Year's End

After the beautiful day's weather that we had on Christmas Day - weather wasted for those who had to endure being stuck indoors being Christmasy, although not me, we have had three days of greyness, gloomyness and dampness, though not rain.
I have been on the reserve around dawn on every morning, dawn that rarely shows much light before 07.15. I've been going at, or just before dawn, for several reasons, the first being that I rarely get up later than around 05.30 in the morning and the first chinks of light not showing until around 07.00 finds me getting very impatient indoors.
A couple of weeks ago a new Marsh Harrier night-time roost was found in the the dense reed beds alongside the sea wall, with up to sixteen birds being seen to leave there at very first light in the morning. Unfortunately my pre-dawn visits over the last three days have come up blank, the birds appear to have moved somewhere else at the moment. There are still several of them to be seem flying around the reserve every day but not to/from the roost it seems.
The Christmas holiday period, with many companies shutting down for a couple of weeks, means that the wildfowlers that shoot the saltings in front of the reserve tend to be more frequent with their visits than during the rest of the winter season.  Slowly, as the reserve begins to wetten up much quicker this winter after two previous drought winters, so the wildfowl are beginning to use the reserve again. This has therefore seen more shooting going on around, and just after, dawn, as the birds fly out to the nearby tide and over the wildfowlers. However, chatting with them as they pack up and from what I've witnessed, there may be a lot of shots being fired but very few birds are being killed. I rather suspect that this is due to poor skills and in one or two cases that I've seen, shooting at birds too far out of range. But the wildfowlers are a hardy and mostly friendly bunch and I always make a point of chatting with them as they pack up, the shooting that goes on there now is minuscule compared to how it used to be twenty-odd years ago.
I've had a few chats with birdwatchers as well while wandering round over the last few days and have enjoyed the fact that both they and the wildfowlers have failed to speak ill of each other, they seem to accept what each other does and leave it at that.
And so this year draws to and end. It basically began with the "Beast from the East" spell of Siberian weather, went through the glorious mid-summer heatwave (please can we have another next year), is ending in increasingly perfect wetland reserve conditions and I'm into my 32nd year as a Volunteer Warden on the reserve - I guess that allows me to say that I know a bit about the place.

I've ended with two wildfowlers and their dog making their way back along the top of the sea wall in the gloom of the early morning.

After the event

Dawn and soon after, on Christmas Day, saw the reserve looking just about as scenic as it could. There was a hard, white frost, a blue sky was just beginning to lighten up and a mist, only about 4-5 feet high, rose off the marsh to make some bushes and mounds look as though they were floating. See what I mean in this black and white photo showing a grass mound with a taller hide in front of it. I quite liked the atmosphere in that photo until someone I showed it to suggested that it looked like a nuclear submarine passing by! It was however, a magical and beautiful morning to be out and about, just me and the dog - bliss!

It looked less so in a coloured version.

 And eventually the sun began to rise, to highlight the frosty field in the foreground.

Returning to black and white this was the neighbouring farm track.

 And reed beds covered in frost

 And the full moon as it began to lose brightness in the western sky.

Today, Boxing Day, was different all together at dawn. Much milder and gloomier and grey with no wind and the wind turbines and solar panel farms in the area all mocking the reason that they were put there for. 

Boxing Day is always a traditional hunting/shooting day and so I made my way across the reserve, in the slowly increasing light, and up onto the sea wall to see if many wildfowlers were out on the saltings. As I got there two shots rang out and two ducks fell from the sky with one being picked up immediately but a second, despite much searching by the guy with his dog, wasn't. Very soon after another two shots rang out from much further along the sea wall but I was to far away to see the result, although when the two guys packed up and walked back to go home, they showed me a small Teal duck that they had shot. I left them to go out with their dog and assist the previous guy who was still looking for the missing duck that he'd shot. 

The Equinox

"I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,
Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring
and gentle odours led my steps astray"........Percy Bysshe Shelley

It's the 21st of December today, the Shortest Day, the one winter's day guaranteed to bring a smile to my lips. With, first every second, then minutes, then hours, we now start the process of longer days, inching nearer towards spring - to warmth, to flowers, to light evenings.

Just lately it seems as though everything is always wet or damp, it seems to rain part of every day. This morning, after overnight rain again, we awoke to a strengthening, gusty and warmish, SW wind. Being outside was liking around in a cool steam room, everything seemed to be dripping.
On the reserve, after two bone dry winters, this winter is most definitely not going to follow that trend. The grazing meadows are now showing numerous splashes of shallow water and the rills that were dug on the meadows are now full of water. The tracks and gateways are very muddy thanks to the cattle that were supposed of been taken off by now but still haven't been. The ditches are still only half full but overall, the reserve is well on it's way to looking like it should do in the winter and to be honest, in a brief sunny spell, it looks quite superb.

Between my front drive and that of a neighbour's, is a tall and fairly wide hawthorn hedge that I planted when I first moved here thirty odd years ago. It is populated for much of the year by up to fifty House Sparrows. In the spring and summer some nest in it and for the rest of the year they shelter in it in order to pop out on to the two bird tables alongside. Sitting in the conservatory the other afternoon watching the birds on the bird table, I suddenly became aware of two rats making their way up through the branches and then jumping across on to a bird table and eating the food. My Jack Russell was going mental with rage through the window but I couldn't let her out to catch them in case they ran out into the road alongside. So that night I put out my baited rat trap, which catches them alive for me to deal with later. Before I went to bed I noticed something was in the trap and on going out there, it was a hedgehog, which should of been hibernating by now and is likely to die if it does hibernate now because it clearly won't have a good enough fat store. I tipped it out, gave it some dog food and off it trotted. The next night I caught it again and so the trap idea was abandoned and I resorted to some securely placed rat poison that hedgehogs and other animals couldn't get to, some people might like rats but I don't. 

Growing up - some of my lives.

A brief trip through my life.

Sometime before I was 5

 Sometime after I was 5 - at London Zoo

1966, aged 19 - the folk years

1967 - convincing myself I looked like Bob Dylan

1972-ish, married two years and the first of my continuous line of Jack Russell terriers.

1970-80's - the rabbiting me.

 1985 - the sporty and nude me.

Still 1980's

 1990's and well past 40

 Early 2000's and starting to show my age

 Gawd! - current day, 71 and looking every inch of it. Why did I do some things to excess!

Humbug and all it's enjoyment

We're now in that bloody awful run up to Christmas and the New Year, short dark days, crap weather and everywhere you go, Christmas and all it's expense is rammed down your throats - and bloody awful Christmas music in many shops!  The only good thing in this period is the Shortest Day, when at last, by just seconds in the beginning, then minutes and then hours, each day gets longer and Spring gets nearer.
I've hated Christmas for most of my adult life, partly because it heralds the depths of winter and everything I detest in winter, as I said above, the short dark days, the not being able to get out in the garden and do much, the endurance of suffering cold, wind, rain and sometimes freezing temperatures as I walk across the reserve. Even worse is the big day itself and all the excesses that your are encouraged to take part in because "it's Christmas" - the over eating, the over drinking, the waking up and over eating and over drinking all over again, because "it's Christmas".
One of the greatest joys of living on my own is that if I choose to, I don't have to endure that. I can put out some washing on the line on the big day, it it's a good drying day,  I can even have egg and chips for dinner rather than an over-flowing plate of turkey and veg.that I don't feel like eating.

But then of course, comes Boxing Day. After an exhilarating walk on the reserve with the dog, home for a bottle of wine or a rum and coke, probably a tad earlier than normal, and sport on the TV, until that is, the bloody adverts drive you nuts. Adverts every few minutes promoting bloody sales in the shops, whereby people, who only a few days before, had spent a small fortune on Christmas presents, waste their Christmas holidays in retail scrums incurring even more debt buying stuff that they can easily survive with purely because it's cheaper. Unfortunately the later credit card bills don't show the same Christmas spirit, they just increase.

After the brief breathing space, for some of at least, along comes New Years Eve, another festival of excess and noise. In recent years, instead of being able to ignore it, go to bed and wake up in a new year, fireworks have become the norm - every bloody where! I've lost track of the amount of times I've sat up till gone 2.00 in the morning consoling my trembling dogs as every drunken neighbour for miles shoots countless expensive rockets into the night sky.

Roll on January the 2nd when normal life returns.