Hello again

"I make this in a warring absence when
Each ancient, stone-necked minute of love's season
Harbours my anchored tongue,slips the quaystone"

When I slipped from my partner's house in Surrey very early yesterday morning, left her sleeping soundly in some other blissful world, it was drizzling and a wet and dark journey home to the marshes of Kent some 80 miles away ensued. The low cloud and murky conditions, the heavy drizzle and light rain, continued throughout the day, throughout last night and into this morning, finally petering out today at lunchtime. It was not the ditch filling rain that I'd craved all winter, it was simply a dark, dank and clothes soaking entity that permeated everything and anybody, that happened to be out in it for any length of time. It was with some trepidation therefore that I ventured out down to the reserve yesterday afternoon to be part of the reserve's three man, monthly Wetland Bird Survey(WEBS) team. My sector of that involved me walking round the wet and muddy grazing fields and sea wall of the middle part of the reserve, counting whatever birds that I saw.
Now, anybody who knows the marshes of Sheppey in the winter will know that they are pretty uncompromising places. They are flat, there are no sheltering places and bone-chilling Easterly winds blow in, unchecked, straight off the Thames Estuary. Well, we didn't have the wind yesterday but we did have relentless and misty heavy drizzle. It gradually ran down my neck and soaked into my roll neck jumper and it dampened my note book each time I got it out and only the birds that I was seeing relieved the discomfort that I felt. 340 Greylag Geese, 175 White-fronted Geese and 17 Barnacle Geese, all together in one large flock stirred my old, marsh-man's memory of days gone by and dried my heart and mind.
But there are times, when as an arthritic seventy year old, that you do question why you are there in such conditions and the answer simply is, very few, much younger people these days, see it as exciting or interesting enough. It's a sad fact of life these days that those of us who have spent a lifetime gathering facts about wildlife in such uncompromising conditions, will have to continue doing so through the rest of our doddery and arthritic lives, because we have always done it and few are willing to replace us.
But with such age comes the memories, and more importantly the routine afternoon glass of wine or beer, the afternoon sitting in the conservatory tracking back through seventy years, the cat-naps with the dog on my lap.  Drifting off to sleep thinking about standing on the sea wall in blizzard showers on a winter's late afternoon as I looked for harriers going into roost, the wading through flooded winter fields, the great orange winter sunrise, being burnt to a crisp by blazing summer suns and slumbering on the sea wall watching bees and butterflies.

"now in the cloud's big breast lie quiet countries,
delivered seas my love from her proud place
walks with no wound, nor lightning in her face,
a calm wind blows that raised the trees like hair
once where the soft snow's blood was turned to ice."........ Dylan Thomas