This year I’m using the two days volunteering my company gives me to spend time with Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire Wildlife Trust.
Today, I’ve been out with them at their amazing Strawberry Hill reserve. This is the rewilded farmland site they took over recently and one of the most inspiring places I’ve ever visited. Taken out of agricultural production nearly 40 years ago, the site has been allowed to return to nature. When I visited in spring, the dawn chorus was perhaps the loudest and most intense I’ve ever heard it in the UK.
Today, at the far end of the bird breeding season, I was helping with work to maintain a wildflower meadow. The rangers had already cut the long grass, and cut some more today, while the volunteers spent the day raking the cuttings and piling them up in large stacks of hay at the edge of the open area.
At first it did seem slightly odd for management techniques to be reapplied to an area where nature had been allowed to take its own course over the last few decades. However, without some intervention, the whole site would eventually be taken over by scrub and then succession woodland. The alternative is to have a richer and more varied pattern of landscape with woodland, scrub, open areas, meadows and water. We were, essentially, acting as large herbivores who, in truly wild areas, would help to create that diversity of places. As much of the site is presently unfenced, these animals have been missing during that rewilding period. While traditional breed cattle are now in parts of the site, to do that work, much of the site remains unfenced, so there’s still a role of us to some of the clearing.
Given the temperature was well into the mid-20s today, it was hot work but by the end of the day we had cleared the whole area. Tomorrow, I will be at another Wildlife Trust site, possibly doing something similar but also cutting willow. I’m hoping I don’t wake up too stiff tomorrow!
Last week we spent much of a day at a photography hide watching and taking pictures of kingfishers. Over eight hours with had at least ten visits from a couple of different birds. They came to perch just a few metres away, using it as a vantage point from which to spot and catch fish.
Despite the sometimes long waits between visits, the time flew past, and it barely seemed like the eight hours when we packed up at the end of the session.
It was perhaps one of the most mindful and relaxing ways to spend a day, between the short periods of activity when the birds turned up. We plan to return to this spot again but to also find more such hides; they provide great opportunities to capture images of wildlife!
It’s many weeks since I last took a dawn wander down the lane to the sheep fields. The sunrise has been so early that even I, a usual early riser, haven’t been up before the sun has broken the horizon for quite some time.
This morning I was up just at the right moment of the ‘golden hour’ to take a few phone photos of the mist in the shallow valleys beneath me. I was surprised to see any sign of moisture at all given we are in the fourth heatwave of the summer and drought conditions were announced some time ago. It’s going to be around 30 degrees Celsius today, not hot in comparison by the current continental extremes being experience but still a continuation of the warm or very warm weather we’ve had most of the summer and reaching back into the spring.
One of the real differences between this and my last dawn visit to the bottom of the lane was the bird song. Gone is the vibrant, energetic, many-voiced dawn chorus and in its place a softer and more subtle melody of a few individuals. Today there were two wrens on opposing sides of the track alternating their calls and a robin perching high in a tree with its quiet song of autumn.
…and it does feel slightly like autumn or, if not, approaching the latter part of summer. Despite the ongoing hot weather, those misty fields show that the cooler days of the next season are not too far away.
A lunchtime walk down the lane and the heat is already building. What rain we had last month has dried up and the land is again turning brown and the wheat fields are becoming indistinguishable from the meadows.
But not all moisture is gone – a last few blackberries (small but sweet) and elderberries are still in the hedgerows and I might venture back down the track this evening to pick a few.
I have to admit a fascination for combine harvesters and I could watch them do their thing for hours. One of my usual cycle routes heads straight through an area of arable fields and this sometimes gives me a good view of the action.
Last year the harvest seemed to go on for weeks and I saw a lot of it happening. However, this year, it seems to be over far too quickly and the action seems to have been while I’ve not been on my bike to see it.
This seems to be the story of the year so far; the days and weeks passing very quickly and before I know it the seasons have moved on. With August already here I need to make sure I’m out in my bike as much as I can be to make best use of the remaining summer.
Two great, but contrasting, examples of driver entitlement on one short section of rural byway near where I live.
The byway isn’t a major thoroughfare and doesn’t really go anywhere, it’s just a farm track through some fields. It’s heavily potholed – well, there largely isn’t a tarmac surface at all, it’s more of a gravel track with holes large enough to swallow a small pony. Despite the risk of damaging their car, people still seem to insist on driving along it; except that they don’t…
The first image is an example of people who like to drive off-road but get worried when it gets too bumpy and they think they might damage their pride and joy. So instead of turning back, they’ve made their own parallel muddy track through what is usually an area set aside for wildlife.
The second image is an example of the same track not being bumpy enough; some off-road enthusiasts last winter decided to carve up the farmer’s field instead of driving along the track, resulting in a section of the field being unusable for planting crops.
I love the countryside, I crave being out in it and I long to have more access to it. However, I can equally see that landowners and their tenants are worried about increasing access when a small (but impactful) minority of people abuse what little rights they already have.
Last weekend we had a night in Ross-on-Wye and two nights in Pembrokeshire. Unfortunately the weather stopped us getting across to Ramsey Island but we did have some great views of swifts. Ross is a very swift town with screaming parties all around the town centre. I also know a great spot just above the Cathedral in St David’s to do a bit of late evening swift watching.
One evening we watched the swifts circle about the valley and come into their nests in a house high above the cathedral. I don’t recall ever seeing them at their nest sites before and it was quite startling just how fast they fly up to their holes and enter with a thud.
Sadly, they’ll be gone soon and sightings have already dropped off around our house. We had a screaming party of 30 last week but I’ve only seen three or four birds at one time so far since we returns from Wales.
For the first time in ages, I had a wander down the lane this morning and to my surprise there were still some birds singing a chorus. This is the time of year when the gardens and fields go quiet as the avian breeding season comes to an end. However, there were one or two calling from trees and hedgerows including a song thrush, yellowhammer and a few tits. There were also a few crows and an alarmed green woodpecker.
This is a slightly melancholic point of the summer when I can feel the year moving from its vibrant burst of life that started in the spring to a slower pace of life as the heat lingers and nature takes a breath.
A good place to start talking about our Shetland adventure is with an animal I had largely forgotten in planning the trip.
Whilst I do spend a lot of time watching birds, I actually have more interest in mammals. In planning the holiday, I had only really thought about the possibility of seeing orca, which unfortunately we didn’t, and the almost certainty of seeing seals, which we did. The possibility of watching otters in the Shetlands had almost completely escaped me. Despite this lapse in thinking, Shetland, perhaps, was the best place I’ve been to in search of this lovely species.
To date, I’ve only ever seen otters in Scotland, specifically in the Hebrides, having previously had some great views in Mull and Skye. I’ve seen tracks and signs of otters elsewhere including the Hebrides but so far I’ve never seen them or their signs anywhere else in the UK.
Our otter watching had a slow start with a momentary glimpse of a splash and tail in a loch as we drove past. Despite turning around and looking around the spot, there was no further sighting. That was almost it for the first of the two weeks until I had a late evening view of a distant otter on the far side of the loch above which we stayed for our first five nights. The brief view through my telescope revealed the otter searching around the shoreline in the failing evening light before it disappeared into a hole beneath a rock.
For the second week, we moved away from the west of Shetland, where we had stayed near to the village of Walls, to the far north and island of Unst. We had thought from what little research we had done before our trip, that otter spotting in Unst was quite difficult and less likely to be productive than other places. This was actually far from the case and we had four excellent sittings.
Our first came in a gloomy and damp afternoon as we drove from Clivocast to Uyesound. As we passed over the narrow strip of dry land between Easter Loch and the sea, we saw a head and then the rest of an otter’s body appear in the fresh water of the Loch. Stopping the car, we watched as the animal fish momentarily before it moved off, avoiding a swan, left the water and trotted up through a meadow on the opposite bank. I suspect this is quite a good place for finding otters as a lady we spoke to later in the week had also seen on at this spot a few days earlier.
Our next encounter was on a day trip off Unst to the smaller island of Fetlar. As we were making our way back to the ferry for our return journey we stopped off at the old slipway below Brough Lodge. At first we saw curlew and great northern divers but then an otter appeared on the water’s surface, diving down in search of prey. After a while it reappeared with a huge crab and proceeded, with some difficultly, to swim to the land. As it came to the shoreline it sat on a large rock to start to break up the crab and eat its contents. Unfortunately, we had to leave for the ferry and missed the opportunity to better the photographs shown below.
The day was not complete for our otter sightings. As we returned to our holiday rental that evening, we decided to stop off at a turning head next to the bay below Westing. It wasn’t long before we struck lucky and found a slightly distant otter fishing between the shoreline and Brough Holm. We decided to walk along the coast to get a bit closer and as we did the otter came to shore and then disappeared. As we walked further searching the rocks we found it again, eating its meal in a secluded spot. We stood for a few minutes watching it chomp away contentedly and managed to get some nice photos of it. Eventually, it moved off back into the water and out of sight.
We had one final otter sighting, this time on Yell. As we drove down towards the ferry to the mainland (checking out the food truck for breakfast the next morning – which is worth a try while waiting for your crossing), an otter ran across the road. As we drove slowly up to the spot where it had crossed, it ran along a drainage ditch beside us and then disappeared into a culvert.
For that second week, it almost seemed easy to find otters in Shetland and I’m sure we could have seen more if we had spent additional time at some of those spots. It really was worth putting in the effort to find them, although, I have to say that our stop at Otterswick on Yell came up with a blank!
Yesterday we got home from two weeks on Shetland. I’ve been a bit quiet on my blog lately and this is largely why – two weeks travelling the length and breadth of a truly stunning place.
I was planning on blogging while I was there but in the end I wanted to keep my eyes away from a screen and more on the scenery and wildlife. So, now I’m back, I plan to do some posting over the next few weeks (perhaps months) with a focus on the places, the scenery, the wildlife and perhaps some of the history too…there’s quite a lot to say.
Daft Mumblings 