Barge at Dawn

As many people will know who wander about in the countryside on a regular basis, many days are the same as each other, can be bloody boring in fact, but now and again along comes one that stands out, that strikes a chord somewhere within. It could be the first swallow in Spring, or the dawn sun sparkling on overnight snow, but for me this morning, it was a sailing barge making it's way out of The Swale as dawn broke across the estuary.

At first there was not a sound as ghost-like, the barge made it's silent way towards the open sea round Shellness Point but as the first tip of the sun rose from behind Reculver, so the birds woke up. A curlew called, followed by another and another, a curlew chorus orchestrated the stillness of the dawn, playing farewell to the barge and it's crew.
And as the sun rose quickly into the dawn sky, a breath of easterly breeze stirred my face and Skylarks began to sing, dawn became morning and the moment was lost, but what a moment it had been.

Unfortunately, the rest of the walk around the reserve was just as it has been now for some weeks, pretty boring. Recent rains and heavy dews have certainly got the grass growing again and it's all looking much greener but water levels remain low or non-existent and hence bird numbers can be pretty much recorded on one hand at times. The other morning along the "S Bend Ditch", normally the best spot on the reserve, I counted 9 Teal, 2 Snipe, 1 Green Sandpiper and 12 Mallard, from experience it'll be after New Year before things pick up again.
Mind you, the weather has got the arable crops across Harty off to a much better start this year. Last autumn it went very wet almost overnight and many fields couldn't be sown with corn and young rape rotted soon after germinating. This year, as the photo below shows, the winter wheat is already off to a flying start, farmers might even be happy.  

 Over the last couple of weeks my garden pond has had regular daily visits from this Heron, fishing for the goldfish therein. The pond is quite large and is home to a good number of both newts and frogs, which was it's original reason for being put there, but many years ago four goldfish were put in there, a huge mistake! They have since multiplied to many, many dozens of all sizes and act like piranhas when it comes to snapping up newly hatched tadpoles each Spring. I now have to rear the tadpoles in a different place in the garden each year - the Heron is a welcome visitor, it's welcome to every goldfish that it snaps up.

 Lastly, while sitting at the computer in my study the other morning, this snail began to make it's way up the outside of the window in front of me. It was quite fascinating to watch it's slow progress to the top and I then wondered, do they have the ability to turn off their suction powers and so simply drop back to the earth below, or do they have to make a slow return journey the same way that they came.

New Dawn

Dawn was just brightening the sky this morning as I turned on to the Harty Road and as I arrived at the top of Capel Hill a mist was rising along the length of Capel Fleet down below me.

 Arriving at the reserve barn shortly after, the dawn sky was beginning to change colour but the most noticeable thing was the temperature, it was only 3 degrees, heralding the first wearing of gloves this autumn.

 As I began to walk across the marsh towards the sea wall a very heavy dew had not only made everything soaking wet but it was clear from the silvery nature of it that we must of only been a degree or so away from our first autumn frost as well. I then heard the distant clamouring of Greylag Geese ahead of me over the sea wall and quickly the first skein of them came came towards me across the marsh, disappearing out towards central Harty.

The photo below shows the Delph Fleet alongside the sea wall, with its typical early morning and  Dickensian look, all mist and eeriness, don't you just love it.

 And so to the top of the sea wall and my first glimpse of the sun as it began to rise in the eastern sky between Shellness and Reculver, something that always makes an early morning walk so worthwhile. To my surprise, because I'd heard no shots as the geese first flew inwards earlier, three wildfowlers were just packing up for the morning and so I stopped to chat to them as they came in. It seems that the geese have begun to realise now where they will be in danger and have started to cross the saltings at each end, rather than where the wildfowlers tend to wait, its amazing how quickly they learn these things.

After chatting with the wildfowlers, I then followed my usual trail across and through the middle of the reserve, hoping to record a bird or two, which turned out to be pretty much the count. 1 Spotted Redshank, 1 Greenshank, 1 Tufted Duck, 6 Snipe and a Peregrine were the best of some very low numbers. The Peregrine was quite amazing because as I wondered along a flock of Starlings crossed within 20 yds of me and all of a sudden the Peregrine swooped through them from nowhere and could of only cleared my head by a couple of yds, easily the closest I've been to a Peregrine!
As I continued around the reserve the sun had begun to pick up strength and with no wind at all, was quite warm on my back and it wasn't just birds in the air. Behind Oare, one of the regular hot air balloon trips was taking place and the balloon seemed to hang in the air for ages without really going anywhere.

And so, back to the barn, where the sun was now lighting up the tops of the willows that we have planted all round it. At this time of the year, the combination of reeds and bushes become quite attractive to migrant warblers as they pass through, and even a Cettis was singing a few times this week.

One last thing, the fox hunt were out again on Harty this week, doing what fox hunts normally do, despite the alleged ban on hunting with dogs. I watched them briefly as they encouraged the pack of hounds through the reed beds of Capel Fleet in the hope of finding a fox, I presume they were "cubbing", looking for young foxes that the junior hounds can be trained on.

Cobweb Times

The two photos below pretty much sum up the Swale NNR at the moment, the cupboard is bare, there are very few birds or anything else for that matter. We are experiencing our usual late summer/early autumn dry spell, the grass is just dry and colourless and can hardly be feeding the bellies of the cattle and the ditches are very shallow and stink.

Spot the green stuff, part of the grazing marsh as it currently is, although today's rain may soon make me out to be a liar.
.

Over the weekend I visited the reserve both mornings at dawn and was lucky enough to be able to witness a couple of beautiful sunrises over Shellness Hamlet. Laying in bed is never better than being on the marsh at that time of day, watching a new day coming to life and listening to the various birds out on the mudflats waking with it.

Walking round the reserve at the moment is an experience with little expectation, there are a few ducks in both the seawall fleet and what water there is left in the "S Bend Ditch." Uusually one or two Green Sandpipers and Greenshanks will get up from the mud along the "S Bend Ditch" and odd Wheatears pop up as they pass through on migration but there's certainly no large numbers of anything, except perhaps the Greylag Geese. It'd be wrong of me to mention dawn in September on the reserve without mentioning both the Greylags and the wildfowlers, because they both feature in a typical dawn at the moment.
Just as the first brightening in the eastern sky begins to appear, then the Greylags that have been out on the mudflats of The Swale during the darkness, will begin to stir. They become increasingly vocal until eventually in a huge whirring of wings and a crescendo of calls, the whole flock takes to the air as a mass of dark shapes and heads across the saltings towards the stubble fields of Harty. Shots ring out from unseen people hidden in the rills of the saltings and down will come several of the birds as the rest of the flock scatter in haste to clear the seawall into the safety of the reserve. Its a very brief respite though because as they just as quickly exit the rear of the reserve and fly over the stubbles, they often find themselves the target of guns there too. Unfortunately for the geese where shooting is concerned, they do fly very slow and low and are difficult to miss at times and as a result they do prove an irresistible target to those people that enjoy their shooting. Having said that, I'm always surprised at the end of each shooting season to see just how many Greylag Geese survive each time, it's not quite the carnage that it seems that it might be, the geese quickly wise up to flight lines that they can take that will see them fly across areas safely.
Which I suppose, given what I have just written, will cause some people to question my support of wildfowlers in recent times. All I can say is that I admire a lot of the conservation work that the wildfowlers do on the land that they own or lease these days and I'm glad that huge areas of important habitat are under their management rather than being developed. I'm happy that if wildfowl are to be shot then that its by genuine wildfowlers, who kill far, far, less than most farmland duckpond syndicates do - but I still can't quite enjoy the actual shooting out of the air bit.

Lastly, I'll leave you with another view across the reserve in its current very dry state.      

September First

Yesterday was of course the 1st September and it not only saw the start of Autumn but also the start of the shooting season and as I always do, I saw it in by a visit to the reserve at dawn. I left home just as the sky was showing signs of brightening in the east and it was still only half light as I arrived at the reserve and began to make my way across the grazing meadows to the sea wall. There was a chill in the air but I was still warm enough with just a shirt and jumper above my trousers and I couldn't help thinking back to the February Harrier Roost count. It was an hour before dark that Sunday afternoon as I followed the same route across to the sea wall but boy was it cold, and not only cold but I was hunched up against heavy snow showers brought in by a strong and icy wind - how far away that all seemed yesterday morning.

My main reason for the traditional early start was to see and hear the extent of shooting that was going on around Harty that first morning. Wildfowlers have a thing about being out on that first morning just as birdwatchers do about seeing the first Swallow, they might not bother for a few weeks afterwards but that first morning is special in their minds. On the top of the sea wall the light was beginning to increase, the sun hadn't yet risen but the sky was turning pink in anticipation and highlighting the aircraft con-trails as it did, seems most planes were going south-east. A first scan along the saltings with the binoculars couldn't spot any wildfowler's heads sticking up from the various rills out there, surely it wasn't going to be a no show, that would be a first in twenty-seven years of patrolling out there. But no, a second sweep finally found the camouflaged head of one such hopeful sitting out there and at the same time I could hear the resident flock of Greylag Geese beginning to become increasingly noisy out on the Swale mudflats, they were surely about to take off and flight inwards across the saltings. As I picked them out with the binoculars they did just that, around 120 of them flying in low, slow and tightly bunched towards the sea wall and the reserve and presumably to the disgust of the lone wildfowler, as they were all around 300 yds from where he was positioned. They carried on across the reserve but then, for the first time in two weeks, did not head straight to a corn stubble field alongside the reserve to glean the spilt corn, but veered off and chose another field a few hundred yards away. That was strange but it turned out to be very fortunate as I was soon to find out.

By then the sun had just started to peep above Shellness Hamlet and a Sparrowhawk skimmed across the grass tops ahead of me, a bird always seeming strange to see in a marshland habitat and it scared up a dozen or so Teal that I hadn't noticed before then. I crossed back across the reserve and took the rear route round towards the Tower Hide. Whilst wandering along the reserve's boundary fence there I suddenly became aware of a shooter hidden in the vegetation on the other side of the fence which surprised me as I'd heard no shots at all that morning, other than in the distance from the Capel Corner area along the Harty Road. I stopped for a chat and it transpired that he and four others, who I later saw as I continued walking, had been hoping to ambush the Greylag Geese as they dropped into the usual stubble field. Clearly the geese had indeed been fortunate that morning, or over intelligent, by their new choice of feeding field, because the shooters, having watched them using the same one all week, had positioned themselves perfectly under the usual flight line. Some things are meant to be and for the geese a hat trick was beckoning and that came shortly after.
After a bit more countryside chat I left the shooters to their wasted vigil and carried on, back to my car. Half an hour later I watched as one of them in a vehicle drove round behind the geese in the nearby field deliberately scaring them up in the hope that they would fly towards his waiting companions. The geese however, were on a roll and having none of it, they simply flew out into the middle of the reserve and settled down there for a nap and a preen. It was 3-0 to the geese yesterday, they will get caught up with at some stage but it was amusing to watch their good fortune on that first shooting day.      

Time Slips By

Last week I attended the funeral of the mother of an old girlfriend, I have known both since 1966 and the old girlfriend still remains a life-long friend and so it meant a lot to be there. The funeral was different, at the mother's request it was a "Natural Funeral", set among orchards, grassy fields and tiny lanes at the Deerton Natural Burial Site, nr. Teynham.
It was a very warm and sunny day and as the service took place in an open-sided marquee alongside the burial field, two Buzzards circled overhead mewing plaintively and Swallows sped by heading south - time, wildlife and people were slipping by together.

In keeping with the naturalness of the occasion, the coffin was of a bio-degradable material, coloured green and featured on both sides, beautiful paintings of Blackbirds, Goldfinches and Redpolls, it looked quite remarkable. The family took turns at quoting their memories of the lady and playing favourite songs and then we all followed the coffin into the burial site alongside, a field of wild flowers and grasses, dotted at various points with shrubs or young trees that marked the site of previous burials. Here, as we stood around the graveside in this almost overgrown meadow, butterflies, bees and wild birds moved around us under the blue skies and it all seemed so remarkably apt. A small tree will be planted on the grave and then apparently the site will be allowed to re-grass over, leaving just the tree as it's marker. Possibly not most people's idea of how a burial should be conducted or marked but the longer that I have thought about it the more I have warmed to the idea.

The farmland on Harty has been very busy this last week or so as crops have been harvested, straw baled and stacked and fields now harrowed ready to be sown with next year's crops. Summer is also slipping by now and with autumn approaching the signs are all around. Wheatears have begun appearing on the reserve as they make their way south, the swallows hardly tarry now and simply speed by and most of the butterflies have disappeared. In the corn stubble the Greylag Geese numbers continue to increase as they feast on the spilt corn and they in turn, remind me that Sunday will see the start of the shooting season, although wildfowl numbers are currently very low. Teal are the only ducks that are being recorded in +50 numbers on the reserve, a lot to do with the water levels I imagine, the ditches are very low, very stagnant and can be smelt all round the reserve. I will be out at first light on Sunday morning to evaluate what shooting interest that there is alongside the reserve and on Harty in general, but I'll be surprised if it amounts to much.

Shooting around

The above, really poor photo but it's the only one I have, shows me close to the old Ferry Bridge one late afternoon in November 1974, about to go along the seawall on to Elmley and try a bit of duck shooting. You can just make out the single-barrelled shotgun that I am holding. Since those shooting days (I was 27 at the time) I have yo-yo'd between supporting, loathing and now supporting, various forms of shooting, all a bit confusing really. At the time that this photo was taken I was into my second season of what was only really a half-hearted interest in duck shooting and beginning to realise that it just wasn't for me. Therefore it wasn't a lot longer before I had packed up shooting all together and have never wanted to shoot since, but why did I start in the first place?

As I have said many times, I had been interested in all things to do with outdoors and wildlife since my childhood and  between 1966 and 1972 had worked for the Kent River Authority throughout the marshes of Sheppey. Most of the people that I worked with on there were all of a similar age to me and several were also active in countryside sports such as shooting, fishing and rabbiting. One was also related to the Gransden family who were farming on Elmley at the time and that therefore gave me the opportunity to get to know some of them as well.
To have the opportunity to work along the seawalls, watercourses and marshes throughout Sheppey was exciting enough but to do it alongside people who actively practised many of the things that I had simply read about, made it even better. During the winter months we would often spend our lunch breaks walking the marshes alongside our workplace looking for rabbits to catch and I soon learnt how to quickly gut and skin them. In the summertime if we were working along The Swale seawalls we put out baited trot-lines on the mudflats and caught flounders, or we looked for partridge nests so that one of the guys could put the eggs under his broody hen at home and rear the birds for game bird shooting. At weekends in the winter I sometimes acted as a beater on the all day farm shoots held at Elmley by the Gransdens and learnt not only what it was like to skin and gut many dozens of rabbits in one go but also how geese and game birds were left to hang in a barn for a week or so in order to end up better flavoured. Seeing the condition some of those birds were in after a week or so could never tempt me to eat them but that's how they did things then.
I loved every minute of it and at the same time learnt many countryside ways and skills that have never left me, and many of them did not involve simply killing things.

My best friend on the KRA at the time did quite a bit of duck shooting on his own and so it was only natural that I would ultimately have a go at that myself, let's face it, most guys do get some kind of thrill from holding and discharging a gun at some stage in their life. My problem with this at the time, was the fact that I hadn't long before re-read Peter Scott's excellent 1961 autobiography "The Eye of the Wind". In there he had described how his long involvement in wildfowling had begun to wane one winter when, after shooting and wounding two geese, he had captured them and then found himself hoping that they wouldn't die. (They didn't die and he kept them for many years at his lighthouse home).
So although I had joined WAGBI - the Wildfowling Association of Great Britain and Ireland, (now BASC the British Association for Shooting and Conservation), and enthusiastically thrown myself into shooting for a while, Peter Scott's words always haunted me in the background. But I was intent of doing it and so having joined WAGBI and read a few articles in the Shooting Times about the romance of being out on the marsh under the moonlight, pitting your wits against wild birds, I then needed a gun. I didn't have the money or the inclination to spend a lot on one and fortunately my uncle, Albert Williams, came up with the solution. He had an old, single barrelled 12-bore that he never used anymore and  I could buy it from him for £10  - problem solved, or so I thought. The gun was in pretty good condition and I cleaned and oiled it after every session but it had no safety catch or anything and to fire it you had to cock the hammer back with your thumb before pulling the trigger. How I never blew my feet off I'll never know, twice, with the gun pointing downwards, my thumb slipped off the hammer as I was cocking it and it discharged into the ground alongside me.
So, the final problem to overcome was where to do this shooting - no problem my shooting mate said, anywhere on Sheppey after dark, no one'll catch us and fortunately they never did, in fact we got chased more times during daylight when trespassing on rabbiting expeditions, but that's another story.  A few times, using our knowledge of where and where not that the Gransdens shot on Elmley, we found it was easy to drive along the remains of the old Ferry Road and park up alongside the seawall. From there we could walk along the sea wall to opposite Ridham Dock and there the Dray fleet ran back into Elmley, nice and wide and attractive to wildfowl and more importantly, we were very unlikely to be discovered there. After a couple of visits there at dusk and darkness I quickly found out that all the waffle that the experienced shooting types put out about first learning how to handle a gun, etc, does make sound sense, I couldn't of hit a duck if it was on the end of my barrel. Could of been the naff old gun I was using I suppose but I think it was more a case of me not having a 100% enthusiasm for what I was doing as much as anything, plus Peter Scott was haunting me, I desperately didn't want to wound a bird.

 Another place that was popular with many duck shooters with no official place to go at the time, was Rushenden marshes between the old Coal Washer and the Ferry Bridge. During the 1960's the Westminster Dredging Company had pumped millions of tons of sandy dredgings onto these marshes until they were level with the top of the sea wall. This had created a huge area of dead flat, almost desert like conditions which were home to a large colony of nesting Little Terns in the summer and many duck shooters in the winter. There wasn't an enormous amount of open water out there, I think it was more a case of wildfowl flighting across it from The Swale to get to the wetter part of the marshes, that made it attractive to us shooting types who were limited to where we could go.
Once again my shooting skills were at best, pretty useless and my main recollection of several visits there is of sitting out there one night in one of the worst blizzards I've sat out in. The snowflakes were enormous and I could see bugger all even if anything was moving, which it wasn't and most of my time there was spent in wiping off an inch deep layer of snow that kept building up along my gun barrel. It was a long and cold trudge back to the car in knee deep snow and my shooting trips became very few and far between after that.
I think the very last outing came in the following September 1975. I had decided to try an evening flight out at Shellness, on the saltings in front of what is now The Swale NNR, once again probably without permission. I didn't have a car at the time and so had to catch a bus to Leysdown with my gun in a case and walk the 2-3 miles along the sea wall to where I intended to shoot. It was a hot and sunny early September evening and clearly I had arrived far too early for the light to start going. I sat on the seawall for an hour in the sun with no apparent change in the light, got totally fed up, walked all the way back to Leysdown, caught the bus home, eventually gave my gun away and have never shot again. I turned to rabbiting and eel netting and other minor things until in 1987 I became a Vol. Warden on the Swale NNR.

That opportunity saw my opinions on wildfowling change markedly. I was involved with the management and protection of a nature reserve and on the other side of the sea wall were Kent Wildfowlers trying their hardest to kill the very birds that we were attracting. I adopted the same blinkered and traditional attitude that many birdwatchers still do, anybody that shoots is the enemy of wildlife and must be treated as such and I spent the next twenty years entrenched in those beliefs. Unlike my brief shooting period, these guys were fully entitled to be where they were and what they were doing but I was having none of it and spent a lot of time making my presence as awkward as I legally could.
Throughout that period I could see a justification in supporting game shooting purely because of the habitat that it maintained for all wildlife but like most who still oppose it today, I hadn't taken the time to research what the Kent Wildfowlers also did for conservation by owning and managing huge tracts of wetlands in Kent and elsewhere. Finally, around three years ago, a local and lifelong Kent Wildfowler took me to task over my constant criticism of the wildfowlers and I for once took my hands away from my ears and listened to his side of things. Through many long conversations it has transpired that we had a lot of common interest in wildlife, in fact most wildfowlers do, because you enjoy shooting a few wildfowl each year it doesn't make you the cretin that some would believe, Peter Scott proved that.
The result has been a new friendship, a shared enthusiasm for the countryside and all things wildlife, I have returned to the same open-minded person that I always used to be in respect of countryside pursuits and my new friend, through no urging of mine, now spends most of his time shooting wildlife with a camera.  Good results all round.

Horsing About

 It was low tide in The Swale as I wandered along the banks below Harty Church on the reserve early yesterday morning, a tad grey and gloomy as well. Looking across The Swale to the mainland and the general direction of Faversham, Horse Sands always stand out well, creating a low-tide island several hundred yards long. The main channel of The Swale is behind the Sands but there is still a deepish channel close to the Sheppey shore and although the Sands disappear completely at high tide the top cannot be far below the water, creating a navigational problem for larger boats. The photo below, taken further to the right of the one above, show the Sands as they start to peter out just before Harty Ferry. There were still a couple of old sailing barges moored there yesterday, left over from last weekend's annual sailing barge race and in the background you can see a white van parked on the Harty Ferry slipway alongside Oare nature reserve.

Back in the mid-1980's, when a mixed bag of us locals, reserve workers and farmhands regularly met up most weekends for drinking sessions that often went on well into the night at the Ferry House Inn at Harty, one of us issued a challenge. The challenge was made to the regulars in the Shipwrights Arms, a lovely little pub on the mainland opposite with the quaint address of Hollowshore, nr. Faversham, to play us in a game of football on Horse Sands on Boxing Day. A novel idea in summer but mid-winter - quite daft, but the challenge was accepted and so late morning on the Boxing Day over they came in their fishing boats to collect our less than hardy team. The boats pulled up against the Sands and we all waded ashore with some wives and girlfriends and a few cases of beer, to generally chase a football about in sloppy mud in what turned pretty much into more of a rugby match. The photo below shows me, full stretch in the mud, having just been tripped up by one of the Shipwrights team.
It was cold, muddy and wet but good and genial fun and afterwards, we all went back to the Ferry House Inn, had a rough wash off in the back yard and change of clothes and then were treated to a roast dinner and more beer by the landlords - happy days!

Anyway, back to the reserve and the dozen or so Greylag Geese that remained on the reserve this spring managed to rear around thirty goslings this year and now they are starting to be joined by other greylags from the surrounding Harty farmland.

Below, a number of them were flighting past to nearby rape grattens (stubbles). The harvesting is a fortnight or so late this year because of the never ending winter but it won't be long before they will be able to feed up in the wheat grattens as well for masses of spilt corn. Seeing them is a reminder too that the shooting season is only three weeks away, although I've seen no sign of game bird poults being put out on Harty just yet.

This is something that you don't see mentioned much these days, or indeed see a lot of, bulrushes. We have a couple of ditches on the reserve that still feature them and they bring back memories from younger days. Some people used to cut them and put them in vases as a sort of long-lasting cut flower decoration but they must of done something to them because it never worked out that well in our house. A few weeks or months after my mother had cut them and put them in the front room as a taste of the countryside, the brown seed heads would suddenly explode and fill the room with loads of fluffiness and the vase was left with just a load of sticks in it.

Much more attractive are the flower heads of the Teasel, here with attendant Small Skipper butterflies. These and Ragwort form the main food plants for butterflies and bees on the marsh and are a pleasure to see and of course, in winter the Goldfinches plunder the cones for their seed.

Its that time of year now where most of the countryside is bone dry and yellow and has the tired look of late summer. The wheat fields have yet to be combined and re-sown with rape, the grazing meadows have little in the way of green grass and the fresh-water ditches hardly live up to their name, being shallow, fetid and smelly. Certainly eating and drinking cannot be that pleasurable for the livestock at this time of year, with the lushness of May a distant dream.