Exploded Optimism

It has been difficult to find either the enthusiasm or topics to write another blog since the jubilation expressed in the last one. Since then we have pretty much had wall to wall winter again, with relentless heavy grey skies and non-stop very cold NNE winds.
March is normally a month where we begin to shrug off all the ill effects of winter, when a few warm and sunny days get both us, and wildlife in general, bursting with the need to get out and about and start things happening. A month when we start to look for those first returning summer migrants, but this last week or so has not seen me feel anything like that.

For a long time now I've not been a winter person, they take quite a toll on me both mentally and physically and as I descend headlong now into old age and arthritis, they get harder and more painful to endure. This morning for example, was pretty much the same as it has been for the last week or so, heavy grey skies, a touch of light drizzle and an icy NE wind. After just half an hour or so and after watching a traditional mid-winter sight of 200 White-fronted Geese flying into the reserve against a leaden sky, I gave up and went home, everywhere and everything, seems so cold and bleak. Sheppey's grazing marshes and fields at the moment look as though someone as weed-killed everything, they have a yellow and dead look about them, which seems so much at odds with how lush and green they were in that incredibly mild December/early January. Clearly it's going to be some time yet before the growth of grass will make it possible for the grazier to bring his cattle and new calves out from the winter stock yards, something that only prolonged warm weather will make possible.
Clearly I'm struggling at the moment to find any kind of enthusiasm for being out and about in this grey, cold weather and I guess that I have to be thankful for the fact that if it wasn't for the two dogs and the enjoyment that they get from their daily visits, then I probably wouldn't be going as much.

Having said all that, the BBC this week did briefly redeem themselves in my eyes and raise my spirits, with the excellent television programme "Land of Hope and Glory: British Country Life". They spent a year following the staff of the "Country Life" magazine and this week's programme was true to it's title and really did show proper aspects of British country life, a life that doesn't exist in the minds of the producers that make the awful and fluffy crap that they churn out each week in "Countryfile". This week they featured a proper gamekeeper walking around his grouse moor estate and pointing out the types of traps that he employs and why they and the control of predators are necessary. There was also another feature showing a guy and his terriers getting stuck into and killing large numbers of rats at a chicken farm, great sport and fun and something that happens regularly in the real and non-"Countryfile" version of the countryside.

Perhaps, once we get next weekend's Easter out of the way, the weather will start to improve and I can start to feel some warm sun penetrating my aching bones, we'll see.

Spring has sprung

Yesterday, we had the totally unexpected satisfaction of experiencing a superb Spring day, the first weather-wise. It was wall to wall sunshine throughout and with no wind, by early afternoon it was quite warm in the garden.
And what a difference that rise in temperature and sunshine made to the birds at least. Two pairs of House Sparrows were taking nesting material into my terrace nest box, see below, leaving just one compartment free and another pair were taking nest material into the hawthorn hedge where they nested last year. Despite the fact that my 50 strong flock of sparrows daily empty all the bird feeders, I felt sorry for those left out and hastily yesterday made another nest box and put it up on the bungalow wall.

The only thing that spoilt the day out on the reserve was the heavy rain that we experienced early Wednesday, it has waterlogged the grazing marsh again and seen ditch levels rise back to where they were a month ago. However, with the next week due to be rain free, hopefully we will see a gradual drying out of the marsh again, in order to get to conditions that will suit the ground nesting birds such as Lapwings and Redshanks. Lapwings in particular, lay their eggs directly into a circular scrape that they make in the ground and their eggs quickly chill and become useless if we get future heavy rain spells that re-water-log the ground.

Today started with a hard frost and then thick fog and for most of my walk round the reserve I was confined to sounds rather than sightings but as the fog rolled in and out, the sun eventually won the day and by 9.30 we had blue skies and warming sunshine again. And that was the signal for all manner of birds to suddenly rejoice at Spring and begin calling, courting, or simply just singing. Very high up in the sky, Marsh Harriers circled round, repeatedly uttering the plaintive call notes that they do when calling for a mate. Skylarks, that didn't seem to be that plentiful a few days ago, were all of a sudden everywhere, serenading the whole marsh from on high with their beautiful song but best of all were the Lapwings. Late as they have been with their courtship displays, today it was all go as they rolled and tumbled in the sky, "peewit" calls echoing across the marsh, scrapes and eggs won't be too far away.

This afternoon as I write this at 13.00, we are now as it was yesterday, wall to wall sunshine, windows and doors in the house are open and Spring is bursting in, lets hope that it's not a false dawn so to speak.  

Yo Yo Weather

Gawd, the weather is certainly in a yo-yo mood at the moment, take yesterday. At 8.00 on the sea wall of the reserve, under heavy grey skies and facing into an icy and bone chilling N. wind, I was as cold as I've been all winter. By 1.00 that afternoon, under blue skies and sunshine it was almost Springlike. Today, heavy overnight rain had cleared before dawn and the whole day, whilst still a tad chilly, has seen unbroken blue skies and sunshine and in the conservatory this afternoon it was positively hot.
Below is The Flood Field earlier this morning from the Sea Wall Hide, looking still nicely wet and although you can't see them, still holding good numbers of wildfowl and waders. Over the next month or so, it will gradually dry out and provide nesting opportunities to several species of birds.

The view along the sea wall towards Shellness. About half a mile further along this wall is where the Richards Pipit has been observed on an almost daily basis since December.

Coots having an argument.

One of the reserve's larger ditches, looking quite splendid and soon to be noisy as nesting Coots and the loud croaking of Marsh Frogs take over.

We've had some spectacular numbers of geese this week, especially the Brent Geese, seen below as they flight into the grazing marsh of the reserve. One sunny afternoon this week I had the beautiful sight of over 1400 mixed Brent, White-fronted and Greylag geese spread out across one field.

Once settled, the Brent Geese start to spread out, squabble, preen and feed on the grass.

I was lucky in this photo to get all three species together. Brent at the top, Whitefronts in the middle and two Greylags below.

I've featured these old salt workings mounds before and there are several dotted about across the grazing marsh of the reserve. Little is written about them but they are several hundred years old and from a time before the sea wall existed and very high tides could still flood flood onto the marsh. We believe that the mounds are the spoil thrown up from the digging of large salt pans in which sea water was trapped and allowed to evaporate, leaving the salt behind. In more recent times they have served as refuges for livestock on the few occasions that the reserve has been severely flooded.

Nowadays this particular couple of mounds are home to around 30-40 rabbits and apart from one or two else elsewhere on the reserve, that is the sum of the reserve's rabbit population now. Quite amazing when you consider that around twenty years ago it was possible on a summer's evening, to walk round the reserve and count 800-1000 rabbits!
But they contacted some disease that caused them to haemorrhage and that coupled with the annual summer myxy. outbreak and ferreting, caused a rapid decline in the rabbit numbers. Unfortunately, even when numbers had dropped to just a couple hundred, management who panicked on seeing just a dozen or so rabbits and considered it a plague, still allowed over-zealous culling to take place.

Mules and things

I wonder how many people, looking at the bird below, will know what it is.

It's known as a Goldfinch mule, one of six that I bred last year in my aviary. I also bred a Siskin mule.

Mules are the offspring that result from crossing a British finch with a canary, in most cases using a cock finch and a canary hen. This the commonest colour that emerges but by using different types of canaries surprising colours can be the outcome, I have seen pure white Goldfinch mules with an orange facial blaze. My Siskin mule simply looks like a green canary with some Siskin markings but sings very loud and beautifully in the canary style as do the Goldfinch mules.

I have bred canaries for a number of years now, not in cages but in sectioned shed and outside flights but inevitably at some stage, breeders will try their hand at either these crosses or hybrids such as Goldfinch x Siskin, etc.. They are bred for the challenge of achieving it and the hope that an uncommon colour type emerges and of course, the beautiful song of the cock birds. Unfortunately the offspring of both mules and hybrids are almost always sterile and so cannot breed on and so where hens are bred and also cannot sing, they do tend to be surplus to requirements.

It's not unknown for some breeders to release these surplus hens into the wild rather than cull them and I often chuckle to think of what some birdwatchers would make of it, coming across a bird such as the above, sitting in a bush somewhere. Probably most would guess what it was but I wonder if some would try and turn it into some new rare bird, as they do, "channel wagtail comes to mind.

I had an hour on the reserve this morning, stopping at the Raptor Viewing Mound as I went by, to speak to an RSPB group who were assembling for a walk around the reserve and Shellness. They had a leader and I left them to it after giving a bit of info. on where the birds might be found. But walking across the grazing marsh this morning was a bit of an ordeal in a bitter cold E. wind coming straight in off the North Sea, which became even worse when there was a 20 min. horizontal, heavy shower of rain and sleet.

Cold Thoughts

At last, this awful February is drawing to a close, although it looks like March might start off in the same vein. As a fellow blogger said to me the other day, "you go right through a mild winter, get to the end of February and begin to dream of Spring and then winter proper starts". See below, the reserve in all it's early morning, frosty glory.

Mind you, just saying the word March somehow makes the month see better, after all it is the first Spring month, flowers spring up and summer migrants begin coming back.

On the reserve we're inching towards Spring, the water levels are continuing to drop, possibly a bit to quickly, many wildfowl are noticeably in pairs and Chaffinch song is now coming from some of the hedgerows and thickets. The Richards Pipit still commands a daily audience of one's and two's who haven't seen it after three months, just as the Shorelark at Minster Shingle Bank does. The Shorelark must be the single most photographed bird in the UK this winter but then it is remarkably tame. In my garden pond, frog spawn has appeared, only for the pond to ice over the next night, so probably that will be a failure this year.

Reading an article the other day about somebodies memories of school in the 1950's quite stirred me. Going to school when I started, aged five, in 1952, was quite a simple process. Having stayed home with my mother until I was five (normal school starting age - mothers rarely worked in those days), in the September I was taken up the long alley that ran along the bottom of several local side streets and deposited in the school playground. I was terrified and immediately beat my mother back home, whereupon I was given several slaps and dragged back up the alley again and told to stay there. After that, until I left school in 1962, I loved every minute of the three schools that I went to. 

In the winters of those early years, when we still had proper winters, my mother would un-pick old jumpers and re-use the wool to knit me balaclavas. Off I would trudge in those awful itchy and stretchy items of head gear to brave what the winter could throw at me, which in those days was a lot of snow! But the classroom in my infant school at least, was a joy to enter. There would be a large coke fire burning, surrounded by a high wire fire guard, on which we would place all our wet and soggy clothing to dry for home time. At break time the teacher would sit us round the warming fire and while we ate the sandwiches that we had taken, in my case marmite ones, would read us a story.

In the winter when it had snowed and built up like a deep white blanket on the roofs of houses and covered all the back yards and gardens as one, we would bound out of the house like wanderers suddenly coming upon an oasis in the desert. The alley outside our back gates was a deep, white, unspoilt surface marred only by the tracks of passing dogs and cats. We became great game hunters and followed the tracks of these animals as though we were hunting lions and tigers from the books that we had read. But they inevitably ended up disappearing over the high wooden fence of the mysterious old lady that kept lots of animals, had long growths of hair on her chin and shouted at us when we climbed up the fence. We lost interest, and donning old pairs of socks as our gloves, set about making snowballs to throw at the next cat that we saw and when none appeared, threw them at each other.

At lunchtime my father, fresh back from collecting driftwood from the nearby beach to keep the one fire in the house burning, threw more on the fire and it burnt with blue, salty flames. Outside, the day was losing light already and warmed, by the fire and the soup, I stayed indoors and read my books. 

Frost, mist and memories

There was a hard frost on the reserve this morning as I arrived and mist was beginning to drift across the marsh. This was the view as I began walking away from the barn.

Footprints in the frost.

And a rather bleak view looking towards the rising sun and the sea wall.

 I had hoped to get closer to these White-fronted Geese but they took flight before that was possible.

An hour later and this was the visibility along the sea wall.......

......and across the marsh, but blue skies and warm sunshine did arrive later on.

Yesterday I was talking to the owner of our local Farm Shop, who is the same age as me and also like me, spent his earlier years working on Sheppey's marshes. We got talking about my time working for the old Kent River Authority and the fact that the old ways of doing things just aren't there anymore. The KRA itself doesn't exist either, it's just a few unskilled men working as part of the Environment Agency now. Below you can see me in 1969, aged 22, somewhere on the Sheppey marshes.

I've posted most of these photos before but they're worth repeating to show how things have changed.
In those days, in early summer, a gang of around six of us, would spend a couple of months walking right round the Sheppey coastline mowing and raking the sea wall grass as we went. Today it's done by one guy on a tractor with an extending arm. Oh to be that young and fit again.

After the mowing had been completed we would then turn our attention to the cleaning of two of the main drainage ditches on Sheppey,  below you can see that I am busy cutting through the club rush alongside one of them. The ditches were all cleaned the hard way, by hand. After cutting the reeds we would then pull out the stuff growing in the ditch with long handled grabs. Despite how hard it was I always found it to be very satisfying looking back at the finished result and it was my favourite job. Today one man with a tractor and an extending arm does it.

The winter would see us either repairing groynes (breakwaters) along the beaches, or repairing eroded sections of sea walls, normally in some remote part of the Sheppey marshes. Once again it was done in about as hard a way as was possible. We used rocks of various sizes to re-fill the erosion and they arrived by barge that was floated as close as possible to the sea wall and we would then un-load the rocks literally by hand and by throwing them over the side into the water. The hold of this barge would of been full to the top and we would un-load around a 90-100 tons in a day. The rocks were placed onto wooden planking hooked on the inside of the hold and then we would climb onto it and throw them overboard. That's me at the front. Archaic and bloody hard work but boy did we have muscles!

At low tide we would then recover the rocks from the mud, chip them to a rough square with hammers and then drive them into the sea wall with wooden "pummers", basically something akin to a wooden log with two handles, as you can see me using here. There was a surprising skill involved here because not only were the rocks shaped in a certain way with the hammer but the section of repair would be left as level and tight as any crazy paving. Today the rocks arrive by lorry, are not shaped and simply tipped onto the eroded part of the sea wall and left.

One last memory from those days was of a farm bailiff on one of the Harty farms, who would still ride round the farm and it's marshes on a horse. In that way he missed very little to do with the farm and it's livestock. Today, it's normally done by a farmer charging about on a quad bike!

February

February, what an awful month it is, I always consider it to be the last month of my year. Wouldn't it be nice if we could re-position the New Year and make it the 1st March instead of the 1st January. March is the month when everything is re-born - lambs and Spring flowers appear, trees burst into leaf and blossom, summer migrants begin arriving from the South. That is the logical start of the New Year, not halfway through the winter!
February is a grotty, in-between month when at times, Spring seems further away than it did in January, when one warm and sunny day can be followed by snow and ice.

I had high hopes for BBC Countryfile becoming an actual, proper, countryside programme last night
when it was announced that it would feature the training of young gamekeepers. After watching it, it was clear that it was little more than a nod towards people like myself who regularly criticise the programme's lack of proper countryside pursuits and issues. Apart from a few trainees firing shotguns at clays and another firing at an imitation deer target, the only other highlight was the covering of hazel stumps with brushwood sticks. The feature was a perfect opportunity for the BBC to feature the trainees learning pest control methods such as trapping and shooting, etc., and currents attacks on gamekeepering practises on the moors, but no, clearly subjects far to strong and controversial for the BBC and it's soft-hearted audience. Amusingly, it came on the same day that some of the Countryside presenting team were featured in the Sunday Mail colour supplement taking part in a glamour fashion shoot with not a pair of wellies or a Barbour coat to be seen, just posh frocks and shirts and claims that they do feature controversial subjects. Bring back Jack Hargreaves!

Despite the sun and blue skies on the reserve early this morning, it was bitterly cold in the moderate and rare NE wind, but if nothing else it's drying the ground out. The Greylag Geese below were part of a hundred strong flock content to keep on just walking away from me and the dogs.

The regular flock of Brent Geese continued to expand as I walked round, up to c.600 strong...........

 ........until eventually they decided that The Flood field would be a better option and they took flight.

They've been constantly harrased this winter by the neighbouring farmer as he constantly tries keep them from grazing his winter corn and have become a lot more jittery than the Greylags nearby.

Back on the sea wall I sat for a while talking to one of the local wildfowlers, who had just completed an unsuccessful attempt for a last duck or two of this season. This coming Saturday finally sees the end of this shooting season for the wildfowlers and for a while we chatted through how the winter had been. It's always nice to get their perspective on how the shooting has been, how the wildfowl numbers continue to drop and how people who have such little understanding of what they do, perceive them.