What happened to Winter?

Here we are at the end of December 2016 and no sign of any really cold weather, in fact it's not unlike the December of last year, predominantly mild and basically an extended autumn. The only really difference between this December and last December is how dank and gloomy it has been.
The photo below shows the Harty Road (it runs across the marshes to the reserve), in December 2011 and it was the last time that we had snow of any seriousness. To the left is a very deep, near empty ditch that concentrated the mind on not going to fast in the car and sliding off the road. But are winters such as this, now a thing of the past, have four or five autumn months now taken their place?

I had a 4x4 vehicle when I took the photo above and so the challenge of getting along the road wasn't too bad. Since then, after a serious of non-snowy winters, I have reverted to a normal two-wheel drive car again and wouldn't want to risk such conditions in that. Up until ten years or so ago, some snow of varying depths was still guaranteed in most winters but then we still had real winters then, not lengthy autumns. Those were the days when it was not possible to get the car off of the drive and so a lengthy walk through deep snow to the pet shop for bird food supplies and household supplies was necessary, or endured. The splendid effect of those days was the fact that many other people were doing the same and the trudge through the snow became a community thing. A time whereby all of a sudden people from the same road shared experiences rather than simple nods in passing.
With bird food purchased it was then back home, sweep 6 inches of snow off of the bird tables and to sit back in the warmth and watch the birds gratefully accepting the life-lines that you'd given them.

Going back to these last two winters, the other event that has not been happening, is normal amounts of rainfall, as I have regularly mentioned this year. Walking away from my car at the reserve barn, this is the sight that I would have seen in many January/February's up until a couple of years ago. Wall to wall flooding that created an arduous walk round for me in wellington boots that were sometimes not high enough and a lot of swimming for my two dogs, but boy, did it attract in many thousands of birds. Ducks, geese, plovers and waders were in such large flocks that it was difficult to count them at times and the wildfowlers waiting on the other side of the sea wall were regularly spoilt for choice when it came to shooting. This morning, and last December, that same view is of unbroken green grass, just some geese and a few ducks, etc. and the ditch water level to the left and right of that gate is three feet below the track.

Things ain't changed

It's been some time since I last wrote about the reserve and to be honest, it's been some time since anything worth writing about, happened. Here we are almost at the end of December and the main talking point, surprisingly, remains that of the lack of water. After this summer's prolonged drought we finally got a few days of rain several weeks ago and things began to look as though they might catch up water-wise. Since then however it has been either dry and frosty, damp and drizzly, or just plain grey and damp, but certainly not very wet. Sure, when I go out to the reserve each morning the grass is always wringing wet from dew, drizzle or mist, and the bare areas are soft and a tad muddy, but the shallow rills are bone dry and the ditches are barely any deeper than they were in July. I was talking to a birdwatcher out there a couple of weeks ago who hadn't been there for some time and he was amazed at the lack of water and as a result, the lack of wildfowl. It is blindingly obvious therefore, that unless we get a high amount of rainfall during the next three months, we will have serious water problems out there by the end of the Spring once drying winds and warm sunshine come along.
Mind you, both the cattle and their owner are enjoying the current conditions. It's mostly mild, the grass is ticking over nicely, the gateways, etc., haven't become impassable due to cattle damage from excessively wet conditions and no doubt they will be taken off for calving much later than is normal.

Bird-wise, well things aren't too bad in respect of variety, it's mainly the wildfowl numbers however that are well below what would be expected there in a normal wet winter. The very low water levels in the fleets and ditches and a bone dry Flood Field, have meant that numbers of Teal, Mallard and Shoveler are well below what used to be recorded 10-15 years ago, only Gadwall are present in reasonable numbers. The 300+ feral Greylag Geese  are surviving the shooting that is going on all round the reserve well though, they always seem to find the safest routes in and out of the reserve on a regular basis. Their numbers are regularly boosted as well by 48-50 truly wild White-fronted Geese, always a joy to see and hear.
What else, well the day-time roost of Short-eared Owls out on the saltings seems to be holding their own at around 10-12 birds and encouragingly, they are regularly joined for a night-time roost, by two female and one male, Hen Harriers, a far better number than in recent years. The only other birds of note are a long stay Crane and a Richards Pipit. This Skylark sized and rather plain Pipit, an autumn/winter vagrant from Asia, is back to the exact same spot along the reserve sea wall for it's third winter running. Other than that, on a day to day basis, the reserve can be pretty boring at times due to the low numbers of birds.

Goodbye Midge

In February 2003 I took receipt of a seven week old Jack Russell puppy to be named Midge. She had been bought to replace the previous Jacko that had just died and to become the new companion of my then, seven year old Beagle, Nana. This photo, taken a day or two after she'd arrived, makes her look a lot bigger than she actually was, she was tiny.

Despite Midge's tiny size, Nana was at first, petrified of her, a supremacy that Midge was quick to exploit but they eventually enjoyed countless hours of playful wrestling.

And when the big day came and a very timid Midge was introduced to the big wide and scary world of the marsh and all it's mysterious sights and smells, it was Nana that showed her round and looked after her.

And after a hard day on the marsh, learning all the things that a young dog has to learn, it would be time for a nap on my bed, protected still by Nana's comforting arm. (This was not posed, they often slept like this)

 And gradually she grew up......

and turned into the wonderful and trouble-free dog that she always was.

And five years ago, when Nana eventually died, I replaced her with little Ellie and it became Midge's turn to be the matriarch and show the latest young up-start the proper way to to things.
But a few days ago, an amazingly fit, near fourteen year old Midge, suddenly developed an aggressive cancer and we had to say goodbye to her - I'll miss her greatly, it's just Ellie and me now.

Clocking Back

The frustrations of being a bad sleeper and a naturally early waker-upper came home to roost badly this morning. No matter how badly I sleep I always wake up at around 5am and get up shortly after. Last night the clocks went back an hour to bring us into British winter time, that meant when I woke up at my normal 5am, a glance at the clock showed that it was now actually 4am. Great, most normal people will say, turn over and go back to sleep for an extra hour, unfortunately once I'm awake that's it, I can't fall back to sleep again, I get up. So I laid there and thought oh well, if everything's gone backwards by an hour that means instead of having to wait for it to get light at 7.15, this morning it'll be 6.15 and I get to the reserve earlier in the day - wrong!! As I lay there in the darkness I could hear the constant mournful sound of the fog horns out in the Thames Estuary, a couple of miles away. Oh no, and a glance out of the window showed that the fog was so thick I could barely see across the road, I'd only been awake a few minutes and my day had already got off to a bad start.
Normally I quite like being out on the marsh in the fog, it has a real Dickensian feel about it, sounds carry, birds appear from nowhere, but this morning I wanted to be there just as the first glimmer of light appeared in order to see what standard of shooting the wildfowlers produced re. the geese again. Now that wasn't going to happen and so I hung around indoors until the paper shop opened, got the papers, read one, and then by 8.00 the fog was beginning to lift and so I set off. By the time I got to the reserve we briefly had a glimpse of the sun before the fog began to slowly thicken again. I wandered across to the sea wall hide and joined two birdwatchers in there for a chat. They advised that they had passed the wildfowlers as they made their way to the hide and that they were carrying dead geese and so it looks as though the geese are going to take a daily pasting all the time that they continue taking the flight line that they do.
Meanwhile the birdwatchers were hoping for a glimpse of the Crane that has been frequenting the reserve for a few weeks, though not while I was talking to them, and were carrying two of those huge long lenses for photography that are popular these days. They looked terribly heavy and it must be a labour of love to carry them around for any length of distance, although I guess the results make it all worthwhile. As I came round the back of the reserve a while later I could hear the Crane calling and amazingly it had flown in and landed in a field quite close to the photographers and so they must of been very happy in the end.
Going past Capel Corner along the Harty Road the Great White Egret was walking about among the Mallards in the now shallow Fleet there and I pulled up to snatch a photo. On lifting the camera it immediately flew off and so I was left with just the Mallards and behind them a load of Coot. It's still only 11.45, I feel like I've already been up for a whole day, the fog has lifted to leave grey skies and I think it is going to be a long day.

Another Day

It was one of those mornings this morning, pitch dark when I rose at 5.30 and no matter how many times I paced the house, looking for a hint of dawn breaking out to the east, it just stayed heavily gloomy. Eventually, at 7.00 with the dark sky turning slightly lighter grey in colour, I gave in and headed for the reserve with the dogs anyway. By the time that I got there it was a kind of gloomy half light, just right for the Barn Owl that was hunting ahead of me.
Halfway across the marsh, heading for the sea wall, I heard the clamouring of the Greylag Geese before I could vaguely make them out in the distant gloom, a wide number of dark shapes lumbering slow and low across the saltings from the mudflats of The Swale. I stopped and held my breath, would they make it to the reserve, would there be wildfowlers waiting to intercept them. All hell broke loose, shots and more shots echoed round the sky, some birds dropped from the sky, some possibly injured, made a long and struggling glide towards the safety of the reserve, before suddenly dropping from view. As sudden as the shots had been it went quiet again, the remaining geese went inland to the stubble fields and myself and the dogs climbed up on to the top of the seawall.  Four wildfowlers were easily identifiable, they were walking the saltings hunting with their dogs for geese that had dropped and were as yet un-found. Two others remained tucked down and half-hidden, clearly they had been unsuccessful in what had gone on. Much walking and shouting at dogs ensued and eventually three dead geese were found and the wildfowlers began to pack up and I had a chat with four of them as they made their back along the sea wall, carrying their dead geese. It transpired that a total of six geese were shot but one remained un-found out on the saltings, as were the two that were last seen dropping into the reserve, did they die, are they out there somewhere injured, not a good result and one heavily regretted by all sides.

Two weeks ago I hastily predicted, after a brief flirtation with some rain, that the drought here on Sheppey was now over. No, that brief spell of dampness that saw grass begin to turn green and crops in the fields begin to germinate, has been followed by non-stop drying winds and some sunshine. In short, the moisture that fell on that gloriously wet weekend was gone within 24 hours and we haven't seen any since. Today as I write this, the sky may be grey but it's almost warm and walking the reserve is no different to walking a concrete road, it's bone hard and dust dry. Looking at the Met. Office long range forecast well into December, it is set to stay mostly dry and increasingly cold and so the drought goes on.

Reading the Paper

Reading my Daily Telegraph today I came across the photo below, used as an advert by some company or other. It was of Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin in c.1938 in his regular watering hole of Brown's Hotel, Laugharne in Wales. It is one of my favourite photos of Dylan Thomas.

I first discovered Thomas in the mid 1960's, curious to see who it was that Bob Dylan had allegedly named himself after. I began with his poetry, wrote poetry in a similar vein and becoming hooked, looked deeper into his life and found someone that I could easily admire and identify with. All these years later, looking back through the various books that I have collected about his life, it is clear that in many ways the facts of his life were falsely presented, although he did work hard at times to give people the image that they expected. And oh to have the balls to do what he did, aged 39, and literally drink himself to death one night because he couldn't face being forty. I can't say I like a lot of his poetry, just a dozen or so exceptional ones, but his stories, including the great Under Milk Wood, are fantastic, but for me there is one outright winner. Dylan reciting his "A Child's Christmas in Wales". To listen to that, in his beautiful Welsh voice, reminds me so much of how my childhood winters were.

In the same paper, a female columnist was going off about the fact that the Pope has decreed that the practice of keeping a loved one's ashes at home should be forbidden, or scattering them somewhere for that matter. I have no interest in religion at all and was moving on until one thing in her column caught my eye and made me chuckle. Did you know that there are some companies who will happily bake your loved one's ashes into a drinking mug, that's taking having a drink with your dad a bit too far! 

On the subject of loved one's ashes as well, I've always been intrigued as to what exactly is in those urns that people have on their mantle-piece or wherever. Are they really the ashes of a loved one, or the ashes from a coffin, or a mixture of the two - anybody know?

We Had Rain

Well, I said in my last post, it was getting colder and indeed it did, with every day until this morning having North East or Easterly winds creating quite a drop in temperatures. Not only that, we also had rain at last, several early mornings and late evenings were wet. It was never enough to make a zilch of difference to the water levels on the reserve but it has penetrated the soil to an inch or two, causing the grass to begin growing again. Not only that, it has wet the soil on the neighbouring arable fields and rape and winter wheat seed that has sat in bone dry ground for six weeks, has finally begun to germinate and grow.
This morning however, the wind had swung round to a milder SW direction overnight and it was a beautiful and mild autumnal start to the day. Below you can see my view across the marsh as I arrived at first light today, with a light mist rising and the sea wall in the distance.

 Looking westwards you can see some of the cattle and the wind pump.

 and here this calf was busy trotting through the mist, anxious to catch up with it's mother.

This direction sign at the foot of the seawall looked like some biblical cross against the dawn sky.

and the sea wall hide and the various colours of the brightening sky. I was tempted to enhance the colours but decided to leave them as they naturally occurred.

Getting on top of the sea wall I easily spotted this wildfowler out on the saltings, one of four, that was just packing up for the morning. Bird-wise it was a very quiet morning in the calm and warm setting, as the wildfowlers confirmed when I chatted with them. Very few ducks were seen and certainly none shot but their biggest concern was the hoards of mosquitoes that bit them non-stop as they sat out there.