The Voles of Roding Valley

I want to share a couple of photos I took during my volunteering recently at Roding Valley Meadows. Roding Valley Meadows is a multiple SSSI reserve in Essex, not far from Epping Forest, and Chigwell, that bastion of Essex culture. It hosts floodplain meadows, a wetland, secondary woodland, a network of ancient hedgerows, and a very dedicated and hard working team of hands-on staff and volunteers. Occasionally I am privileged to join them on their regular work parties.  Kingfishers and Little Egrets are commonplace on the river Roding.  However, a week ago on Tuesday, the day that the sun came back and I saw my first Bumble Bee of the year, it was mainly covered in so many voles.

While we were building some fencing in advance of the arrival of the cattle which provide summer grazing on the open parts of the nature reserve, we accidentally disturbed some of the little furry mammals. It was with some surprise that rather than scattering, although they did run away initially, at least a couple of the voles returned to their grass cutting pile and the round holes in which they seemed to live. Noticing movement, I sat and watched for a little while, as a stubby, furry snout emerged from one of the vole holes. The tiny, round beast sat outside its hole for a moment, looking unperturbed, before finding a few blades of green grass growing from among the pile of cuttings, and beginning to munch on them.  If I moved too close with my camera lens, they would dart back into the hole, sausage-shaped blurs of vole hair, though not for too long. Eventually, my watching began to make them clearly unsettled, and one discovered the tactic of biting off a strip of long grass and retiring with it, into the vole hole. The tip of the grass, protruding, wobbled as the vole munched. I left them to it and got back to work.

 

As I wandered away at the end of a busy day fence building, passing the long hedges of white blackthorn, the first wild blossom of the Spring, I was aware of several voles moving in the leaf litter, seeing another, quite clearly between the blossom covered branches, munching something busily in the leaf litter. I’d heard a rustle and been looking for a small bird as the source of the sound.  A couple of paces on another darted into the long grass. Perhaps at a local scale they are having a good year, they are a species prone to strongly cyclical population dynamics. My observations were entirely unscientific, perhaps I was merely more tuned in to their presence than usual, or perhaps, I just saw a lot of voles that day.   But it struck me how seldom we actually see these creatures. The short tailed field vole is thought to be the only mammal in the British Isles to outnumber humans, yet I was at University before I noticed that I had seen one which wasn’t in a Longworth trap.  They live outside of our radar, though of course many mammals and birds of prey, including Barn Owls and Kestrels, are almost totally dependent on them as a source of food.  It also struck me that they are very beautiful.

Fingringhoe Wick in February

About a fortnight ago, I went with the Beautiful Bee Girl to the amusingly named Essex Wildlife Trust reserve at Fingringoe Wick, near Colchester.  We parked in the gravel car park beside the visitor’s centre.  We’d heard there was a bittern which had been seen in recent days from one of the hides overlooking the site’s main body of fresh water, a small lake just a stone’s throw from the centre.   I'd understood Bitterns were best seen in the afternoons, when they move between their feeding and their roosting sites, but the Bee Girl, who had yet to see a Bittern despite having spent a lot of her time raising money for them, wanted to check the hide first.  To my shame, I’d rather hoped to get out to the river Colne to look at the waders, and some grebes which had been seen in the channel.  Luckily, we decided to do it her way.  Armed with our coffees, we made our way through the late February drizzle to the hide. The bench was packed with birders and volunteers, eyes to their telescopes and binoculars.  The volunteer from the visitors’ centre talked us to the spot where the bird had, seconds before, begun to climb up on a tussock of reeds. Of course, it took a while to find the vertically striped, straw-coloured heron among the vertical, straw coloured Phragmites which lined the opposite shore. But find it we did, standing on its tussock. Through the scope we could see the dark lines running down its face, its’ long, grey beak. We could see its excellent camouflage, the camouflage which makes this scarce heron one of the trickiest birds to see in the country.  Centuries ago they were common, especially in the huge fens of East Anglia, but reedbeds are much scarcer now, and though individuals like this one can winter in relatively small sections, breeding pairs need large expanses of unbroken reeds. Efforts are underway to restore and create large reedbeds, projects such as Wicken 2100 and the Great Fen Project, both in Cambridgeshire, may see the species re-establish properly in South East England.  Staffordshire Wildlife Trust is raising money to buy Tucklesholme Quarry to help them establish there.  Have a google and give them some money. The Beautiful bee girl did, and the bitterns rewarded her with a sighting! 

I wouldn't normally trouble my blog with a record shot. But Bittern!

 There were a few other birds out on the lake, including Shovellers, again displaying, circling each other on the water, and a confiding little grebe swam close to the hide. Teal lurked among the reeds, resting, heads on wings, but all was pretty quiet and we decided to head down to the saltings and the Colne estuary.  We passed the boardwalk near to which I had seen one of my first Turtle Doves a few summers ago, which was underneath a pond swollen by the very wet winter.  The spring was in the air already though, and a few daffodils had begun to open in the wildlife garden beside the centre.

Later in the day, the flooded boardwalk. 

On our way to the saltings we came upon one of the scarcer habitats at Fingringhoe, the lichen and moss carpet that grows on the poor, very sandy soils beside some of the old military installations, which have fallen back to nature on the reserve.   These sandy heaths, fringed with Gorse and Brambles and Concrete, are rather lush. Amongst the green mosses grows the beautiful and intricately branching Cladonia lichens, the so-called reindeer moss.  These sensitive plants are found only on very nutrient poor , and often acid soils, often appearing where there is very little soil at all. Lichens dominate the vegetation of shingle apposition beaches like Blakeney Point and Dungeness. They are also found on windswept tundras. Natalie the bee girl was immediately photographing the beautiful micro-world found down in the moss and lichen carpet as the clouds parted and the sun burst out above us.

Lichen and Moss carpet.

<3

We stepped up to one of the benches overlooking the beautiful Colne Estuary. The water seemed to become curiously blue, as the sky cleared.  Skeins of the locally ubiquitous Brent Goose, something of an overlooked speciality of coastal Essex in winter, flew past, out toward the estuary. These dark geese fly in from Scandinavia and Siberia to spend the winter in the relative warmth of the Essex coast.  Across the stretch of water were a cluster of gleaming white birds, with the scope we could identify them as Avocets, the elegant black and white waders which are familiar from the RSPB logo, and an iconic conservation success here in Britain.  Some appeared to swim in the rising water, others waded on the mudflats. We had only been watching them for a moment when they took to the air, and departed downriver after the skeins of geese. A couple of oystercatchers were left behind.  A fishing boat, pursued by a flock of gulls, headed downriver too, and we scanned the flock for interesting species. Sometimes Kittywakes or Mediterranean Gulls can be seen flying behind the fishing boats, but we only saw the ubiquitous Black Headed Gulls, Herring Gulls and a few brown juveniles of various common species.

Passing shipping.

We headed down to a hide on the waters edge, where several Great Crested and Little Grebes could be seen out on the open water, and the bones of an old wooden boat protruded from the sand. Wigeon and Teal whistled on the banks, and a small party of curlew flew by.  An interesting looking grebe turned out to be a curiously grey, but nevertheless lovely Little Grebe.

Boat Bones.

We were aware that time was marching on so we headed back toward the centre, eventually finding a hide overlooking the scrape, a small body of water cut into the saltmarsh and fenced off from it. A section of fence appeared to have come down in the recent strong winds.  The hide turned out to be the best decision we ever made. The saltmarshes lay before us, full of Brent Geese, beautiful Lapwings, handsome, stately Curlews and busy Dunlins and Starlings. On the waters edge sat a handful of Golden Plovers, rather scarce, handsome birds which will soon be returning to their upland breeding grounds, which include the moors of Northern England.  The light was beginning to fade, and the saltmarsh was bathed in golden light, the trees beside the hide casting long shadows over it. A Barn Owl drifted silently past the windows, just a few metres away. A pair of handsome Red Breasted Merganser, one of the most stunning, elegantly punk looking ducks you will ever see, floated out on the water, toward the centre of the channel. They are locally uncommon, and the ragged green crest of the male sets them apart from other ducks. They are closely related to the handsome Goosander which is becoming so familiar in the North of England.  Not long after a dark shape, wings raised in a slight V shape drifted over the marsh. The grebes Every duck, gull and wading bird smaller than a curlew took to the sky,  which filled with the shapes of hundreds of Lapwing, Golden Plover, Oystercatcher, Teal and Widgeon, and echoed with their alarm calls. The Marsh Harrier, apparently uninterested, continued flying, flapping lazily Southwards and Eastwards.  A couple of Black Headed gulls made mobbing passes as the large raptor flew on.  

The Saltings.

The last species we added to our list was a handsome bullfinch, and, with the reserve gates apparently locked at five, we headed back to the centre. Natalie discussed lichens, and attempted to ID a couple of specimens with the centre volunteers while I watched Little Egrets and cormorants fly off into the sunset to roost. We left, reminded of why Fingringhoe, that beautiful spot on the Colne estuary, remains one of my favourite reserves in Essex.

oh yeah, linkies.

Bringing Bitterns back to Staffordshire!

http://www.justgiving.com/tucklesholme

And the reserve this blog is actually about, which I properly recommend, one of the most beautiful places in Essex.

http://www.essexwt.org.uk/reserves/fingringhoe-wick