Is this really Summer?

When I got up this morning at 05.30 it seemed pretty clear to me that a reserve visit wasn't going to be on the cards any time soon - it was raining steadily and very windy. So I settled for having some breakfast and reading the Sunday papers and during that time the rain eased to next to nothing. At the same time, every time that I got up, both the dogs would rush to the front door to remind me that surely it was going out time. That's one of the many beauties of having dogs, they never allow you to go a whole day doing nothing, they force you to be active, weather conditions have no effect on their lives.
So, around 08.00, with the rain pretty much stopped, we set off and arrived at the reserve, as it promptly started raining hard again! Not only that, it was very gloomy and there was a strong SW wind blowing, is it really summer? And so we set off, the dogs rushing ahead to get to the old salt-working hillock where rabbits abound and me with my coat zipped up to under the chin and hands in pockets to keep warm. By the time that I was making my way across the marsh to the rabbit hillock the rain had stopped and I was just left in a blustery wind and like a tortoise, my neck gradually began to extend from where it had sunk into the depths of my coat. Ellie, the youngest of the two terriers, was meanwhile chasing rabbits at full speed. The hillock is covered in both stinging nettles and rabbit holes and she works on the principle that if she runs round the site at full speed she will ultimately come upon a rabbit that wasn't expecting to see her wizz by and occasionally it works.
Today I was in no mood for hanging around though and so called both the dogs to me and we carried on across the marsh, following the line of the Delph fleet as I did so. I stopped at one stage and listened to the non-stop and monotonous singing of the Reed Warblers in the tall phragmites reed beds and pondered the fact that the reeds were being severely buffeted by the winds. The warblers build a nest by placing it between 3-4 reed stems and inter-twining some of the material around the stems to hold the nest in place. However when the stems are being pulled in all directions by the strength of the wind it hard not to imagine the nests being pulled apart and the contents spilled into the water below.
Tomorrow night and into Tuesday morning gale force winds and heavy rain showers are forecast and so any relief from the weather will only be short-lived for these birds and their nests. We still seem some way short of getting any settled spell of proper summer weather and it's getting quite depressing.

For a while, more raindrops briefly flew in on the wind and so I made my way to the seawall hide and sat in there for a while, looking at wavelets being pushed along the surface of the Delph, the non-summery view and pondered where I'm at in life. The answer was pretty much as I commented to another blogger earlier today, it's basically about enjoying still being able to get out and about as a 68 year old with arthritic feet and other minor problems. I don't obsess these days about being able to ID everything that I see, or to keep tick lists and stats sheets about every year that now goes by. There's a whole new generation out there now, Twittering and Face-booking their natural history achievements to everybody, and ever challenging each other to better a macro'd to death photograph.  
No, these days I'm happy to just wander round the reserve with the dogs, see what I see, muse on my fifty-odd years of experience being involved in the countryside and basically leave it at that.

And now, dragging myself out of the stupor of a bad day's weather, how's the reserve doing at the moment. Well for a lot of the birds, such as the waders and plovers, the breeding season is beginning to come to an end and as the youngsters start to fledge, it won't be long before some post-breeding flocks of Lapwings begin to form. A lot of the continuing breeding will be with species such as the summer visitors - Reed and Sedge Warblers for example. I had a wander round 50% of the reserve's reed beds yesterday in an attempt to gauge how many pairs of both species were nesting and the Reed Warblers appear to be looking quite good. The only problem is that because of the width and breadth of the reed beds you cannot get in and actually find nest, you can only count singing male birds and use that as an estimate on pairs.

But as the breeding season gradually draws to a close, dryness begins to take over and wildfowl and waders drift away, wild flowers and butterflies become the main interest for me at least. Two types of wild flower currently in full flower on the reserve are the staple of any grazing meadow, the Buttercup and a flower of roadside verges and waste land, the purple-flowered Salsify.

Back to Reality

Well, after spending a bit of time in the past, it's now time to fast forward fifty years and rejoin current life for a time. Last Sunday, Di and I attended a midday event at the Elmley barn whereby a very large number of friends and colleagues of the late Steve Gordon had gathered to celebrate and remember Steve's life. Steve, who was far too young when he died last December from the effects of a brain tumour, had lived on Elmley for around thirty years and had been for many years the much respected and loved farm/reserve manager there.
The photos below don't do justice to the large number of people that attended on Sunday and the car park there was overflowing, although one of his friends got round that problem by arriving in his own biplane and landing it alongside the barn, that was pretty cool.

It was an extremely pleasant couple of hours and it was astonishing to realise just how many people that Steve had befriended and been loved by, from all corners of Britain and Europe, and he has been greatly missed over the last few months. Personally, it was great to meet so many people that I had known for years but not seen for a number of them and to talk about both Steve and where we are at in our own lives these days. I first met Steve in the early 1980's when he joined a badminton club in Sheerness that I played at and we played there for a few years. I also met him occasionally at Elmley in those days, when I was out there on my weekly rabbit and eel catching forays. Those were the days when the staff at Elmley were a colourful bunch of guys who farmed hard and drank hard, mostly on large quantities of home-made beer of dubious quality! In a lot of ways they carried on a lot of the old-fashioned and historical ways of Elmley and in doing so it meant that transition to a fully fledged nature reserve only happened gradually and smoothly.
In recent years, as Steve became responsible for the Swale NNR as well as Elmley, then we saw each other and co-operated a lot more and it was then that his remakable qualities really came to the fore.
Huge thanks must go to Philip Merricks and his family for making both this the event and the Elmley NNR possible.

Moving on to The Swale NNR, and May, like April this year, has been a pretty cool and dry affair with really warm and sunny days very few and far between. But at last, the grass has begun growing well now and both the small cattle herds and wildlife are enjoying the benefits.

The down side are that water levels are still dropping too fast as can be seen by the pale tide-line at the base of the Delph reed beds..............

...........and the fact that several of the shallow rills created across the grazing marsh to provide wet and muddy areas and insect life for plover chicks, have now dried up.

But it's not all doom and gloom, latest Lapwing breeding counts are showing a reasonable number of hatched chicks after a cold and dry start and there is the potential to better last year's number of fledged chicks. There are also more duck and geese young being seen, the Avocets have done well and are now dispersing their chicks away from the main breeding site and Yellow Wagtail pairs are currently up. A bit more regular warmth and no winds are now what is needed.

The track through the farmland spinney onto the reserve is now looking well overgrown on each side, making it attractive at the moment to both Whitethroats and the odd pair of Sedge Warblers and a Blackcap.

And amid all that vegetation is one large clump of Comfrey, giving much sustenance to both bees and other insects. May as always, is one of the best months to be out and about in the countryside.

And one last thing. Across the road from me is a short terrace of old houses with traditional chimneys and their pots, home for many, many years to breeding Jackdaws. I'm always fascinated when watching the birds drop down the chimney pots to their nests inside as to how they always pop back out just as easily. The pots are 2-3 feet deep, with smooth sides and of a width that doesn't allow the birds wings to fully open out - so how do they do it - it's a mystery to me.

Young Love Tries To Move On

After the breakdown of my first romance in Sept 1964 and a short spell of getting over it, I decided that there were plenty more fish in the sea and so moved on and cast my net. The result, over the next year, was almost sod all caught, clearly I didn't have the appeal that was necessary, which wasn't surprising.  I was 17 going on 15, and girls my age were looking at guys closer to 20 years old, plus I was growing my hair longer, as was the fashion then, I wanted to look like the Stones, the Kinks - everybody on "Ready Steady Go". That first year growing my hair just didn't work, my hair just seemed to grow thick and tight like sheep's wool and at one stage it looked like I had a German helmet made of hair stuck on my head. But I stuck at it and by mid 1966 and later, coupled with a moustache, I had eventually achieved a look that resembled the guys in the charts and seemed to do OK with the girls, but in late 1964 that was an awful long way away.

So it was simply back to spending an awful lot of boring evenings round the house of my old school mate in Minster. We cycled to and fro to each other's houses, we played chess, we hung around with the girl next door and her mates and dreamed of romance and pop stardom but in reality achieved none of it. But by the end of 1964 we had achieved something, despite being under-age, we had discovered the pub, the "Halfway House" pub to be exact. Today, it's one of the few pubs on Sheppey that still remains open, as you can see below, but back then, even in the small area known as the Halfway, there were two pubs within a few hundred yards of each other, the "Halfway House" and the "Oddfellows" and for the next several moths we frequented them both.

Unfortunately the "Oddfellows", the large white building below, ceased to be a pub years ago and is now a collection of rather tatty flats. It's hard to believe that the entrance door used to be where the middle downstairs window is.

Also, in November 1964, my work location changed. As part of my continuing training as a Groundsman, the Kent Education Committee (Estates Dept) decided that several months working at two other sites the other side of Maidstone was necessary. So I was firstly transferred to their plant nursery at Boughton Monchelsea and later, to the Maidstone Police HQ sports grounds. This entailed the daily chore of catching the 7.30 commuter coach from Sheerness to Maidstone and then a trolley bus out to Loose, close to where I worked. It also meant that every Tuesday I had to attend one of the Maidstone colleges in order to learn about and pass, exams in horticulture and agricultural machinery, which I eventually did.
I was not at all happy, I was getting home two later than I would working on Sheppey. However, as is always the way on daily commutes people form little cliques and normally sit in the same seat each day. It soon became clear that a pretty girl sitting near the front was always going to be on the same coach and that she normally had the attention of two rather flash guys a year or two older than me, in suits. However, because I got on the coach a stop before them it meant that the seat next to her was always empty and so I quickly claimed that as "my" seat. So that's where I always sat and for the next eight months we became good travelling companions and I fantasised many times about how nice it would be to ask her out, but never did. I bought her chocolates for that Christmas, I sneaked a kiss or two for New Year and she even visited the "Oddfellows" pub a couple of times when I was there. Sometimes if she absent with sickness, I would even ring her at home to ask after her health. But despite us being the same age, I'm pretty sure that she never saw me as anything else but a pretty immature boy with funny hair who was OK to travel to and fro to work with. Eventually I believe, she did in fact go out with one of the suits. When I was eventually transferred back to Sheppey in July 1965 I rarely ever saw her again and anyway, soon after that, my world went off in a totally different direction to the one that I imagine her one did.
Two things that I do recall from those coach journeys were both the route and the lack of public holiday. In those days the A249 did not go past the bottom of Detling Hill as it does now, it turned into and through the little village of Detling and came out further down. Secondly, we still travelled over to work at Maidstone on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve and worse still - New Years Day! It wasn't a public holiday then and that was always a difficult morning after being out till after midnight.

Back home my social scene changed very little during the first half of 1965. When our meagre funds allowed (wages then were c. £5-6 a week, but you could get drunk on £1) my best friend and I visited the two Halfway pubs and very rarely a social event such as a dance. In the winter of that first half of 1965 we had also bought electric guitars and small amplifiers, in my case a bass one because I wanted to be like Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones. For the next few months we spent many noisy days and nights at my friend's house trying to convince ourselves that we were turning into a group and thoroughly annoying his parents and neighbours in the process. Purely because I didn't have the patience to learn the basics of bass guitar first, I never did learn how to play that bass guitar properly. However by mid-summer, after I'd been turned on to Bob Dylan by a guy at work, we ditched the electric stuff and bought cheap acoustic guitars and then I did it properly and became a reasonable folk guitarist. From then on, while the likes of Bob Dylan and Donovan became our principal interest, we also began to expand out into all kinds of folk and blues music, something that stuck with me for the rest of my life.

Aside from that I also grew all manner of vegetables and flowers in my parents garden and my greenhouse, with some of the plants unofficially brought back from the nursery where I was working at Boughton Monchelsea. I still occasionally visited the older groundsman that I used to work with, still cycled to and fro to my best friends house in Minster - in short it was a pretty unspectacular time in my life but by late summer it was to change quite dramatically. In July I transferred back to Sheppey and joined a gang of men that travelled round several school grounds, each week, maintaining their sports fields, etc and then on Sheerness Carnival night in early August I met the gang of long-haired and like-minded youths who became my way of life both overnight and for several years afterwards. It's an event previously written up by me a couple of years ago but perhaps I'll re-visit it soon.

One last point before I go, there are one or two readers of this blog who are old ex-Sheppey followers and aside from the demise of the "Oddfellows" pub pictured above, they might be interested to see the following photos.
Below is the old Victoria Working Men Club (the VC), for so long part of Sheerness's drinking history, as it looks today - now a block of apartments.

Below in the background, is the Conservative Club (the CC) and still going strong.

This is the old "Prince of Waterloo" pub at the top of Minster Hill, closed for several years and in the process of being changed into a restaurant.

Lastly, the old "British Queen" pub, by Oak Lane, Minster, closed for several years and now a private house.

Young Love

51 years ago, in 1964, Sheppey was still a green and pleasant land clinging on to much of the countryside that had characterised it for many, many years. Minster village was surrounded by narrow lanes with trees and hedgerows, wide grassy meadows and even the odd orchard. Despite living in Sheerness I spent a lot of my early teenage years in and around Minster because my best friend from school lived there, as did several other friends of both sexes.

51 years ago in 1964 I met and courted my first proper girlfriend (half a century ago - gawd!). It was the late Spring of that year and I was shortly to turn seventeen years of age and she was a year or so younger and in her last year at school. She was slim, fair-haired and had an appealing streak of rebelliousness about her that I knew from seeing her with a group of my Minster friends. Despite being almost seventeen I was still a tad immature and it would be another year before I plunged headlong into a whole new group of friends and the hedonism and music of the "Swinging Sixties" that grew me up and shaped my future life. But in that late Spring of 1964 we were still on the cusp of such things, our horizons were very limited and I was working as a trainee groundsman on the wide school fields of the Boys and Girls Secondary schools in Sheerness. Throughout my working week there I saw the girl quite regularly around her school and I think she made sure that I saw her and eventually I asked her out.

Our romance began slowly and tentatively, it was a whole new first thing for both of us, but I spent my whole 17th summer with her, we had no cares, we owned those summer months. There wasn't much of a social scene then, we walked the lanes and fields together, we went to the cinema and we visited other friends, one of whom was the much older groundsman that I worked with and his wife. They lived in a quaint old house in Minster, on it's own opposite the end of Love Lane and at it's rear, grassy meadows ran down to the edge of the cliffs and the sea. Today that house is still there but is surrounded on all sides by a multitude of big new houses and there is no field running down to the cliff edge. But back then, when we were out walking, getting to know each other and talking about our future as you do when all life is still ahead of you, we would call into that house and share coffee and cakes with the older couple. I was always fascinated by the fact that in his garden he grew a large number of tobacco plants whose leaves he dried and sent away for processing before turning them into the tobacco that he smoked in his pipe.

I met her parents and her older brother who had been in the same year as me at school and who didn't particularly like me. It became increasingly clear that her rebelliousness regularly caused a rift between her and her parents and so a lot of our evenings were spent out walking. If we didn't walk around Minster, we would walk the several miles down to my house in Sheerness where we could at least sit in my bedroom and play records. Later, before she had to be in, we would back to a favourite field near her house where we would lay for a while in the summer grass and kiss, cuddle and fumble, but little else.
For a time we were inseparable, her school broke up and she left school for good. One hot summer's evening we sat on the edge of the hill above The Glen, the "Bunny Bank" as it is known. We sat shoulder to shoulder like two doves on a bough. We held hands and snuggled up as the sky gradually began to fade from orange, to yellow and then to darkness and watched the lights of distant Southend begin to twinkle in the dusk.  Bats came out and flew over the Glen, over the bushes and the pool below. "I love you" she whispered and I felt the same and could not of been any happier. The darkness gradually enveloped us and  mosquitoes began to bite and so we reluctantly rose up and made our way back across Minster village. Past the bus stops, the library and New Road to eventually arrive at her front door, where within minutes, her mother sprang from - she had this strange and disconcerting thing about stroking my longish hair and telling me what nice eyes I had!

And so it went on, August was hot and sunny and much time was spent together, we were young and in love and loved being young - adult life was not for us. September arrived and one day we went on a bus trip down to Dymchurch. It was a lovely day and we had a great time there looking around and taking a trip on the miniature railway between the villages. But, two days later, she told me that she had found a new boyfriend and I was devastated, I spent a couple of days pleading with her to re-consider but to no avail, Clearly she had briefly over-taken me in the growing up stakes and needed new horizons and although we stayed friends, she was gone.

"I never dreamed you'd leave in summer
I thought you would go then come back home,
No, I never dreamed you'd leave in summer
and now my quiet nights are spent alone.

You said then you'd be the life in Autumn
said you'd be the one to see the way,
I never dreamed you's leave in summer
but now I find my love has gone away
-why didn't you stay"......................Stevie Wonder

Spring is almost Sprung

For a few hours this morning it was actually wind-free, sunny and humid and a real joy to walk round without needing a coat or heavy jumper. With a colder and wet weekend forecast it will be a short-lived rare occurrence but any rain will be welcome on the parched ground.
Not only did the sunny conditions brighten up the reserve but the reflection from this rape field on the neighbouring farmland also added to the colour of the morning.

As did this male Yellow Wagtail, one of several newly arrived from their winter quarters in South Africa. We currently have 4-5 pairs on the reserve and if they all stay to breed it will be the most for several years.

The breeding season on the reserve is finally beginning to catch up after it's late start and a few days ago I came across this lovely brood of Mallard ducklings in a ditch. Several broods of Greylag Geese goslings are also in the seawall fleet and so the wildfowl appear to be leading the way in the successful breeding stakes.

 Likewise the Coots, I have found seven nests so far this last week.

Hopefully the big success that we have been having in recent weeks with crow trapping will ensure that these rather vulnerable eggs will be left alone, in recent years whole clutches of eggs have been eaten by crows over a couple of days.

The Avocets are also busy in The Flood and will also welcome the fact that there are less crows and foxes on the reserve so far.

Finally, the first Reed Warblers have now arrived and are doing their best to out sing the rather noisier Sedge Warblers in the reed beds. Spring is finally taking off and to emphasise that fact I had an Orange Tip and a Small Copper butterfly along one of the reserve paths - great stuff.

Spitend Cottage

For those of you that are interested, here is the close up photograph of Spitend Cottage that I forgot to add to my posting yesterday.

Also regarding yesterday's posting and the mention of how dry it is becoming, I read in the Daily Telegraph today that the Met. Office is hinting that we might be heading towards a drought this summer. Apparently, as we on Sheppey know, so far in April we have only had a third of the rainfall normally expected during April. 

It has certainly caught one or two farmers out. A couple of weeks ago one of the farms alongside the reserve drilled his spring corn into a couple of large fields. When I had a look at it this morning the soil is dust dry and the corn seed is as dry and hard as when it was sown.

Secondly, I complained about how cold it has been, so what is it like today - warm and sunny and due to get warmer - I should have learnt by now!

Cold Comfort Farm

Cold Comfort Farm has seemed quite an appropriate title for the reserve this last few weeks given the cold weather that we have generally been experiencing for some time here on Sheppey. But first mention of the brief spell of almost summery weather that we experienced on Tuesday and Wednesday. The wind finally shifted round to the South and West and combined with long spells of very warm sunshine, it not only meant that I was able to walk round without a coat but that it brought about an incoming rush of migrant birds. As I mentioned in my last posting, the barren spell of Spring migrants that I was experiencing finally broke, since then, I have seen most of my target species, although not in large numbers. Wheatears, Sedge Warblers, Sand Martins, Whitethroat, Common Sandpiper, Yellow Wagtail and Hobby, were all recorded. Coot's nests and some chicks have begun to appear and I even saw a Spoonbill in The Flood one morning.
By Thursday however, the wind had gone back to the regular ENE direction that has plagued us for several weeks now, and with often dull skies, the temperature has fallen away again. Earlier this morning the wind had an almost icy feel to it and I was back to wearing my winter coat and gloves again as I wandered round hunched against the wind and cold. And with those cold and drying winds and any sun that appears, there comes the constant drying out of the wet marsh and the speculation that we are fast heading into a very dry summer. The current weather forecast suggest that we have another week of ENE winds with no rain and you only have to look at the photos below to see how much the water levels have dropped already. Just 5-6 weeks ago the dry area of mud was covered by water and the white water mark on the bush trunk shows how the water has already dropped by almost one and a half feet!  

This drying effect means that much of the grazing marsh has already become rock hard and is starting to crack up and the rather odd photo below shows something that gives me great discomfort as I walk round. It shows the countless cow hoof prints that are created as they walk on the soft ground in early winter before being taken off the reserve. When they become dry and hard as they are now, it has the constant effect of walking on cobbles and given that many of the areas that I walk each day, are affected like this, after a couple of hours of walking, the arthritic bones in my feet begin to ache quite badly and on bad days it is quite an ordeal.

Anyway, moving on from my tales of cold weather and knackered feet, I visited a part of Elmley this week that I haven't been to in almost thirty years - Spitend. Although I have often walked down to the "Brickfields" part of Elmley, for historical and solitude reasons, Spitend and it's daily visitors to the bird hides there has never really appealed to me. I have always been more than happy for the last thirty years with my patch, The Swale NNR,  mainly because of the peace and quiet that I get there. But, my "return journey" to Spitend turned out to be immensely enjoyable. It was nice to see how well the flood areas that I helped to start, back in 1976, have helped to create a beautiful nature reserve but more than that, I was filled with a great deal of melancholia because it still retained that over whelming feeling of flat and isolated marshland that has remained unchanged for centuries. It brought back memories of those pre-RSPB days in the late 1960's/early 1970's when we would roam across Spitend at will, hunting rabbits in the winter and eel-catching in the summer. Such special memories of youth and country pursuits and knowledge of the countryside learnt by actually doing it rather than reading about it.
Nothing portrays how hard it must of been living out there in the late 1800's/early 1900's than Spitend Cottage (Cods House) pictured below.

Thanks to the current owners of Elmley, this is one of just two surviving cottages out of several that used to be scattered around the marshes there and which either tenant farmers or their labourers would live in. Spitend Cottage was/is easily the most isolated of all the cottages that used to be there though. Standing as it does in the middle of Spitend marshes, it had one or two other buildings, probably cattle byres, adjacent to it at one time but that was it, it was miles from any other habitation in most directions. Fresh water probably came from a nearby well, lighting, if any, would of been candles or paraffin lamps, heat would of been from what little could of been found to burn and food, well it too must of been hard to come by. Try and imagine living there in those conditions, with several children, in bitter cold winter winds, rain and snow.

Oh, and one last thing, some misguided pratt or pratts this week, have been releasing the decoy crows from the reserve crow traps. Pest controls are a valuable part of successful reserve management and continued breeding bird success's and most nature reserves now employ them. It's annoying therefore, when soft-hearted people, with little practical experience of how the countryside works, have to interfere in such matters and without doubt, contribute towards the demise of such threatened birds as Lapwings.