Birds Before Breakfast at Cranham Marsh

I see no need to blog in chronological order, so in between Holiday Blogs I'm going to post this, about a lovely morning joining a walk organised by my local Essex Wildlife Trust group.

Cranham Marsh is a small patch of land, managed for the benefit of wildlife by Essex Wildlife Trust, bounded by monocultures of oilseed rape and other crop plants, and the small conurbation of Upminster. In spring its ancient woodland, historic reedbeds, scrub and wet meadow rings to the sound of birdsong and the hum of bumblebees. It is a patch I do not blog about nearly enough, and wonderfully local. On the 5^th of May the site hosted its annual “Birds Before Breakfast” walk, led by its inimitable warden, local author and EWT conservation stalwart Tony Gunton, and my Mother and I were up early to attend. We somehow arrived between the two crowds who take the walk, and while the site seemed initially quiet for birds, the view across the wide fields of yellow brassicas toward the Church of All Saints was pleasing in the early morning light.

View of All Saint's Church, Cranham.

We eventually joined a group of about 20 people, curious local people and experienced birders, and walked onto the reserve. A few Swallows pursued insects over the hedge tops, against a blue sky.  My first UK Swifts of the year also wheeled about, and Orange Tip butterflies fluttered amongst the Red Campion flowers.  Common woodland birds, including Dunnock and Blackbird were singing loudly and conspicuously, and the distinct two note song of Chiffchaffs could also be heard, amongst the burgeoning trees.  Little charms of goldfinch fluttered through the hedge tops. Tony led us to a spot where we were able to watch a pair of whitethroats a little warbler and summer visitor from Subsaharan Africa, going back and forth feeding their young. Cranham Marsh seems to host large numbers of these charming little migrants, and their song, sometimes described as scratchy, and rather thinner perhaps than the song of some other warblers, is an evocative sound of the place.  Part of the reserve had been closed off as conservation grazing cattle worked their magic, controlling scrub and helping to restore the historic wet meadows. Mumsy heard a cuckoo, although neither of us could see it, its distinctive call is unmistakeable.  I saw a local cuckoo in Hornchurch country park later that day.

Blackcaps were also in evidence, another charming warbler species, also largely a summer visitor to the site.  Jackdaws periodically made squawking flights from some of the tall, ancient woodland trees which border the meadows, and they were joined by the bright, noisy and exotic Rose Ringed Parakeets which have joined the breeding bird list for the site in recent years.  While distinct in flight, their bright green plumage makes them very well camouflaged in their treetop habitat, as no doubt their ancestors in India were. More conspicuous in the treetops was a handsome Stock Dove, a smart and oft-overlooked pigeon, resembling a well-scrubbed, more minimalist looking woodpigeon, to which it is closely related. This one sat on the bough of an ancient oak, not far from a pair of parrots.

Part of Cranham Marsh LNR

 We were, for a donation, treated to a cooked breakfast of egg sandwiches, and, for the more carnist-inclined, egg and bacon sandwiches, prepared for us by the EWT local group’s volunteers.  People noted that attendance was down a little on previous years, which seemed a shame for what is so clearly a gem of an event, connecting people with the wildlife on their doorstep here on the outskirts of London. If you are in Upminster on the early May Bank Holiday, I heartily recommend birds before breakfast, it is well worth the early start.

Okay this wasn't taken at Cranham Marsh, but the other group's place down the road. Nevertheless, this is what it looked like.

As Mumsy and I were walking homeward, at what must still have only been about 10am, a small bird took off from the bridge, which crosses the stream, perhaps flushed by its approach. There was a flash of blue, and a distinctively shaped bird, with a stocky body and a long, sword-like beak, flew off across the meadow, presumably cutting out the streams meanders. Kingfishers breed locally at an RSPB reserve down near the river, and can even be seen in some urban parks, but this was a new one for me on my local patch, and what a bird, a stunner,  a Kingfisher!  I left with a healthy appreciation, renewed, of a local wildlife asset, and of the efforts of people like Tony Gunton and the other volunteers who do so much to preserve it and maximise its wildlife value.

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.