RSPB Hodbarrow, or The Start of the Northern Summer

I want to blog about the buzzards, I really want to, but nothing but incoherent rage can come out of my mouth on the subject at the moment. Indeed, I cannot talk about it without incitement so I’m not going to. Instead I am going to tell you about all the trips I managed to squeeze in, between the GIS coursework, in  the last few days, the days summer arrived in Lancashire! Instead of raging against English (anti) Nature, and the game industry to whom they are in thrall, I am going to tell you all what a nice week I have had.  There will be more to come, think of this as “part one.”

Sunday took Natty and I to the RSPB and National Nature Reserve at Hodbarrow, on the West coast of Cumbria, near Millom, where apparently there is an ex RAF airfield and possibly a prison. It is also home to a large coastal lagoon where a colony of very special, on a UK level at least, Terns live. No sooner had we left the car park, and overcome the disappointment that for some reason dogs were permitted on the reserve, we were surrounded by the sound of birdsong. We could hear the scratchy melodies of Whitethroat, the full-on techno beats of Sedge Warbler, the tumbling melodies of willow warbler, and the repetitious, two-note song of Chiffchaff, the melody with flourish at the end of Chaffinch. A pair of blackcaps hopped about in an oak tree. The paths were lined with yellow flowering Gorse.  There were a few white butterflies about.

Rounding a corner, passing a pond attended by the obligatory pair of Mute Swans and large numbers of Swallows and Sand Martins, Natalie, ever the sharp-eyed entomologist, found me the season’s first Damselfly, sunning itself on a blade of grass. By the season and the red colour, it was probably a Pyrrhosoma nymphula, A large Red Damselfly. A couple of fresher damselflies were about, still to develop their adult markings.  The trees had only just entered full leaf, and one or two were still sparse. To see the first Damselfly of the year was a relief. The snow in Bowland and down into the Peaks at Easter is still a recent memory, as was Roeburndale in late April, sliding about in the pouring rain, and noticing the bluebells were still underground. We walked on and found a small cove. A few crab skins lay about on the beach. Out on the water we could see some Red Breasted Merganser, and a few Eider and Shelduck. Redshank and crows foraged in the mud. We were out of Morecambe Bay by now, having driven through the South Western corner of the Lake District National Park. Across the river Duddon the fells of South Lakeland stood out above the estuary mud.

We were crossing a small headland when we saw a bird of prey being mobbed, fairly relentlessly, by gulls. It drew toward us over the estuary. There is nothing unusual about seeing a buzzard or some such crossing a small strip of water, or getting mobbed by gulls, but raising my binoculars, this was no buzzard. Its long wings arched slightly like a gulls’, and its body was white, a dark stripe running through its eye. This was an Osprey! We couldn’t see a tag or a ring, and shortly the gulls had seen it off, back over the Duddon Estuary. To my mind this seemed too late to be a passage migrant, the internet reports the Rutland Water Ospreys already have chicks, it may have been one of the adults now nesting in the Lake District.

We had lunch on the beach and dipped our toes in the still freezing water. A few Sandwich and Common Terns flew by, some diving for fish, and some skimming the water surface. Hodbarrow is one of the few places little terns can be seen in the UK. They breed on islands left behind by abandoned Iron workings on the site. The industrial history of the Hodbarrow reserve is rich, and plain to see, the muddy soil stained red by haematite, old quarries scarring the landscape and the odd fragment of a concrete structure protruding among the rushes. We walked the sea wall to the hide were we were entertained by the pretty Little Terns, sweet looking little birds with black caps, yellow bills and short forked tails. They were feisty, defending their nest site against anything, mobbing even larger terns as they passed by. They had arrived only a few days ago, but now there seemed to be as many as forty of them, nest scrapes already established on the bare bars of stone in the lagoon, presumably stacks of spoil from some quarrying operation. Despite their aggression little terns are infamously vulnerable to predators. Here, electric fences, and broken fences, were all over the islands, presumably from attemptos to protect these nationally rare (but globally distributed) birds.  I have seen Little Tern before, but only when I was volunteering in Gialova in Greece, in a place which bore odd similarities to Hodbarrow.  A few Eider swam in the still water, one of the males very vocal, tipping his head back and making the classic Eider call, perhaps best described as an impression of Kenneth Williams. The smart sea ducks dabbled about for a while. Great crested grebes swam around, paired up, no longer dancing as the summer is now in full swing, but not yet with the little chicks on their backs, as will I have no doubt charm us in the months to come.

We ended the day with a spot of sea watching, in the distance, Gannets and Kittywakes could be seen diving for fish in the open water among flocks of terns and black headed gulls. Gulls and Eider, and a few Red Breasted Merganser bobbed on the surface. The falling temperature and building wind coming in off the sea reminded us of our latitude, but among the birds, the swifts and swallows flying all around us on the walk back to the car park, we could be in no doubt that the summer had begun.

Lydd Airport Expansion

Finding time to blog is sometimes a bit of a challenge.  This is why I am blogging about an announcement made now several weeks ago. On the 10^th of April the news broke that permission had been granted for Lydd airport to be expanded, a measure which will may conclude the story of Dungeness’ National Nature Reserve’s “Death from a thousand cuts” to quote the expression once used by the botanist Brian Ferry, who has worked extensively on the site.

Dungeness Old Lighthouse from the RH&DR narrow-guage railway.

Dungeness, announced as “the other lands end” by a sign welcoming visitors to the expansive National Nature Reserve and ramshackle fishing community, is a totally unique habitat, with no parallel existing anywhere in the world. It consists of miles of shingle, bound by a community of lichen and bryophytes, grazed by a few hardy rabbits and hares.  It shows a complete succession from a maritime flora of rare Sea Kale, a curious, salt-tolerant member of the cabbage family, up to scrub, established on soils left behind by lichen and bryophyte pioneers, an example of life finding a way on a stony desert of rounded pebbles deposited by the sea. Wild flowers grow among the simpler plants and lichens, and in high summer these are visited by a range of butterflies, small tortoiseshell, small heath, small copper.  A single road winds across the foreshore, past the two lighthouses, historic and modern, past the Pilot Inn, serving local fish and chips, past the old coastguard cottages housing the Dungeness Bird Observatory, my home for five weeks in the Autumn of 2010, toward the dual towering, steam emitting monstrosities of Dungeness A and B nuclear power stations. A small footpath cuts north in a straight line across the shingle, past a memorial two a couple of brave Polish lads who died in their Spitfires defending the English coast, a threadbare polish flag flying over the wild, flat shingle country. A series of lakes,  traces of the gravel extraction workings which dot Romney Marsh are attended by herons, and in Autumn, swallows and martins gather over them in their thousands, surround an old cart track, where the lichen flora is barer, and where one can experience jelly legs after hours spent walking over the unstable shingle, which leads up to the famous RSPB reserve, home to the most obliging birds of prey in the country, a population of Marsh Harriers, a bird described by the lands custodians as rarer than a Golden Eagle. Yellow wagtails and meadow pipits breed here, and the reserve hosts black redstarts, specialists in these extreme habitats, and a rare colony of Tree Sparrows.  The gravel workings present an opportunity for migratory birds passing through the area from Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and even Iceland and Greenland, through the migration bottleneck the peninsula presents, on their way to the Mediterranean and beyond. From the lighthouse the ridges and troughs, landforms typical of an apposition beach, can still be seen, creating interest for Geomorphologists as well as Ecologists.

Rare Lapland Bunting at Dungeness.

Lydd airport as it is now is fairly inoffensive. Light aircraft fly out of it, pleasure flights take in the beauty of the channel coast and the Kent countryside. But the news of impending airport improvements threaten all of this, and, wooed by the promise of a meagre 200 new jobs (according to the Guardian’s transport columnist) local opinion is spilt, although a poll suggested 2/3 people would still rather not see their treasured NNR disappear, and are opposed to the airport expansion.  More concerningly, the scheme has been approved by government who claim, despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary,  that the airport scheme will not damage local wildlife.  This is a clear falsehood, as the RSPB, and Professor Ferry, of whose teaching I had the honour when I was an undergraduate at the University of London, would testify. The Sulphur dioxide pollution associated with jet propulsion causes increased nitrogen deposition to the soil, to which lichens, complex symbioses of algae and fungi, specialists in nutrient-poor environments, in which the two organisms depend on each other to survive, are particularly vulnerable.  The increased nutrient levels will destroy the unique plant communities and the succession.  The RSPB manages its reserve for birds, and flight safety legislation may prevent them from managing in such a way as to encourage them. The Wildlife and Countryside act protecting wild birds from hunting does not apply where there are flight safety issues, and any birds perceived as presenting a danger to flights will probably be shot.  Lydd Airport expansion, for Dungeness and its wildlife, means death.  The RSPB has been campaigning hard against airport expansion, with petition after petition, and even calling in the initial approval of the scheme to judicial review.  Their case was that the nature conservation value of the area was overlooked by the planners, which is clearly true. Nevertheless the judiciary sided with the business cartel.  The airport is owned by the charming Sheikh Fahad el Athel, who was once in court over millions of pounds of commissions involved in weapons deals between BAe and his native Saudi Arabia, who complains the runway.

Cricket among the shingle at Dungeness.

The government seems intent to force upon us some new airport building in the near future, despite widespread campaigns to the contrary. They support their war on Ecology through the use of academic stooges such as the Ecosystems Markets Task Force, a group, tellingly composed of economists, who claim it is possible to offset damage caused by commercial building projects simply by directing conservation effort, funded by developers, to other sites, equivalent to licensing an individual to destroy the Mona Lisa and replace it with a picture of a smiley face. Dungeness is irreplaceable, as the barren shingle “habitat creation” projects at Sussex Wildlife Trust’s Rye Harbour reserve demonstrates. Such habitats, and the landforms which accompany them, cannot be created artificially. This deserves another blog, but ridiculous exercises in market-based approaches will sound the death knell of the British conservation movement if they are permitted to get any further. Nevertheless they will try and fall back on such guidance notes.  Meanwhile Hundreds of loyal, Tory-voting West Londoners have succeeded in convincing the government not to expand Heathrow, with the help of well meaning green campaigners. Few of us see the need for increased airport capacity, and much as I love aeroplanes, and the opportunities for travel they provide, I acknowledge we need to reduce, not increase our capacity if we are to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and minimise the coming climate disaster. Campaigners, including those at the climate camp in 2005 I had the honour of attending, have done well, but using Heathrow as a focal point for protest is problematic, as it risks diverting development to places they can do much more damage, places like the Thames Estuary, and Cliffe. Places like Lydd.  The truth seems to be, although many West Londoners appear curiously reluctant to adjust to the jet noise which has been going on above their heads, usually since before they were born, Heathrow may just be the least worst place for this environmental tragedy to play out. Not Dungeness. We would all rather it didn’t happen anywhere, but so called green campaigners who talk of airports “in unpopulated areas” are really doing biodiversity no favours at all.

View across Dungeness to the Nuclear Power Station.

Now it seems the campaign against the airport, and to save Dungeness, could have found a pair of very unlikely friends. When it is next in court, as the RSPB will, with widespread support, ensure it will be, the main focus may be in the area of Nuclear safety.  Large aeroplanes and nuclear power stations present a fairly obvious safety risk and security challenge, and, especially in these days of paranoia, the risk of aeroplane-reactor collision, and all the associated fallout, are a real concern.  A blight on the beautiful landscape may yet, ironically, save it.  If not, one can hope that the legal fees will eventually build up sufficiently that the business interests whose endless greed would see this green, windswept paradise of bird life and lichen erased forever, will be put off by the mounting cost. The possibility remains that the cost of building the airport at Lydd will eventually prove prohibitive. We must not be complacent, campaigns continue to prevent it. It is not over, and it may yet go to court in Europe, where, as a designated SPA site, UK equivalent of the Natura 2000 network, the planning authorities will have to demonstrate that the airport, is in the vital national interest.

Small Copper butterfly and Cladonia lichen

What is in the vital national interest is preserving this unique, and incredibly fragile and vulnerable wildlife habitat.

View across Romney Marsh from the RSPB reserve.

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.  

The Last Flurries of Winter

ese past couple of days, still in Lancaster and without any pressing deadlines (how wonderful it feels to be free of pressing deadlines,) I was rather hopeful of getting some good wildlife spotting in. It’d been nearly a week since I last went birding, when incidentally I was able to add Bittern to my Lancashire list, one flying through the evening sunshine over the still brown reed beds at the RSPB’s stunning Leighton Moss.  I was enthusiastic to get out there and find some wildlife, see something I’d not seen before, perhaps.  On my way to drop off my essay, it did occur to me there may have been a fall of migrants, with what I am  I handed in my essay on Friday afternoon, and, no sooner had I done so, than the wind began to pick up, and Lancaster was, not for the first time that day, raked by horizontal, and some might say unseasonal snow.

Unseasonal. With Pheasant tracks.

I cursed climate change for its increasing tendencies toward extremes of weather, and spent the day indoors watching films instead. When I did manage to face up to the unseasonably big freeze, I got in the car and headed up, away from the sea this time, and into the Forest of Bowland, an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty which lies to the East of Lancaster. It took only a few minutes on delightfully names roads (Bay Horse Road! Procter Moss Lane!) to reach the car park in Abbeystead, a small town in Bowland. I wandered into the woods toward Abbeystead Lake. Bird life seemed a little scarce, the woods were quiet, and the footprints in the snow, enchanting to look at though they were almost exclusively those of grey squirrels and pheasants.  However the great tits with their two syllable song, were really going for it, the harbingers of early spring appeared unperturbed by the snow, which was thick on the ground in places. There were a few blue and coal tits about in the branches, but bird life seemed sparse.

Upland stream  in the Forest of Bowland

Upon reaching the lake, which was all pleasantly dramatic, lying in a steep-sided, wooded valley, with the snow white Bowland fells climbing up behind it, I startled up a few nervous mallards. Some teal, too, rested on the dark green water and a couple of Jackdaws passed overhead cawing. I continued round the lake, which was held by an impressive dam, and down into the woods. Robins and chaffinches occasionally flew across the path in front of me. As I walked back up toward the lake I became aware of a few Goosander, unfamiliar before my move up North but near ubiquitous round here it seems, floating about on the water surface, but I wondered where all the birds had gone. It occurred to me they may well have cleared out of these upland woods and headed somewhere at lower altitude, somewhere more sheltered, perhaps.  Walking across a bit of farmland on the way back to the car park revealed not just pheasants but also good numbers of Lapwing and Snipe in the fields, so the true upland waders at least were still on their spring habitat. Some of the lapwings were displaying, whooping and tumbling, using their broad wings to aerobatic advantage. Spring, it seemed, was in the air still somewhere, alongside the wind chill.  I drove home dodging pheasants and snowdrifts. One poor pheasant must have had the fright of his life, caught between a snowdrift, an oncoming vehicle and a Buzzard. Of course I waited until he had disappeared into the hedge beyond the snowdrift before I proceeded. 

Abbeystead Lake, Bowland, Lancs.

Today I headed down to a place near Scorton, on the river Wyre where it is still fast and narrow. I parked up at a picnic site with some bird feeders in it, which clearly hadn’t been filled for some time. A few blue and great tits hopped about in the trees above them, looking awkward and expectant. I walked past and onto the banks of the Wyre, where the tree canopy opened, The sky was blue, but a few flakes of snow fell from it inexplicably. A dipper shot up and down the river and paused on a rock for a moment, allowing me to take a (poor) photograph before returning to a cluster of branches by the waters edge. As it did so a second bird appeared and flew upstream. A pair of dippers, and a lovely new addition to my Lancashire list. These lovely birds are very scarce indeed down South, they are birds of the west and the midlands it seems, specialists of fast flowing streams, dipping under the water to hunt invertebrates and emerging still perfectly dry, smart and distinctive in their smart brown plumage and white breast.

Cinculus cinculus

   

Rounding the corner into the wood what struck me was the snowdrops. The wood was covered in them, and among them daffodils too were springing out of the ground. In stark contrast to the upland wood in Bowland, this wood down near the Wyre was a different matter. The snow had all cleared, as if it had never been there (of course, it might never have been there) and the snowdrops and daffodils still stood proud. March snowfall has been part of these plants evolution, of course. When the channel first separated Britain from the continent, about 12 thousand years ago,  isolating its impoverished fauna, anything which could not tolerate March snow would not have been able to survive. Colder winters abound through our history, the mini ice age of the 18^th century, the cold snap of the 1970s, and spring flowers have made it through. Here they formed a glorious white carpet splashed with yellow. Somewhere among the singing great tits I thought I heard a chiffchaff.  Cormorants flew overhead through a blue sky, and a buzzard was patrolling somewhere. Spring wasn’t cancelled, it had just had a minor setback, and it will be interesting to see what effect this late flurry of winter has had on wildlife phenology as the year progresses. 

Snowdrops near Scorton, Lancs.