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

Haweswater, no birds, but what a landscape (plus a footnote on the neonic ban)

I spent yesterday tramping across the mud and rock of the Eastern Lake District in search of England’s only Golden Eagle, who makes his home, we are told, in  the Lakeland Valley which contains the Haweswater reservoir. It was wet, and the precipitous scenery rugged beneath the grey sky and broken cloud. Moss and lichen grew in profusion over dry stone walls and on the trunks of the stunted and miniature oaks which dotted the landscape.  The lake lies in a high valley to the East of Windermere.  Beside it sat a couple of female Goosander, a smart, fish-eating duck, and on a tree covered island, a colony of noisy lesser black backed gulls, unusual so far from the coast, had set up their nest sites.

There were clusters of trees, plantations, of Pine and Larch, and a fallen specimen of the latter, in the light woodland, where the sun could penetrate through the bare branches of the deciduous conifers, the most luxuriant tree beard mosses, really lichens, grew abundantly, alongside several true mosses, and the strange pink flowers and soft, pastel-green new growth needles of the still living, horizontal conifers. Beside the larches stood a stand of Scots pine, and these presented a very different woodland, dark, the trees placed in rows, strangely quiet and foreboding. The woods, which helped hold the soil to the hillside and offer a little shelter to walks in the valley, were of course planted, for human use, but add a little diversity to the landscape. The RSPB web site announced they contain Redstarts and even Red squirrels. My friends and I saw a Chaffinch and a Goldcrest and were happy about it. I suspect the Red Squirrels, holding on because the stunted growth and conifer plantations cannot sustain the invasive Greys, and the latter, which only arrive in late April, may still be suffering from migratory setbacks induced by the continuing cold weather of the last few weeks.

In the rain it was a far cry from the previous weekend when we had set off to Leighton Moss, with our hangovers, and seen Osprey, Buzzard and Marsh Harrier on the same day, over the open reed beds in the sunshine an unusual break in the usual grey weather.  We were so lucky that day with all the birds we saw, and at Haweswater we were reminded that you don’t win them all. But what a place, nevertheless.  We found a high place, and ate our lunch while a few buzzards continued to soar about, sometimes generating undue excitement, as perspective distorted our perception of perhaps large buzzards seen head on. At least one Raven flew over us, and meadow pipits, in what looked a nonsensically unequal struggle, mobbed a buzzard incessantly as he crossed the valley, ducking into and landing among some pine trees where he could avoid the annoyance of the relatively tiny, more agile, and apparently mocking passerines.  Meadow Pipits were everywhere, and there were plenty of Wheatears about. The Wheatears’ name is famously a contraction of “white arse” a historic name dropped in Victorian times when it was thought vulgar. Inevitably we delighted in calling them white arses all day. The wheatear is a smart little passerine, with a uniform back, grey in the male and brown in the female, with a little dark ‘bandit’ mask on his face, a black tail, and of course a white rump, conspicuous in flight. It too is a migrant, arriving from Africa to the heaths and moors of Northern Europe.

We pressed on a little, trudging through the mud and mosses, past an abandoned sheep fold, as far as the RSPB viewpoint, but we saw no eagle. Grey mountains and scree slopes towered above us, with tiny oaks clinging to them, seeming to pinch the sky. If Dungeness and Elmley Marshes in the South of England can be called Big Sky RSPB reserves, Haweswater has a small sky, hemmed in by steep, dark mountains. A herd of Red Deer grazed on a hillside. A couple more meadow pipits chirped overhead.  I pressed on a little alone in the hope of catching up with our eagle, and walked through the stands of dead Purple Moor Grass until I reached the RSPB viewpoint, checked out a little more valley, and trudged guiltily through a sphagnum bog. We began to loose the light so I headed back to the crowd, and glanced around for a dipper on a mountain stream. Bird wise this place was incredibly quiet. The continuing, driving rain was doing little to help, and we decided it was time to head back, keeping an eye out as we returned to the vehicle.

We saw no Eagle but what a landscape!

As a footnote to this blog post I think I should at least refer to the recent ban on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides on bee attracting crops, which, thankfully, and not a moment too soon, emerged from the EU at the weekend.  It is wonderful news, and I am heartily relieved that our money-minded government, with their short term thinking were not able to overwhelm the scientific consensus that neonicotinoid pesticides have profound sub lethal effects on bees.  It will not solve the problem, and halt the decline of bees, there are other sources of pollution, as well as land use change, the effect of which on species is seldom instant and according to recent scientific literature it may take decades for land use change to have its knock on effects on species, workers suggesting there may be an extinction debt for lowland grassland butterflies in at least some EU member states.  The detractors of the neonicotinoid ban will continue to point to this as reason to allow them to continue using these pesticides, which affect the navigational abilities and reproduction of bees. The fact remains that the burden of proof falls, all to often, unduly upon our wildlife, and there is simply not time for more work. We need to take action to stem the decline. The costs of losing our pollinators could be massive, economic and human, as well as ecological, given our reliance on so many insect pollinated crops. We are already seeing parallel declines in Pollinator diversity and plant diversity in England and Holland.   I am grateful to all those who campaigned long and hard for this new legislation, and the agricultural community should be too, pollinators are vital to their long term well being and ours. The Neonic ban may not go far enough but it is a great step in the right direction.