LETTERS FROM SHEPPEY

Dawn, Snow and Harriers

2012-02-12T19:37:00.003Z

I left home this morning in temperatures of -5 and just as the first glimmer of light was showing in the sky. As I drove along the Harty Road, I stopped at Capel Corner to have a look at the large number of Mallard and some Mute Swans that were congregated around one small, pond-sized piece of unfrozen water in the Fleet. Mallard were the only duck species there which was surprising, given the +1000 Teal that had been there earlier in the winter.

By the time that I had arrived at the reserve and begun walking across the marsh towards the sea wall, the dawn sky was just starting to brighten up, as you can see below. A week after the snow fell it still looked, and felt, pretty bleak. The lights behind the sea wall are a large cable laying vessel that is moored in The Swale and is engaged at the moment in linking the wind turbines out to sea with the receiving station on the mainland opposite.

There were virtually no birds about, which was hardly surprising given how frozen up it was, and so after an hour, knowing I was going back late this afternoon, I cut the visit short just as some light snow began to fall. I just had time to take this photo of some of the sheep and the frozen grazing fields before a mini blizzard started up. In just 10 minutes everywhere was white again which was not exactly what was forecast and for me, was quite depressing.

Late afternoon, after several hours of slighter milder weather that had cleared the fresh snow, I was back at the reserve for the fifth Harrier Roost Count of the winter and as usual my station was on the seawall monitoring the saltings on the seaward side. It was a tad busy this visit, with ten wildfowlers out on the saltings and I anticipated the possibility of disturbance from shooting but it turned out to be the opposite. Talking to a few of them as they returned back along the seawall prior to it getting dark, it seemed that the cold had weakened them and they had packed up early. In fact for the time that I was there, stood on top of the sea wall in a cold N. wind and in slushy snow, shaking with the cold, I fortunately never heard a sound from the wildfowlers.

With the light beginning to fade and a murkiness hovering over the saltings in the distance it began to look as though no harriers were going to appear this visit. But all of a sudden they began to appear out of the increasing gloom and made their way down to the saltings at the Shellness Hamlet end. First a ringtail Hen Harrier dropped in, then two female Marsh Harriers, then another ringtail Hen Harrier, then a single female Marsh Harrier. It was getting difficult to see the birds then but just as I was thinking of packing up three more harriers appeared together and circled the saltings in the gloom and much straining of watery eyes confirmed them as three more ringtail Hen Harriers just before they dropped into the vegetation.
So 5 Hen Harriers and 3 Marsh Harriers were my best roost count this winter so far and it made the cold and the stumbling across the marsh in the dark with two terriers that kept disappearing, all worthwhile.

Cats and Rocks

2012-02-10T07:51:00.006Z

For the third time this week I was woken up at around 3.00 in the morning by my Jack Russell Midge barking madly in the conservatory as she looked into the back garden. A neighbouring cat has taken to wandering across my garden in the middle of the night, triggering the security light. This ends up with me opening the door, Midge going up the garden at the speed of light and the cat just clearing the six foot high fence inches ahead of the dog, but one of these nights she will be successful!

Cats are the only pet that I can think of that have the twin luxury of being able to roam their neighbourhood shitting in gardens and killing wildlife and yet be legally protected whilst doing so. A dog being shut out every night to do the same would quickly be carted off to the Pound and the owner prosecuted.

Unless of course, you are a biased cat owner, it is generally recognised that domestic cats are one of the worst predators of wildlife in gardens and the countryside and responsible for the deaths of many thousands of songbirds each year. Even more surprising is the fact that many people who rail vigorously against those that hunt or trap pests such as crows and magpies, own and protect cats. When you point this out to a cat owner they tend to come up with the same response every time - the cat is only out following its natural instincts. Yet when I reply, fair enough then, myself and my dog will follow our instincts and treat it as we would any other wild predator such as a fox, it quickly becomes this cute cuddly pet that wouldn't hurt a fly. I wouldn't put my dogs in their gardens and don't expect their cats to be in my garden, simple as that - seems fair enough to me.

I came across the photo below today whilst unsuccessfully looking for some old snow scene ones. Its an old faded one of myself from around 1968/69 when I was still working for the Kent River Authority. I think it is along the seawall of The Swale, close to the Kingsferry Bridge but could be at Elmley. Judging by the roll neck and coat it was in the winter time and I was rock-pitching the base of the sea wall. As I have explained in previous postings, we would roughly shape the rocks square with hammers and then punner them into the clay of the sea wall to create a level defense against erosion from the tides. The punner was the long round wooden thing that I was holding and with this and a lot of hard thumps, the rock would be driven into the clay until level with those around it.
These days they just tend to tip a line of loose rocks along the base of the wall but in those days the stone-pitching was something that we took great pride in and still today long lengths of sea wall still remain as we repaired them all those years ago, testament I like to think, to the skills that we once had.
Looking at the wall behind me it is clear that we hadn't been at that site long because there was a lot of driftwood laying round. Just above me on the wall were our grub bags because we often had to sit out in the open for our meal breaks and therefore if it was very cold we would sit round an open fire on the wall, burning nearby driftwood. After a lengthy spell at one site we would normally have cleared anything flammable for half a mile or so in either direction. In fact, being the fire-lighter was quite a treat because you got to have a walk along the sea wall for driftwood whilst the others were working.
That has just reminded me of an amusing incident from that time. Our toilet in those days was as you expect, out in the open and we would simply walk further along the seawall with a sheet of newspaper. One particually lazy guy was away for ages and we suspected that he had simply used it as an excuse to have a long break and when he eventually came back we accused him of that. But he quickly countered with the reply, no, the piece of paper blew away in the wind and I had to chase after it!

P.S. A correspondent has just advised me that latest figures show that there are an estimated 10 million cats in this country, each killing an estimated 3 wildbirds per annum - that's 30,000,000 songbirds killed each year by cats!!

Snow Scene

2012-02-07T14:25:00.008Z

I made a visit to a snow bound reserve this morning but with a blanket of snow across the whole reserve and all the waterways frozen solid, the only thing there was, were lots of sheep.!
Bird-wise on the grazing marsh, there were very few to be seen, a couple of fly-over Curlews, a Snipe that got up from a frozen ditch side and two or three Marsh Harriers - it was quite bleak. Obviously the majority of any birds that there were about were going to be out on the soft, low-tide mud of The Swale but I wanted to stay walking round the flat marsh, so therefore missed out on the birds there.
Mind you, Ellie thought it was quite amazing, all that white and cold stuff, all so new to a near five month old puppy.

Looking across the reserve towards Harty Church, it had am almost lunar feel about, quite bleak.

The other most obvious thing as you walk across the flat of the snow fields is the wildlife trails. Its quite amazing to see just how many fox and hare trails criss-cross across the reserve, rarely seen but obviously there, as were these geese prints.

And these of hares. Hare prints were everywhere, perhaps just one being very active, who knows.

Up on the seawall there were signs of much activity, dog footprints and human ones were all along the top - wildfowlers or simply dog walkers, hard to know. And then the big surprise, the ancient old Seawall Hide had had its steps sawn off and removed - no more access for anybody! A phone call to the reserve's Estate Manager found that for Health & Safety reasons the hide had been closed down (it was pretty much falling down) and so that's it. Two new hides along the sea wall are proposed some time this year but until then the reserve now has no public access onto it and no hides at all, just viewing from the top of the seawall.

Lastly, it was sad yesterday to hear of the unexpected death at the age of just 50 of Gordon Allison, the Elmley RSPB manager. Although we swapped some local bird news I didn't know him that well but he was a very likable and enthusiastic guy at carrying out what was both his job and his hobby.

Wind Chills

2012-02-02T15:17:00.003Z

Sitting in the conservatory this afternoon with unbroken blue skies and sunshine outside and a temperature inside, without heating, of 78 degrees, it was hard as I supped a glass of red wine, to equate with just how cold it was outside. But cold it was and the afternoon temperature here on Sheppey barely rose much above freezing all day.
I arrived at the reserve at around 9.00 this morning, after a slight hold up along the Harty Road for the re-surfacing work. This work is dramatically changing the appearance of the Harty Road and making it a real joy to drive now after far too many years of having the bottom of cars damaged due to it's subsided nature. With a bit of luck the majority of the road should be re-surfaced by the weekend.

The constant and strong E winds of the last few days, combined with the zero temperatures, have have introduced a wind chill that has both dried out and frozen the grazing marsh and its surroundings. Many of the smaller ditches are also beginning to freeze over and consequently most of the ground feeding birds such as Lapwings and Golden Plovers have left for softer and warmer surroundings. Walking round the reserve this morning was notable for two things, all the thousands of livestock footprints had frozen hard and it was not comfortable walking over ground that mimicked cobbles and then there was the wind!
Inland birdwatchers who are doing their birdwatching today among trees and hedgerows and thinking it is cold, should try walking across Harty marshes into a wind with a sub-zero wind chill, coming straight off the sea and with absolutely no shelter, as I did, it was certainly an endurance test for a couple of hours. At times it felt as if the wind was going through you rather than round you and the skin on the face was being peeled off, I won't give in to it but it's certainly not my choice of weather.

And what did I see for such personal heroics, well bugger all to be honest, unless you count the huge flock of sheep that have pretty much stripped the reserve bare of grass. One or two Lapwings trying to find a bit of soft ground round the ditch edges, 4 White-fronted geese and a dozen or so Greylags, 1 Jack Snipe and 2 Common Snipe and that was pretty much it. Oh and a large flock of assorted corvids, mostly crows, who had resorted to picking at maize cobs from the old game cover strips on the farmland because the ground on the reserve was so hard.

So it was back home then, to the warmth of the conservatory where sitting in there in the sun it felt like I was looking out to a sunny summer's day, or was that the wine, well going out to shut the canaries up soon dispelled the summer bit.

Winter sets in

2012-01-30T11:22:00.002Z

I left home a tad too early this morning, its a lot brighter now as I write this. When I left home it was very gloomy and we were experiencing a few wintery showers which persuaded me to leave my camera behind due to the poor light - that was a mistake.
It seems that winter is due to set in very cold for the next couple of weeks at least, personally not something to be glad of but I assume the few birdwatchers that have been calling for a bit of proper winter will no doubt be trying to get a day off work in order to get their share of being cold. For me, well perhaps a spell of indoors hibernation is on the cards.

Arriving at the reserve barn and getting out of the car, both the biting cold temperature and the damp gloominess didn't make a wander round seem very inviting and as the NE wind began to freshen shortly after, that's how it turned out, it wasn't a long spell out. I decided to head in a straight line across the grazing marsh and up on to the seawall and was surprised when I got halfway across the field to find that what I thought with the naked eye was a line of soil alongside one of the new rills, was in fact the flock of around 70 White-fronted Geese that's been back for a few days. I decided to attempt going round them and so carried on walking outwards across the field as the geese became increasingly vocal. I was surprised given their wild and nervous nature how close I was able pass them by and how all they did was to simply walk away from me. I passed by only around 60-80 yds away and given that the two dogs were running free in front of me it was even more surprising, somewhat dispelling some of the complaints about dogs in the countryside, although I guess I was keeping them in check. Despite the poor light, getting that close was a great opportunity for even my little camera to record the scene and I cursed greatly when realising it was back indoors!
Here I also have to be honest and record an unpleasant and harrowing sight. About a hundred yards away from the flock there was a single Whitefront walking round and calling and a quick look through the binoculars showed that it had a damaged and trailing wing. The result of being shot at? probably a safe bet, but who knows. Anyway as it continued to call, another goose flew up from the main flock and went and joined the other bird, with much exchange of sound between them - almost certainly its mate and they stayed together away from the flock. Clearly the injured bird couldn't fly any distance and at some stage in the near future its mate will have to make the decision on whether it departs with the rest of the flock or stays behind. Perhaps we shouldn't transfer human thoughts into these birds, but its hard not too and it makes supporting shooting very difficult.

About an hour later as I turned back onto the marsh further along, blow me down if I didn't then also get amazingly close to a flock of around 130 Greylag Geese grazing on what grass was left - another great camera shot gone begging!
Yesterday at long last, the water that has been pumped into The Flood scrape finally bore fruit as I spotted 130 Teal in there. Having only seen mainly ones and twos of Teal all winter that was a real treat and hopefully they'll hang around for a bit now. The inland duck shooting finishes tomorrow night so they won't have that problem to face and there is only then three weeks of wildfowl shooting left below the high water mark on the saltings.

Getting back to the cold weather, I was surprised at coming back past Capel Hill farm on the Harty Road, to see two pairs of new born lambs, poor things. I don't think the main batch of lambing there is due for a few weeks yet so possibly one ram sneaked in a bit early without anyone noticing - except for the two ewes that is!

Early Morning Robin

2012-01-25T12:10:00.005Z

In the pre-dawn darkness, lit by the odd street lamp, a Robin sang this morning. It sang as early morning cars went by and it sung to the lady waiting for the early London bus. I opened the bedroom window ajar and listened in the cold, in-rushing air as he continued to sing, bold as brass and cocky as a sparrow.
A little later when I'd got up and gone into the garden dark he was still there, atop a bare magnolia bush in a neighbouring garden, looking down at me with half-cocked head as he sang. Just then another Robin close by also began singing and my Robin's attention was lost to that threat close by as they dueled in song across the gardens. Many other birds are rightfully praised for the beauty of their song but for me the Robin's takes some beating, to hear it emerging from the dank fog of a November day or the cold darkness of a pre-dawn January and it can be so uplifting.

When it finally became light I made my way down to the reserve with the dogs, having missed going yesterday due to the rain. It wasn't the most pleasant of scenes down there though, after yesterday's rain and in this morning's still damp air, everything was so wet and muddy. The majority of the reserve is also pretty much taken over by sheep as well at the moment and so I made my round the boundary fence of the reserve and decided on a walk across the two RSPB fields. Before I did I left the main pump running in order to replenish the part flooded scrape in the "Flood" field.
The two excellent RSPB fields are still holding really good numbers of larks, finches and buntings and support well the reasons for having that type of habitat out there, a true oasis for wildlife amongst so many well grazed fields. As I walked along the top of the bund between the two fields a mixed flock of around 12 Lapland Buntings and 20 odd Skylarks got up and briefly flew round before re-alighting where they'd come from, 2 Twite passed by overhead and then a flock of around 50-60 Linnets also dropped in to feed. Herons are aso still to be found walking about in the two fields on a daily basis, something I imagine that suggests a probable healthy vole population for them to feed on.
Other than the small birds however, it was a remarkably quiet morning birdwise and stopping to talk to three other birdwatchers by the two fields, it seems that they also thought the same, no harriers or S.E.Owls had been seen by any of us and the White-fronted Geese on the reserve have also moved on in recent days.

A misty and heavy drizzle set in for a while to add to the dampness of the day as I made my back on to the reserve and to switch off the pump. Having done that I turned into the drizzle and decided to head for home, such damp and dull days are not my favourites, the bones start to creak and the arthritis becomes sore, yes, time to hobble off.

Of interest to any birdwatchers intending visiting the Raptor Viewing Mound this week/weekend, the re-surfacing of the Harty Road has begun but it has started at the Harty Ferry end and so it should be a some time before it starts to cause delays getting along to the RVM.

Waiting for Spring

2012-01-24T07:36:00.003Z

We're now into those few weeks of the year that I hate the most, the between the winter and spring seasons time, when time seems to drag as we wait for those first few warm spring days to happen. Winter visitors start to trickle away and summer visitors are slow to arrive and we end up in that vacuum of little happening. Saying that, its been pretty much that way since winter begun this time, it and the birds that come with it, haven't really happened. Personally, I've enjoyed the mild and dry conditions for comfort reasons but the two have combined to create a dearth of birds, especially wildfowl, and with a dry spring/summer looking increasingly likely, a poor wetland breeding season looks like being the outcome as well.

This morning as I begin writing this it has taken ages to get light, rain has just begun falling and a day of wet and cold weather is forecast, leading to a not very inspiring, indoor day. However, the twice daily Jackdaw event has just happened to brighten things up somewhat. The flock of some 400 birds strong, feed on the Scrapsgate marshes across the road and at the first glimmer of daylight, down the hill behind my bungalow they come, this great black, cawing mass. They sweep past at just roof-top height, over and between the houses like some blizzard of large black snowflakes, and in an instance they are gone again, to be repeated in reverse later in the day.

I found this, slightly hazy photo in my files this morning (it comes up a bit better if you click on it). It was taken during a light aircraft flight over Sheppey for my 60th birthday in July 2007 and shows the edge of Sheerness and the neighbouring marshes. Those in the top corner are part of the Scrapsgate marshes that lie opposite my bungalow.

These marshes, minus the holiday camp now in the middle, were my playground as a young lad growing up in Sheerness in the 1950's - that escape from the back streets and alleys into the great wide countryside outside the town. Here, between the ages of eight and fifteen, I wondered alone exploring ditches and fields and developing the love for the flat marshland landscape and its wildlife that I still have today.
The long stretch of straight water is the Sheerness Canal as it is known locally and it was originally longer than it is now, so that it ended just short of the sea at both ends. When first dug it was intended as a kind of moat as part of the Sheerness defences necessary due to the town for many years being home to both a naval dockyard and an army garrison.
Looking little more than a bridge from the air, is the main road into the town, which splits the canal into two halves. The bottom half is the freshwater scenic half, full of wildlife and the top half is the sterile half, regularly topped up with seawater, in order to keep Bartona Point lake alongside from getting too low. The very final stretch of beach at the top of the photo, to the right of the canal's end, is known as The Shingle Bank and both that and the Bartons Point lake often feature on the Kent Ornithological Society's website with bird postings. The lake was dug in recent years and now forms a large part of the Bartons Point Coastal Park but in my youth that particular area of the marshes was a restricted area. It was a military firing range where various servicemen came to practise their shooting skills, out in the open air and at large, raised targets.

But going back to my childhood, aged 8-10, an age these days considered far to young to be out there on one's own, I learnt all about the trials and tribulations of falling in ditches, crossing water-logged marshes and wandering amongst live-stock. I would return home muddied and wet but triumphant, with tadpoles, voles, slowworms and dare I say it, birds eggs to be blown.
An education that was priceless and free but is seldom sought by today's youngsters, or encouraged by many parents.

Comments, Morning Gloom and Willows

2012-01-20T11:09:00.011Z

While I now seem to be able to post blogs properly again, I'm not sure that readers will be able to read any comments that become attached. For some of us this Blogger system seems to get more confusing by the day. Anyway, if you do want to contact me about any of my postings, my E-Mail address is at the bottom of my Profile and I'm happy to accept comments that disagree with me just as much as those that do. Can't be getting like one blogger, who screens out remarks that contradict his opinions before we actually see them - so you only read nice comments and he's always right - a very sheltered way of life!

Anyway, back to the real world and here we are a month past the Shortest Day and yet to me the mornings seem to be getting darker rather than lighter, Ok it's a gloomy day today but it took till 8.00 to get properly light. It seems that every minute we gain in the afternoons is being added on to the mornings at the moment. You can see how dull it was this morning in the attached photos, fortunately I'm not an avid photographer and so the light doesn't bother me too much in that respect.

We've now had a large flock of sheep introduced to the reserve, for reasons I've yet to understand or be convinced of, and boy are they skittish. It seems the minute that you get within a 100yds of them the whole flock runs off, en-mass, giving the impression that I or my dogs are chasing them. I decided to give that half of the reserve a miss this morning and so stayed in the area around the reserve's barn and cutting some willow whips for planting seemed a good idea. So I walked back up the track to the small farm thicket that we enter the reserve through, its nice and bare and vegetation free at the moment, which gave me a chance to inspect the several nest boxes I'd put there last year. Around 50% of them had been used and I'll add one or two more in the next couple of weeks.
The one shown below is only about 10 yds away from the approach track and yet in the summer the Cow Parsley grows so tall in the thicket that the box was completely hidden.

Along the edge of the thicket is a line of Crack Willows which are cut back every 3-4years by the elecricity board because they grown up underneath overhead power lines serving a farmhouse a small way away. It was done last spring and the re-growth as you can see, is quite rapid and privides ideal whips for pushing into the ground. Willow roots ridiculously easily when sinply pushed into the ground and I simply go along the edge of a ditch and push the whips into the soft mud at the edge and hey presto, nice willow trees or few years later.

As I've mentioned in previous blogs, its something I've been doing for around 20 odd years, with some good results. See these mature willows in front of and screening the barn.

These ones in the foreground were whips, about three foot long, that were pushed in along a ditch just two years ago, with another mature line in the background. Its giving a new type of habitat around and spreading out from the barn, and attracts and feeds passing migrants such as ChiffChaffs and Willow Warblers.

Blogs and Birdwatchers

2012-01-18T08:06:00.003Z

I'm hoping that this latest posting does actually publish. As those of you who read this blog will have found this week, when attempting to open the "comments" you end up with a blank white screen, or I did when accessing it on somebody else's PC. It seems that due to having an IQ of 1 when it comes to PC's and twiddling with my blog on Saturday night, that I have managed to erase the back up governs of my blog and every attempt to get into it comes up with a blank screen which states that my browser is no longer supported by Blooger. And yet looking in my history of the last 300 subjects I found my last creation attempt and find I'm still able to create a posting through that, well providing this publishes that is. Its not satisfactory however and due to the fact that I now also have problems maintaing a constant broadband link to the internet, I'm awaiting a visit from a computer guy who will hopefully be able to sort out both problems.
I also intend joining the modern world and getting one of these new-fangled things called a Laptop and need his advice on a good, basic model to buy.

So in the meantime, it seems as though comments on my blog will not be able to be made or read, although my E-Mail address is on there, and if the blog disappears for a while you know why. It's a real pain at times being PC illiterate.

In respect of birdwatchers, its been amazing this winter to see the number of birdwatchers that appear to have discovered the eastern end of Sheppey, in the main due to a good supply of decent birds I suppose, but its been good to see so many people discovering the place. The Raptor Viewing Mound last weekend was a classic example, drawn out by excellent weather, people packed it and the Harty Road most of each day and got good views of many birds. The only down side at times, has been cars using the lay byes along the road as parking spots, which can cause passing problems at times for through traffic.
I understand from Kent Highways as well, that commencing next Monday, they are due to start a completer re-surface of the whole of the Harty Road and so therefore access along it could be problematical. It's a much needed stretch of work that in the short-term at least will be joyous for both drivers and their cars and hopefully it'll be a few years hence before the huge weight of the farm vehicles rendures it broken up again.

Comments

2012-01-14T06:35:00.004Z

Unfortunately, something is preventing me from both opening your comments and replying to them on the actual posting page. I can read them from within the set up of the blog but once again can't reply and cannot figure out why.
So please continue to send your comments, I love to read them, but for the moment I can't reply to them.

Early Harty

2012-01-13T08:27:00.002Z

I was having a glance through the late Sheila Judge's excellent book "The Isle of Sheppey" for the umpteenth time the other day, it really is head and shoulders above any other book on Sheppey's history. As a result I found myself picking out a few mentions of Harty's early history, although they were fairly scant. Clearly it wasn't one of the most hospitable or habitable parts of Sheppey, something that could still be attributed to it today, thankfully.

In 1873 the stock from a Bronze Age foundry was discovered at Harty, stock consisting of various moulds, knives, hammers, etc. This hoard was able to yield valuable information on the methods of bronze casting in the first century B.C. This might not neccesarily be the earliest find relating to Sheppey as others have been found around the Island but I relate only to those found at Harty
Julias Ceasar arrived in Kent in around 55 B.C. and although he seemed to be only aware of the Island in passing, remarked on the number of sheep grazing there. As a result, by the time that he had left Britain, the Island was known as Insula Ovinium - The Island of Sheep, which has slightly corrupted into how it is still known today.
A hundred years later, Claudius invaded Britain and some Romans were stationed on Sheppey. Although no major sites of buildings have been found, some smaller items have. On Harty specifically, roofing tiles, Samian ware and coins of Constantine have been found and nearby at Shellness, a kiln for burning shells. Roman coins have also been found in the Leysdown area and so possibly the eastern tip of Sheppey and the high ground of Harty had some strategic importance in guarding both the approaches to Sheppey and the back door that The Swale represented. As someone who has stood at the Raptor Viewing Mound on numerous occassions and near froze to death, one thing's for sure, if the traditional pictures of Roman soldiers dressed in thin tunics and sandals are correct, they must of found it a bit draughty around their bits in the bleak mid-winter!

The Romans were in Britain, and possibly Sheppey, for around four centuries before finally leaving in the fifth century, after struggling to repel repeat attacks from various Germanic tribes with diminishing forces. As a result, by A.D. 442 the Saxons were now the dominant invaders in Britain and unfortunately it wasn't long before the country had returned to the ruinous disorder of pre-Roman times. Various fortifications from that time have been found on Sheppey and the remains of a moated earthworks at Sayes Court are said to have been of Saxon origin. It has also been suggested that Harty got its name from Saxon origins, being called at one time Harteigh, after the Saxon words Heord-tu, meaning land filled with cattle, which is currently apt.
Despite the visit from the Saxons and a later lengthy occupation by the Vikings, no other remains from either race have been reported as found at Harty. The Vikings initially did much damage in Britain when they began to invade regularly, as is quoted for A.D.893. "Three hundred and fifty sail of ships under Haeston arrived in Sheppey and spoiled it, the like they did four years later."

Little else relating to Harty appears until 1066 when in the Domesday Monarchorum of the time it is noted that an earlier version of Harty Church was obviously in place because it was paying annual dues to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The current, tiny church was built in the 13th Century and even in these modern times services are still lit by candles and oil lamps.

Perhaps I'll write about more recent history at a later date but one item from Sheila Judge's book did catch my eye and is worth relating here. Apparently around 1571, Mote Farm, which was part of the Manor of Sayes Court, was sold by a John Chevin to a Thomas Paramour. However, John then declared that he was under age at the time of the sale, having resold it to John Kyne and Simon Lowe. Those two gentlemen brought a law suit, called a "writ of right", against Paramour for recovery of the land, but they lost the case and Paramour was given possession. This came about because on receiving the writ of right a trial of battle was demanded by Paramour, and awarded by the court, a regular way of deciding a legal action at the time.
The Queen intervened and ordered that they were not to fight themselves but the formalities had to be observed. Therefore Champions chosen by each party, properly dressed in full armour, met at Tothill Fields, Westminster, on the appointed day. Apparently four thousand people had also gathered to watch, such was the enjoyment in those things.
The Justice of the Common Pleas were also present as Judges of the Duel, but when, after much formal ceremony and making of proclomations and declarations, the non-appearance of Kyne and Lowe was recorded, a non-suit was requested and made, and the land judged to belong to Paramour. What a tame end to a much anticipated day!

There are currently two major farmers who own most of Harty and who in the past have allegedly had their disputes, wouldn't it be great if we could reinstate such ways of settling disputes - the Battle of Capel Corner, or the Ruckus at the Raptor Mound, maybe.

Marching into Spring

2012-01-11T12:20:00.003Z

Walking across the reserve this morning under blue skies, sunshine, light winds, mild temperatures and with Skylarks singing, it would have been so easy to assume that it was a typical March day, it was so Springlike. Obviously there are grotty days still to come but this morning really had that feel that Spring was just around the corner, hopefully this year it is. Its guaranteed that this weather won't suit everybody, what weather does, and reading other blogs this week there are those that still want a cold blast to hit us because they feel that they've missed out on some cold weather birds, but for me, loads more of today's weather please, its so uplifting.
See how peacefull and fresh the farmland alongside the reserve looked this morning, you can almost hear the Skylarks singing.

I first had a walk across to the sea wall to see if the Whitefronted Geese were still insitu in the Flood and yes, they were, feeding alongside the resident Greylag Geese. A rough count totalled a 160+ birds so my proper count of 167 on Monday was probaly still about right. What a lovely sight and sound these geese are, I just love their high, "winkling" calls as they communicate with each other, so much more exciting than the brash, farmyard geese calls of the Greylags. These birds spend most of the day feeding fairly close to the reserve's Sea Wall Hide and so are easily watched by any passing birdwatchers. That point came back to me when I eventually got home and realised that despite having my camera on my back I had still completely forgot to take a photograph of the geese.

Despite the beauty of the day it was hardly wall to wall birds on the marsh and even harriers were hard to come by today, I eventually saw just the one Marsh Harrier, and for the first time in weeks, no S. E. Owls. Other than that it was just a few Skylarks and Reed Buntings, an Egret or two and a couple of Herons. But I could see two birdwatchers making their way along the raised bund between the two RSPB fields and so, guessing that they were looking for the Lapland Buntings there I walked over to have a chat. They turned out to be two long-time Kentish birdwatchers, Bob Bland and Alan Woodcock and while watching the Lapland Buntings this morning in near perfect conditions, had managed to raise the count to around 50 birds, a phenominal count for recent times. Most winters, birdwatchers will be lucky to see or hear just one or two Laps. flying past overhead, so what has caused this number to all appear in such a high number. The two RSPB fields are about as good and seed laden as you can get for these buntings but how the heck so did so many find their way to exactly that spot, or are they always there flying round in the winter and have called each other in. Apparently 90 is the highest count recorded in Kent in the last 30 years so there's still some way to go but what a blinder these birds are just at the moment.

After that there wasn't really a lot more bird-lfe left to see and the real event of the morning was carrying on being able to enjoy such beautiful weather as I walked round - a return to cold weather - not for me I'm afraid, I'm happy to miss seeing a Redwing or a Waxwing this winter.
One last note, it appears that we have a pair of Barn Owls back at the reserve barn again this year, which is really good news.

Wishing for Rain

2012-01-04T14:08:00.008Z

In my last posting I was suggesting that we wouldn't be likely to see the flooding of previous winters. We then had the rain of yesterday morning which culminated in a lunch time cloudburst of rain and hailstones of an intensity that reduced visibility to just a few yards and I can't recall ever seeing before in my lifetime. Afterwards I had an E-Mail from a blog follower who suggested I might want to limit what I wish for.
In early morning sun then, which lasted less than an hour, I arrived at the reserve this morning hoping to see much improvement in the water levels for a change, but can't say that any was over obvious. Certainly the grazing marsh itself was much softer to walk and the various tracks have muddy puddles along their length but the only really glaring difference was the amount of mud churned up in the gateways by the cattle. It makes for difficult and smelly progress at times (its not all mud) and when your legs are only three inches long like Ellie's, it's definitely not appreciated, it brings the nose into to close a contact.
But getting back to water levels, the photo below shows how far we still have to go. This ditch is the point where after the reserve has flooded to an optimum depth all over, the excess water then flows over the top of the pipe in the photo and into a drainage ditch on the neighbouring farmland. January for the last three winters has seen this pipe over-topped by floodwaters.

Likewise, this was one of last summers newly dug rills on the grazing marsh this morning. The intention is that this and all the others will be full of water this Spring in order to gradually dry back and provide insect life round the margins for the wader chicks - obviously still some way to go.

But its not all doom and gloom and praying for rain of biblical proportions, this is how the new scrape in the field that we know as The Flood looked this morning. Over the last three weeks, when the ditches alongside have allowed it, I have been gradually pumping their water onto the scrape to arrive at how it now looks. Its still not as wide as will eventually be and will need a season to develop some insect life and vegetation but it is already rewarding me. This morning in there, were 48 White-fronted Geese and 18 Greylag Geese and a spattering of Lapwings - great stuff, and the largest flock of Whitefronts that we've had this winter so far.

Finally, for those who always ask about her, Ellie continues to progress how I would wish. Here from this morning are two photos of her and Midge inspecting a rabbit warren that is sadly vacant.

A new day, a New Year.

2012-01-01T16:36:00.003Z

Well here we are at the start of a new year and with several hours rain this afternoon and evening and some more forecast this week it would be nice to think that we could get to the levels of previous winters (below) before the Spring, but I think that's very unlikely.

I was still awake at 02.30 this morning, not because of any New Year's Eve celebrations, not my thing, but because people will insist on sending huge amounts of pound notes into the air at midnight with so much noise. Not the end of the world as such, people get their fun in all sorts of ways, but if like me you have a dog that is petrified of fireworks and takes a lot of calming down it can be a tad distressing and irksome. Especially as always, you get the morons that still have to let fireworks off until gone 02.00 in the morning, meaning several forays back out of bed to re-calm the dog down again.
Anyway, despite that, I still got up at 05.30 as is my way but didn't leave for the reserve until 9.00 seeing as it was a damp and gloomy sort of morning, although very mild thankfully.

I'm not in to all this mad scramble to count birds on day one stuff and so decided to simply give the dogs a run on part of the reserve and round the edge of the RSPB fields today and count birds another day. The RSPB fields had attracted a number of birdwatchers anxious to get the increasing flock of Lapland Buntings there onto their lists and some were lucky as at one stage a total of 30+ were counted by one local birdwatcher. They can be extremely frustrating birds to see there because unless they get spooked up from feeding in the not very long grass they still remain amazingly invisible. I managed to see one party of around 20 get up and even better, in a flock of around a dozen Linnets I had my first 4 Twite on Harty for well over ten years, something for me that was as good as any much rarer bird.

Eventually I made my back along the Harty Road and called into The Raptor Viewing Mound to chat to one birdwatcher there who turned out to be Kevin Duvall the warden of Oare Nature reserve. It was good to meet him for the first time and we swapped chat about both our reserves and other stuff before being joined by several other birdwatchers. Its been good today to see so many birdwatchers out and about enjoying the countryside and I enjoyed being able to point this group in the direction of the Lapland Buntings which they were looking forward to adding to their day lists.

End of the Year

2011-12-31T13:07:00.006Z

I arrived on the seawall just as dawn was breaking as you can see below and it was both mild and very damp from overnight rain. What you can't see due to the light, are two wildfowlers sitting in front of me halfway across the saltings.
After an hour and no shots fired the two of them were still out there and so I rang one up on his mobile to find out if he had seen much prior to my arrival. Apparently he had bagged one Teal and claimed to have heard some Pink-footed Geese fly along the saltings in the dark, if he was right then hopefully they will be re-found some time today by any birdwatchers out and about. As well as the two wildfowlers mentioned I could just make out the heads of another two at the far end of the saltings by the old barges and that total of four is the most that I have seen out there in the last couple of months, which pretty much describes how few wildfowl there are in the area.

In recent weeks the two RSPB fields alongside the reserve have been attracting both good numbers of birds and as a result increasing numbers of birdwatchers. The principal interest has been increasing numbers of Lapland Buntings, peaking this week so far at 20-22 birds, a number unheard of on Sheppey for many years, if at all.
These two fields, that run between the public footpath that runs down behind Muswell Manor and the edge of the reserve are simply two grassy fields. What makes them so attractive to a large and varied number of passerines however is their progress over the last year.
Three years ago the two fields were part of the neighbouring arable farmland and shot over and were two of four purchased to eventually come into the RSPB's ownership. During autumn 2010 the two fields, after levelling and landscaping, were re-sown with grass seed which by this Spring had produced a good green sward. As I understand it, the fields are destined to become yet another two examples of grazing marsh for the benefit of breeding Lapwings, as though we need more! For whatever reason the fields were left to become totally overgrown and the wide variety of grasses, corn, wild oats and rape, all run to seed before the fields were eventually cut in late September. The resultant grassy base of the fields, packed with all manner of wild seed, first became a magnet this autumn/winter for flocks of a 100+ Skylarks and Linnets and then gradually Reed Buntings and the Lapland Buntings have followed. It has become an accidental example of what you can achieve out there by providing that, in very short supply, that type of habitat and hopefully the senior RSPB management will now re-consider their original plans for the fields.

One last point of possible interest to some readers, Ellie continues to make progress as you can see below. Despite her little legs she now manages to complete an almost full patrol round the reserve in company with Midge. I think she's always going to be a much shorter version of Midge but she has tremendous stamina and character.
Tonight, and not by choice, I have to stay up until well past midnight in order to calm Midge as we endure the barrage of fireworks that now have to be let off each New Year and so panic her.

Mild and Quiet

2011-12-26T10:29:00.003Z

I arrived on the seawall of the reserve this morning just as it was half light from the dawn and was struck by two things, one it was incredibly mild and two, there were no wildfowlers present, which is pretty much unheard of for Boxing Day. In fact there were no visible signs of anyone shooting on the whole of Harty, something I've never known before in this Christmas holiday period.
While its nice that there is no disturbance, etc. from the wildfowlers it has to be tempered with the fact that the reason that there are no wildfowlers is because there's nothing to shoot and if there's nothing to shoot at, there's also nothing for us to see on the reserve, which this morning was pretty much the case. On Boxing Day last year the reserve was covered in snow and completely frozen up except for one small patch of open water in the seawall fleet and yet I saw a few hundred ducks, over a thousand geese and fifteen wildfowlers - today I saw just five Mallard! Talking to various wildfowlers recently it seems that the dearth of wildfowl is pretty much the same throughout much of North Kent this winter, lets hope that it is simply just a case of the mild and dry weather and not an indicator of anything more serious.

Staying on the quiet theme there really were few birds to be seen on the main reserve this morning. Now I don't want to get into the same trend as a few blogs have recently - you know, where they produce an enviable list of birds seen on a particular day and then smugly complain about how quiet it is, but have a look at my main sightings in an hour or so this morning.
5 Mallard
2 Grey Heron
1 Little Egret
2 Marsh Harrier
1 Kestrel
80 Lapwing
1 S.E.Owl
1 Lapland Bunting
1 Wren

OK, if I'd of stayed for several hours I could of added to that list but a wetland reserve at the end of December should have large numbers of wildfowl, plovers and waders viewable the minute you arrive there. It was a strange visit, it was mild enough to grace any March day and eerily quiet as though something had sucked all the birds out of the sky and moved them somewhere else.

A Special Day

2011-12-22T14:00:00.009Z

What a superb day's weather we had today, clear blue skies and an almost warm sun, despite being a tad breezy on the marsh, today could of easily been one from March or April. Last night in the garden I found a Common Newt making its way across the lawn and today there was a Great Tit loudly "teaching" to all and sundry - is it really only mid-December?
Last Friday we should of completed the Dec WEBS count but the weather defeated us and so early this morning two of carried out a belated count on the reserve. I don't have the count for Shellness Point yet but mine covering birds on the mudflats in front of the reserve saltings and along to the saltings below Harty church were encouraging. The two stand out counts were 210 Avocet and 1050 Lapwing. 800 of the Lapwing were on the saltings below Harty Church and it is a welcome back to good numbers of Lapwing, they have been in very low numbers through the continuing drought. A few other noteable counts were 180 Grey Plover, 60 Redshank and 100 Shelduck. One absentee in recent months has been Coots. Normally at this time of the year we would see numbers building towards the 100 mark but since the drought set in during late summer they have pretty much disappeared and I can't recall when I last saw any.
On my back round the boundary hedging of the reserve I was also pleased to come across 12 Long-tailed Tits, 2 Blue Tits, 16 Blackbird, 40 Reed Bunting, 26 Goldfinch.

Back at the reserve barn at 10.15 it was obviously to good a morning to waste and so I briefly nipped home to collect Ellie the puppy (only 15 mins each way) and set off again across part of the reserve. I'd left Ellie at home because I assumed that a long walk such as the WEBS would be too much for her little legs but I think I worried unduly, she ran for ages on that second walk of the day. Here below she is in the reserve barn helping Midge sniff out any mice or rats and then out on the marsh itself.

Despite looking beautifully green and muddy, the overall level of water on the reserve remains very low and I'll be surprised if we achieve anywhere near normal water levels this winter. The scrapes in the field that we know as "The Flood" (its in front of the Sea wall Hide), we re-dug this summer and they still remain pretty much dry and so I decided to pump what water that we could spare, onto them this morning. The Pumphouse pumps water from the ditches alongside The Flood onto the scrapes and at the moment that means lowing the ditches from just a foot or so deep to around six inches. However once we can get the scrapes reasonably wet then any further rains do at least add to the depth of water in the scrape rather than simply soaking into the soil. The pumphouse has the ability to pump the water in three different directions by opening/shutting various valves.

This is the main scrape before we started pumping.

And after we had been pumping for a short while.

All in all a splendid morning's work on the reserve and a real treat to be able to get out in such enjoyable weather, we've had the Shortest Day, soon all this Christmas rubbish will be out of the way and we can start dreaming of breeding birds, swallows and butterflies - can't wait!!

Barnacles

2011-12-19T08:23:00.002Z

Yesterday morning I arrived at the reserve Just as light was lighting up what soon became a blue sky. There was a hard white frost and it was bone-chillingly cold but as the light increased and the eastern horizon gradually became a deeper orange, the sun threatened to rise shortly. Actually the shortly took another hour and it was 8.00 before the first orange tip inched it's way above the hills behind Seasalter but with the Shortest Day just two days away, things should start to swing backwards in time before long.
Arriving on top of the seawall,I could just make out the dark shapes of three wildfowlers out on the saltings in the half light, how cold they must of been and for no return. No wildfowl were visible at all on or around the reserve, the only ones audibly and occasionally visible, were Brent Geese out on The Swale. There have been large rafts of Mallard and other ducks recorded lately on the sea off of Shellness but where they are going to on land no one seems to know. The three wildfowlers packed up just after sun-rise and came on to the seawall for a chat before heading home, all teeth chattering and juddering with the cold. Apparently a few Greylag Geese passed along the salting before it got light, none of which were shot, and that was the sum of the morning's wildfowl. Looking at the still dry, new rills and scrapes across the reserve, despite last week's rain, that looks like remaining the case as well. I'm beginning to despair of seeing the reserve properly wet this winter, which could be disastorous for next year's breeding birds.

After the wildfowlers had gone, I carried on along the sea wall for a while before catching the sound of approaching geese, the exciting yapping of Barnacle Geese! 18 of them came in from The Swale and circled round me before going back out towards The Swale, what a lovely sound they make. With another 40-odd seen over mid-Kent the same morning perhaps birds are beginning to move in from the Continent, although one would normally expect to see good numbers of White-fronted Geese before or with the Barnacles.

Yesterday afternoon/early evening I was back at the Sea Wall Hide, enduring relentless cold, for the third Harrier Roost Count. This time fortunately, there were no wildfowlers out on the saltings and I had the increasing gloom to myself, but the cold was a bit of an endurance test, just standing there looking through a scope. It turned out to be one of the best I've ever had for Hen Harriers roosting on the saltings though. Immediately I put the 'scope up and look towards Shellness, I spotted a ring-tail (female) HH drop in and disturb a superb, pale grey male HH, which re-alighted a few yards away. Gradually, as the light lessened, single ring-tail HH's made their way along the salting past me and down to the Shellness end to roost. Eventually I ended up with 1 male HH - 4 ring-tail HH's and 1 female Marsh Harrier - a really good count for there in recent times!

Arriving back at the barn and my car in the near dark I was encouraged to see a Barn Owl out hunting. Whether this was the poorly one from last weekend I couldn't say but I was encouraged to see it. However there was a down-side to the owls in the week, looking round for a possible dead adult, three decomposing bodies of young Barn Owls were found. They had been dead for some time and had no rings on their legs and as we had rung the first brood of three chicks we could only surmise that the adults had had a second brood that didn't survive after fledging.

Adey comes to Sheppey

2011-12-15T09:19:00.004Z

Adey is an unusual name from my family's history and is one that I would love to have been called. Unfortunately it was allowed to die out before it got to my turn to be named but I'll take you down the path it took until then, hopefully it won't be considered a boring indulgence.

Adey Faulkner was born in Ospringe, nr. Faversham in Kent in 1822, and his father, also an Adey, had been born in 1796. By 1847, exactly a hundred years before I was born, he had moved across The Swale and was living at the eastern end of Sheppey, and thus starting the Faulkners' link with Sheppey. Its also a pretty fair bet that he came across via the small boat ferry at Harty Ferry, one of three along The Swale at the time.
During the first three months of 1847, aged 25, he had married a 20 yr old Doddington girl by the name of Mary Marchant and within four years they already had two children.
So by 1851 Adey was working as a farm labourer and living with his family in a small farm cottage at Stonepitts Farm, out on the marshes, two miles below Eastchurch village. In those days there were a great numbers of these farms and their small cottages strung out across the bleak and waterlogged marshes of southern Sheppey. Rose Cottage and Cod's House at Elmley are a couple of the few that remain. Like all the farm cottages on the marshes in those days, Adey's would of had no sanitation, no lighting other than candles or oil lamps and water gathered from either a well or even ditches. The malarial mosquitoes which abounded on the marshes saw many people suffering with and often die of, the ague (malaria)and periods of extreme cold and snow in the winter months must of been particually excruciating to bear.
To compound the misery at the time, these workers cottages were only available while you were employed by the owner and you often found yourself sharing with other families, despite the cramped conditions. Become unemployable and you and your family were homeless again.
The 1851 Census at the Stonepitts cottage Adey was in illustrates this quite clearly:-

Adey Faulkner 28
Mary Faulkner - wife 23
Adey Faulkner - son 2
James Faulkner - son 5 mths
James Newman - lodger/farm labourer 26
Harriet Newman - wife 20

Much later in 1909, Stonepitts Farm was bought by the Aero Club who were desperate to move from their airfield at nearby Muswell Manor, Leysdown. They immediately began turning it into both an airfield for their members and an aeroplane factory for the Shorts Bros.. It of course then went on to became both a military airfield in WW1 and WW2 before ending up in its current form - several prisons. The photo below shows Stonepitts Farmhouse in 1911, surrounded by the early aeroplane sheds.

Also in 1851 and living on Sheppey, were the Thomas family, who lived at Parsonage Farm, near Halfway village in the centre of Sheppey. Thomas, like a big percentage of Sheppey at the time, was also a farm labourer and his second daughter Martha was born that year. Ten years later in 1861, the Thomas family were housed in another farm cottage, this time somewhere along the Harty Road but Martha aged just 10, was
living, and working, at nearby Elliots Farm as a Housemaid. Martha was would marry into the Faulkner family a little later.
Also by 1861 Adey Faulkner and his ever growing family had moved from Stonepitts and were now living in a cottage at New Rides farm along the Leysdown Road below Eastchurch. Adey continued to be employed as a farm labourer, as was his son Adey, now 12 and employed as a Carter.

This general merry-go-round of families moving from farm to farm was typical of the period as both farmers and their labourers struggled to earn a living. During the last quarter of the 1800's there had been a gradual shift away from agriculture to industry and even in those days, an increase in the amount of imported food, so farmers were seeing their profits starting to drop. It was a very traumatic time for the farm labourers and their families and they were constantly moving from farm to farm, as jobs were easily lost for the slightest of reasons. Adey Snr, to his credit, seems to have managed to stay employed throughout these times and even ten years later in 1871 was still employed as a farm labourer and living at New Rides Farm, aged 49, and by today's standards probably looking like an old man. Not only that, with his wife Mary having died in 1861 and his three sons all left home, he now found himself lodging there in a cottage with another family.

Adey Jnr meanwhile had moved a few miles further along the Leysdown Road, was employed as a farm labourer and was living with a family of seven and two lodgers, all crammed in to No.5 Tills Cottages at New House Farm. This farm is still there today, sits on high ground looking south across Capel Fleet and the Harty Road below and also towards Elliots Farm where the young Martha Thomas had been working ten years before. Fate however, now found the 19yr old Martha living back with her parents and alongside Adey Jnr at No.3 Tills Cottages at New House Farm. Clearly they had also been doing some courting because in the autumn of 1871 they needed to become a married couple with their first son, Adey, being born in early 1872. My eventual Grandad Albert was also one of his four siblings. Unfortunately, this baby Adey was the last in the family to be named so but we can follow him on until his eventual death and the demise of the name, in 1926.

1872 was also monumental for the fact that schooling for children became compulsory and as a result two small schools were built at Leysdown and Harty. The Harty schoolhouse was alongside Harty church and was only pulled down a couple of years ago to make way for the new bungalow there. Imagine the children from the many farms and cottages dotted across the whole of Harty making their way there on foot using just tracks and footpaths across the marshes in winter! Ironically this new education system also had the unfortunate effect of increasing the poverty experienced by these already poor farm workers' families, because it limited the earning ability of children to provide cheap labour on the farms. They were now expected to attend school every day and were only allowed to leave at thirteen if they had gained a School-leaving Certificate. No Certificate meant compulsory staying on for another year. Local school records also highlight the poverty suffered by these families with children arriving at school wearing no socks and often even no shoes and frozen cold with no coats or jackets.
Quite which school Adey's children would of gone to I don't know but I imagine that the Leysdown one would of been much easier to walk to from Till's Cottages than the much further Harty one.

Adey Snr was to eventually die in 1884, aged 62, but before that in 1881, Adey and his family were now to be found living in a cottage at the far more pleasant surroundings of Whyburns Farm in Minster. Minster since the year dot had always been the dominant and ruling parish over most of Sheppey and was to remain that way for a few years more until Sheerness began to spread out from the hulks of the dockyard there. The village was on high ground, warmer than the wilds of Harty and most importantly had shops, churches and schools all close by. The farm, of which the farmhouse still remains, was situated alongside Wards Hill Road, just below the village, and ironically I now live further down the same road. Adey was employed there as a Waggoner, and although it wasn't a huge farm it did encompass part of what is now known as The Glen village green and park.

It is also worth noting here that in Kentish records for the time the position of Waggoner or Carter was generally regarded as a fairly prestigious and well paid one. They would be responsible for the complete welfare of the farm's horses, without which little could happen. As a result the Waggoner would be employed on a year's contract, guaranteeing his family their living regardless of weather and sickness and would often receive other benefits such as free cottage, coal and faggots. Whether Adey was beneficiary of such a standard of living is unknown but it would be nice to think so. And if he needed a constant reminder of the price of failure, just a few hundred yards up the road was the Sheppey Union Workhouse!

It is difficult to know exactly but it appears throughout this potted history that our Adeys all managed to stay one step ahead of unemployment which was quite credible and seemed to involve regular moves to new farms. As a result, by 1891 he left Whyburns and was now living with Martha and their sons at Ripney Hill Farm, halway between Minster and Sheerness and only a few miles from Martha's birthplace at Parsonage Farm, she had almost travelled in a full circle. The majority of Ripney Hill Farm is now covered by the Sheerness Golf Club but in 1891 both Adey and four of his sons were working there as Farm Servants, I assume that was another name for labourers. The average wage for the farm workers at the time was less than three shillings a day and in an effort to improve conditions for themselves and their workers, in 1894 local farmers formed local branches of the National Agricultural Union. A large number of the farm workers joined this Union in the hope that it would bring better security but there is little to suggest that it actually did.

The last record of Adey and Martha and their family, including the younger Adey, mostly living together was in 1901, they were living in the short High Street of Minster village itself. The High Street even now, is still barely much more than a hundred yards long but in those days was full on both sides by mostly wooden shacks on both sides of the street, some of which had become shops. Eventually in the 1920's many of them were destroyed in a fire that quickly spread along the High Street.
In 1901, despite now living in the very heart of the village, the Faulkner's had hardly improved their situation, the shacks were in very poor condition and things such as water and oil for lamps still had to be bought from the daily cart rounds, or water sometimes bucketed from a local communual well.
Here Adey and three of his sons were as usual still employed in the area as Agricultural Labourers, although there was an indication that times were changing. A fourth son was lodging in Queenborough and now employed as a railway plater on the Island's new railways.

Adey died there in 1907, aged 59 but for some reason I cannot find Martha's date of death. Their son, the last Adey, by 1911 was living as a boarder at Neats Cottages, between Queenborough and Minster and working as a labourer. Eventually he died in 1926 and is buried in an un-marked pauper's grave in the Sheppey Cemetery, which I have located. The last of an unusual name.
One last photograph that I must share with you, is that of my Great Grandmother Martha in her later years in Minster. There are those that say I have inhereted her severe look - I prefer to think that even then someone might of mentioned the word twitcher.

Brent at Dawn

2011-12-10T12:33:00.007Z

The first glimmers of dawn light were showing to the east as I left home this morning for the reserve after first clearing a frozen windscreen on the car, it had been a cold night!
As I turned on to the Harty Road I glanced back towards Eastchurch up on the hill and was struck by the night's full moon gently slipping down behind the village and adding to the coldness of the scene.

When the sky is clear, as it was this morning, its amazing how quick the light increases and by the time that I pulled up at the reserve it was almost full daylight, with a lovely blue sky changing gradually to pinks and yellows the closer it got to the horizon.
I alighted from the car to the regular weekend dawn chorus of shotguns going off at various point around the farmland marshed behind me, the commercial duck ponds were suffering their regular attacks. As I crossed the reserve towards the seawall the grass underfoot was covered in hard frost, crunchy and firm and so much easier to walk across than the wet and the mud. Up the seawall steps and my first peruse of the saltings in both directions for any wildfowler heads that might be visible out there. Nope, none - the story so far of this shooting season, the wildfowlers have been very few and far between out there this winter - talking to them I doubt collectively if they've shot much more than a dozen or so birds over three months!
Still a dozen too many you might say, fair enough, but compare that with the scores shot around the commercial duck ponds on the farmland, each visit!

So, which direction to walk, I went west along the sea wall, heading for the stretch of reserve that lies below Harty Church. As I have mentioned before, these narrow grassy banks that run down to the saltings below the church, are a favourite part of the reserve for me with their views down The Swale and across to Oare. Looking across to Oare I could see a couple of wildfowlers on the saltings in front of the West Flood, presumably hoping to surprise any wildfowl leaving it, but instead they were shotless and instead stood around talking, its sometimes hard being a wildfowler - should I say that, oh well.
On the mudflats below the banks were several hundred Brent Geese, bathing, preening and generally cackling and barking away, they sound at times, like a pack of fox hounds away in the distance.

Eventually, they began to rise up in regular small flocks and make their way over me towards the farmland, a cackling, brent-full sky of birds.

They were heading for their current daily feeding area on the adjacent farmland, see them here towards the top of the field.

The field was sown this autumn with a silage grass mixture that will produce one or two cuts of silage next summer. It must be very lush and palatable for the geese at the moment, why mess about on mudflats! Technically, as long as the field doesn't become water-logged and muddy, the grazing by the geese won't do a lot of harm, just as a lawn does in the warmth of the Spring, after the geese have moved on, the grass will quickly shoot away to produce the silage crop that the farmer expects. Wether he will see it that way is a different matter, there could be trouble ahead as the song goes.

A sadder event occurred when I visited the reserve yesterday morning. As I parked up I became aware of one of the reserve's resident Barn Owls sitting atop a post alongside the car. That was unusual, they don't normally allow me to get that close. Getting out of the car with my camera, I was allowed to get within a few yards before the bird weakly flew off to quickly land in some long grass close by. For whatever reason, the bird doesn't look well and I fear that we shall find it dead there in the coming weeks, a real shame.

Another Side of Winter

2011-12-08T11:02:00.005Z

In my previous posting I made no secret of my dislike of the winter cold and the conditions that come with it, and yet there are times when I find myself having nostalgic thoughts about winter's past and how we did things. Perversely these normally occur when I'm laying on my sunlounger in the garden on a hot summer's day, glugging some chilled white wine (sipping is out of the question). I suppose its that normal thing whereby when you're in one season you find yourself dreaming about another, just as many of us are currently dreaming about next Spring.
Anyway, while I'm glugging away and staring up at a hot July sky, I find myself sometimes thinking about cosily sitting in front of log fires, with it cold outside, and mulled ale and hot chestnuts and all the atmosphere that goes with it. I suppose the modern day equivalent is the central heating full on, a glass of red wine and a bag of dry roasted - hardly something for our grandchildren to be nostalgic about! But what I'm recalling are wintery events that I've read about or heard, not my depressed memories.

Of these and easily the most nostalgic for people of my age, is Dylan Thomas's "A Child's Christmas in Wales", narrated by himself in that lovely deep Welsh voice of his. He describes so perfectly a typical winter childhood in those hard times of the 1930's and despite the fact that mine was in the late 1940's- early 1950's I was shocked at easily he was also recanting my very own memories of those times.
The fact that it always seemed to snow, the snowball fights wearing old socks as gloves, the same presents that old bosomy aunties always gave you every Christmas - the knitted scarves and matching gloves and the jars of bullseyes, the mechano sets for "Lttle Engineers", and one of my favourite Stocking presents at the time, the packet of sweet cigarettes. Dylan describes the event as "and then the packet of sweet cigarettes, you put one in your mouth and stood on the corner of the street and waited for hours in vain for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette and then with a smirk, you ate it".

Its a real nostalgia trip through the childhood of people of my age and should you ever get the chance to listen to it you will not regret it.
And before we leave Dylan Thomas behind, what about a verse or two from his poem "A Winter's Tale"...........

It is a winter's tale
That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,

And the stars falling cold,
and the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
in the river wended vales where the tale was told.

Dylan typically takes a simple observation and packs it with extra words because he loves the sound of words, but if you say the words slowly to yourself you can picture great flakes of snow silently blowing down across a Welsh valley and its farm and farmyard animals and feel the intense cold of it all.

And as always, as I lay in that summer sun, competing with Dylan Thomas in the nostalgia stakes was my old friend "The Wind in the Willows".
Take one of my favourite chapters - The Wild Wood - where we find the Mole slipping out of the house on a bitter cold winter's afternoon - "it was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead, when he slipped out of the warm parlour into the open air. The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, till they could riot in rich masquerade as before"....

How often have we all experienced those bitter cold, steel grey days when sniffing the air you just know that snow is not far off. And lo and behold, when you get up in the morning there it is, a thick layer of fresh snow, captured perfectly for me in those great words my Ratty in the same chapter of the book. Emerging from their overnight stay in a hollow tree in the Wild Wood Ratty exclaims "hello, hello" - "what's up, Ratty" asked the Mole - "Snow is up replied the Rat briefly: "or rather, down. Its snowing hard".

So I suppose there is a lot of nostalgia and warm feelings about events that happen during the winter but its the enduring of the winter that defeats me - best read and remembered from the comfort of a sun lounger in the middle of summer, I can fit them into my life then.

An Odd One Out.

2011-12-04T13:10:00.004Z

I was on the reserve earlier today and what a cold, grey, breezy, not properly light and gloomy visit it was. These cold and gloomy days that are only around eight to nine hours long are very much not my cup of tea. I hate having to walk round weighed down with winter clothes on and my body rigidly tensed against the cold. I hate it when its only light for four hours either side of lunch time and having to spend so much time indoors looking out at darkness or gloom. The photo below from this morning records nothing other than how cold and grey it all looked.

However, reading several of the regular blogs lately, it seems that I'm the odd one out - no surprise there to many who read my comments - but in this context I refer to this deep winter period and my loathing of it. Several of the other writers are hoping for some proper winter weather, snow even, purely to apparently increase the bird species and numbers that are being seen. Mind you even those guys portray some contradictions in what they say - when its sunny and bird-boring they call for cold, grey, more like it winter weather and when they get that weather, plus the birds, they then complain that its too gloomy to photograph them.
Some of these people seem to spend every day either working or birdwatching, with nothing in between - no mention of spouses, or mowing the lawn, or shopping, or decorating - just the constant hope that if they stay out long enough each day that they might add one more bird to each month's list. Its easy to imagine them emerging from a violent storm that has wrecked their houses, stepping over the wreckage and saying, "wow, I bet there's some birds about today".

No, I hate this weather, I spend it looking forward to the passing of The Shortest Day, praying for a mild January and February and at last, that first warm and sunny Spring Day. Oh to feel a hot sun soaking into my bones, a cold glass of wine at hand, light till 10pm and sitting outside watching swifts overhead and bats hawking round, and of course, just a couple of hours each day birdwatching - does that make me the odd one out?

After the Rain

2011-12-02T13:34:00.003Z

Sheppey finally had several hours of prolonged and fairly heavy rain last night, easily the most noticeable rain for several months - no longer can we say it never rains on Sheppey!
And after the rain came the sun, under clear blue skies and steady sunshine this morning, the reserve looked quite beautiful and green, and had the feel of March or April about it.
Arriving at the reserve I briefly watched the constant small flocks of Brent Geese that were leaving The Swale and flying across the reserve to alight and feed on the neighbouring farmer's fields of winter corn and silage grass. By the time that I moved on the flock was reaching +700 birds and I fear that prevention measures will have to be taken by the farmer before very long. The photo below shows part of the flock, which despite being several hundred strong, had very few juvenile birds amongst it.

Buoyed by the overnight rain and the fact that a couple of the smaller, dry ditches now had a film of water in them, I carried on to have a look at the "S Bend Ditch" - surely it must have a covering of water in it, the rain last night was really heavy at times - the photo below shows the result, not even a dribble's worth. Obviously the bed of the ditch was so dry after the prolonged drought that all the rain had simply soaked into the ditch bed, we are going to need almost monsoon proportions to re-fill it!

Oh well, Midge and I carried on, we moved through the herd of cattle, with Midge walking between their legs, we left the marsh and walked up on to the reserve and looked out in to The Swale. It was low tide, most of the birds out there on the mudbanks were invisible from the wall but a birdwatcher could be seen making his way out on to Shellness Point - Snow Buntings, that's a thought, I must go out to The Point this weekend and have a look for them.
We wandered about for a while longer but I was thinking of the puppy back home on her own and so we didn't spend as long out there as we would normally and eventually we regretfully left the blue skies and the sunshine behind.

Some of the birds that we saw were:-
700+ Brent Geese - 200 Mallard - 2 ring-tailed Hen Harriers - 5 Marsh Harriers - 1 Peregrine - 1 Kestrel - 2 S.E. Owl - 3 Green Sandpiper - 2 Snipe - 1 Green Woodpecker - 6 Bearded Tit - 3 Wren.

Time moves on

2011-12-01T08:03:00.007Z

The Tower Hide at the rear of the reserve is no more, on Tuesday it was pulled down and burnt, all that remains are a few Elderberry bushes to mark where it once stood. It had been in-situ for over twenty-five years and was badly showing its age and had become a liability in respect of health and safety. This was borne out when it was pulled over to reveal that half of the thick uprights that it stood on were rotten at their base, severe gales this winter could of seen its demise anyway.

This now leaves the Sea Wall Hide below as the sole survivor of the original hides that once rung the reserve, and as regular visitors will know, that itself is far past it's best and probably due to suffer the same fate as the Tower Hide.

Regular visitors will have also noted that both of the previous entry points onto the reserve along the seawall have now been closed and in effect that there is no access on to the main reserve in front of the Sea Wall Hide now at all. Why, you might ask. Well, with the need to access the Tower Hide now gone and the narrowness of the reserve along its length, most of it can be viewed easily from the seawall and the most recently closed access point across the Delph fleet was always a bad thing. In a normal winter it was hardly useable due to the marsh beyond being flooded and in the breeding season it allowed people to walk across the marsh within feet of nesting Lapwings and Redshanks.
But all this doom and gloom needs to be viewed as a short term event, estimates are being sort for the provision of at least two new seawall hides next year which should make viewing the reserve far more comfortable, especially once the newly dug scrapes and rills fill with water. Other improvements are also being considered, so hopefully next year will see the reserve being re-born so to speak.

There has also been a few new improvements to the habitat out there made this week, this time on the farmland. The farmer that owns the grazing fields that run from the Shellness track, across to the reserve, has dug several shallow scrapes across them. These fields in recent years have been host to numerous breeding Lapwings but have suffered from quickly drying out, these scrapes should help increase the survival rates of Lapwing chicks by providing much needed insect life at a vital time. Once again a much maligned shooting farmer has ticked some very important boxes for wildlife.

Lastly, can I say how touched I've been at the comments and E-Mails that I've received expressing sympathy over the passing on of Nana. Dogs are not everybody's cup of tea and I can understand some people finding it all a bit over the top, that's fair enough, but anybody who has had the companionship of a dog over a long period of time will have known how I felt.
But time has to move on and descisions made and I decided to get another companion for both Midge and myself, and the result was another Jack Russell, called Ellie and seen below. She is only nine weeks old and in the picture seems to be daring anybody to get in the conservatory door, but at just 8 inches high, she's kidding herself. So, as anybody who has brought up a puppy will know, the next few weeks and months will be beset with non-sleep and tension as she tries to chew her way round the house and train me to her way of thinking, and Midge is trying to recall how blissful it was to be able to sleep without having her ears chewed.

Nana

2011-11-27T06:26:00.003Z

Sadly, Nana my Beagle had to be put to sleep last Thursday and she has left behind a huge hole in the house that Midge and I are struggling to cope with.

She first appeared in the Faulkner household 16 years ago, after we had travelled down to Devon to collect her. This photo shows her, around four months old and getting her first taste of snow in my garden.

True to her breed, she lived for food and could sniff it out from some distance, and right up to the end would still remind me at 6.00 in the morning and 4.30 in the afternoon, that it was meal time. She could be asleep all day but at around 4pm you would suddenly hear a bark to remind you of the time. She was also an escape artist, once scaling a six foot high fence round my garden, via a bush, to see what was in a neighbours garden. And just like Midge is doing, she spent her whole life wandering the reserve and its neighbouring farmland, enjoying every year to the maximum.
Here she is asleep on my bed with the puppy Midge and in her prime on the reserve, a beautiful dog.

Unfortunately, arthritis, a heart murmur and a tumour, all combined in the end to make life uncomfortable and we had to say goodbye. She will be replaced but in the meantime she is badly missed.

Harrier sunset

2011-11-21T07:49:00.004Z

It was most definitely a day of two halves yesterday. When I got up at 5.30 there was thick mist outside and a dawn visit to the reserve looked pointless. However, by 6.45 here in Minster, the mist had cleared and so I thought I'd give it a go and headed off out. Going through Eastchurch and looking out across the eastern half of Sheppey, it was obvious that visibility at that end of the Island was very limited due to the mist. However it was one of those house-high type of mists again, with blue skies overhead and so I carried on anyway.
Arriving at the reserve in thick mist and hard frost I decided to briefly go across to the seawall and then home again. Despite not being able to see anything, except flying over, the sounds coming from the tidal mudflats were quite spectacular. Curlews, Redshanks and Oystercatchers all called non-stop and somewhere out in The Swale, Brent Geese could be heard "barking" in the mist, you don't always have to actually see the birds for it to be quite magical.
Just then a figure loomed through the mist on the sea wall, a figure carring a long-lense camera on a tripod, someone with a high degree of hope obviously. He turned out to be a guy that comments on my blog, a professional wildlife photographer called Lewis, and he was hoping to get some shots of Short-eared Owls, a slim hope at that moment. We had a chat and I told him that I would be back later in the day for the monthly Harrier Roost count and he was welcome to join me for that, and then I departed for home.

The return trip at 3.00 pm was in far more pleasant weather conditions, clear blue skies and pleasant sunshine, it had been a really good day after the mist had cleared. It had certainly brought out the walkers and bird watchers as well, its the most I've seen around Harty for some time, and why not in such perfect November weather. I stopped at the Raptor Viewing Mound to speak to some and they confirmed that as well as several raptors seen, the 27 Pink-footed Geese were still present at Capel Corner and a Great White Egret had been in Capel Fleet close to The Mound.
With the sun now fast losing its warmth and a chill starting to rise across the marsh, I made my way back to the reserve and across to the seawall, stopping briefly to speak to a couple from Surrey who were enjoying a walk round the Harty circuit. They were also very novice bird watchers and so were well pleased when I pointed out both Short-eared Owls and Bearded Tits to them as their first-time ticks. I then re-joined my photographer friend from the morning on the verandah of the Sea Wall Hide and took stock of the scene.

The sun was just starting to set behind Harty Church to the west, there were four wildfowler's heads just visible way out on the saltings in front of us, and several Short-eared Owls were hunting close by. Suddenly, around 90 Teal came off the reserve and shot low across the saltings towards The Swale like arrows. Thankfully, the two wildfowlers they passed closest to were deep in conversation and before they had grabbed for their guns, the Teal were long gone. That, until I left in the near dark, was the only action the wildfowlers had and you wouldn't of even known they were there. Lewis the photographer showed me some of his superb photographs captured during that day, I decided to keep my cheap little Fuji concealed behind my back and we chatted about his work at Eagle Heights.
The sun was now well gone, a damp cold was setting in and the light was receding fast and yet still no harriers at all, anywhere, just the owls and a solitary Kestrel. However, after constant sweeps of the saltings in the increasing gloom a male Hen Harrier suddenly swept in across the saltings at Shellness and without hesitation, suddenly dropped into the saltings to roost, my first male Hen Harrier of the winter as well. The saltings close to Shellness Hamlet are a long established favourite roost for Hen Harriers and with the light making viewing at any distance increasingly difficult, a female Hen Harrier made its way along the saltings in front of me and I was just able to see it drop in close to the male to roost.

So, just the two Hen Harriers there this month, it'll be interesting to see how the other three observers on Sheppey did at their roost sites. And before I left in the near dark, with Lewis now departed, I got out the Fuji and took this photograph of the sky behind Harty Church with mist just visible, lifting off the marshes.

Up and Downs

2011-11-18T15:04:00.002Z

I found this photo in an old album the other day. It is my good self in early Spring 1963 and just approaching my 16th birthday. It'll be of no particular interest to readers of this blog except I was sitting on part of an old building that stood where the Raptor Viewing Mound now stands. Look carefully and you can see Capel Fleet in the background, running north east towards Leysdown. I haven't a clue what the building was, or had been, all I know is that a friend and I cycled out to Harty that day from Sheerness and we took some photos. It'd be nice to say that even at fifteen I had just seen Sheppey's first Marsh Harrier or something, but I'd be lying, I was simply having a look round Harty and anyway, within a year or two I'd become a bit of a long-haired beatnik and birds took a back seat for a few years.

I bumped into another couple of really nice birdwatchers this morning as I left the reserve, well I say bumped into but what I mean is, as I suggested in yesterday's blog, I made a point of stopping and chatting with them rather than being some person disappearing into the distance. I believe that they were a father and son and early in our conversation they told me that they came from London and were avid fans of my blog - cue for a long and pleasant chat with my fans - such nice and sensible people!
The trouble with all this new interaction with passing bird watchers is that I'm beginning to feel that I should know more than what I do. While I can talk for hours about Sheppey's countryside, its wildlife and its history, I've always been a bit of a lazy birdwatcher and despite watching them for fifty-odd years and having a pretty good knowledge of them, I've never bothered with the finer points. Take a Rough-legged Buzzard for instance, I find people asking me for example, was it a second winter, or third winter bird - gawd! I haven't a clue, its just a Rough-legged Buzzard as far as I'm concerned!

To another subject now and I've made no secret over the last year of my change of attitude regarding wildfowling and my increasing friendship with many of them. Yet just as all this back slapping and adoration between each other is going on along the sea wall, along comes one of the shooting fraternity to kick me in the goolies and encourage my bird watching critics to say - I told you so!
This week in his regular column in the Shooting Times, a gamekeeper has made the suggestion, which has been building momentum for some time amongst the shooting fraternity, that Brent Geese should be put back on the shooting list. His reason for suggesting that - there's loads of them now and it'd be nice to be able to shoot some - what a pathetic reason and a load of crap! There's the shooting fraternity under attack from antis from all sides and they start suggesting something that will harden the attitude of even more people towards them. And if the simple arguement is, despite their protection, that there's lots of them, presumably they could argue the same case for shooting Shelduck.
Anyone that regularly watches Brent Geese around the coast will know full well that they fly low, fly slow, stay very close to the shoreline and are very confiding birds. A few wildfowlers sat on the edge of some saltings will easily be able to kill large numbers of these birds as they take advantage of the birds' non-fear of humans - and for why? I'm advised they're not pleasant to eat, so will we see them simply thrown away. Its also suggested that once shooting them begun that the birds would soon wisen up and become more wary and harder to shoot, really, and how many would be shot easily, before and if, that happens.

It's been an up and a down couple of days, tomorrow looks set fair, lets hope we get back on an even keel.

Tomorrow is a Long Time

2011-11-17T11:48:00.003Z

"Tomorrow is a Long Time" is a Bob Dylan song from the 1960's and one of many favourites of his that I have and it could in some ways describe my spell on The Swale NNR asa Voluntary Warden. I was only 39 when I accepted the offer from the Nature Conservancy Council, as Natural England was called in its early form, to become a Vol. Warden on their Harty reserve. I accepted with a touch of trepidation and wondered what tomorrow would bring, and yet here I am at 64, a quarter of a century later, still hobbling round the reserve - tomorrow really has been a long time!

And yet, I suppose because its always been a part-time thing and for the first twenty years, not an every day thing, it doesn't feel as if twenty five years have sailed by, it's seemed a lot shorter. But it's certainly been a long education in the ways of the countryside and at times, the closest thing to private meditation, as I've spent most of it through choice, in isolation with just my dogs and my thoughts for company.
And when I look back over the countless memories and sights I've experienced throughout that time, I have realised that it has taken me the whole, first twenty-four years, to achieve in my mind the correct balance in order that I can be fully at peace out there. Only during this last year have I been able to accept that the wildfowlers are not the aliens that I've always seen them as, seen the surrounding farmland as a huge contributor to the local wildlife habitat and as a result sort of trebled the size of the reserve, and lastly, accepted that effective pest controls are a vital tool in successful reserve management. There were times when I seemed to be running around the reserve at all hours, and getting stressed out single-handedly trying to retaliate against various shooting factions and farmers in general. But this year Karma has descended over this old curmudgeon, as I was called recently, and so I don't "chase" anymore, although that's possibly because the arthritis in my feet has altered the word to "hobble".

But seriously, to sit on the seawall now, as I've mentioned before, and spend an hour or two swapping gossip and memories with some of the wildfowlers, especially the older ones, is a real delight now. Many of those, like me, have been out and about on those marshes at all hours for around fifty years and there's some great tales to be told of ducks, geese, rabbits, eels, ferrets, terriers and of poaching and farmers. Its took me a long time for me to realise that we do actually have a lot in common, apart from killing ducks that is.
There were times as well for many years, when the sight of birdwatchers advancing along the seawall or going into a hide, would see me going in the opposite direction, because it meant having to talk to people and I preffered to remain as the figure in the distance. But these days I find myself looking forward to a chat with many of them and sometimes guide them across unofficial parts of the reserve, if they don't walk too fast.

And the reserve itself, has that changed over the last twenty-five years. Well the one fundamental thing that hasn't changed, which is a success, is that it still remains the same example of an old piece of grazing marsh, still looking as it probably did a hundred years ago. However, when I started there, there were six viewing hides with a circular route round part of the main reserve. Today there is currently just one hide and no access at all off of the sea wall.

So its been a long learning curve and a privelage to conduct it out there but what will the next tomorrow bring. One thing's for sure, I certainly won't be celebrating any half century as a Vol. Warden out there and it really is one day at a time now, rather than planning for the tomorrow's. Perhaps the next step is as Dylan sings in the title song:
"I can't see my reflections in the waters
I can't speak the sounds that show no pain
I can't hear the echo of my footsteps
Or can't remember the sound of my own name.............

Gloom Free Dawn

2011-11-13T10:05:00.006Z

Despite getting up as usual just after 5.30 this morning, I hadn't planned to visit the reserve today but a glance out of the window just after 6.00 showed a starlit sky - could we really be looking at a gloom free dawn, too good to be missed, I was off!
The view below was taken over the reserve's barn just as I arrived, a spectacular sight as the light began to increase.

Getting up onto the sea wall this was the dawn view looking across The Swale towards Seasalter.

At first there wasn't a lot of bird activity, a look across the fields to the Shellness track proved that the Rough-legged Buzzard does seem to have moved on and only a couple of Marsh Harriers were gliding low along the sea wall.
However as I made my way across one of the reserve's grazing fields I suddenly hit apon a remarkable treble of birds. Standing in the grass just twenty yards away were five Short-eared Owls, all bunched together shoulder to shoulder. I wondered if they'd roosted overnight like this or were just discussing breakfast, but whatever, they didn't hang around and rose up and began to lazily disperse. As they did, a Great White Egret flew low across the field directly above them and eventually dropped into the Delph fleet alongside the sea wall, where it was yesterday.
I was well chuffed but it hadn't finished yet, just a hundred yards further on a Lapland Bunting flew overhead calling repeatedly - trebles like that don't happen too often and coupled with a beautiful November morning of blue skies and sunshine, it was one to remember. The true essence of simple, solitary bird watching on the same, regular patch and getting the maximum enjoyment from it.
I moved on and with the sun rising higher in the sky it lit up the cattle contentedly grazing in the dewy fields, emphasising that lovely, desolate nature of the marshes that I love so much.

Some even came to say hello.

I was only out for an hour and a half, but what a glorious way to start a day and rounded off back at the barn by three Long-tailed Tits working through the willow trees.

Birds at Last

2011-11-11T09:58:00.003Z

After a barren spell for birds, going back almost to the Spring and due mainly to the extremely dry conditions, the eastern half of Sheppey, including The Swale NNR, has had a dramatic surge in bird records since the end of October.
It pretty much all began on the 20th October as we carried out the monthly WEBS count on the reserve, which produced one of the lowest wader counts that we've ever had. As the count came to a close, two of us found ourselves watching a Rough-legged Buzzard, circling high above the grazing fields alongside the Shellness track until it eventually drifted northwards into Harty.
A week later it had begun to be seen again along the Shellness track, with increasing numbers of Short-eared Owls and on the 28th Oct we saw two RLB's at the same time on the reserve. That was a real bonus, coupled with a probable eight S.E.Owls the same afternoon but two RLB's were rarely seen again and it petered out to just daily sightings of the one again, lasting until the last reported sighting last weekend.

Obviously the increase in bird watchers that the birds caused brought many more pairs of eyes to the area and besides the RLB, regular and increasing numbers of S.E.Owls were being reported, with up to ten some days. Watching these owls hunting the fields and saltings with their slow and moth-like wing actions is always a joy but to see them in these numbers is quite spectacular and yesterday a total of fifteen were seen! Throughout this same period a Great White Egret started making forays across the Sheppey marshes and this too began to be seen along Capel Fleet at Harty, until sightings of this bird also doubled up to become two on regular occassions. It was starting to get quite impressive and quite novel to see that end of Sheppey featuring on a daily basis on various bird websites and for me, used to spending quite a solitary time on the reserve, I found myself talking to all kinds of knowledgeable and interesting bird watchers - yet another rare event.

This Tuesday 8th November, with things quieting down again I decided to walk out to Shellness Point to look for Snow Buntings and was chuffed to find the reserve's first nine of the winter on the beach there. My joy was a tad short-lived however, when having been home for a few hours, it turned out that another birdwatcher had been out to Shellness after me and found the next rarity, a Great Grey Shrike. I have never seen one of these birds and despite one or more of these being seen throughout the area over the last few days, I still haven't, but what an impressive list of uncommon to rare birds over the last three weeks.

Moving off of that subject slightly, The Swale Wader Group were ringing on the reserve a few nights ago and also came up with some interesting observations, if I can steal their thunder a bit. This group have been catching and ringing mostly waders on the saltings of the reserve for many, many years, normally in the middle of the night. One night this week they caught a total of 85 waders which included two re-trapped Bar-tailed Godwits - re-trapped meaning that they had been caught and rung before.
The first of these two re-traps had originally been rung at Shellness in December 1997, making it 13 years and 10 months old but the second was even more impressive, it had been originally rung at Shellness in December 1994, making it 16 years and 10 months old. So many hazardous journeys to and from Sheppey to its breeding grounds in the near Arctic and yet still getting back after all those years, how wondorous is that.
N.B: An hour after posting the above, I went out to the Harty Road and finally saw my first Gt. Grey Shrike, although I'm getting sleepless nights wondering if I'm turning into a mini-twitcher - god forbid!

A Bit of Snow at the Point

2011-11-08T13:03:00.004Z

This morning Midge and I drove out to Shellness and walked out to the Point to have a look at the high-tide roost. The weather was a far cry from the last time that I was out there several weeks ago, watching a film crew on a hot and sunny day. Today it was grey, chilly, gloomy and damp and never really got properly light - and to think that when it was warm and sunny a few weeks ago some birdwatchers were complaining and hoping for this wintry weather, to better the bird watching - takes all sorts I suppose, I know which I prefer!
Anchored on the tide and fairly close to the Point were a total of eight vessels of varying sizes, all to do with the cable laying operation that is going on between the wind turbines out to sea and the new receiving station on the mainland at Graveney. This is the biggest of them, which is a lot bigger than it looks in this photo and of a night has so many lights on that it illuminates the beach at Shellness.

A second vessel was anchored close to the Point, looking ghostly in the gloom. The dark area on the beach of the Point is around 900 Oystercatchers and 400 Dunlin that were roosting there, so it would appear that the vessels are not disturbing the roost very much.
I followed the path out to the beach at the very tip of Shellness, careful that Midge and I never disturbed the wader roost and faced into the bay there. Almost immediately I heard the familiar and budgie-like twittering of Snow Buntings and just along the beach of cockle shells there were indeed 9 Snow Buntings busily looking for seeds. Unfortunately the light and the range were just a bit too much for my little camera to take photos.
In all along the beach of Shellness Point this morning I had a total of 900 Oystercatcher - 400 Dunlin - 5 Cormorant - 12 Knot - 50 Turnstone - 4 Grey Plover - 70 Brent Geese - 9 Great Black Backed Gulls and the 9 Snow Buntings. On the saltings alongside I also had 8 Little Egrets.

And one last surprise for the time of year, was this specimen of Vipers Bugloss still in flower.

Mild November

2011-11-03T15:29:00.006Z

Well it hasn't been the brightest of days today, so I stayed at home and didn't visit the reserve at all. But although its been gloomy it certainly hasn't been cold, almost warm in fact and especially so for the first week in November.
Along the top of the seawall at the reserve we have just the one large dog-rose bush and yesterday I was surprised to see amongst the hips, this newly-opened flower, quite remarkable. Everytime that I pass the bush I pick off a hand full of hips and scatter them one at a time along the side of the seawall in the hope of getting more bushes established for the wildlife. Despite being such a simple thing, I always feel that the dog-rose flower is one of the most beautiful of all the rose blooms.

And take a look at this rose bush in my garden, photographed just an hour ago, it still has as many flowers on it now as it did in June - quite amazing.

While sitting in the conservatory this afternoon, watching great, dark grey clouds being pushed across the sky in the wind and turning it increasingly gloomier, I watched Bumble bees still actively working the flower heads of that great favourite of theirs - Verbena bonariensis. It seems to flower almost to Christmas and is always there to feed a late bee or butterfly that chances by. Its all so remarkable for the time of year.

With the clouds getting heavier and rain not far away, its starting to get dark already, or so it seems. As I look out of my study window and across the Scrapsgate marshes, the Shingle Bank and the Thames Estuary, a container ship is passing by for Grain and the lights of Southend are beginning to twinkle in the gloom. The daily winter flock of corvids are beginning to rise up off the Scrasgate marshes and circle round before passing overhead to their evening roost. By mid-winter, this flock wiil build up to around 400-500 birds strong and consist of mostly Jackdaws and a few crows.
Just as the first chinks of light start to appear in the sky in the morning this great flock pass over my house and go out on to the Scrapsgate marshes across the road. Here they seem to stay the whole day, feeding on the grazing meadows. Then as the light starts to fade in the late afternoon, up they all rise and for a few moments, spread across a large tract of sky and cawing madly, they make their back east over Minster. I haven't a clue where they all roost but its a great joy to see so many Jackdaws still on Sheppey and this daily event is repeated well into the Spring.

And lastly, the Sloe Gin that I started up in September, has now turned a lovely rich beetroot colour, the hardest part now will be to avoid sampling it until at least the New Year - gawd!

Rough-legs in the gloom

2011-10-29T06:04:00.005+01:00

I hadn't planned on going to the reserve yesterday, it was a pleasant morning's weather and a Friday and I had decided to stay at home and catch up with some work in the garden. However at 11.30 the reserve's other Vol. Warden, Rod Smith, rang to say that he was out there watching now two Rough-legged Buzzards.
I decided to have a bit of early lunch and then pop out there, it seemed a nice day for it.

I arrived at the reserve barn just after mid-day to find that what had been a nice drop of weather in Minster was dull and murky out there but I immediately had a ring-tail Hen Harrier come gliding past me, which was a great start! I began walking across the middle of the reserve towards the Tower Hide, mainly to avoid the mud on the main track. The grazier had just been there and had pushed all the cattle herd across the reserve, via the track, in order to take the cattle temorarily off the reserve to split the calves away from their mothers to be weaned elsewhere. So their massed hooves had churned the softened surface up somewhat and it was plastered in mud and other smelly stuff, best avoided. You could hear the cattle, who by now were penned up just off the reserve, all round the place as they were split up and calves and mothers called anxiously for each other, to no avail.
Anyway, almost straight away as I walked through the grazing marsh I saw a hovering Rough-leg Buzzard near the Tower Hide and then swinging round, saw another over by the saltings in front of the Seawall Hide, that's how days on the reserve should be! Behind me on the main marsh, a flock of Golden Plover was building up, inspired no doubt by the fact that after a few rainy spells this week, the surface looked muddier and softer than it actually was and therefore might produce food. By the time I eventually left the reserve there were around 600 Goldies there.

A couple of Kestrels hovered over the rougher areas of grass and a Marsh Harrier made its way along a reed bed and stirred up some Reed Buntings, it was starting to look quite good. I made my way over to the sea wall and sat there for the rest of the visit with another regular bird watcher to Harty and we watched the reserve and the saltings from there. A few more Marsh Harriers drifted in and out of the reserve, all females today for some reason, and then a Short-eared Owl began quartering the marsh in front of us, followed soon after by a second that sat on top of the sea wall further along. The Rough-legged Buzzards seemed to have disappeared but it didn't matter because, despite the light becoming increasingly gloomy and damp, with a hint of drizzle, the saltings and the fast rising tide had plenty to offer. Yesterday was the culmination of the four weekly cycle through the year whereby the tides increase in height before dropping away again, yesterday was a high one at 6.2 metres and should of covered the saltings completely, and it did, with great effect.
Its an amazing sight, it first starts to flood over the saltings out on their far edge, quite quickly fills and overflows the various rill-ways before quickly sweeping across the saltings in a silent flood to reach the base of the sea wall. Coupled with the still and gloomy visibility it had a Dickesian atmosphere about it all, like you get from marshes at certain times of the year and time of day. And with it came the birds that normally sit on the tide further out, large numbers of Brent Geese and Mallard, drifted in, Curlews, Redshanks, Reed Buntings and Meadow Pipits, flooded out of their normal saltings roosts, all flew up and wheeled around and the noise of birds was fantastic.
Gradually, as you can see below, the saltings began to disappear.

Rob, the other birdwatcher and I, sat there and watched it all, we had birds behind us and birds in front of us. There was always a Marsh Harrier or two on the reserve somewhere everytime we looked, a third S.E. Owl appeared and quartered out into the marsh and small numbers of Skylarks and Reed Buntings got up again. In the distance the cows still mournfully called for their calves and it was a day when all the sky seemed to be full of birds at once, it was great.
By now, as you can see, the saltings were pretty much totally covered and as the white marker post that the wildfowlers must shoot behind indicates, there wouldn't be any of those out that afternoon, even chest waders wouldn't cope with that.
Rob and I finally went our seperate ways and he E-Mailed me later to say that as he made his way back along the sea wall to Shellness Hamlet, he saw a further 5 S.E.Owls, either new or including the three we'd already seen, its hard to know. I suspect that they'd been flooded up off of the saltings where they roost and hunt.

As I made my back along the sea wall in the other direction, I came across a strange sight. After I'd taken the photo above, I watched two Herons further away who had alighted on a piece of salting that wasn't fully submerged. They were regularly stabbing at the vegetation and as I got closer it became apparent what was occurring. Several voles that had obviously got caught out by the tide had sought brief respite on the vegetation, only to become a meal table for the Herons, who were eating them.
It was a good visit and the best counts were:- 2 Rough-legged Buzzards, 2 ring-tailed Hen Harriers, 6 Marsh Harriers, 5 possibly 8 Short-eared Owls, 600 Golden Plovers, 2 Kestrels and a Barn Owl.
And this morning as I crossed the reserve again, I had the first Lapland Bunting of the winter. After several barren months the reserve has come alive again - fantastic!

Singing In The Rain

2011-10-26T14:25:00.006+01:00

I was fortunate to be on the reserve at lunch time today and experience a rare event - an hour's torrential rain, even more fortunate was the fact that I just got to the Seawall Hide as it started. I even recorded the sight of rain hitting the surface of the Delph Fleet.

And the reduced visibility as it poured down across the grazing marsh. All the cattle did was to turn their rear ends to the wind and rain and carry on grazing!

Pictures of rain seems silly I know, but after near eight months without any, it was an event of some magnitude - could we be at the turning point of the drought? Despite adding to overnight rain, this morning's still hasn't made the slightest difference to the miniscule ditch levels but it has definitely softened up the surface of the grazing marsh and we should now see the re-greening of the marsh at least.
And after sheltering in the hide for an hour I eventually came out to sunshine again and the resultant rainbow below. Perhaps I should of stayed in the hide a little longer, might of been blesses with good luck!

One of the few benefits of this year's drought has been the exposure all round the reserve of Water Vole entry/exit holes. Whilst we see evidence of a few of the voles' feeding stations as we walk round, the platform of the mink trap is one, we rarely actually see the voles themselves. It is therefore encouraging to see so many holes dotted around the reserve's ditches, although there's no guarantee that many of them are actually occupied.

This young willow bush was also feeling exposed, the water level is normally above its root system but today that was a very different case.

Before the rain begun I had been walking round in windy but sunny conditions and was fortunate to get some good, if distant, views of the Rough-legged Buzzard that has been around for over a week now, on the grazing marsh alongside the Shellness track. Its a terrific looking bird and seems to alternate between sitting on the ground and hovering over the fields like an enlarged Kestrel. Certainly from the Shellness track many people are getting good views of this uncommon winter visitor and hopefully it will be around for most of the winter.

Bob Gomes

2011-10-22T15:20:00.002+01:00

I gained great pleasure yesterday (Friday) from attending a small gathering of people at a retirement presentation to Bob Gomes the ex-RSPB Warden at Elmley and lately of Dungeness.
I first met Bob just after he had arrived at Elmley in the late 1980's to replace Les Street and like most people have, I immediately found him a really likeable guy, extremely knowledgeable and always willing to share that knowledge. I had just become a Vol. Warden at The Swale NNR then and my vists to Elmley became very few after that and as a result never met Bob that many times after. The most recent prior to his retirement was funnily enough, at a Kate Rusby concert, where I bumped into him and Liz, we obviously share similar musical tastes.

The one memorable time that we did come together was on The Swale NNR in June 1988. On one of my morning patrols around the reserve on a warm and sticky day I suddenly spied what at first I thought was a strange Lapwing on the ground. Watching it through the binoculars it immediately became apparent that it was definitely not a Lapwing but a bird of similar size but brownish and with a very swallow/tern like flying action as it hawked for insects. I had never seen a Pratincole before but it looked very much like one that I'd seen in bird books and so rushed home to look it up and yes, it was a Pratincole. Going back the next day, I found two of them hawking for insects together, this was getting silly! Every day for the next week they were always in the same area, reasonably tame and hawking for insects and with the reserve manager on holiday I decided it would be best to get verification of what I'd seen. I was after all, a new Vol. Warden and of limited experience and repute on the Kentish bird watching scene - who was going to believe just me.
So I rang Bob at Elmley and asked him to come down and verify what I was watching every day. We arrived at the reserve on a pleasant and warm, almost Mediteranean June evening. I took him to where I hoped the two Pratincoles would still be after over a week, and yes, after crawling up an earth bund, there they still were. Bob was able to identify the two as a Black-winged Pratincole and a Collared Pratincole -how about that for a double, and we had a pint in the Ferry House Inn afterwards to celebrate.
The next day the Black-winged Pratincole had gone but the Collared amazingly, remained until September, a daily feature of my patrols and unknown to the regular passing bird watchers. One day in September it was gone but, almost certainly it, turned up at Elmley RSPB reserve the next day and was identified by a birdwatcher with knowledge of the species, as an Oriental Collared Pratincole - we had registered both the 2nd British and 1st Kent record of that species.

Bob was a great RSPB warden and of a type that the RSPB can sorely do with out, he will be missed as he spends his time on his allotment.

Harrier Counts

2011-10-17T07:29:00.005+01:00

The dawn vist to the reserve yesterday morning found it even frostier and mistier than Saturday morning and as a consequence, after two hours both were only just lifting as the sun climbed the sky. So little was seen or heard but I was back again late afternoon yesterday for the first of this winter's Harrier Roost Counts. There are four of us on Sheppey taking part - one at Elmley Hill watching a roost over at Ridham, one covering Capel Fleet west of the Harty Road, one covering Capel Fleet east to Muswell Manor and myself on the Swale NNR. It's a valuable exercise in identifying both what sites are being used by the birds and if they're being disturbed and how many birds there are.

I arrived at the reserve at 17.00 and it was still warm and sunny and without a breath of wind as I made my way across the marsh to the Sea wall. With some time left before the light would begin to fade, I spent half an hour chatting on the seawall with two wildfowlers, the first I'd seen for some time. As we stood looking at a bone-dry and pretty much wildfowl free reserve, they commented on how diablolical the season had been so far due to the drought and how they had very little hope of getting anything that evening, and so it later turned out. We had a chat about all things countryside for a while and then they moved off, and further along the seawall made their way out to the seaward edge of the saltings and pretty much disappeared from sight, as they do.

I walked along to the seawall hide and took up my position on its verandah while Midge amused herself trying unsuccessfully to catch voles under the recently mowed hay along the seawall. Accompanied by the various sounds of the marsh that you get, Curlew and Oystercatcher cries out on the mudflats, a Wren working its way through the reed bed and scolding me, a Water Rail squealing from the same reed bed, I turned and watched a beautiful red sun set below the horizon behind Harty church in the distance. Immediately that you lose the sun a pronounced sense of hush comes across the marsh as dusk starts to settle, and bird calls become more pronounced.

Whilst looking west I picked out a harrier coming along the saltings towards me and putting the scope on it, saw that it was a ring-tailed Hen Harrier - really great, I wasn't expecting one on this first month's count. It travelled the length of the saltings in front of me until reaching those close to Shellness Hamlet and then dropped into the saltings to roost, a traditional roosting spot for these birds for some years. Immediately I lost sight of it I became aware of three Short-eared Owls hunting over the same stretch of saltings and watched them for a while, they are such lovely birds to watch with their lazy, flapping wing actions.
By now the light was just starting to fade and looking west again, I picked up yet another harrier following the same path as the Hen Harrier, this time it was a female Marsh Harrier. It carried on along the saltings until more or less where the Hen Harrier was roosting and to my surprise drew up another female Marsh Harrier from the saltings that I'd obviously missed. These two birds then flew all the way back along the saltings in front of me again and I last saw them disappearing into the pink sky and dusk over Harty Church, clearly they favoured Harty marshes for their roost site. Strange how the one seemed to go and fetch the other though as though it knew it was there.
With the light fading fast now and the mosquitoes biting more regularly, there was one last flurrybof harrier action. Directly in front of the hide and far out on the saltings, a male Marsh Harrier and a juvenile both suddenly appeared in off the mudflats, circled a couple of times and then dropped into the saltings to roost, its a great sight, it really is. Almost immediately after a female Marsh Harrier then shot across the marsh in the near dark and went into roost with the other two, a family group, who knows but I was really glad that it was one of those nights that the two wildfowlers hadn't had the opportunity to fire a shot and disturb the birds.

It was pretty much dark by then and there was nothing left but to make my way back across the marsh again, successfully avoiding scaring up a couple of Mallard that I'd seen drop into the Delph fleet nearby, for obvious reasons. I love walking back across the marsh in the pitch dark, obviously easy because I know my way after 25 years, but it has an almost romantic quality about it, apart from the stumbling over ant hills and standing in cow pats that you do!
It was a really great couple of hours and good to be doing something useful and for me, far more worthwhile than simply chasing rarities around the countryside. Back again this afternoon for the latest WEBS count.

First Frost

2011-10-15T11:13:00.006+01:00

I left home just as it was starting to get light this morning and thought it was a bit chilly but was really surprised on getting to the reserve to find that it was coated in a hard white frost with a rising mist. As a result I didn't see an awful lot as I wandered across the marsh, along the seawall and then back across the marsh. A couple of Marsh Harriers appeared out of the mist and around 50 Mallard passed by overhead. A Water Rail squealed from the Delph reed beds as I stood watching a small party of Bearded Tits working along the seed heads and they were joined soon after by another group of Reed Buntings. Making my way along one of the boundary hedgerows I had a total of 1 Blackbird, 1 Wren, 3 Chaffinch, and 3 Robin - not exactly the expected invasion of migrants predicted.
A fox walked out of one the reed beds quite close to me and I don't know who was the most surprised, the fox or Midge, but she pursued it for a short way before realising that her short legs were never going to catch it and so quickly gave up. One thing that did surprise me was catching sight of a medium-sized black bird at the top of a large hawthorn bush, pecking at the berries, when I looked at it through the binoculars it turned out to be a Moorhen!

This is the scene from the top of Capel Hill on the Harty Road as I drove out, with the mist just beginning to spread across the marshes.

This one was taken from the top of the sea wall looking across the reserve and showing how at field level it was difficult to see much around you, only upwards.

But its always atmospheric being out so early in such conditions and eventually at 07.15 a huge red sun came up above Seasalter and quickly began burning the mist away. This second view along the sea wall at 07.45 shows how quickly it had made a difference, although on the shady side to the right you can still see the white of the frost.

Getting to the end of the sea wall, this shot of the Delph fleet shows the extent to which it is drying out now. Quite a grim sight.

What Rain

2011-10-11T12:06:00.013+01:00

The euphoria surrounding the event of decent rainfall on the reserve Sunday morning was very short-lived. Today is the second day of strong and drying winds, which coupled with warm sunshine have sucked every last drop of moisture back off the reserve and we're back to how we were.

I walked across part of the reserve this morning, seeing very little and being pushed backwards at times by the strength of the wind and decided to complete a circular walk by continuing on round part of the neighbouring farmland. So I took the footpath track that we know as "the gravel road" and headed up it towards Harty church. At the top you can make out the white of the sign-post. (All the photos are best viewed by double clicking on each one and enlarging it)

At the top it's nice to turn round and take in the view across the farmland, the reserve, and out towards the buildings of Shellness Hamlet in the distance.

Here at the top of the track you have the choice of two directions.

I briefly turned left and you can see that alongside Harty Church the derelict old school-house has now been replaced by a newly built bungalow, in which the mother of the four farming brothers will live.

I then re-traced my steps and took the right-hand option, heading down the track with high hedges either side and past The old Forge cottage towards Elliots farmyard on the corner of the Harty Road. It was relatively wind-free going through there and I hoped that I might be able to both hear and see a few migrant thrushes or finches because the hedges were full of berries and the game cover alongside was full of seed. The result surprisingly, was pretty much bugger all, a few Blue Tits and a possible Goldcrest and that was it, has Sheppey been declared a bird-free zone?

Having gone through Elliots farm yard, where there was a sizeable flock of House Sparrows, I then turned right at the Harty Road and begun making my way down the footpath track known to us as "the concrete road". By following the track along the line of bushes winding its way left in the photo you not only get superb views across the Harty farmland but you also end up at Leysdown, its really worth walking. Me, I turned into the small thicket on the right and followed the track through it to get back onto the reserve. This thicket is where I normally see my first Goldcrest of the autumn but again that was not to be today but I did manage a Little Owl, which was calling within yards of me although I never did see it.

It was then just a matter of following the reserve track down to the barn and my car.

We've had rain!

2011-10-09T11:57:00.006+01:00

This is only a brief posting, to firstly apologise to the few people who have commented recently on my blog and secondly to celebrate the fact that we have finally had proper rain.
For some reason, I'm both unable to post comments on other people's blogs but also not even post relies on my own blog, I haven't a clue why.

Earlier this morning we had 3-4 hours of good and steady rain and so I was a tad later visiting the reserve today and then only for a short walk. The first thing that I saw on parking at the reserve barn was a large flock of c. 150 Golden Plover and 80 Lapwing further out in the middle of one of the grazing fields. The rain had obviously fooled them into thinking that they would find the soggy conditions that they need in order to probe the soil for invertebrates. Having found that this was not indeed the case, they departed shortly after for the tidal mudflats over the seawall. Mind you, if nothing else, the rainfall has soaked the roots of the grass and should hopefully see it stirred into re-growth and green-ness, something the cattle will enjoy.

The photo below is perhaps a tad childish but celebrates the first minor puddles that I have seen on the reserve track, probably since the early Spring!- almost a miracle.

Mind you, the only difference to the "S Bend Ditch" is the fact that the colour of the dry mud has darkened. This is how its looks for the whole of its several hundred yard length and it will need an awful lot of rain before it once again becomes the favourite site for wildfowl on the reserve.

That said, we do still have a few ditches on the reserve that retain some water, here is one of them!

Lastly, walking across one rain-soaked meadow, I came across this young Edible Frog hopping through the grass, no doubt happy at feeling wet again. He's only about a third of his adult size, double click on the photo and enlarge him.

Roosting at Shellness

2011-10-06T11:07:00.004+01:00

With the wind gusting fron the WNW early this morning I thought I'd have a run down to Shellness Point and perhaps catch a Gannet going by. Because Midge and I don't favour seawatching as a birdwatching past-time, (too much standing around doing nothing), I rarely see them unless they come further into the Swale. An hour or so later, when I arrived at Shellness the wind had moved round to more of a westerly direction which pretty much reduced any chance of oceanic stuff, for at least the time that I was there anyway.
What was also noticeable was the weather, when I was down seven days ago to watch the filming of a scene from Great Expectations, it was swelteringly hot and sunny - today in near gale-force and chilly gusts of wind, I was sheltered behing the blockhouse in a coat - gawd, I know I shouldn't wish my life away, but roll on next March!
But if nothing else it was the height of the tide and so there was at least the daily roost out on the beach at the Point to look through. The photo below shows part of the Oystercatcher flock, which I eventually estimated at around 1,700 birds. (Double click on it and enlarge it and have a look through it)

Surprisingly, there weren't that many other waders, just 8 Turnstones and a Barwit. The rest of the roost was made up of 46 Lesser-Black-Backed Gulls, 20 Herring Gulls and 2 Sandwich Terns.
On the sea alongside the beach were 18 Brent Geese, all adults, and despite numerous scans out to sea, that was pretty much it. So, not being one born with much patience for hopping on the spot for long periods of time, I begun to make my way back along the beach. There I had a couple of Wheatears pass by, hunting insects in the vegetation and I was also surprised to see that some of the Vipers Bugloss was still in flower, nice to see a bit of summer hanging on.

Driving back along the Shellness track a female Sparrowhawk overtook me as it sped along the seawall and in and out of the chalets before eventually alighting on a fence post some way in front of me. I stopped the car and had a look at it through the binoculars and was surprised to see a Pied Wagtail sitting two posts further on. This resulted in a short staring match between the two, which I thought was quite brave of the wagtail given how fierce the eyes of the Sparrowhawk can look. Eventually the wagtail lost its nerve and flew off and to my surprise, after one quick pass at it the Sparrowhawk disappeared off in the opposite direction. Perhaps the wagtail had won the war of nerves after all, he's probably out there still, bragging too his mates.

On a different note and for those of you that use the Harty Road Raptor Viewing Mound regularly, a change has taken place close by, immediately to the north of the Mound a large area of the grazing marsh has now been ploughed up. Its a real shame to lose such valuable habitat but its all to do with economics. As I understand it the grazing marsh and its value to wildlife was subsidised by agreements set up with Natural England but with NE having its budgets cut they in turn have had to cut back on the amount of subsidies that they were able to offer each landowner this year. Put simply it means that the farmer there can make more money from growing arable crops next year on the unsubsidised acreage.

Summer is Gone!

2011-10-04T16:04:00.003+01:00

Today finally saw the end of several days of hot and cloudless, blue-skyed, sunny days of above average temperatures. Days that saw fantastic and photogenic sun-rises and sunsets, the wearing of shorts and T shirts, long bike rides during the hot afternoons and later, unexpected BBQ's.
Yesterday Minster beach was still full with people sunbathing and swimming and simply enjoying being unfettered and outdoors - today under grey skies and a chilly breeze, there was just a few dog walkers in coats! What a difference just a day and the ending of a season can make, that must surely be it now - just six months to come of gales, rain, mud, frost, snow, and everything that makes stepping outdoors uncomfortable and hard to bear.

And yet, out there somewhere, are those few people that last week found it impossible to enjoy such a short-lived period of unexpected bliss because it made finding birds difficult - I can't understand their failure to relax for just one week anymore than they can probably understand my failure to put birds before everything else in life. Roll on the Spring!

"the warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
the bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
and the year
on the earth her deathbed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
is lying"..............Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mellow Dawns

2011-10-02T09:48:00.009+01:00

The unseasonal hot, cloudless and sunny weather this week has been fantastic and none more than the sunrises and sunsets, they have been spectacular. Most mornings this week I have been on the reserve around dawn to enjoy that pre-dawn chill that rapidly changes to post-dawn heat. The photo below was the sun rising this morning over Seasalter and being reflected in The Swale. Surprisingly as well this morning, there was very little mist, just a few whisps along the ebbing Swale.

Withe the sunrise comes that warm glow and blanket silence that always seems especially noticeable in autumn. Double click on the photo below and enlarge it and enjoy the peaceful and mellow scene at Harty Ferry in The Swale at 07.30 this morning.
I began my walk on the reserve by walking along the top of the seawall, with The Swale to my left and the reed beds of the Delph fleet to my right. And having mentioned the blanket silence above, that was the case apart from the constant "barking" calls of around 400 Brent Geese feeding on the mudflats on the Seasalter side of The Swale, they appear to have come back in early good numbers this year. A few Bearded Tits and Reed Buntings called from the tops of the reed beds and one or two few Wrens busily made their way through the reed stems as they will now for the winter to come. A couple of Green Sandpipers and a Heron got up from the increasing muddy fringes of the Delph fleet and that was pretty much it bird-wise. Oh, all that is, except for a Green Woodpecker that got up in front of me as I turned onto the grazing for my return journey. Its odd to think of these birds as regular birds of the marsh here, rather than just woodlands, but the large numbers of ant-hills spread across the marsh provide them with an easy supply of both ants and their young, which they quite like.
Making my across the marsh I marvelled at what the herd of cattle are still finding to eat from the parched and yellow fields, but they still look in really good condition so must be doing OK. It'll only be a few weeks now till the calves are taken away from their mothers for weaning which is saddening for a few days as you hear the mothers calling for their young, but its all part of the farming year.

On the subject of the farming year, this is the scene across much of Harty at the moment, huge fields tilled and re-sown with winter corn and sitting there dust dry now as they wait for rain to germinate the seed.

Its not all bad though because around many of the fields are the regular cover strips of maize and various seeding crops, created especially for the game shooting interests and to provide food for numerous wild birds. Currently coming into seed is a type of millet that finches and buntings feed on all winter, as well as the Red-Legs of course. Enlarge the picture to get a better idea of what it looks like, its the whispy stuff right alongside the taller maize, with some sow-thistle seed heads amongst it. What great wild bird feeding areas for the winter.

To prove the point of how it benefits the smaller birds I took a selection home for my canaries, who eagerly pounced on it and fed from it.

One last comment on this current hot and seemingly mid-summer weather is how confusing it gets early evening when, instead of carrying on until 9-10 o'clock, the light suddenly goes and it starts getting dark at 6.30.

What's Going On

2011-10-01T11:10:00.004+01:00

The seawall in front of The Swale NNR is an important part of the reserve because of its ungrazed sides with long and thick vegetation. It always has something to offer wildlife be it breeding birds or moths , butterflies, lizards and small mammals.
At this time of the year it is particually important because it gives shelter to the countless over-wintering eggs and pupae of moths and butterflies, next year's generation in other words. The rarer Ground Lackey moth caterpillars normally favour this area to pupate as well.

It is also home to thousands of various spider types, as this photo taken in the mist this week shows.

Fantastic you might say, everything a nature reserve should be - fantastic that is, until a tractor mower from the Environment Agency turned up yesterday and reduced the vegetation to the state it is below. All that loss of insect life, and for what purpose? Does anybody have any idea why the EA finds it necessary to go out to a remote nature reserve and spend the public's money causing such environmental vandalism in the name of seawall management?

At Last a Summer

2011-09-29T15:11:00.011+01:00

What a fabulous week we are having, after a rubbish summer, we have had guaranteed hot, sunny and cloudless days this week with more to come. It's like we have suddenly gone backwards into July, this really has been a topsy-turvy year. Every day this week it has simply been a case of enjoying it to the full, on the reserve in the mornings, followed by gardening, etc, and then after lunch out for long cycle rides around Minster and finally an hour or two sunbathing in the garden with a cold beer to finish - looking for birds has been put aside for just this week.
And yet, amazingly, I read a blog last night, by a guy who rarely misses a days birdwatching, in which he complained that this rare, hot sunny weather meant that there were few birds about for him to count and therefore he might not see as many as last month, now how sad is that!

Anyway, I have mentioned before how the road going out to Warden Point ends, due to cliff erosion, by suddenly going over the edge of the cliffs, which are very high. If you double click on this photo and enlarge it you will see the tarmac road suddenly end at the edge, although it is of course blocked off just behind where I took the photo.

It must be unique that just a couple of miles to the west a second road does exactly the same - Oak Lne in Minster. Unfortunately there there end of the road is all overgrown with bushes and so I couldn't get a similar photo but this next one, slightly to the left, illustrates the edge once again of the cliffs, looking out to sea.

Turning to the left and this is the view from the top of the cliffs at Oak Lane looking down onto Minster Leas and beach.
Oak Lane itself has always been a very quaint old lane, barely a car's width wide and we used to cycle up there from Sheerness as youngsters to enjoy the wildlife and the risks involved of making our way down the steep and boggy cliffs to the beach. Even nowadays people still have to be rescued by Coastguards through getting trapped in the boggy conditions there.
The cliffs here are very sandy with sheer frontage and throughout my youth and early teens were home each year to a large Sand Martin breeding colony, which fourty odd years ago suddenly died out and has never returned, despite it remaining suitable habitat.

Oak Lane is a turning off of the main road running from Minster to Eastchurch and directly opposite is another side road running southwards in the opposite direction and this one is called Elm Lane. This one too is a reminder of how beautiful Sheppey's lanes and countryside used to be and halfway along it is a place where the old Sheppey Light Railway used to cross on its way to Brambledown. But for me, the best part of Elm Lane is still thankfully, Tadwell Farm and its views across southern Sheppey to the mainland. It has been in the same family for many years and is still farmed with old-fashioned ideals in mind and is superb. Double click on it to enlarge and enjoy the view.

Sloe Gin and Mists

2011-09-26T13:05:00.008+01:00

It was beautifully autumnal over the weekend, especially the early mornings, with mists and spectacular sun-rises. With all that mists and mellow fruitfullness stuff in mind my thoughts turned to sloe gin this morning and I determined to get out and pick some sloes. To be correct you should wait until they have had a frost on them but sloes on Sheppey always seem to disappear quite quickly so I picked mine this morning and will give them a few days in the freezer to mimic a frost. The crop this year is as good as I've seen it and the bushes are well laden as you can see from this photo.

Picking something free from the countryside is always a special treat and it was just so this early morning, with the sun on my back and The Swale and Harty Ferry to my side. A Robin accompanied me with its wistful autumn song, two Great Tits made their way through the hedgerow and all was well with the world.
Sloe gin is a delightful winter's drink and so welcome when arriving back home on a frozen winter's evening from a late afternoon bird count, frosty darkness outside and cold hands are soon forgotten as those first few sips are swallowed.

Saturday was a favourite type of weather for me, thick mist to the height of a house and then clear blue skies above it and getting to the reserve before it was fully light made it even better. Clarity of sound is amazing and it carries for miles and things suddenly loom out of the mist as it closes in thickly and then recedes again, a spookiness that I love.
Midge in a mist.

And gradually the sky gets bluer as the sun struggles to break clear of the horizon and the mist and then all the aeroplane con-trails seem to lead towards it. A slight breeze stirs and the mist becomes more mobile as the sun attracts it like a magnet and burns it up and then suddenly, its all gone and the curtain rises on a beautiful autumn morning.

Dawn on Sunday saw no mist, just a lovely sunrise across the saltings and a new set of con-trails still leading towards the sun. (Double click on it and enlarge it for a better view)

Later in the morning on the farmland they were sowing the winter wheat into bone dry ground and the continuing drought is illustrated by the dust cloud being kicked up from the soil. We have a mini-heatwave forecast for the next week or so and so it looks like the birdless conditions on the reserve are set for some time yet.

"The dog-pissed doorway stains
an the shop fronts,
have to wait now until it rains,
sadness like an empty bottle of wine,
is all that remains,
an dust blows in circles
as eyes weep their stains

memories like anchors, weigh
heavy on the soul"...............................Derek Faulkner

Dry Days and Memories

2011-09-19T10:35:00.012+01:00

Well, another week has passed by and its still difficult to come up with anything new from the reserve. The dryness out there now has probably exceeded last autumn's drought and it is the driest I've known it in my 25 years wardening out there. Yes, you can still see good numbers of birds at the traditional High Tide Roosts at Shellness Point and Harty saltings but on the main grazing marsh its pretty dire. Walking round each day it's very difficult to find anything substantial, a few Wheatears and Yellow Wagtails still pass through and there are usually a Chifchaff or two in the boundary hedgerows, but little else. Even the local wildfowlers have pretty much stopped coming because of a lack of wildfowl, which I suppose can't be a bad thing. Its hard to see when these conditions will change, certainly not this side of New Year I shouldn't think.
Its also getting colder in the mornings now and yesterday as I drove down to Shellness Point at dawn there were several patches of frost on a few low lying pieces of marsh. Its that awkward time of year where you start off in a coat because its so chilly and then an hour or so later, when the sun has come up, you're too hot. I took this photo yesterday morning from Shellness beach just as the sun was about to come out.

Back on the main reserve and the floating mink trap is still being used as a feeding platform by the water voles as you can see. (I've unsprung the trap to avoid catching them in it)

Even these two young marsh frogs got in on the act and were doing a bit of sunbathing. (Double click on the photo and enlarge it for a better view)

I'm afraid that the rest of the blog is aimed at a few ex-Sheppey-ites that I know read it, a few places that they might recall.
This first one is at Sheerness East. The shrubbery at the side of the RH house was the track of the old Sheppey Light Railway before it crossed the Halfway Road to the Sheerness East station, which used to be alongside where I was standing and behind me would of been the old bus station. You may recall that the RH house was a sweet shop for many years.

I moved out to the Warden Road for this next photo, the Wheatsheaf Inn, which some might of used and its still going strong today.

And just round the corner from the Warden Road is Plough Lane, probably the only lane left on Sheppey that still looks much as it always did. To the left is Garretts Farm and to the right is Connetts Farm, out on the cliffs.

From the same spot I swung right and over the top of Eastchurch Gap there is the familiar sight of the old WW2 Maunsell Forts.

And lastly, two shots of the walk along Sheerness seafront towards Garrison Point, with the Moat and the few remaining wartime buildings from the old army garrison there. Double click on each and enlarge and recall your memories from there, I took the photos standing close to where the old "Greenhill" would of been - now there's some memories we'd better not talk about!

Shurland Hall

2011-09-12T14:17:00.005+01:00

I went to the reserve earlier today but with a gale force wind and horizontal drizzle blowing across the marsh and me getting very damp, I quickly decided that I'd leave such unrewarding conditions to those that feel it classes them as somehow superior, and returned home after an hour.
No such weather on Saturday afternoon when in hot, humid and sunny conditions I enjoyed for the first time in my life the opportunity to look round the recently repaired remains of Shurland Hall, it was open to the public for just three hours.

To those of us that have lived all of our lives on Sheppey, Shurland Hall has always been this mysterious and empty Elizabethen hall that stand on its own in fields to the rear of Eastchurch village on Sheppey. Somewhere that we could never visit or get close too as it yearly fell into disrepair and our only ancient building of great historical significance. Recently however a London based charity, with grants from the government and others, spent a few years replacing the Hall's derelict roof, rebuilding the chimneys, re-pointing large parts of the outside and repairing all the inside rooms, although they remain bare.
In the picture below you can see members of the public enjoying views of the surrounding Sheppey countryside from the roof.

The chimneys had to be rebuilt exactly as they were, with only old photographs as a guide and even used mortar mixed with local seashells, exactly as originally. Even more impressive, if you double click on the photo and enlarge it, is the fact that the brick work in the chimney spirals, a superb piece of re-created skill by a modern day lady bricklayer!
Something that impressed me whilst on the roof, were the views, it must be one of the few places on Sheppey where the view on all four sides remains pretty much as it was hundreds of years ago - no housing estates etc. just old farmland.

Shurland Hall has connections with two of Sheppey's most famous families from the Middle Ages - the de Shurlands and the Cheyneys.
The original Shurland Hall, some say castle, had stood on the site and been owned by the de Shurlands for many years before being inherited by one Sir Thomas Cheyne in 1496. He did not like what was by then an old hall and so between 1510 and 1518 built a new and splendid hall, surrounded by twelve, square, walled quadrangles. It was classed at the time as a "stately residence" and had no expense spared on it. It was the main hall to a huge estate that took in most farms and marshes at that end of Sheppey.
In 1532 King Henry VIII and his new wife Anne Bolyne stayed at the Hall for a few days whilst on their honeymoon and en-route to see Francis I in France. They were entertained at near financially crippling expense by Sir Thomas Cheyne, to great feasts and much hunting on the estate.
It seems that by the early 1600's the Hall had already begun to fall into disrepair and went through several changes of ownership, none of them continuing to spend much money on it.
Apparently the last time it was occupied was during WW1 when soldiers were billeted there, resulting in the place being left much damaged. And that was how it remained until recent renovations, a mystery place to us Sheppey dwellers and now up for sale at 1.8 million pounds.

Some Harty Views

2011-09-09T12:13:00.015+01:00

The marsh part of the reserve remains quiet bird wise with even the Green Sandpipers now apparently having moved on. Wheatears are the most constant passage bird at the moment with several seen most days and along the edge of the saltings the four Eider ducks are spotted regularly, they were there today, an imm. drake and three ducks.
As a result I thought I'd capture a few views of Harty in general, although I picked a pretty gloomy day light-wise to do it but if you double click on each photo in turn, the enlarged view will be much better.
This first one is down the track running to Harty Church. Alongside it the farmer has sown a wildflower cover crop for the birds which as you can see includes sunflowers. Park Farm is in the background.

Passing the church and following the track down to the seawall and The Swale, out on the edge of the saltings the remains of the old sailing barge "Lizard" are gradually being swallowed up by the ever expanding saltings. It was originally built in 1891 and was still working during WW2 and is still serving cormorants today.

Half a mile away, moored in The Swale at Harty Ferry, there was the real thing this morning. Unfortunately I forgot to record its name.

This photo shows the causeway running down from the Ferry House Inn to what once used to be the site of Harty Ferry across to the mainland. It began as a simple boat rowed to and fro across but before it ended had improved to being wound to and fro by cable. The frame is all that remains of the original winding gear.

The view eastwards across Harty marshes from the top of Harty Hill, a little of the water in Capel Fleet is just visible in amongst the wide reed beds. When enlarged, this shows the old and the new - a sailing barge passing the wind turbines.

Harty Hill from the Harty Road.

The Raptor Viewing Mound along the Harty Road. Never the warmest of places in the cold winter winds.

The view NE from the Raptor Viewing Mound, a great place to watch harriers quartering the reed beds of Capel Fleet alongside.

From "Capel Corner" on the Harty Road, Capel Hill Farm sitting up on the hill to the north.

From the same spot, two views of Capel Fleet and its differing width, these two shots are seperated literally by just the width of the road.
Looking west.

And looking east.

What Month Is It

2011-09-08T15:18:00.004+01:00

It is September but to be honest it feels more like October, this whole year has seemed like that, since the hot and sunny April and May we seem to have always been a month or two ahead of the actual month name. It could even be snowing by actual October, its been that kind of year.
Anyway, as a result I've started trimming back and part-tidying up the rear garden - it will go from overgrown and neglected to a tad tidier - overgrown is so much better for the wildlife.

The first job has been to cut out completely the prostrate conifers on the bank behind the pond, as per the before and after photos below.

It looked good and now looks rubbish but its only a small garden and I try and grow everything that will benefit bees, butterflies, etc. The bank will be re-planted with flowering herbs such as Golden Marjoram, Thyme, heathers and any other flower that does the right job, the conifers looked good but fed nothing, so they had to go. It might become a bit dis-organised, things might not be all the right heights and things, it might not look like gardens do in gardening magazines, but my ultimate aim and delight is sitting there in summer and seeing the plants covered in insects.

As I write this it's another gloomy, grey and cool afternoon with spits of rain. Nana has just woken up from her old age slumbers and sits at the open door of the conservatory, sniffs the outside air and stays where she is - not the weather for old dogs, she'll just stick her nose out and leave it at that. Midge, after a run of several miles on the reserve this morning, is asleep, tucked up inside a blanket on the "dog's sofa" in the conservatory and there is an imaginary sign on top of her that says "do not disturb until dinner time".

Dylan Thomas in one of his poems said "time ticks a heaven around the stars" and this year is ticking down now unto its end, unfortunately it'll get worse now before it gets better.

Reflective Stormy Weather

2011-09-06T15:32:00.007+01:00

Today has seen the first stormy day of this year's Autumn, gale force gusts of SW wind and varying degrees of rain, a stay indoors day for the most of us - a reflection day.

The rain beats on the conservatory windows, the view from the study window is of the Thames Estuary shrouded in mist and rain, with nearby trees bent over in the wind, and somewhere indoors I can hear Nana snoring, probably behind the sofa in the lounge, her favourite place. Another afternoon and another CD, this time Van Morrison's "Inarticulate Speech of the Heart", haunting stuff and with it a dram or two of the best rum in the world - Appleton Jamaican rum. I've been to Jamaica several times and love the place and that rum is best drunk on a stool at a hot beach bar alongside the Carribean - today grey, wet and windy Sheppey will have to do.

One of my favourite memories of Jamaica is walking along a hot and deserted beach at 6.00 in the morning, paddling in the warm Carribean as I went, and following along the length of the beach, a flock of Turnstones as they ran up and down the sand at the water's edge in front of me. It seemed surreal, a few days previously I had seen Turnstones on Shellness beach and now there they were again in Jamaica, although obviously not the same birds, but it seemed like a bit of Sheppey had come with me, what great and well travelled birds they are.

Back to reality and the other morning, just after dawn, I was really pleased to see a small bat circling my garden. It seems ages since I last saw one, when I was a child they were as common as House Sparrows, now, well both are becoming more and more uncommon - what is happening to this world. Fortunately, I may only have the one bat but I still have a large and resident flock of House Sparrows in the garden and most of the year they average out at around 30+ a day on the bird tables.

I also came across this old photo of me in the 1970's. Double click on it and enlarge it and you will see I'm wearing one of my favourite stripey tank-top jumpers - so 1970's. I was checking one of several fyke nets for what is obviously a poor catch of eels and the fleet is now part of The Flood in front of the Wellmarsh Hide on Elmley RSPB reserve. Such perfect days, eel trapping all summer, rabbit catching all winter and birds and wildlife around you all the time.
Much experience, many memories, and much to reflect on during a stormy September day.

Good Autumn

2011-09-02T09:26:00.004+01:00

I've just returned from a short visit to the reserve and wow! is the only way to describe how beautiful it was down there theis morning. It was one of those classic early autumn mornings with blue skies, slight distant mist and a stillness so profound that you could hear a pin drop a mile away. It was also very warm, I can't remember the last time I was able to walk across the marsh in shirt sleeves at 7.30 in the morning and be so warm. (Double click on this photo to enlarge it - can you not feel the hazy warmth and quietness coming out of it)

I didn't see too many birds, just a couple of Wheatears, some Green Sandpipers and a Greenshank and this small collection of long-legged cousins having a chat in the sun. (Double click on the photo and it'll enlarge them a bit).

I had a brief chat with the morning's sole wildfowler, who was bemoaning the fact that there was little about to shoot and I've also read on a few blogs lately, birdwatchers also complaining about the scarcity of migrant birds, but do you really need to have such things on such a beautiful morning - what's wrong with simply enjoying being there.
It was only a short visit because I had taken Nana the beagle for one of her now rare walks out there. She's 16 in November and with bad arthritis and general old age she struggles to walk more than a few hundred yards these days without lots of rests. But if nothing else, she enjoys the opportunity to experience the sights and smells of a place where she has spent so many happy years doing her own thing.
It is so gratifying being able to give a dog a lifetime of free ranging on a marsh such as that, without the restrictions of leads and collars and fortunately, for lots of reasons, during 40-odd years of doing so, I've also not suffered the attentions of narrow-minded birdwatchers who are unable to share the countryside with other people.

Another Autumn Day

2011-08-30T15:11:00.007+01:00

Continuing my Autumnal theme of yesterday I photographed these geese on the reserve this morning, fattening for our Christmas dinners? no, they arrived several years ago from the farm nearby and now live and breed on the reserve, but you never know.

Sitting in the conservatory this afternoon after a hard spell of weeding in the garden, I put on a Barbra Streisand CD, poured a large glass of red wine and looked out at this last week of August scene. Back in the late Spring I found a few Nasturtium seeds in the garage and stuck a few in at the back of the pond with the result as below. They so remind me of childhood days, of sucking the spur behind the flower and enjoying its hot and peppery taste and Cabbage White butterfly caterpillars under every leaf.

The pond itself looks jaded now and thanks to this photograph, looks a third of its size, it really is much bigger than how it looks here.

Elsewhere in the garden the flowers are all continuing to do their bit and are sending out their messages of "come and get it", and yet the grey skies and chilly wind seem to deter even the hardiest of bees.

And that is the problem, here we are at the end of August and yet it is like mid-Autumn, it should still be so hot and sunny and Pittswood Man should still be complaining about the heat and the sun and the need for a shady tree, but no, its like mid-October.

In the chapter called "Wayfarers All" in the Wind of the Willows, Ratty, desperate at the way summer seemed to be slipping away so fast, had come across a group of Swallows who were discussing their soon to happen departure southwards. He asked why they couldn't stay on to enjoy the good times that he and his friends had during winter.
"I tried stopping on one year", said one Swallow. "I had grown so fond of the place that when the time came I hung back and let the others go on without me. For a few weeks it was all well enough, but afterwards, O the weary length of the nights! The shivering sunless days! The air so clammy and chill, and not an insect in an acre of it! No, it was no good; my courage broke down, and one cold, stormy night I took wing, flying well inland on account of the strong easterly gales. It was snowing hard as I beat through the passes of the great mountains, and I had a stiff fight to win through; but never shall I forget the blissful feeling of the hot sun again on my back as I sped down to the lakes that lay so blue and placid below me, and the taste of my first fat insect!"

Does not that say it all - it does for me!

Autumn Blues

2011-08-29T14:13:00.004+01:00

My, its over a week since my last posting but to be honest there hasn't been that much occurring, despite going to the reserve every day, and as I said in my last post, we are pretty much marking time until something does.
The last two mornings I have arrived at the reserve at first light and been lucky to see the sun rise up over the horizon both times and the photo below doesn't really capture the stillness and beauty of it as it rose over Shellness.

My reason for being so early was to hopefully bump into a wildfowler who I have known for a few years now and who always visits the reserve a few days before the shooting season starts to get an idea of what's about wildfowl wise, which this year, is pretty much naff all. As I probably mentioned this time last year this guy has been involved with the countryside for most of his sixty odd years and we always spend a pleasant hour chatting about shooting and the countryside in general. This guy's knowledge comes from a lifetime's experience in the field, not from watching Springwatch or reading birds magazines and despite the solitary nature of his sport he still doesn't find it necessary to whinge on about other countyside users such as walkers and dog owners.
So we sat there for an enjoyable while, swapped experiences of all things countryside, and watched the sun rise up into the sky, I enjoyed it.

After leaving him I made my way along the seawall to the end of the Delph fleet, which as you can see, is also starting to recede from the drought, and began to walk back across the marsh. The passage waders are still around in small numbers, utilizing the mud in the ditches and I put up several Green Sandpipers, a Spotted Redshank and a Greenshank as I walked along. The reserve's first Whinchat of the autumn was also making its way along the Delph reed bed tops, which with the waders was another reminder that we are going into the autumn, not a pleasant thought.

For me the autumn is the forerunner of the winter, the one season that I absolutely hate. By October I find myself kind of holding my breath, and not letting it out until March, in one huge sigh of relief and I just get through the winter as best as I can. Seems stupid I know, especially to those people that like cold, rain, snow, mud, gales and above all horribly short daylight hours, but me, I don't.
I really hate those short days, those brief scurries between dawn and dusk, when there's no before breakfast and no after dinner, its all darkness. I love those long warm and sunny days when you can pack a whole raft of things in up till ten o'clock at night, how can anybody like darkness at 4.30 in the afternoon?

And yet as much as I hate it, I sometimes find myself perversely thinking of nice winter things, such as a cold afternoon's bird counting and getting home to be warmed up by that first sampling of this year's Sloe Gin. Foggy days, I quite like the fog, and I suppose best of all, The Shortest Day, that lovely day in December when you know that from now on, minute by extending minute, the days are getting longer - yes that day alone is worth having winter for!

Marking Time

2011-08-20T15:11:00.003+01:00

I arrived at the reserve at 07.00 this morning in cracking warm and sunny conditions, it was a great time of day to be out and about. The farmland alongside is now all either stubble or lightly tilled soil and into the wheat stubble the rape for next year has already been sown - the winter corn will go in fairly soon into what were this years's rape fields. Walking round was really pleasant but like the title suggests, walking round the reserve at the moment you form the impression that you are simply marking time until something changes. Because of the very dry conditions, you know that the opportunities to see any noteable bird numbers are almost not there and its simply a matter of just enjoying being out and about.

What is the next change, well, I suppose apart from several days of continous rain, which is very unlikely, it is September 1st and the start of this year's shooting season. Thats unlikely to make it rain hard but the intensity of shooting around Harty will probably see an increase of wildfowl on the reserve as the birds become disturbed and look for refuge.
The photo below shows the scene along the Harty road at the moment as up to 400 Greylag Geese frequent the wheat stubbles looking for spilt grain. Many of these semi-tame feral geese will no doubt be enjoying their last few days alive before they are slaughtered. From what I can gather, large chunks of Harty have beem leased to various different people this coming season and it has the potential to be shot very intensively. These geese for instance, over the first week or so and until they lose their tameness, will be shot in large numbers by leaseholders who have very little interest in conservation but simply getting large bags in the name of "getting their money's worth" and shooting 30,40,50 birds at a time is not unheard of.

Witnessing slaughters like that is when you come to realise that the wildfowlers that frequent the saltings in front of the reserve are a far less damaging and much hardier breed of wildfowl shooters.
I recall one afternoon last year, 22nd December to be exact, when heavy snow was just beginning to thaw across Harty but a bitter cold N wind had set in during the afternoon creating sub-zero temperatures until well into the night. I had been out on the reserve for the last two hours of daylight, taking part in the monthly Harrier Roost Count, and was walking back to my car as it got dark, absolutley froze to the marrow. I watched a wildfowler come up onto the seawall in the distance and begin to trudge back along the seawall himself.
Talking to him the next day it transpires that he had arrived on the saltings that previous day and shot the early morning with no success. He then moved out to the edge of the saltings, placed some decoys out on the mud and sat their for over eight hours in sub-zero temperatures while the tide came in and went out, just to get half a dozen ducks. I was numb after a couple of hours, gawd knows what he felt like after his spell and there is most certainly a huge difference between that kind of shooting and that of the morons on the farmland that practically have the birds put on the end of their gun barrels for them.

Having admired that guy for his determination, I still face the coming shooting season, as I do every year, with a large degree of sadness at the loss of solitude that I've enjoyed for the last six months and knowing that it means I will have to witness the regular shooting of wildfowl again. The best I can do is accept that one faction are far less harmful than the rest.
And having just said that, its also sad in these modern times, knowing that the improvements that we have made to the nature reserve this last couple of weeks, should not only increase the numbers of wildfowl attracted to the reserve this winter, but will also increase, through nothing that they have contributed too, the number of wildfowl presented for shooting by those wildfowlers just a hundred yards the other side of the seawall. It sometimes makes you wonder why you bother.

Dry Days and Poetry

2011-08-17T15:32:00.008+01:00

Only a shortish posting today as I return to my current theme of the drought on the reserve.
With most of the reserve's ditches now dry or nearly so, the ditch below, which is close to the reserve barn, came up with the reserve's first drought fatalities. This ditch ends alongside the barn gate that I featured in the last posting and is responsible for flooding accross the track there in the winter - now look at the sorry state its in and the three eels that lay dead there. However there was a ray of hope, alongside the dead eels there was a small puddle of wet mud and in it one, just surviving eel.

Despite getting smothered in foul smelling black mud, I managed to get the eel into a bucket and got immense satisfaction from releasing it into a nearby ditch that still clung onto a few inches of water and watching it swim away. Such small triumphs and pleasures!
The ditch that I released it in to had had so much water loss that normally under-water Water Voles holes had now become exposed, which at least confirmed their existence again. But look at how far above the hole the normal tide line is.

The original three Aberdeen Angus bulls on the reserve have now been reduced to two now that most of their "duties" have been carried out. I watched this morning as this one was pushed some distance away from the herd by the other more aggressive bull. He stood by some willows, looking a lot less the powerful specimen that he was earlier in the year, very much the dejected loser. He also carried a sparring wound on his forehead.

And lastly, I came across the following poem by the English poet Edward Thomas in a newspaper recently. It was an observation during a train journey that he took shortly before being killed in the First World War.

Yes, I remember Adlestrop -
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express train drew up
there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed, Someone cleared
his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop - only the name.

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No white less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudless sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang,
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestshire.

Simplicity

2011-08-15T12:05:00.006+01:00

Sitting here today on the patio(sounds grand but it isn't)on a very warm and sunny August morning, I feel contended that at last the rear garden has come up trumps. I have gardened all my life, even being briefly employed as one, but have never quite been able to find the knack of getting it right, this year I have. It doesn't look that much from the photo below but the top part, which is part hidden, is a riot of colour which is attracting all manner of bees, butterflies and other winged insects. Its all I've ever wanted, a garden full of such insects and I can't be alone, how many of you out there get simple satisfaction from seeing bees for instance, being helped by the flowers in your garden.

For me also, there is one flower that is the king amongst all others Verbena Bonariensis. This purple-flowered plant comes up every year and quickly thrusts itself to six feet in the air, shouting "come and get it" to all and sundry insects - its is magnificient and if you want Hummingbird Hawk Moths in your garden, plus all manner of butterflies, this is the one to grow.

Coming a close second is the lower growing Golden Marjoram. It has a more "while you're passing" approach but neverless, when its in flower it is a magnet for bees and butterflies, plus its good in ommlettes!

And lastly, although not about to set a twitcher's pulse rate racing, perhaps in a few years time though, House Sparrows. I always have a decent sized flock in the garden all year round on the bird tables in the drive but on Saturday they beat the record in count, there were 46. I love them and in reality so should everybody, especially as they are on the point of being classified as "endangered". The photo below shows part of the flock on one of the bird tables, there were also many on another and many in and out of the hedge alongside.

Off now to the reserve to take part in the monthly Wetland Bird Survey (WEBS), although given the desert like conditions on the main marsh I don't think I'll be adding many birds to the overall count.

Rills, Scrapes and Waders

2011-08-12T10:16:00.006+01:00

Any visitors to The Swale NNR at the moment can't fail to notice that the largest part of it, the grazing marsh, not only looks very dry and yellow but also as a result, there are pitifully few birds about. Unfortunately with no means of storing water for such events the reserve depends almost 100% on rainwater, which for the second year running has been in very short supply on both the reserve and Sheppey in general. As I have mentioned in previous postings, its a bizarre nature of these marshes that for three months of the winter we have almost too much water and for six months in the summer, very little. What ditches that haven't dried up on the reserve at the moment, have at most an inch or two of muddy water left in them.
The two photos below show the variances in water levels at different times of the year. The first is a typical January scene and the second an August one. I should add that at the moment the ditch either side of that track is about two inches deep and so around three foot lower than the levels seen in winter - that's a lot of rain needed.

The second thing visitors will notice at the moment is that recent excavations have left the reserve looking somewhat unsightly but there is a good reason for this. Across the grazing marsh many new rills have been dug, as per this one.

And large scrapes that flood in winter to become shallow lakes have either been deepened, or in this case, newly dug. In these dry conditions both the scrapes and new rills look quite an eye-sore but imagine them this winter and next spring full of water and with their surroundings green and re-vegetated. Imagine how attractive and beneficial they are going to be for both waders and wildfowl. All of this work will improve the reserve by some degree and throughout a twelve month cycle each year and will at last restore it back to how it used to look in earlier times.

One of the major beneficaries of this work will be both Lapwings and Redshanks. It has become clear over the last couple of years that while really good numbers of Lapwings have bred and hatched chicks, that actual chick fledging numbers have been low, this year for instance just 11 chicks fledged from 62 breeding pairs. Now I'm no expert on these things but even to me it is quite clear that to breed successfully, both Redshanks and Lapwings need two main things, protection from predation, and habitat that provides areas of shallow water with muddy fringes covered in the insect life that they feed on.
To their credit, the management at The Swale NNR have recognised that this year and so as well as intensifying our pest control programme this Spring, the works described above have now taken place and next year we look forward to a successful breeding season on vastly improved habitat.

Another Side Of Elmley

2011-08-09T12:20:00.018+01:00

AS ALWAYS THESE PHOTOS ARE BEST VIEWED BY DOUBLE CLICKING ON EACH AND ENLARGING THEM.

With The Swale NNR attracting few birds these days due to the bone-dry conditions and with on-going improvement work being carried out by a bulldozer, I took myself off to the wide patures of Elmley NNR this morning.
Parking my car up at the farm I began by walking down the track past the old Elmley schoolhouse, which is struggling to stay upright these days, its so dilapidated.

Even when intact it still didn't look that friendly, as this old photo shows, when the church alongside was still standing. The church was knocked down in 1951 and only a few foundations show where it was now.

I then carried on down to the area, known these days as "The Brickfields", probably due to the remains of old buildings that lay around down there. In the late 1800's it used to be a mini village surrounding a Portland Cement factory known as the Turkey Cement Works. There was even a pub called "The Globe" there plus as you see below, a small dock for the loading/unloading of sailing barges. At low tide you will see that there is still the remains of a barge lying in the dock. The Works closed in 1900 and the villagers moved away to the mainland soon after.

In the area around the dock there are stll foundations left from the old buildings and various heaps of stone and brick.

I then made my east along the seawall to arrive at what is known as Elmley Ferry. At low tide there is a short gravel causeway here that only runs as far as the deep water channel of The Swale. It was never much more than a small rowing boat and ferryman stationed on the mainland side of The Swale at Murston, who rowed across when requested. It is also the place that gas supplies to Sheppey cross under the water and the marker posts indicate that fact to larger vessels that sometimes come down the river. If you enlarge this photo you will see to the left of the mainland side, the skeleton of an old sailing barge in the water. It was common practise when these barges had had their day, to sail them to a quiet stretch of water and beach them on the mudflats and leave them. There are several along The Swale like this.

In its final years its main users were the Gransden family who lived in Kingshill farm and farmed the Elmley marshes. Some of the children went to school at Murston and were sometimes sent over there for shopping. This old photo shows one of the Gransden children at the ferry.

A view down The Swale from the ferry with Harty Hill in the distance. In the winter, this stretch of sea alongside the Elmley RSPB reserve will be covered in several thousand various ducks at high tide and is worth seeing.

A mixed clump of Sea Lavender and Golden Samphire on the seaward side of the seawall.

Close by the Sea Aster was also out in flower.

I completed my walk by walking back up the track to Kingshill Farmhouse, home to the RSPB warden. In 1688, King James was attempting to flee England to France and was arrested at Elmley Ferry by fishermen and apparently held at Kingshill Farm overnight before being returned to London.

Satisfaction

2011-08-05T16:53:00.003+01:00

Waking up at 04.00 this morning and looking out of the window to see it still dark was a bit of a jolt in the arm. Just six weeks ago I could do the same at 03.00 and see the first glimmers of light to the east, summer is slipping away and autumn is nearly apon us!
In my world there is nothing comparable with the height of an English summer and going to bed at gone 10.00 at night with it still part light and five hours later its getting light again. Oh joy, if only we could live forever the daylight hours of May, June and July, who needs the darkness of winter that last fourteen hours from 4.30 in the afternoon!

Eventually, after getting up to a chilly but clear 05.30 in the morning and fetching the paper from the papershop and reading it with breakfast, I was on the reserve by 07.30. There, the rain of yesterday was invisible and the day was quickly turning sunny and very warm and humid and not really as forecast thankfully. Midge and I walked from one end of the flat marsh to the other and surveyed new rills, re-dug scrapes and a freshly-flattened unnecesary bund in front of the Seawall Hide and it all looked great, at last its becoming a nature reserve again, and not only that, the work is on-going!

So, no list of birds seen, or butterflies fluttering, or paths re-walked for the umpteenth time - just a gentle appreciation of a reserve being re-awakened and I'll leave you with the distant sight of two Sailing Barges making their way down The Swale - happy days and a photo that could be a hundred years old.

A Day Off

2011-08-04T16:02:00.003+01:00

At 06.00 this morning the last remnants of a very warm, sticky and clear night were just being replaced by a cloudy morning with a few spits and spots of rain. The forecast was for a wet day and so I decided to forgo my normal first hour reading the paper with a cup of tea and go straight to the reserve.
Even as I walked round the reserve at 06.30 it was obvious that grey skies, an increasing SW wind and spits of rain meant that the day was going to be different to those recently, I wasn't wrong.
I mainly went to the reserve to see how well the bulldozer had done throughout yesterday and the results were really good. Rills have appeared throughout the flat marsh and some low-lying areas have been re-scraped to improve their winter flooding abilities. When we eventually get back to mid-winter water-logged conditions all these areas will re-fill and hold water well into the Spring, to the benefit of plover and wader chicks.

I only managed an hour out there this morning before the rain set in properly but did come across a lovely looking moth on the seawall. It was difficult to get a decent photo of it because heavyish rain was falling and I didn't want to expose it to the rain too much. But I E-Mailed the rubbish photo below to Tony Morris and he identified it as a common and ordinary Drinker moth, the moth and I thought it was quite special!

Yesterday afternoon, as I had done all week, I took my daily, good-weather cycle ride around Minster and I sat on Minster Leas looking down on Minster beach packed with families sunbathing and swimming in temperatures of 30 degrees. This afternoon in temperatures a whole 10 degrees lower, I sat in my conservatory under grey skies and with rain lashing against the windows. I drank a glass or two of red wine, read a book about Ian Botham and reflected on those saddo's that complained about recent hot weather, because it was hot and nasty and didn't produce lots of good birds. Is that all their lives turn on, how many birds are seen.
"Life" and "get" came to mind because I know for a fact that they will also complain about the wet weather as well!

Fabulous and Hot

2011-08-03T18:16:00.005+01:00

Wow, here in Kent at the moment the weather is hot and sticky and quite fabulous, unless of course you're one of these people who thinks that great is staring out of a window at cold and wet weather.
Anyway, leaving those people to their dreams of damp and winter and miry ways, the reserve is at the height of summerness at the moment. Evident in the ditches, that have very little water in them, an inch of water and two foot of black mud. Every time that Midge goes in to cool off she comes out as two-tone black and white.
The grazing marsh is just as dry, and walking across it you are struck by how dry and yellow it is, even the green bits have no moisture in them and you wonder what the hell sustinence the cattle get from it at the moment.
Its not some drastic scene, its how the traditional North Kent marshes are without artificial means, waterlogged in winter and bone dry in summer and wildlife knows how to cope with it.
Have a look at the "S Bend Ditch " today, it's finally given up the ghost and dried out, just as it did last year, and yet for a few months in the winter it will be impassable and full of wildfowl.

The bulldozer has been busy over the last few days improving or creating shallow rills across the grazing marsh. They will look a bit ugly for a few months until weather conditions alter them, but this time next year they should have already increased various wader production during the breeding season by providing shallow and muddy, insect filled areas for the chicks.

On the neighbouring farmland there was that traditional scene of fresh cut corn fields and straw bales, what a great sight, and all day long trailers and lorries were collecting the bales and taking them away ahead of tomorrow's forecast heavy rain.

The big plus with this hot weather has been the number of butterflies that have been on the wing. This Common Blue was one of many hundreds out and about across the grazing marsh this morning.

And lastly, just after getting home from the reserve this morning, Rod Smith, a fellow Volunteer, rang to say that he had just seen a Maid of Kent beetle in a fresh cow pat - their favourite habitat. This beetle was classed as extinct in the country until one was re-discovered at Elmley RSPB in 1997 and even now they remain rarely seen. This particular one was a first for the reserve and happy evidence that they are spreading on Sheppey. Shame I missed it but, rain permitting tommorow, I shall be about early on the reserve trying to find another.

Hot and Sunny

2011-07-31T10:50:00.013+01:00

My day got of to a great start early this morning when I found an E-Mail on my PC from an ex-Sheppey-ite living in Melbourne, Australia, who wrote to say how much he enjoyed the blog - thanks Maurice, it was much appreciated.
And then off to the reserve and the joy of walking across it in hot sunshine, it was absolutely superb, perfect weather, I do love the heat.

Walking across some baked grazing marsh Midge suddenly shot up in the air like a Harrier jump jet and began circling at some distance and very warely, the Grass Snake below. He was a lengthy specimen which quickly sped off and disappeared down a dis-used rabbit burrow.

(Double click on the photo and enlarge it and look at the eye - scary).

I made my way to the best part of the reserve again, the grass banks below Harty church, which in the heat and sun were alive with butterflies and moths. These low-tide photos look across The Swale from the banks towards Faversham and Oare. (Double click on each to enlarge them and better see the view). The sandbank in the middle is known as Horse Sands and most weeks of the year is a favourite laying out spot for Common Seals.

Along the banks the Spiney Restharrow is still giving good displays of its pink-purple flowers.

Once again, as I said the other day, Burnet moths were much in evidence, see this 5-Spot Burnet on thistle.

On the way back along the Harty Road I stopped at the top of Capel Hill and took this photo looking down across the marsh and Capel Fleet.

And this one looking across the corn fields to Eastchurch in the distance.

Grey Day No.2

2011-07-30T11:35:00.009+01:00

It was another disapointing walk round this morning weather-wise with grey skies coming in off the sea with a chilly wind and once again, not what the stupid Kaddie on BBC had promised (by 2.00pm it was gloriously hot and sunny). The only thing that brightened things up, depending on your point of view, was some guy who jogged the whole length of the seawall in front of the reserve completely naked. It looked a bit painful to me with his meat and two veg. slapping to and fro.
Having cut across part of the reserve I hopped over the fence and made my way across part of the farmland, where the profusion of wildflowers has made things much more interesting in recent weeks and there I found a couple of blackberry bushes that gave me my first snack of the year of quite juicy berries. I also came across a nice clump of wild snapdragons, Common Toadflax, as below.

As is the norm each year, the grazing fields alongside the Shellness track have been left to grow and during this week the hay has been cut and dried and now awaits baling. (Notice the wind pump in the background, which supply a "wader pool" with water)

This one has already been baled and cleared and now awaits some unlikely rain before greening up again.

Because of the hot and dry Spring this year, the hay crop has been quite poor and many farmers are reporting a 50% reduction on the number of bales per field as against previous years. This is already seeing prices per bale almost trebling and I imagine that any farmers with a supply this winter will be making some pretty good profits.
One of the commonest birds on Harty at the moment appears to be the Green Sandpiper and because of the amount of mud showing in most of the ditches, each one seems to have two or three Green Sandpipers in it - all in all this morning on the reserve and the farmland, I must of seen around 30 or more. I also saw my first autumn Wheatear and too my surprise, an over-flying budgie, poor thing.

One last feature from this morning is this example of numerous, mostly square and shallow "pools", that are on the saltings along the front of the reserve. They have been there all of my 60 odd years and none of us locals know what caused them and more importantly, why nothing has grown in them. The spartina grass that makes up most of the salting along there is extremely vigorous when it comes to colonising the mud and yet not one of those pools has anything growing in it. Is there something toxic in the mud in each one? although that seems unlikely given the amount of times that the saltings have been flooded by Spring Tides. Its a mystery that could do with being solved.

Another Grey Day

2011-07-29T13:50:00.010+01:00

Well, as I start this blog today its early afternoon and the first day of the 2nd Test Match is not going well with England already five wickets down to India, I've had to walk away from it! Its also yet another warm but grey and sunless day, what a joke this summer and its forecasts have been, although we did actually get a couple of hours of hot sunshine late yesterday. I was also amused yesterday to read a local blog that I follow, why I don't know because its always pretty boring, to see that after the writer and some of his "followers" had spent the last few weeks complaining about the constant bad weather, that he then complained yesterday about it being too warm - work that out!

Anyway, in the real world, where we're glad of anything that resembles a summer, the good news on the reserve is that we at last have the limited use of a bulldozer and a digger in order to try and rectify at least part of the last 15 years of non-maintenance. Today the bulldozer was in "The Flood", the compartment in front of the Seawall Hide, beginning to re-profile the reel-ways that snake across it. These reel-ways are areas of shallow water and insect life that in the Spring are valuable areas of habitat for Lapwing and Redshank chicks. There is much that these machines need to do on the reserve but they are expensive to hire and budgets are tight.

If the current dry conditions prevail it will unfortunately be many months before this work shows any value and they hold water, but it's so great to see some work taking place. The reserve is currently bone dry and rock hard and if it follows last years pattern, which it looks like it will, it will be Christmas before any substantial water is to be seen on the surface. If you double click on these photos and enlarge them you will see how dry the place looks.

Along the saltings edge the Sea Lavendar still looks good and colourful.

The last place that I visited this morning was the area that we know as "The Banks". This long and narrow stretch of the reserve is below Harty Church and slopes down to the saltings. It was grazed in the early Spring but has been left alone since then and has turned into a great example of hay meadow, full of various wild flowers, especially large areas of Spiny Rest Harrow and Trefoil. It is easily the best part of the reserve at the moment and is hosting large numbers of butterflies as a result. This morning it was apparent that a hatch of good numbers of 6-Spot Burnet moths was taking place, the first photo shows one emerging and then the second, two getting it on together.

Lastly, the Mink trap in one of the ditches. This hasn't caught any Mink and I have closed the entrance but it remains in place because of its attraction as a platform for Water Voles. Look at this photo of it and the amount of dropping and the fact that club rush stems have been eaten there. I haven't actually seen a Water Vole on the reserve for a few years, but this proves that they are there.

Summer Really but Seems like Autumn

2011-07-24T11:29:00.006+01:00

It's only been several days but it seems like ages since I posted my last blog but then it seems like ages since we've had both a few days of hot and sunny weather and anything interesting to write.
I got up this morning buoyed by forecasts of unbroken sunshine for most of the day and warmer temperatures, and walked round the reserve under grey skies and a strong N. wind, OK it's cheering up as I write this but summer it ain't, it's so autumnal. This is borne out most mornings by the fact that pretty much all the bird life on the reserve is made up of autumnal passage waders, there were 22 Green Sandpipers, a Common Sandpiper and a Greenshank on the soft mud of the "S Bend Ditch" this morning. We're also in that silly season where Oare reserve on the other side of The Swale are having to lift sluice boards to release excess water and expose mud and yet on our reserve its getting so dry that every time a cow pees we see it as a blessing.
See the photo below of a ditch that I have posted photos of a few times this year to monitor the water dropping and now consider that the crossing plank was under water in February.
The winter is long enough most years without it almost starting at this time of the year, a run of hot and sunny days would be so nice please before this alleged summer finally ends, it would also be nice if it did happen, if a few people didn't moan about it.

Continuing round the reserve this morning I made my way up on to the seawall and spent a pleasant half an hour or so talking to some KWCA wildfowlers - yes, it's only five weeks away! There were six of them - two regulars showing four new members the shooting areas and explaining to them the do's and dont's. I enjoyed the chat and we discussed breeding birds, farming practices, shooting prospects, etc. One subject of concern to us all was the fact that over the last few years, that once very common and iconic duck of the countryside, the Mallard, has continued to decline in numbers quite badly nationwide - who'd of ever thought it. But we've seen it on the reserve in recent years, very few broods of Mallard ducklings are being found or recorded. Let's hope the decline can be arrested and it doesn't go down the same path as the Grey Partridge, will it cause duck shooters to show restraint in respect of such knowledge, I doubt it in the immediate future,especially those that shoot large bags around the commercial ponds.

A visit to Shellness Point one morning last week to look for an albino Herring Gull that was impersonating an Icelandic Gull was fruitless but I did record a new wild flower for the reserve, a large clump of Ploughman's Spikenard, which I somehow walked away from without photographing, bloody stupid, so you'll have to look it up but it's a tallish plant with pretty featureless flowerheads.
Alongside that plant on the upper part of the beach at the Point was also a huge spread of quite thick lichen, I haven't a clue what it's called but it's very impressive and is shown below.

I also found several plants of Sea Holly, which I quite like and which has an improved version that is popular in garden planting.

And lastly, back on the reserve, the Teasel is in flower and despite having quite minimal flower heads, seems to be very attractive to both bees and butterflies as this Red Admiral shows.

Feelin' Better

2011-07-15T11:06:00.008+01:00

(Double click on each photo to get in closer)

Wow, if I'd of been asked what I needed to lift my spirits then this morning on Harty was about it - clear blue skies, hot sun and at last, no wind. And to cap it all, butterflies were everywhere, they react to the sun and warmth just as I do. It seemed as though every head of thistle flowers or clump of ragwort was covered in Red Admirals, Peacocks, Meadow Browns, Whites and Skippers. The whole of this was being patrolled in front by small squadrons of Common and Ruddy Darters, doing just that, darting to and fro snatching small flies. Also overnight, Gatekeepers seem to have had a mass hatch and were being attracted to the ragwort, as per below.

I'm a great believer in ragwort, not only do its large clumps brighten up a dry and sad looking marsh in summer but its beloved by so many different insects and butterflies. And at last I'm beginning to find more of its main beneficiary, Cinnabar Moth caterpillars. They always make me think of burglars in their stripey T shirts.

Another flower now coming into bloom is the Common Fleabane, if you want to find Skipper butterflies this is the flower to look on, they love it. A word of warning though, don't do as I did some years ago and plant some in the garden, it spreads like wildfire by creeping roots and is almost impossible to eradicate - but I do get plenty of Small Skippers!

After that I wandered round to the "S Bend Ditch" which, just as it did last year is now receding fast, but its one redeeming feature on a dry and yellowing reserve is the fact that it is currently the one place attracting birds. This morning on the soft mud I counted 14 Green Sandpipers and a few Lapwings but yesterday was even better. Then I had 16 Green Sandpipers, 1 Common Sandpiper and 3 juv. Little Ringed Plovers and some Blackwits - amazing what a bit of soft mud does for passage waders. I took this photo yesterday when the light was a lot worse but it shows the very shallow water and exposed mud quite well. Another month and it will look like the second photo from yesterday, which shows the start of the Ditch, about a hundred yards further back.

I still get wound up when I think that when we had a prolonged spell of this weather in the Spring that some people complained about it being too warm, still -

"Its a restless hungry feeling
that don't mean no one no good
When everything I'm a-saying
you can say it just as good
You're right from your side
I'm right from mine
We're both just one too many mornings
An' a thousand miles behind"....................Bob Dylan

A Retrospective Moment

2011-07-13T13:58:00.004+01:00

"Been down so long it looks like up to me" - was the title of a book written by Richard Farina in the 1960's. Until his untimely death in a motorcycle accident Richard Farina was married to Mimi Baez, the younger sister of Joan Baez. Some years later I connected with that title because it seemed a pretty good description of my life, but that's another story.

But in a spell of being more down than up just recently I trawled backwards through parts of my life, using You Tube to look at some of the music, re-visiting real people, real singers and unfortunately, mostly real dead. Janis Joplin singing "Summertime" in 1968, played back to back with The Doors and "Riders in the Storm" - wow, good music - pass the bottle and fill the glass stuff! Red wine and rum now but it never was so in the 1960's, it was beer and stuff. We never got into all that sniffing and injecting stuff but grass was a regular feature, we either got drunk or we had a "smoke". I've never smoked so I rolled the joints and the others smoked them while I got drunk - I think most Sundays of my late teens and early twenties were spent in bed getting over hangovers.

And what did we drink, well it certainly wasn't wine, although I do recall the drinking of something called VP Sherry because it was cheap and effective, no it was mostly beer. None of the lager stuff that became fashionable later on either, no, in the 1960's it was bitter, Brown or Light ale and mild.
Brown and Light ales were by the bottle and the others came from the barrel and out of the hand pumps. Brown and Mild was a regular drink, as was Light and Bitter but me, I drunk Stout and mild, a thick, sweet mixture of Courage Velvet Stout and dark mild. Mild in those days came via the barrel and usually in two forms. There was the properly brewed and supplied mild and the slops mild. It was still legal in those days, though not for much longer, to utilize all the left overs from unfinished glasses at the end of the evening. These slops from glasses and the pump drip trays were all poured back into an empty barrel in the cellar and this disgusting mixture was re-served to customers as "mild". It wasn't too bad if you was mixing it with a bottle of beer but on its own, especially if it had a lot of lemonade content, it was quite awful.
Where did we drink, well for those readers that know Sheerness, we drank mostly in the Queens Hotel", a small pub that had the distinction of being the first and last pub in Sheerness, depending on which way you was travelling. In those days it also had outside toilets, which meant when it was raining hard you got soaked getting there and sometimes soaked being there, there was no proper roof - pubs were tough in those days! The first time I ever went in there I was sick across the bar and the landlord, but I got over it and so did he, eventually.

Seems hard to believe these days but in the mid/late 1960's we were Sheppey's original hippies, seemed as if there were only a couple of dozen of us. We grew our hair long, we wore denims, we played guitars and mostly, for protection from ridicule I suppose, we all took over and used the same cafe in the town all day long, Den's cafe. We mostly all worked but on weekends and holidays slept rough, did beer and pot, didn't wash, and hitch-hiked around - there were no limits, no morals and no pressures. It was a great time, easily the best ten years of my life and I could write chapters on our experiences and do you know, I often envy those that died when it ended.
In 1953 Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, aged 39, because the best times were all gone and in 1970 Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix all died - sometimes surviving ain't all its cracked up to be.

Me (the alternative Bob Dylan) in 1966

Good Farming

2011-07-09T12:48:00.012+01:00

How rubbish the last few days have been with the constant gusty winds, wind is the one element that I hate above all others.
Anyway, on the reserve this morning the wind wasn't as gusty, the sun was out and it was really pleasant and warm. The "S Bend Ditch" remains the best place to see any birds now as it continues to dry back. This morning there I had 8 Little Egret, 5 Herons, 7 Green Sandpiper and 20 Mallard.
After that I crossed over onto the adjacent farmland, as I do several times each week, because quite frankly, it has better wildlife than the reserve at the moment. On a good sunny day like today the tracks across it are hedged with all manner of wildflowers which attract countless butterflies, bees, etc and birds are everywhere. Look at the track below that I walked along, see how the various wildflowers have colonised it.

Bring it up closer and it compares with any garden border.

And then look at the butterflies that the flowers attract - a lovely Red Admiral.

A pristine looking Peacock.

Nearby were hedgerows and small thickets deliberately planted by the farmer and when farmland gets that good, well I think its well worth the price of some shooting during the winter months and anybody that can't agree that stand to deny themselves and wildlife a lot of pleasure. Get the balance right and there's room for everything - to everything's benefit.

That's not to say that the reserve was all doom and gloom, the water lilies in one ditch continue to expand each year.

White Melilot was in flower.

As was Great Willowherb.

And the much maligned Ragwort, so beloved by all manner of butterflies and other insects.

And on Shellness beach the Vipers Bugloss continues to expand and delight all manner of insects in such a barren place.

As did the Yellow-horned Poppy.

Missing Things

2011-07-06T09:12:00.002+01:00

A disappointing change in the weather was apparent today, cooler, a blustery wind and some heavy showers - not to my liking at all, much better the heat and dryness of the last few days. Time to be inside and write about several missing things.

I was talking to a good friend the other day who mostly wanders about on the marshes below Eastchurch Prison. One of the things that we discussed was the apparent absence this year of Marsh/Edible frogs across the marshes. I managed some photos of both in the Spring but since then I've had few sightings and even more noticeable has been the absence as we walk round, of the clamouring calls of the frogs. Normally at this time of the year, especially when its hot and humid as it has been recently, one would start calling and there would then be a massive ripple effect of calls right across the marsh as all the others joined in to answer. This year so far it has been noticeably quiet and we could only come up with the suggestion that the prolonged intense cold of last winter possibly killed many off whilst in hibernation.
Staying on the subject of Marsh/Edible frogs, and I'm talking about normal years now, something that has always puzzled me is the fact that I've never seen spawn of these frogs in any of the ditches. As anybody with both common frogs and a garden pond will be familiar with, every spring the pond is full of large clumps of spawn, so why do I not see the same on the marsh - do they do something different?

The scarcity of eels was another point of discussion, they are almost at the point of being classified as an endangered species now. In the 1970's-early 80's both of us used to either rod fish the ditches or spend every week of the summer fyke-netting across Sheppey's marshes and big numbers of eels were always guaranteed. Out of curiosity a couple of years ago I dug out my little lightweight rod, secured some garden worms and tried my luck in some perfect looking ditches in mid-summer. Four two-hour sessions produced a total catch of just two eels, which I returned to the water, but numerous Rudd. It was a really depressing experience and echoed the plight of that once common bird the House Sparrow - who'd of ever thought it. In all probability the excessive catching of returning elvers by the millions has had a lot to do with it.
By the way, most of Sheppey's fleets and ditches are full of Rudd and have been for around 30-40 years - how they originally got there is anybodies guess, just like the goldfish that one often comes acroos as well.

My pet subject on scarce things, as anybody who reads these posts regularly will know, is rabbits. The trouble with trying to convince people that this is indeed a fact, or at least on Harty it is, is that people go out for a drive and see say ten rabbits and class that as loads of rabbits. The trouble is that that number these days doesn't multiple all the way across the marsh like they used too, they are probably just one small isolated pocket of rabbits. Yes, there will always be some examples of big numbers, but in general, when you walk large areas like I do on a daily basis, its then that you realise just how few you are seeing. Land management staff can be guilty of the same tunnel vision and still talk at times as though rabbits are eating their way through the countryside in numbers like they were in Victorian times.
I have video footage taken on the Swale NNR around 15 years ago which shows around 400 rabbits on just one salt-working mound alone and the mound was stripped bare of any vegetation, it was just dry soil. Multiplied through the reserve we used to have thousands of them and they were a real problem but nowadays you couldn't total anywhere near 400 rabbits on the whole reserve and all the mounds and banks are overgrown. Obviously good news for some people, especially farmers, but I miss seeing them in good numbers and their shortage is missed as part of the local food chain by other wildlife. And why have they reduced so much, well disease is the biggest factor. They were always reduced each summer by myxymatosis but normally each autumn the survivors would quickly re-breed and recover their numbers but around the time that I took the video footage a new virus appeared on the scene. I can't recall the name of this one but it has been quite lethal and had a devastating effect on the rabbit numbers and isn't just seasonal as the myxy was. It has left large areas almost rabbit free and even where they are in small numbers, over exuberant culling by people who should know better, has reduced them still further.
Will I be believed? I doubt it, people still historically see the rabbit as a pest in the countryside and still to be found in the thousands, and many land managers will say that just one rabbit left is one too many!

Those of us who are members of the Kent Ornithological Society will have received our free copy of the 2009 Kent Bird Report this week. This booklet is an excellent and well written record, with photographs, of Kent bird news and most records of sightings and breeding. It is produced by an extremley hard working team of volunteers who in publishing this 2009 Report have through hard work brought the Reports as up-to date as they can be.
Reading through the Report I was surprised to find one recurring comment however, and this has nothing to do with the writers - a lack of breeding reports for Stodmarsh. There are breeding records for most other sites/patches but none, not even estimates, for one of the largest and most visited reserves in Kent. How can this be?
Quite clearly Natural England as the reserve's managers have failed to play their part but I'm also surprised that the regular local team of watchers there, that have even created blogs for the area, haven't managed any counts.

The Legendary Me

2011-07-04T11:22:00.007+01:00

No, not me, but the title of the Wizz Jones CD that I was playing as I wrote this posting today. Wizz spent the 1960's becoming a great blues guitarist around the folk club circuit in England and that album was released in 1970. The old boy is still going strong and I saw him perform at Whitstable Folk Club just last summer.

It was hot and sunny from the word go on the reserve this morning, just superb, unfortunately it never lasts long enough. The Flood has completely dried out now and the "S Bend Ditch" is heading that way with more and more mud becoming exposed. This morning it had attracted 7 Little Egrets, 4 Green Sandpipers and the first two returning Teal.
Up on the seawall the Ground Lackey moth caterpillars have started leaving the saltings now and making their way onto the sea wall to pupate in the long vegetation. I found these two this morning as I walked along the wall.

Despite the continuing reports of large numbers of butterflies inland, especially Large Skippers, butterflies in general still remain in low numbers on the reserve, a good mix of varieties but low numbers and I've had a total of just 6 Small Skippers so far. Another big disappointment this year has been the absence of Cinnabar Moth caterpillars, despite large amounts of Ragwort I've found just the one caterpillar, can't remember the last time this happened.

I made my way off the reserve and spent some time wandering across some of the farmland and came across an adult female Marsh Harrier and three recently fledged young. They had nested in a corn field and it was nice to know that they had fledged before combining starts. Before they all flew off one fledgling stayed long enough for me to quickly get this photo

And lastly, how many of you remember this stuff, Barley Grass. As schoolchildren we used to throw it at each other as darts and as it usually had tiny black beetles in the darts we used to throw them into each other's hair shouting "fleas in your hair"

A Harty morning

2011-07-02T13:04:00.015+01:00

Before 6.00 this morning I was driving along the Harty Road and across the marsh, in conditions just about as good as you can get them, clear blue skies, very warm sunshine and no wind - Harty looked a real picture. All along the road Hares, of a wide age range, got up in front of me and disappeared into the various crops. I love Hares and at the moment on Harty, despite attention in the Spring from the beaglers, they are doing really well and are everywhere. Rabbits also, especially on the Reserve, have been making a recovery from the excessive and unecessary culling last winter until that is, myxy made its annual return recently. This one with swollen eyes and genitalia had just been dispatched by Midge - its vital to isolate the infected fleas as best as one can, and of course, reduce the rabbit's misery.

My first destination this morning was the end of the farm track, which we know as the "concrete road", to collect a bag full of Canary Grass for my canaries. And on my drive along that track what did I find in my path but this male Peacock. He was outside the privately owned Brewers Farm, having moved down from outside Harty Church, some two miles away, in recent times - perhaps on his summer holidays!

He was a magnificient creature and knew it and I was much in awe of him at such an early time of day. After stopping alongside him I briefly crossed over to the reserve. Here, underneath the Tower Hide steps, I came across a Woodpigeon's nest in an Elderberry bush that was growing up and between the steps.

And noted that Teasel was beginning to come into flower.

and despite it only being early July, that blackberries were starting to form on the bushes. As I took this photo an agitated Whitethroat appeared with a a large grub in its beak and, assuming it had a nest there somewheres, I moved on.

Back to the "Concrete Road" on the farmland, split on oneside by fast ripening wheat and on the other by a line of willows that the farmer planted some ten years ago to enhance the bird populations.

This photo shows the dark green "cover strip" that the farmer sowed this Spring all around his crops. It is a mixture of barley and corn and maize and canary grass and other seeds all beneficial to wild birds, as well as the game birds.

And finally, I went back out there at 11.30 to have a look at the annual Harty Church flower festival. This tiny church sits on the edge of the marsh and is also on some of its highest ground. The photo doesn't do the various stalls justice, there were so many of them, but I was after a picture of the church itself, which was decked out inside with huge numbers of flowers.

The rear of the church has little ground but looks down to The Swale and across to Oare nature reserve, it is a beautiful site.

And to round things off, how about this from Rupert Brooke:-

"Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, "Through glory and ecstacy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old..." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, others lips", said I,
Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"

Heatwave Heaven

2011-06-27T10:57:00.012+01:00

Well, well, it was the fourth fabulous morning on the trot today on the reserve and with the temperature approaching 25 degrees by 8.00, it was hot, sticky and sunny and for me personally, superb. I'd be more than happy to have a month of this weather - a few hours on the reserve in the morning, out on my bike cycling around Minster at lunchtime, sunbathing in the garden with a cold beer in the afternoon and sitting out till after dark in the evening - who needs winter!

Oh well, back from daydreaming and the heat brought out more butterflies today although they mostly remain Meadow Browns and Whites still. But I did spot the first Small Skipper. The reserve lways has hundreds of these through July and August so hopefully that one is the forerunner of them all. Lastly, I found this Small Tort. along the seawall, although several were seen in the Spring it still remains a reserve rarety at the moment.

With birds at a premium wild flowers still remain the most interesting subject at the moment and here we have Milk Thistle and Ragwort.

Lady's Bedstraw.

Sea Lavender on the saltings.

Seed heads of Goatsbeard along the top of the sea wall.

And this Emmits Cast with a Birds Foot Trefoil topping.

Midge is lucky in that when she gets hot she can just wander into the fleet for a cool down, however at the moment the mud is often deeper than the water and she ends up coming out dirtier than she went in.

On the subject of water levels take a look at this old and well used by me, ditch crossing, at one stage in the winter the water covered that.

Likewise, the Delph Fleet continues to drop in depth.

However, the regular showers over the last couple of weeks have at least freshened up the surface grass and kept it a nice shade of green as these cattle would agree with.

Well that's it, push bike is about to come out of the garage, shorts are on and another hard day's retirement coming up!

Wandering Dew

2011-06-26T10:33:00.015+01:00

Quite a mixed bag from my wandering round this morning, but first- I left home at 06.00 this morning in blue skies and very warm sunshine. I stopped briefly at Capel Corner, along the Harty Road to admire Capel Fleet in the early sunshine.
(As always these photos are better viewed by double clicking on each and enlarging)

I then moved on to the reserve, to find this:-

and this - the reserve was being covered in bouts of mist and was wet through with heavy dew.

It allowed me to take this classic type of photo though of typical grazing marsh, home sweet home as far as I'm concerned.

Another effect of the dew, with an almost autumnal feel, was these cobwebs being lit up. This morning, instead of the usual upright build of the cobwebs, most had been built horizontal, like trampolines - perhaps the spiders were expecting insects to drop in rather than pass by!

One of the things that often fascinates me is how many blogs only post photos of the more glamorous wild flowers and ignore the commoner ones, which can be just as attractive. Take this clump of White Clover for instance.

Come in closer and the flowers get even better. Now if you double click on this picture and enlarge it even more, the flower structure is as good as any orchid - I think so anyway.

By the time that I'd got onto this track across the farmland the sun had started to burn through in ernest and it was getting very warm. I found several of these black slugs, who'd obviously been out on an overnight excursion and were now trying to get back to the shelter of vegetation before the track got any dryer and warmer.

Whilst on the farmland I sneaked a look at one of the shooting ponds, known as Flight Ponds. This shows only half of its length and it borders the reserve further on. These particular ponds were specially created last summer specifically for shooting purposes and now, a year later, are beginning to look really attractive for all manner of wildlife. There were ducks, Coots, Moorhens, Sedge Warblers and dragonflies there this morning. Its hard to believe that in just over eight weeks time that the shooting season will begin again, but here at this site, I see two compensations. I have become quite friendly with the chap that leases the ponds for duck shooting and I know that he shoots very sparingly over them and only takes small numbers of ducks during the season. Secondly, as a result of that small price to be paid during the winter months, wildlife in general benefits all year round from a valuable piece of habitat that wouldn't of normally been there. I guess that the more extreme of you will still cry foul but I can assure you that there are far worse examples of shooting on Sheppey, that give far less back. If you take the blinkers off sometimes and take the time to talk to some of these guys you will realise that there are often things to be gained from both their activities and working with them.

And lastly, as the sun now burnt down really hotly, Marsh Harriers were riding the thermals and I came across this family of swans sitting on the ditchbank.........

before returning to the water and returning to their journey round.

Fabulous Friday

2011-06-24T11:20:00.011+01:00

Wow, I had a fabulous wander round part of the reserve and the neighbouring farmland early this morning in near perfect weather. Clear blue skies, warm sunshine, and for once, only light winds. It was one of those days when you didn't bother with counting things, you just enjoyed being immersed in all the joys of a summer's morning in the countryside and let everything else go over your head.

The first part of my walk took me through part of the reserve where I came across both the Spiney Restharrow and Poppies below. Spiney Resharrow is extremely well named, double click on the photo to enlarge it and look at its spines, its quite viscious and is found in large numbers in one particular field.

Walking past the "S Bend Ditch" there were several Little Egrets, a good number of Black-tailed Godwits and three Green Sandpipers all utilizing the shallow water and soft mud. Its the second day running that the Green Sandpipers have been there and possibly indicates that autumn migration is beginning to start, despite its name it normally does in July.
A depressing observation there was the sight of a couple of rabbits with myxamatosis. Having been culled to near extinction last winter there have been encouraging signs that their numbers were re-building again but the return of this annual disease will quickly reduce them again - its a real pain because the reserve needs a decent number of rabbits as part of the food chain.
After a little more meandering around the reserve and finding little else of note I left the reserve and began to walk across part of the neighbouring farmland. Along the track-sides here large clumps of Marshmallow and Black Horehound seemed to have been energised by the sun and the warmthand were offering themselves up to every passing bee or butterfly. In the main this was mostly Large and Green-veined Whites and some Meadow Browns but I wasn't worried about their ordinaryness, I just took the time to sit amongst it all for awhile and enjoy it. See this Green-veined White on Horehound (a poor photo I'm afraid).

Even Midge got in on the act and sat there and watched the world go by.

Returning on my journey round I arrived at the very eastern end of Capel Fleet. Originally it would of continued past here before entering The Swale half a mile or so further on but a new seawall and part reclamation many years ago left it ending here in its original form. The large reed beds either side have gradually reduced its width but it still remains an attractive piece of habitat that this morning was ringing with the calls of many Bearded Tits.

Sandwiched between the end of Capel Fleet and the reserve are two fields that the RSPB aquired a couple of years ago with the intention of adding to the grazing marsh habitat there. After landscaping them last year they were then sown last autumn with grass seed and some other beneficial mixtures. This year the two fields have been allowed to run to seed so far and look a tad overgrown as the photo below shows.

However, its what they're overgrown with that matters. In those fields, all going to seed, there is a wide range of grasses, rape, corn, barley, marshmallow, Sow thistle, and a really valuable grass, known to us locals as Canary Grass. (See below) It appears a lot around Harty as it is in the mixtures that the two farmers sow around their field edges as cover/field strips for both game birds and wild birds. Its seeds are well loved by the smaller birds and, as its name implies, by canaries, and mine have been almost reared on the stuff this year.
What it means is that when these fields are cut in the near future they are going leave behind a real harvest of food for a whole range of birds this autumn and winter. Great stuff!

And finally, I'll leave you with some opening words from the Wind in the Willows - Chapter Seven.

"The Willow-Wren was twittering his thin little song, hidden himself in the dark selvedge of the river bank. Though it was past ten o'clock at night, the sky still clung to and retained some lingering skirts of light from the departed day; and the sullen heats of the torrid afternoon broke up and rolled away at the dispersing touch of the cool fingers of the short mid-summer night. Mole lay stretched on the bank, still panting from the stress of the fierce day that had been cloudless from dawn to late sunset.......it was still too hot to think of staying indoors, so he lay on some cool dock leaves, and thought over the past day and its doings, and how good they all had been".

How sad that some people cannot enjoy such days!

Boredom and Books

2011-06-22T19:38:00.004+01:00

Its getting a struggle at the moment to find anything new and recordable on the reserve at the moment and as a result I've been walking out into the farmland a bit more and the RSPB fields alongside the reserve.
Driving along the Harty Road yesterday morning the Barn Owl above got up from alongside the road and, ignoring a nice fence post to perch on, chose instead this telegraph pole tensioning wire. It stayed there just long for me to glide to a halt alongside and quickly take this photo through the open car window.

The weather is forecast to warm up considerably on Sunday and the beginning of next week, let's hope so, and all those people who complained when we had the earlier hot and sunny weather, and who are now complaining about the wet and windy weather, can return to complaining about it being too warm!

On the subject of the weather, while it was raining this afternoon I began to dust my many book shelves and found out the real reason for the word dust jackets, there was plenty of it! Anyway, as you do, I started to reappraise some of them and to trace where some of my interest in the great outside began and put a few together as below.
Obvious from many of my previous blogs is my love for the one book that I first read as a child and still read at regular intervals now - The Wind in the Willows. For me there is no equal to that book and when I feel like an injection of nostaglia for a particular season then out comes the book and I read the relevant chapter. The chapter "Wayfarers All" where Ratty is struggling to let go of summer, despite autumn happening all around him, is something many of us must experience at times, or in my case most years.
The next great book that I first read when I was probably only around 12-13 was Peter Scott's autobiography of his life from birth to 1960. That man's early life was a fabulous tale of so many different adventures, all connected to wildlife and so inspirational to me. Many years later I also bought the book by Elspeth Huxley which cronicled his whole life and was once again a fascinating read.
Not far behind Peter Scott in terms of making great strides in respect of the conservation of wildfowl was Jeffrey Harrison. Possibly not everybody's cup of tea because of his passion for wildfowling but boy did he give plenty back to conservation and was intrumental in setting up the Sevenoaks Wildfowl Trust.

Who else, oh yes, Gavin Maxwell and his "Ring of Bright Water" about his otters in Scotland. If you haven't read it, his life story by Douglas Botting is hard to put down and you will read about a complex man who, like Peter Scott, had many diverse adventures as he meandered through life before Mijbil and Edal entered his life as young otters.
There is also my battered old copy of "A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe" by Peterson, Mountfort and Hollom. A book surely, on most serious birdwatcher's shelves and even today one that is very hard to beat. It must of been sensational when it first came out in 1954.

And finally, although many more led me along my path, there is the truly wonderful " Wildings - The Secret Garden of Eileen Soper". This beautiful and touching book is illustrated throughout by her superb water colours of wildlife in and around her huge and overgrown garden. And if you don't know who Eileen Soper is, well she illustrated amongst many others, all of Enid Blyton's Famous Five books, which if you scroll down, you will see I have the whole 21 of, all in their dust jackets - they really do hark back to an age of innocence in the countryside that only us old'ns can truly remember.
The dusting? - it never actually got finished.

Two Reserves

2011-06-19T12:28:00.003+01:00

Getting up at 05.30 this morning, as I do every day, there was clear blue skies and sunshine. I quickly cleaned and fed my canaries and with clouds beginning to appear to the west in an increasing wind I quickly sped off to Shellness Hamlet in the hope of enjoying a sunny spell on the Point there. The sign below will explain why I was there but it wasn't to be under sunny skies, with some speed the clouds arrived just after me and out on the Point under cloudy skies and in a surprisingly cold and gusty wind it was very un-June like.
Just 5 weeks ago I was reading how June and July were going to be heatwave months, with temperatures sometimmes exceeding 100 degrees but with the Longest Day only two days away and this unsettled weather forecast to last well in to July, it seems we're about to miss out on some long and balmy evenings this year.

With the tide out this morning there wasn't too many birds to see along the beach, although there were a few Barwits out on the mudflats. Along the upper reaches of the beach there were some Ringed Plovers with chicks of various ages, some nesting Oystercatchers, some Little Terns and two my surprise, a Red-legged Partridge with some two/three day old chicks!
As you can see from the two photos below, a large stretch of beach is roped off and explanatory signs giving the reason why but we still find the public inside this area, fishermen being the worst offenders. Its amazing how some people still can't accept that some bits of countryside, even on nature reserves, still need to be out of bounds, normally for obvious reasons as the sign states. The whole point of a nature reserve is to preserve a special piece of habitat from both disturbance and damage for both posterity and wildlife but some people, including those interested in these things, still need some convincing at times when you say you can't go there.

Also on the beach I found a few specimens of my favourite caterpiller, of the Cinnabar Moth, feeding on the much maligned Ragwort plant.

Yesterday a rare event occurred, I travelled off of Sheppey to visit another nature reserve, part of the Stodmarsh complex at Grove Ferry. Dave Rogers, one of Natural England's Kent Team managers had recently voluntary left NE (its a job to see how NE can continue to exist as a credible force for many more years with lack of workforce and finances) and had invited friends and ex-colleagues down to Grove Ferry for a two hour walk round and then an excellent buffet at lunch time in the Grove Ferry Inn.
We walked round the section opposite the Inn and it was the first time I had ever been there and it was nice to see places I've seen written about many times such as The Ramp and the David Feast hide, especially as David Feast was with us. However, for me, as well as the fact that there was far too much reed bed and not enough open water, it was a quiet day birdwise and little of note was seen. Mind you, given the fact that much time was spent looking down to avoid numerous dog poos along the paths, that could of been the reason, they certainly do seem to have a problem down there with un-curteous dog walkers.
It was lovely scenery though and must be great in winter when there is more flooding and winter wildfowl numbers are higher and the Inn was great inside and serves a nice pint of Sheps.

Super Sunny Start

2011-06-12T11:32:00.011+01:00

Just as yesterday I arrived at the reserve at 06.30 but today I managed over two hours of lovely warm, sunny and wind free weather before the wind and cloud eventually arrived to spoil the day.
I may of given the impression yesterday by going on about the mud and wet that we'd had a fair bit of rain but that has not been the case, only the top inch or so was wet. The ground under that remained bone dry and rock hard and one of the effects of that which is fairly common in such conditions is pictured below. Its something that people might not realise occurs but unless moles can find the same hole to re-enter the soil they find it impossible to dig their way back into the hard ground and then get stranded on the surface and eventually die.

On a more pleasant note I came across this juvenile Coot that was making its way along the edge of a ditch. What broods that I've seen this year have all been of only one or two chicks.

A few more butterflies were about this morning, mainly Meadow Browns and Small Heaths, but I did come across my first two Painted Ladies of the year. Unfortunately my little camera needs me to get fairly close to them to get photos, which scares them off, so its back to nice easy static things like wildflowers. As always they are better viewed by double clicking on each photo.
Firstly is this Black Horehound.

Scentless Mayweed

Birdsfoot Trefoil.

A bit gruesome I know but I also came across this spot on the farmland where de-horning of the cattle obviously took place at some time.

My little garden has managed to look quite good this year so couldn't resist a couple of shots of it. Wherever possible I have planted flowers and shrubs beneficial to bees and butterflies. Sitting alongside a large clump of Marjoram on a sunny afternoon watching its flowers covered in various types of bees is a simple pleasure as enjoyable as finding any rare bird. To the side you can just see the flight for my canaries aviary.

And lastly, taken through my conservatory window, something that is a normal sight to many bloggers but a rare and exciting sight for me, a family party of Goldfinches on my feeders. Hopefully my neighbours, who are further away than they look, didn't think I was aiming the camera at their bedroom.

Topsy- Turvey weather (seems like April)

2011-06-11T09:54:00.011+01:00

I arrived at the reserve this morning at 06.30 to find cloudless blues skies, warming sun and no wind - super, but it took exactly an hour for that to change. By 07.30 a chilly NW wind had sprung up and was bringing in increasingly heavy, grey clouds that began to blot out the sun. The second hour was spent walking round with an eye to the north where the clouds were turning increasingly blacker and did eventually drop some brief light rain.
Here you can see the onset of the weather change.

One of the disadvantages of the heavy showers that we had yesterday evening here is the change in conditions as you walk round. Most of the paths round the reserve are soil based and this morning, with the top couple of inches now being muddy, my walking boots gradually found mud building up underneath them until I gradually became a few inches taller. Coupled with that, with vegetation being tall at the moment, as soon as you had to walk through any of it, which was dripping wet, trousers quickly became dripping wet as well. Personally I would of been happy to have enjoyed the bone dry and sunny weather for another couple of months, its so much easier and enjoyable to walk round in!

My route round was planned to take me through the gate below but with this bull on sentry duty I decided that perhaps discrection was the better option. These bulls are very placid and I only took this photo from around fifty yards away but there are limits to my bravery and that gate was one of them.

When he brought in reinforcements I was even more certain that I wasn't going that way. (Double click this photo to enlarge it and look at the superb specimen of a bull that the RH one is)

And when it got to three of them "beefing" it up you can see that I had already started to retreat. In reality, I suspect that it was not this arthritic old Volunteer that had captured their attention, more likely the delicious and "in season" cow that they were encircling, nostrils flared and testing the breeze for the right scents and so I left them to fight it out for the honour of being her beau.

The breeding season on the reserve is winding down fast now and with it the bird numbers. Many Lapwings are already forming small post-breeding flocks and moving away and they in particular have had a very poor breeding season on the reserve. Many pairs just haven't bothered to breed at all and those that have have reared few chicks to a fully fledged stage. Breeding now will be mainly left to the Reed and Sedge warblers in the reed beds and the odd late brood of ducks.
As part of an exercise taking place across a lot of North Kent this year we have put a mink trap into one of our wider ditches, as you can see below. Mink have'nt been recorded on the reserve and still haven't so far but it was encouraging this morning to find fresh Water Vole droppings on the platform. Its always nice to get confirmation that they are still active on the reserve although we rarely see them.
Whilst looking at this trap I became aware of a drake Wigeon swimming away from me which eventually struggled to fly about fifty yards further along the ditch. Possibly it was a winged bird left behind after the winter's shooting activities.

Earlier in the week I drove down to Shellness Hamlet and walked out towards Shellness Point and was able there to add another couple of wild flowers to the list this year. One that does very well with numerous plants on the higher beach there is Viper's Bugloss. The flowers act as a bit of a cafe for the bees along that fairly barren stretch of sand and shingle.

Against one of the groynes was also this specimen of the Yellow-horned Poppy.

Rain, Rain and even more Rain

2011-06-06T08:52:00.003+01:00

Well, after almost three months of near drought conditions the weather finally broke here on Sheppey and since yesterday afternoon we have currently had around 20 hours of near non-stop rain, often quite heavy and prolonged. This morning it is cold, windy and very wet everywhere and it looks very un-summery outside and a visit to the reserve and a soaking, will not be taken today.
Whilst sitting here this morning, staring out of the study window and unable to even see the sea just half a mile or so away through the gloom and the rain, I mused on the fact that I am now in my 25th year as a Voluntary Warden at The Swale NNR, a quarter of a century makes it sound even longer! Looking at my acceptance letter from the Nature Conservancy Council, as Natural England then was, it appears I started the role in February 1987, although the other Volunteer still active there, Rod Smith, started well before me. But how did I come to be a Volunteer, well like many a good idea, it started as a result of Friday and Saturday night drinking sessions.

By around 1985/6 my twenty odd year association with Elmley was coming to an end. I have explained in previous postings how I worked through Elmley with the Kent River Authority in the 1960's and then spent many years rabbiting and eel netting there before and after befriending the first RSPB manager there, Peter Makepeace. However after he had left for Dungeness, the following year became difficult as the new manager became increasingly disenchanted with both our friendship and interests and so it became necessary to move on. That left me floundering around for a year or so, with no real freedom anywhere else to wander about with my dog as I had done at Elmley and for a while I was reduced to wandering along the seawalls at Shellness and Harty, although during the summer months I did get permission to walk the length of Capel Fleet towards Windmill Creek.
Now during this year or so in the wilderness so to speak, it was the habit of myself and some friends on Friday and Saturday nights to drink in Eastchurch village. However by mid-1986 many of the regulars from the village became noticeably absent, and it appeared that they had begun to transfer their custom to the Ferry House Inn at Harty. Two youngish couples and a single guy had taken over the pub and had begun to attract a lot of trade with their easy going attitude, it also transpired that the single guy was what would now be called a twitcher. So I began going down there myself, or with my wife at the time, and it what a time we would have at weekends. As is often the case, all us locals formed a large back bar clique that thanks to the pub's remoteness, were able to drink well into the early hours of the morning. The locals consisted of Eastchurch regulars, farm hands, a farm manager, some regular birdwatchers and a few others including one who turned out to be the manager of the nearby Swale NNR. We became quite adept at negotiating the twists and turns of the Harty Road in a car while less than sober and accidents were surprisingly rare, although ice and snow did see the odd car end up in the ditch. Not surprisingly, snow, rather than the threat of the poilce, was the quickest way to clear the pub of custom. It only took somebody to walk in and say "its just started snowing" and the thought of getting stuck along the Harty Road would cause a mass exodus.

What made the following year or so more special was the fact that at regular intervals, especially in the summer, the landlords would throw a free after hours buffet or BBQ party. These were great events, with only the after hours clique invited, and from closing time onwards we served ourselves with beer and left the money on the counter while the landlords got stuck into the party. Great weekend nights, especially on hot summer nights BBQ-ing outside on the terrace till the early hours. Very happy days in great company.

Anyway, one Sunday morning in late 1986 I was walking the dog along the Shellness track as normal, doing a bit of birdwatching, when the manager of The Swale NNR, Phil Holmes drove past. He stopped and after we'd spent some time discussing the previous night's escapades in the Ferry House Inn he suddenly said to me have you thought of becoming a Volunteer Warden on the reserve as you like being out all the time with your dog. I asked what it entailed and he said basically, the opportunity to do your own thing wandering around the reserve when you like and keeping an eye on it and recording and supplying me with, everything that you see.
A great offer which I was over the moon to accept and so by Feb 1987 I was accepted by the NCC and given a Volunteer's authorisation card and a key to the access gates and joined four or five other Volunteers at the time, all doing our various bits for the reserve. We sometimes had Volunteer's days out to other reserves, often had monthly meetings at the manager's house and still enjoyed a good party at the pub at weekends.

The NCC in those days was an organisation with real national environmental clout and budgets and in Phil Holmes had an excellent manager who maintained a really good reserve. Why, in those days, they even supplied the manager with a company house until he decided to buy his own. Sadly, successive governments diluted the power of the NCC, whilst re-naming it, to leave the under-staffed and un-budgeted sorry state that is Natural England today.

I found one of the original reserve leaflets in my file and the front page is shown below, hopefully it will enlarge OK.

Summer Returns

2011-06-02T11:29:00.015+01:00

It was an early morning walk round the reserve today under blue and cloudless skies and a very warm to hot sun, quite superb.
The only really outstanding birds today were Blackwits, Med. Gulls and a Water Rail that flew across a track between ditches, right in front of me. After that it was back to recording mostly wild flowers that are to be found around the reserve.
Having said that, the first photo is of a web full of Ground Lackey moth caterpillars out on the saltings. This is quite a rare moth these days and not found much outside of North Kent and Essex. (Double click on this photo to enlarge it and its quite amazing)

Whilst crossing the Delph Fleet a family party of Bearded Tits worked their way through the reed beds alongside me and I managed to snatch this photo of what I believe is a female before they were gone. (This one also enlarges quite well by double clicking on it)

So, back to the flowers and this first one is Grass Vetchling, a member of the pea family which has just the one flower per stem.

Water Forget-me Not along one of the ditch banks.

Wild Migonette.

Crow Garlic growing along the seawall. It has little spring onion like bulbs at the base and an onion-like smell.

This tiny flower is the Cut-leaved Cranesbill. It grows in quite large clumps along the top of the sea wall.

Also along the seaward side of the sea wall is a favourite of mine, the Sea Wormwood. It doesn't have spectacular flowers and is mainly a foliage plant but when rubbed it has a really pleasant and aromatic smell. Often when I've been handling something smelly, I've rubbed this plant in my hands to make them smell better.

And lastly, the seed head of the Goatsbeard.

Not So Summery

2011-05-30T09:43:00.010+01:00

This last week has been a tad disappointing weather wise culminating with early Saturday morning on the reserve being the coldest I've been since back in March. This morning wasn't a lot better, with overcast skies and a chilly wind, look at the photo below which demonstrates how gloomy that it was and it also affected the quality of the photos. Butterflies and the like have also been very noticeable by their absence and therefore it has beem difficult to find much of interest to blog about this week.

However there are always these snails along the top of the seawall, hundreds in fact, unfortunately walking along there tends to be accompanied by a crunching sound at regular intervals. My wildlife books suggests that they might be White-lipped snails.

The cows and their calves on the reserve have now been joined by three strapping Aberdeen Angus bulls, really lovely specimens, and walking past them across the grazing marsh this chap seemed reasonably happy for me to get quite close. I think he was more interested in what he was there for than me and Midge.

Just past him I came across this Redshank's nest tucked away in a tuft of grass, probably not the best of places to nest when you consider all those hooves walking about.

The swan family is still doing OK, although in recent years we have found that once they achieve almost full size as juveniles in the autumn, that is when they tend to die for some reason.

Close by in one of the ditches, this large spread of water lily is just coming into flower, it is normally quite huge by the autumn and is normally used as a roosting raft by various ducks and coots.

I've put this one in to show how fast The Flood is drying back now, I imagine it will be totally dry by the end of June. There's nothing we can do about it then until we get substantial rain in the autumn.

Back at home the Blackbirds are still suffering. Having failed to rear any young because of the Magpie attacks, they are now struggling to find much to eat because of the rock hard ground. As a result I have been putting out old apples and sultanas for them but even here they seem to suffer at the hands of other birds. The minute any food is put out down swoop large flocks of those avian locusts, Starlings and within minutes everything has gone - a real pain.
There has been one small success this last week however, the Magpies that unfortunately nested in a neighbour's tree and fed on Blackbird eggs and young, fledged three young. One immediately dropped into my garden in front of Midge and another was caught by a neighbouring cat - two less around next breeding season!