with a stagger before straightening out again, or was it the other way round.


I also found the first Lapwing's nest scrape, using the remnants of an old cow patt, a few wisps of grass to line it and eggs won't be far behind.


On to the top of the sea wall then, to wait for the light to eventually begin to fade and the harriers to come in to roost on the saltings. The two small cable laying ships were still anchored in the Swale in front of me and its always fascinating to watch them become more prominent as the light gradually ebbs away. In the early evening sun they don't really stand out that much but gradually as it begins to get dark the lights on the vessels begin to take on more prominence until its just you and them in the solitary darkness of the marsh. As I waited I watched the vessels through my scope in the increasing dusk and could see one or two crew members in the lit up bridge doing whatever they do. Curlews "bubbled" away on the mudflats and a Water Rail mewed in the reed beds alongside me, its a mystical sensation to be out there on your own at that time of day, and the sun finally sank behind Harty church.



Its only then that the harriers begin to come into roost, suddenly appearing from seemingly nowhere, and they made their way low along the saltings before suddenly dropping down to roost for the night. One or two stayed together but generally they roosted singularly and they were all female Hen Harriers. I counted seven in the end, my best count this winter and I look forward to seeing them back again in the autumn.
By then the dimming of the day was complete and as the last rays of light across the marsh slipped away, I turned and made my way home.


"I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times its only me,
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man,
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand".........Bob Dylan

Relieving the Boredom

I was sitting in the conservatory over lunch, watching it rain and blow a gale and relieving the boredom by watching the uncommon winter sight of Goldfinches on my sunflower hearts feeders. The photo below shows one of them - I know its not one of those "count the individual feathers on the back" close-ups that are the norm these days on blogs, but at least you can see that its a Goldfinch.
Anyway, whilst watching them I was struck by how wasteful they are when feeding. We go to the trouble of providing de-husked sunflower seed and yet the birds still twirl it around in their beaks as though de-husking and end up dropping two thirds on the ground below. Once again, unlike other blogs, I don't have legions of mixed finches photogenically marching across my lawns sweeping up this dropped seed, just the odd Collared Dove, and so much of it just rots, or flashes "canteen open" signs to the local rats.
Looking at my regularly deserted, bird-wise, garden and seeing these photos on other blogs of gardens swarming with finches, I often speculate if there is a secret E-Bay site where you can buy stuffed finches by the dozen to scatter round your garden in order to take such photos.


Last year I was given a new re-print of a fabulous old book called "British Birds in their Haunts". Despite being originally published in 1862, I've been surprised whilst reading through its 600-odd pages, to see how akin to today's knowledge on birds it was. OK, there have been a few name changes and habitat losses down the years but the knowledge imparted in the book is remarkably as it is today.
Each bird has its own write up, illustrated by a simple but effective pen and ink style drawing and what makes the book particularly delightful are the accounts of each bird's habits and associated folk-lore. Take the Common Swift for example.

After recognising that the bird was only a summer visitor, it goes on to state that "it never proceeds far north and occasionally even suffers from un-seasonably severe weather". It went on to refer a case from Deal in July 1856 where after a mild but wet day the temperature suddenly fell till it became disagreeably cold. The Swifts were sensibly affected by the atmospheric change and fluttered against the walls of the houses and some even flew into open windows. The witness to this occurrence was then surprised when a young girl came to his door and asked him he he wanted to buy a "bat", which he quickly identified as a Swift and that they were dropping down in the streets and the boys were killing all these "bats". Going outside it was true enough, the children were charging them everywhere and on arriving at the church in Lower Street he was astonished to see the poor birds hanging in clusters from the eaves and cornices. At intervals, benumbed individuals dropped from these clusters and many hundreds fell victim to the ruthless ignorance of the children.

As I have already stated, some names have changed, the Corn Bunting was then known as the Common Bunting and the Reed Bunting as the Black-headed Bunting. It is also interesting to see the Wagtails that are listed - White, Pied, Grey and Grey-headed but no Yellow. However their is one called Ray's Wagtail (Motacilla Rayi), whose description is clearly that of a Yellow Wagtail.


All in all its a fascinating book and if you get the chance to purchase it, it's well worth it. It was published in these modern times by www.bibliolife.com/store. You might also find it at Amazon.

Water and Walls

I went down to the reserve this morning but after an hour and half of being pumelled by an icy cold NW gale I gave up and did what most of the birds seemed to have done, and cleared off. Boy, if ever a day was designed to be the opposite of last week's glorious weather, today was. Clouds raced across the sky in a gale that was touching 50mph at times and it was alternatively dark or bright depending on the cloud cover. Over the seawall, the high tide in The Swale was higher than it should of been as the tide was funnelled in by the gale and white-capped waves raced down the middle channel.
But it was not all a waste of time - part of the reserve has water again, no, yesterday's rain was not of the monsoon variety - the borehole is working again! Regular visitors along the seawall of the reserve might of noticed a small shed at the western end of the grazing marsh, this housed a generator that sits over a borehole sunk into the underground aquifer. Until the generator broke down a few years ago we pumped water from this borehole into the shallow rills at that end of the reserve in the Spring to maintain the conditions required by the breeding Lapwings, etc. The reserve management has now replaced the defunct generator with a mobile one and water is once again flowing again, as you can see below as the first rill fills up.
The supply of this water will be limited and to only that end of the reserve but its going to be a major benefit to the reserve and the Lapwings there.


And on an entirely different subject, I came across the two photos below in one of my albums today. They are from my Kent River Authority (KRA) days and were taken in September 1971 on the seawall between Sheerness and Minster. A few years after the photos were taken the seawall was completely re-built and is now higher and much wider and is protected on its seaward side by huge rocks barged in from Scandinavia.
However in those days it was an old and narrow and basically just a clay seawall covered in small rocks and cemented. Unfortunately, due to the force of the tide on that northern side of Sheppey, the cement and rocks would regularly need replacing as they got washed away. Prior to the building of the new seawall the KRA carried out inspections of the seawall and were horrified to find out that over the years large areas of the original clay seawall had been eroded away and in places it was literally a concrete shell over large holes. So, before the new seawall could be built, it was deemed necessary for us to spend a couple of months there pumping in concrete at high pressure to replace the missing clay. So we first went the length of the seawall drilling holes up and down it and pushing a wooden peg into each hole as a bung. One of us, normally me as in the photo below, would then go along and at regular intervals pump concrete into one of the holes until it begun to force the bungs out in that immediate area.
Like everything on the KRA in those days, everything we used was archaic. The only way we could seal the hole around the pump spout as the cement went in was to use a rubber sorbo ball on the end. We would have to hollow out a hole through the ball and then push it over and up the spout so that it became a seal round the hole in the wall. The pressure behind the concrete going in was so graet that you only had to lean the pump over slightly and break the seal and you got covered in the stuff, as my overalls below show.


To complete our archaic equipment there was no super, modern ready-mix lorries supplying the concrete, we did it ourselves. Each day two of our lorries would back up to each other on the main road and on one, two men would shovel sand and cement into a large mixer, which would then be fed into a hopper on the other lorry and then pumped over the seawall to me on the other side.
It was quite an easy operation for both myself and the pump operator, as you can see by his bored look on the lorry, but the two guys preparing the concrete shoveled away like billy-o all day long feeding the mixer.

Spring was here - briefly.

Well as I write this blog mid-morning today its cold, misty and damp and the weather of the last four days seems like a dream already. With rain, sleet and stronger winds forecast for the weekend here it's now looks grotty for the weekender birdwatchers, but despite now being retired, I had my share of such frustrations. But it has been great this last few days and as well as getting in an hour or two of early sunbathing yesterday, I also got out for my first warm bike ride of the year.
The sun also brought out the first flush of primroses in my garden,


and overnight the frogs appeared and set about laying spawn in the pond with great vigour and much wrestling.


Its doubtful that I'll visit the reserve today, its too misty and damp and I'll give my aching feet a rest I think and anyway it gets a tad boring recording the same birds every day.
The farmland around the reserve has been been quite active over the last few weeks, with the ploughing up of the Shellness grazing marshes to the fore. The cultivations have certainly gone some way to improving the soil if nothing else. Huge tonnages of the white gypsum were spread across the fields pre-ploughing to act as a soil conditioner. When I was an apprentice gardener I was taught that gypsum helps prevent clay particles sticking together and therefore creates a more open soil structure, rather than the typical clay that is either water-logged in winter or cracked in the summer. Manure from their huge cattle stockyards at Eastchurch was also spread and then the ground ploughed. It has been suggested that the fields will be sown with maize this year which is normally harvested in the autumn, with the whole plant being shredded during harvesting to be used as cattle feed.

Elsewhere on the farmland there has been much shooting taking place along the hedgerows and in the spinneys as several syndicates use up their options to carry out regular pest controls in the form of pigeon shooting over the rape fields. Until you see the huge size of some of these Woodpigeon flocks and then walk into the rape and see how much the plants have been stripped of leafage, its difficult to understand the justification for these measures. The National Farmers Union claim that annual pigeon damage in East Anglia alone costs farmers up to £53m, with 77per cent of growers suffering losses. Clearly such losses would cut no ice with those that oppose the culling of any pest species but never mind and lets us move on to another piece of reality. Hopefully anytime soon, those same pigeon shooters will turn their attention to the large crow flock that is roaming part of the reserve and the farmland. Currently the flock is averaging around 120+ birds and although it will reduce soon as some birds move away to breed there are always those that don't.
All the indications this year, as a result of the deepening drought, are that Lapwings are going to have a very difficult breeding season on Sheppey at least. All the new rills and scrapes that we dug on the reserve to provide shallow water and muddy fringes teeming with insect life for hungry chicks, are currently dust dry and pretty certain not to improve. Every Lapwing chick that we can hatch and fledge this year will have a vital role to play in a decreasing population and so its hardly rocket science to realise what effect a roving flock of crows will have across the breeding fields. Whole clutches of eggs are stolen and eaten on an hourly/daily basis and its very easy to lose a large part of a breeding season to these birds - so their numbers have to be reduced, simple as that.

Buds are Bursting

For the first hour that I was on and around the reserve this morning, it was sunny and warm with just a light breeze. After that the wind picked up a bit and it came in overcast and murky and a tad chilly. The first hour though made it seem very Spring-like and driving through the small thicket that gives entry on to the reserve (see above), it was evident that things are changing.
The Alder below was in full male bloom with its catkins looking very showy.


Alongside it this willow had all its buds bursting as the silvery catkins were desperate to get out into the warm Spring air and provide nectar for the early bumblebees.

In the same willow tree, just a month or so ago, I put this new nest box and going by the attention the nest hole has had it looks hopeful that a pair of Great or Blue Tits have already adopted it.



Walking across the reserve under a shower of Skylark notes falling from the sky, and the feeling of warm sun on the face, it really did feel as though we were leaving winter behind. The Greylag Geese have definitely decided that because more and more are flying around in pairs now and along the tops of the reed beds the male Reed Buntings now sing their wistful songs. The danger is getting ahead of yourself, there are certainly bad weather days still to come, but it won't be long before that lone Starling rushing across the sky makes you gasp as you think its that first Swallow and fence posts and ant hills are scanned for the bobbing action of the first Wheatear.
But since my last posting we have seen the arrival of some birds that I never thought I would ever find myself getting excited about - ten Coots have returned! The Delph Fleet, much deserted this winter, now looks proper again, and not only the Coots but Pochard, Teal, Wigeon and Gadwall are being seen in small numbers. I love Gadwall, get a close up of the drake and you will see that its feather patterning and colours are as good as any of its more colourful cousins.

And as I walked, soaking up these Spring-time dreams, from high overhead I became aware of the continual and plaintive call of a male Marsh Harrier. It took some finding but eventually through the binoculars I found the bird, almost lost in the clouds, as it turned and wheeled high in the sky in a form of courtship display to some hopeful female far below somewhere.

I turned then and accessed the two RSPG Harty fields alongside the reserve - you can see them below, either side of the old counter wall that runs between them. This counter wall was originally the seawall that bordered Capel Fleet when it still ran across the marshes there, to join up with The tidal Swale. Now it provides an ideal vantage point onto the two rough, grassy fields either side which have consistently this winter given food and shelter to a flock of over 40 Lapland Buntings. They can be amazingly invisible though and this morning I saw none, just two singing male Corn Buntings which are a hopeful sign for a second breeding season there.



Oh, and one last fall back to my last posting, re. the two dead Mute Swans under the power lines along the Harty Road. After receiving my photos, the Kent RSPB contacted the power companies responsible and it appears that their budgets won't run to providing an extension to the warning balls that are currently there on a length of the lines. We are now hoping that Natural England will be able to exert a bit more pressure on the power company.

A Pleasant Day

Blue skies, a warm sun and rising temperatures gave it a Spring-like feel as I walked round the reserve this morning. The reserve still had the typical end of winter bare look about it as we wait for the grass to begin growing again and turn green rather than the yellow that it currently is. The drought-stricken ditches are little more than shallow splashes between the fields, promising little by way of drinking water for the livestock this summer, but on such a beautiful morning as this was the birds at least were ignoring such shortcomings.
Skylarks were doing what they do best and filling the reserve with their beautiful song from somewhere up in the sky and some pairs of Lapwings had broken away from the main flock and were carrying out several display flights over the grazing marsh. The morning had that "feel" about it, when you can sense that things are about to happen, that Spring really is just around the corner and first Wheatears might only be a fortnight away. It lit up the old Forge Cottage in the sunlight, under the blue skies.


Part of the Greylag Geese flock allowed me to pass very close and never did take flight, they've become very trusting over the years and aren't what you could truly call, wild geese, other than the fact that they fly freely.


I had a good look round the ditches and along the Delph Fleet this morning in the hope of bringing to an end a mystery that has plagued us this winter, I was hoping to find a Coot. Since September, this bird, as much a part of the reserve as the grass and the reeds, has disappeared, we haven't seen any. Its really strange, as well as breeding in good numbers every year on the reserve, its numbers in winter normally swell to around a hundred or so. Despite the fact that many of the ditches have hardly any water in them, the Delph Fleet alongside the seawall is still reasonably OK and so the disappearance can't be blamed on the drought, it simply remains a mystery. The Delph also came up trumps this morning when I recorded two pairs of Gadwall and a pair of Tufted Duck in there. Couple that with 30 Mallard, 20 Teal and 8 Wigeon also seen around the reserve and we were getting into heady stuff as far as wildfowl counts go this winter. Until the last couple of dry winters its been unheard of not to get average counts of around 800-1,000 Wigeon each winter.

And just to rub in the fact that Spring is getting close, as I write this I'm watching, with little joy, a pair of Magpies collecting twigs from my hedge as they begin nest building in a neighbour's garden.
And to finish, yet another photo of Midge and Ellie as they inspect another empty rabbit warren, Ellie is still not convinced that these brown, furry things actually exist, despite what Midge tells her.

Tales of Woe

It was a frosty start as I left for the reserve this morning and only just getting light but the sun was up by 7.15 and it was soon a glorious sunny morning with clear blue skies. Travelling along the Harty Road is a tad distressing at the moment as it means driving past the bodies of two dead Mute Swans that have unfortunately collided in flight with the overhead power lines. For many years a length of these power lines have had plastic warning balls hanging from them but the swans' current flight line is taking them over a section without these warning balls. The photo below, taken in poor light yesterday, shows the birds. I have E-mailed the photo to both Natural England and the RSPB and asked if they can request the power company to extend the warning devices.


Despite the fact that it was still only half light when I arrived on top of the reserve seawall, the only three wildfowlers there were already packing up and so we stood on the seawall and had a lengthy chat. Seems that although there is still the one day left tomorrow of the shooting season these guys will not be returning now until September 1st when it all begins again. The absence of wildfowl this winter has meant that their shooting season has been pretty much a non-event and definitely their effect on the reserve has been virtually nil.
We stood and discussed the reserve in general and while we did so remarked on both the absence of birds in general and how dry it remains. Obviously the two are linked and the dryness is a major concern, here we are just coming to the end of the winter and the reserve has no more water on it than it had at the end of last summer. Local water companies are calling for drought orders, reservoirs are two thirds empty and we haven't even started the dry and hot weather of the spring and summer yet. Its going to be quite grim and birds such as Lapwings, that depend on wetlands for their breeding success, are going to struggle badly in this area.

And to carry on the depressing Lapwing theme, look at the two photos below, which were taken from the seawall early this morning. Regular visitors to Shellness and the reserve will recognise these fields as the grazing fields that stretch between the reserve and Shellness car park and all the way back along the track to Muswell Manor. For the last ten years or so they have provided perfect habitat for all manner of wildlife, the Rough-legged Buzzards hunted across them this winter and large numbers of Brent Geese used them. More importantly they provided vital breeding habitat for the hard-pressed Lapwing, but now they are currently being ploughed up!
I don't know exactly why the farmer is ploughing them up, he has always been happy to receive subsidies for maintaining them as such vital habitat. However it has been suggested to me that a new edict is on the agricultural horizon that will insist that all grass pasture that has been around longer than five years will have to permanently remain that way. Clearly many farmers will not want to lose the option to be in control of what they do with their land and so there is a rush to plough up such grassland. This hasn't been confirmed as the reason for what's happening at Shellness and I stand to be corrected but one thing that can't be denied is that the preservation of vital Lapwing habitat on Sheppey has taken a backward step.