Monthly Archives: December 2021

Northamptonshire – raising hope for nature in our rural places

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Come the early days of February, we will have lived in our cottage in a quiet Northamptonshire village for a year. So much has happened and so much has changed over the 12 months that I could write about but I want to get back to the basics of my blog; my love of nature and my concern for the natural environment.

As I have written previously, we knew very little of Northamptonshire before we started looking for a new home. I’d only ever passed through the county, racing through by train or car, usually on the West Coast Mainline or along the M1 or A14. It came as a surprise to us when we started looking at the county, having first focused on Warwickshire, just how lovely rural Northamptonshire is. 

Our part of the county, particularly, is rolling, steeply in places, with a patchwork of large arable fields for growing grains and smaller pastures primarily for sheep and beef cattle. The fields are bounded by both mixed hedgerows and dry stone walls and the area is criss-crossed by a network of country lanes and relatively quiet more major roads. The west of the county is very lightly wooded for a rural area, with West Northamptonshire having only 5.6% woodland cover, less than some cities, but what it is missing in trees it makes up for with water. 

We have a good selection of open water around us with Ravensthorpe, Hollowell, Stanford reservoirs close by and the much larger Pitsford Water a ten minute drive away. There is also the River Nene, which passes through Northampton a few miles to the south of us and makes its way through the county and onto Cambridgeshire, briefly into Lincolnshire, before it meets the North Sea at The Wash. As it meanders through Northamptonshire there are groups of lakes, many being former gravel pits, that have increased the water habitats through a large area of the county.

This wold-like landscape, with its mixed farming and its range of water habitats has had a particular positive effect on me. It holds a range of wildlife, birds, mammals and insect life, that was so often missing from my former home in South Cheshire. It is altogether a richer place in nature terms and in being so has rekindled some hope that rural England doesn’t have to be so nature-depleted, that it can mix farming with wildlife and that man’s impact on the land doesn’t all have to be bad.

I won’t pretend that everything is as it should be in rural Northamptonshire; that would be very far from the truth. Only in the last month have I seen flood water inundating rivers with soil from autumn-ploughed fields, turning them to the colour of fudge. Chalara die-back is taking many of the ash trees which are so widespread around the edges of the county’s fields. I also expect, like so many other places, that the wildlife I am seeing now is in a very much diminished state compared to earlier decades. However, what wildlife I have seen over the last 11 months has been in a positive contrast to where I used to live.

In that time, we have recorded 53 bird species seen in or from the garden and a further five heard. We have also had 11 species of mammal, including six species of bat over the garden, as well as 11 different types of butterfly. I could only dream of such richness in my old garden (although I do still miss the badgers that suddenly started sneaking in under holly hedge in the last few months before I left).

Almost from the moment we moved in to our cottage, the wildlife was evident. From the owls calling during the first night, to a kestrel landing on the telegraph post next to the house the following snowy morning, it was immediately clear that this might be a better place for wildlife.

That owl on the first night wasn’t the last. We hear tawnies almost every night and in the spring we heard little owls nearby and as well as a barn owl once or twice in late winter. During our first drive around the area after we moved in we saw a barn owl in broad daylight sitting on a post and also saw one in an old barn at Hanging Houghton, a place we have come to love for a walk when we have a spare hour or so. This was also the first place we heard skylarks this year and we saw upwards of a dozen at a time on some of our spring and summer walks there. I love to just stand or sit, eyes closed, listening to the skylarks; a perfect way to meditate for a while.

Working from home for so much of the year, wildlife has been a release, during the working day as well as after it. Red kites and buzzards frequently fly over the house and I hear them from my desk. I also often hear green woodpeckers from the same spot yaffling away in the nearby gardens alongside their great spotted cousins hammering on the trees down in the shallow valley beneath us. There’s usually a few birds flitting about in the trees and bushes behind the drystone wall opposite my home office but the best view I had this year was a fleeting one, of a spotted flycatcher perching on the telegraph wire just outside my open window.

Some of the flora has also been notable, particularly in the hedgerows. During the spring there was a procession of blossom over the months with apple and cherry coming first followed by the blackthorn and hawthorn, then the elder and finally the bramble. With such a display of flowers we expected, or rather hoped, for a great glut of berries and we weren’t disappointed. Several autumnal walks resulted in good harvests of sloes, blackberries and elderberries and our hedgerow gin has just been decanted and kicked off a few festive evenings.

My cycles around the local countryside were accompanied in the spring and summer by yellowhammers and whitethroats, as well as more skylarks. In some spots it seemed as though they were in every hedge and tree; a continuous calling as I pedalled along the country lanes. As summer started to fade and the crops were harvested, I got frequent views of groups of red kites feeding on the creatures exposed in the stubble left behind by the combine.

It’s not just our walks that have revealed the richness of nature in the area; there are quite a few nature reserves too and our favourite to date has probably been at Titchmarch. In the eastern half of the county, it is one of those series of lakes on the Nene and our first spring time walk there was lovely with a wide range of warblers calling from the reeds and undergrowth. We also saw a cuckoo for the only time this year, standing in clear view in a stand of poplar calling out over the water.

We have visited a few of the reservoirs and particularly like Pitsford and Ravensthorpe, which are so close by. A walk around the nature reserve half of the former is always very quiet despite the number of bird hides provided. I particularly loved watching the common terns which nest there, a species I never saw in Cheshire. The autumn and winter have revealed a place for thousands of waterfowl of a wide variety. Ravensthorpe on the other hand, whilst also good for ducks and swans, gave us views of hundreds of hirundines hawking over the water as they arrived for the breeding season and we’ve also seen a small starling murmuration over the reed beds and grey wagtails on the dam.

Returning to home, we also have a grey wagtail visiting our often waterlogged patio at the moment and our bird feeders have more visitors than I can remember seeing at any other. We often have a dozen or more goldfinches supported by a cast of greenfinches, chaffinches and a range of tits.  

Good numbers of my favourite bird, swifts, appeared around the village in the summer. The Chairman of the parish council not only has his own swift boxes on his house, he’s installed some in the village church tower along with speakers playing recordings of swifts. Often on a spring lunchtime walk around the village I would stare upwards expecting to see them flying above only to (again) realise that it was just the recording. However, one late spring day they were actually chasing around above my head and I stood watching as they raced between the steep roofs of the ironstone houses, my heart lifted by the sight of them. Over the course of the next few weeks we regularly saw them around the village and could lie in the back garden watching them wheel and dart above us.

Perhaps, however, the birds that has most made an impact on us in our new house have been the starlings. They were calling in their slightly crazy way from tree tops and TV aerials around the house when we first arrived in but then they moved in too. We have had three pairs nesting in the eves of the house and we regularly hear them in the morning before we get out of bed and during the rest of the day. When they had chicks, we heard them grow; their calls starting as quiet ‘cheeps’ but developing into raucous screeching to wake us every morning for two weeks running before they fledged. They then had creches in the back garden, the fat balls on the feeders being rapidly devoured each time we put them out. Now we are at the quiet time for them but some are wintering in our roof and we still hear them as they chatter and slide down the sloping section of the eaves.

Despite all the above, the view that pleased me most was a very recent one. As we headed down the hill for our usual walk at Hanging Houghton, we saw four roe deer feeding quietly in one of the fields. We stopped the car and watched them for a moment and they looked back at us. I never saw free-roaming deer in Cheshire in the 40 years I lived there, but these roe add to the muntjac we have seen on several occasions at various places in the county. I love seeing deer, they remind me of wllder places, particularly of my trips to Sweden where they are so often seen in forest glades at dawn or dusk, and seeing them in my new home county really lifted my spirits on an otherwise gloomy day.

I’m sure we have only just touched the surface of Northamptonshire’s wildlife and I can’t wait for the new year to start and to see what else we can find out about nature in this quiet and so little known county. If we find even more, this place will make that hope for a better future for nature in our rural places even stronger.

The Uists in Summer

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With Christmas upon us, it now feels an age since our summer trip to the Outer Hebrides but the memories remain vivid. Our week staying in a croft cottage on South Uist was spectacular in so many ways and deserved a much quicker blog post but such tasks have been on a back burner this year. Finally, I’ve written the post and, hopefully, the coming year will have many more.

We travelled up to South Uist via a night in Fort William and the CalMac ferry from Mallaig to Lochboisedale.  Our cottage was only a 15 minute drive from the ferry, located in the very far south-west of the island; much further south and you meet the causeway across to Eriskay, from where you can catch the ferry to Barra. 

The village where we stayed, Smercleit, like many settlements in the Outer Hebrides, is formed of single homes or small collections of houses, spread over a wide area, rather than more clearly defined villages on the mainland. Our cottage stood alone down a gravel track, set back from two road-front houses and the beach beyond them. It stood on a small island above the surrounding wet pasture, which was dissected by drainage channels and punctuated by small lochans and the remains of old crofts. Looking behind the cottage, the land eventually started to rise into the southern hills between Lochboisdale and Eriskay. They are not high, only 243m at the most and tiny compared to those further up the island; the highest being Beinn Mhor, standing a 620m. Out to the front, looking south west, was the Atlantic Ocean, but with a glancing view of Barra too.

The wildlife of the rich, wet pastureland around the cottage was almost immediately visible. That first evening there was a short-eared owl patrolling in front and around the house and snipe ‘chipping’ in the long grass and ‘drumming’ overhead. Drumming snipe are one of my favourite wildlife sights – the sound not unlike a comb kazoo as the bird drops quickly through the air vibrating its wing feathers. There were other birds too, easily seen with a walk along the quiet road  behind the beach front; plenty of starlings, lapwing, redshank, swallows and the ever watchful and noisy oystercatchers. 

There’s one word that it synonymous with the Outer Hebrides at this time of year: machair. The low-lying sandy and rich coastal pasturelands are at their best in June and July with the scent of their flowers drifting across most of the islands. Away from the damp pasture, the machair coats vast areas on the west coast of the islands with the flowers spreading from the sea to the bottom of the eastern hills and mountains in some places. The land that run at right angles from the central spine road towards the sea put you right into the middle of the scenes with sandy tracks then leading off through the flowers. I’ve visited the islands a few times before but always at the wrong time of year for this seasonal spectacular – this time, at the end of June and beginning of June, we hit the perfect moment for the flowers to be at their peak.

However, the Uists do not just have flowers out on the Machair; the harsher moorland areas were surprisingly rich in flora too. A walk around the national reserve Loch Druidibeag revealed great numbers of orchids, the scale of which I’ve seen nowhere else.

Like so many remote islands, the landscape is dotted with abandoned houses and farmsteads and in the case of the Uists, abandoned vehicles left to decay on the machair. I often feel drawn by the signs of people being taken over by nature and disappearing into the landscape and these islands are full of such sights. Some of the abandonment is very old but even with relatively new vehicles left out in the fields, nature hasn’t taken long to take control, with a few becoming homes to small flocks of starlings. 

As with most of my trips, watching wildlife was a big part of the experience. Many of the birds we saw may have left the area now, replaced by winter visitors or other passing through on their autumn migration from the high north. 

There was one particular summer visitor to the islands I’ve wanted to see for many years but they can be particularly challenging. Gone from the vast majority of their former range, populations of concrakes hang on in some of the Scottish islands and the Uists are a particularly good place to find them. We were driving down a single track road one sunny lunchtime when we saw partridge-like birds walking along the road. We immediately knew what they were and as we came to a halt, they jumped into the long road-side grass. However, they didn’t go far and were quite obliging in providing us with very close views from within the car. We eventually got out but they slinked off further into the long grass, not to be seen again. 

That wasn’t the last time happened upon them. We didn’t see them again but we heard them several times at the RSPB’s Balnarald reserve and while out walking along an area of Machair – the video below recorded their instantly recognisable call.

We saw 75 species of bird over the course of the week with plenty of species of note. We particularly went to see those species of the remote areas of Scotland; those of the moorland, the lochs and the sea. There were red-throated divers, eiders, Manx shearwaters and storm petrels, there were white-tailed eagles, hen harriers and peregrines, dunlin, common sandpipers and curlew, and there were arctic and little terns, and great and arctic skuas, and twite and wheatears. All in all, a great range of birdlife amongst quite spectacular scenery.

Perhaps the most spectacular of all the scenery is down on the coastline. The Uists are home to some of the most fabulous beaches in the UK and, for the most part, even in summer, you may find you have vast areas of sand to yourself. We were very lucky on the days we went for beach walks in that the sun shone strongly with very little breezy giving fairly balmy weather for the Outer Hebrides. 

The Uists, North Uist and South Uist with Benbecula in the middle, are 54 miles, or just under 1.5 hours to drive north to south. Staying at the very bottom of the islands, it was a long drive to the top each time we went and I’d perhaps suggest it’s better to stay in the north of South Uist or the south of North Uist, to provide better access to the islands as a whole. For me, Benbecula perhaps has less to offer in wildlife and scenery terms but it well worth a look around and certainly should just be pass through on route between the Uists. In fact the causeways that join the three islands together are good places to see wildlife from, although our otter targets never appeared when we were looking.  

Overall, if you like remote islands with few other people around, beaches to yourself and scenery and wildlife to linger long in the mind, the Uists need to be on your holiday list.