Early summer birdwatching

After the heat of the week before last, we have had four days or so of rain. Driving home late Friday afternoon, after two days in the centre of Bristol, the countryside south of Exeter was green and wet, and the roadside verges lost in cow parsley. The early purple orchids have replaced the primroses, and the steep slopes of the Teign Valley are blurred by trees in full leaf.

I am never quite sure when spring ends and summer begins in this part of Devon, but this weekend it feels that we are on the cusp. As I write this post, Caroline is sitting listening to bird calls on the RSBP website (if you haven’t tried it you should), to fix the sounds in her mind. With the start of summer, it is increasingly hard to watch birds in the tree canopy, but you can still hear them. Walking through Yarner Wood a fortnight ago, the pied flycatchers were easy to spot, but tomorrow when we hope to get out again, it will be harder: deeper shadow and thickening leaf cover. This year we are determined to raise our bird watching game, and learn to identify them by song.

Late April we were in Wales, staying outside Brecon and mixing walking and birdwatching, and since then, and much closer to home, we have been in Yarner Wood (pied flycatchers and ravens), by the Hennock reservoirs (blackcaps and great crested grebes) and out on the northern moor (red grouse and ravens).

The highlight in Wales was climbing Pen y Fan, highest of the Beacons. We started from the Upper Neuadd Reservoir and climbed easily in hazy sun along the old Roman road.

At the gate at Bwlch ar y Fan, we turned left to Cribyn, the tops lost in low cloud. We heard, before we saw, a group of a dozen or so young men, loud and raucous, first on the path down from Fan y Big, and then coming up fast behind us. By this time they were quieter. Each had a pack, though not a Bergen, so we weren’t sure whether they were squaddies or a college trip.

They passed us easily (the speed of the young) and as they did, their two instructors (we met them on Cribyn, and learnt they were junior leaders) were not even puffing. It was somewhat different for us, but we finally reached the top of Pen y Fan, the final stage up the steep stone pitched path reminding us of Snowdon last year. Sunlight, and ravens in the sky.

We were back in Wales, walking with ravens.

Spring butterflies

Today has been one of those April days when we have seen snow, hail, and sun, where a cold wind has kept us out of the garden, and yet the greenhouse has been so warm that I have been in shirtsleeves. We woke to snow, forecast by the Met Office, and as we drove up the hill behind the town, looking back we could see the tops of the High Moor lightly covered. Two hours later we returned in bright sunshine, the back of the Land Rover packed with plants and potting compost.

Spring is in the garden, and despite the fact that we now have help, there is a lot for us to do. Yesterday the roses in the courtyard had to be tied back, and wires replaced; today more tidying up, as well as the new plants to be sorted, and everything prepared. My greenhouse is still waiting for the first alpines.

And this is the time of year when we are pulled two ways, out into a garden that is just breaking into life, or up onto the moor or through the woods, to watch for birds and wait for summer visitors. Last week we were back in Yarner Wood, and knew that spring was here, as we watched Brimstone butterflies along the woodland paths, sulphur yellow males and the lighter greenish tinged females, like autumn leaves but falling upwards. The feeders at the hide were empty, but long-tailed tits romped through the tree tops and we watched a pair of nuthatches cleaning out nest box number 5, below the hide, ready for use. Opposite, in the high pines, we could see, and hear, the ravens. Next time we go, the pied fly-catchers should be back, and the greater spotted woodpeckers nesting.

Yarner ravens

Below Trendlebere Down, looking over the Bovey valley, is Yarner Wood. Part of the East Dartmoor Woods and Heaths NNR, it is ancient upland oakland, probably pre-1600. More importantly, for us, it is our patch. In spring, pied flycatchers arrive and the tree canopy is alive with small passerines, as well as all three of our native woodpeckers. There is a hide (in late winter the feeders attract a wide variety of tits and finches, as well as nuthatches) and the quiet woodland paths wind through the undercover of bilberry. As well as the birds, on warm summer days we have sat and watched roe deer and butterflies. Good Friday saw us walking up the path from the car park, buffeted by a bitter north wind, and far from sure that we would see any birds at all.

It is too early, and cold, for the pied flycatchers and other summer visitors, and the wind in the tree tops drowned out such bird song as there was. We were hoping to see ravens. The edge of the moor, where Hay Tor plunges into the Bovey valley is a good spot for watching these magical birds. There is a pair that nests somewhere on the ridge, across from the Yarner Wood hide, and we have often seen them above the treeline. This is the time of year to see ravens display, although as Caroline said as we reached the hide, chance would be a fine thing, given the weather. Yet as is so often the case in this part of the world, the weather blows through fast, and sun followed the rain. From the hide we saw one of the ravens, having first heard it: the call is unmistakeable, deep and carrying. As the weather improved we walked outside and almost immediately saw more ravens high in the sky, five in all.

For the next fifteen minutes we stood and watched. Three disappeared below the trees, but a pair remained and their aerial display was breathtaking, including the raven’s piece de resistance, a full barrel roll at speed, wings tucked in. And when this pair had gone, three more in the distant sky resolved themselves into a pair mobbing a large raptor, which through the glasses did not appear a buzzard, and was too large for a sparrowhawk or a kestrel. Although the rule is always go for the obvious (which here would be a buzzard), I think that along with the ravens we were also watching one of the scarcest, and most persecuted, of our hawks, accipiter gentilis, the northern goshawk. There was a report of a goshawk on Trendlebere some two weeks ago. Every day at Yarner has something memorable, but this was more special than most.

Great Crested Grebes

One of the discoveries this past year has been the writing of Mark Cocker. In the 1970s I never missed Harry Griffin’s Country Diary in The Guardian, and walking in the Lake District in the early autumn of 2005, Caroline bought me A Lifetime of Mountains, Martin Wainwright’s selection of Harry Griffin’s best columns. It was reading those that persuaded me to begin these Dartmoor Letters. But it was not until I bought Caroline A Tiger in the Sand, in anticipation of our birding week in North Norfolk in late January, that I realised that Mark Cocker has been a regular Country Diary columnist for nearly twenty years. It shows how long it has been since I read The Guardian (and is almost enough to make me change the daily paper).

In his Introduction, Cocker speaks of the “emotional charge of the encounter, the deep fulfilment that flows from our engagement with our fellow creatures”. As we walked  up at the Hennock reservoirs this morning, I thought of the piece I had just read, and in particular

“Nothing we do to capture our encounters can quite match up to the living reality. It will always evade and exceed our imaginations, whether it is a tiger in the jungle or a blackbird in the garden. This is where I believe writing on nature, in its various forms, is wholly distinct from a particular kind of wildlife television. Moving images of wildlife often far exceed, in terms of dramatic content and physical closeness, our own modest experiences of nature. They leave nothing unspoken, nor hint at any wider experience and, in a way, seek to replace our experience of the genuine article and become a substitute satisfaction.”

Last Sunday we had also been at Hennock but then in late afternoon. As well as seeing six plus Bullfinches, we also saw Crossbills in the treetops in the plantation alongside Tottiford Reservoir. This was a first for us at the Reservoirs. Hoping to see the Crossbills again, we drove this morning to Trenchford. As it turned out, no Bullfinches and no Crossbills. But instead we watched a pair of Great Crested Grebes, close to the bridge over the Trenchford stream, beginning their courtship. At one moment necks intertwined, at another synchronised diving; water weed offered by one to the other and then returned. It was quite magical.

Red Letter Days

2007 has been the year we have started birdwatching in earnest: see A Birdie Year. We are very lucky living where we do: Yarner Wood, the best place in the South West to see Pied Flycatchers, is 15 minutes down the road. 15 minutes in another direction will take you to the High Moor (Golden Plover at this time of year; Skylarks and Meadow Pipits for much of the Spring and Summer; and always the magical Ravens), or to Soussons Woods or the Fernworthy Plantations. Only a little longer and we can be on Dawlish Warren, watching waders along the Exe, or Slavonian Grebes and Common Scoters off shore.

We never know quite what we are going to see, and rarely set out with the intention of finding a particular bird. We don’t have life lists, and such records as we keep are more to help us remember what we have had the good fortune to watch, than to boast of our sightings. I see each day we are out as a red letter day, but some this past twelve months have been the reddest of such days: the afternoon of 14 April, with leafbreak just happening in Yarner and the first Pied Flycatchers arriving; the Ravens on Snowdon as we came off the Bwlch Main in very early May; the trip to the lighthouse at the tip of the Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge on Nantucket Island in October. These are days that will live in the memory.

Nature’s Fireworks

To reach the hide at Dawlish Warren, you have to come off the sandy spine that runs from the car park towards the tip of the Warren, skirt the golf course and then walk back along the beach. There is a sign, some 25 yards or so along the edge, asking birdwatchers to take care not to walk when golfers are about to tee off; and not to stop on the shore to watch birds, as this may interfere with people taking their shot. As we walked down the path towards the shore, it was clear that few were paying attention to the warning. It was not hard to see why. It was at the top of the tide, and a great flock of Grey Plover, with Dunlin mixed in among them, were settled on the spit of sand in front of the hide, jostling for space with an equal number of Oystercatchers, with the odd Turnstone and Sanderling.

The Plovers were unsettled, lifting off and turning and wheeling in the sky in front of us, before landing again. This was happening regularly and as the bright sunlight caught their white undersides and wings, the whole flock glittered against the grey sky behind. It was if silver foil was caught in the wind, but the swirling cloud of shorebirds moved as one: now light, now dark, now silver. The Oystercatchers just tucked their beaks in, and faced the wind.

We spent over an hour in the hide, watching the the birds as the tide fell, and wishing that we had had the gumption to bring our thermos of coffee. Our neighbours in the hide, a son and his elderly parents, had arrived not only with the usual birding paraphernalia, but with lunch. I am not sure what hide etiquette about lunch is, but we had to wait for coffeee until we got back to the Land Rover, just as the rain expected all morning arrived.

Walking with Ravens

Bwlch Main, the Thin Path, is the first part of the final section of the Rhyd-Ddu Path up Snowdon. Rightly named, it is a narrow exposed ridge, the path barely a couple of feet wide. On the North West side the land drops away to Cwm Clogwyn, and on the other side there is an equally precipitous, if less rocky, drop into Cwm Tregalan. We had chosen the Rhyd-Ddu Path as it is one of the easiest routes to the top, and certainly not as difficult as the route over Crib Goch (where one of the children just short of her 16th birthday and on Adventure Training, burst into tears, unable to go on until she realised that to go back was simply impossible as no one would go with her). We had, however, looked long and hard at the map, at the tight contour lines and both of us had started the walk with some apprehension, compounded by our failure three days earlier to get beyond Craig Cau on Cadair Idris. We had excused this on the basis that the wind on the tops had been vicious, snatching at our legs and making walking difficult. One of my headmasters would have had a different explanation: funk.

Age is very much in the mind but what I was able to do thirty years ago, with hardly a hair turned, is now no longer easy. As we looked at the path along the southern ridge, we nearly turned back. That we did not was in large part a matter of pride: we had been shadowing a group of walkers from Ross on Wye all morning: they were all in their 60s or early 70s, and most, like us, had not climbed Snowdon before. If they could do it, and they were determined they would, then so too would we. We were also determined not to let each other down.

It was more a slow shuffle along the ridge than anything else, but as we started, a pair of Ravens slipped effortlessly past, soaring in the wind above us, and our spirits lifted. Once across, the rest of the climb was easy. We reached the summit in bright sun, with a blue sky and our Ravens wheeling and tumbling along the top, folding their wings as each called to the other: a deep, resonant “gronk”. The descent along the Snowdon Ranger Path was long, the zig-zags rough and steep, but however weary we were when we finally arrived back at the Rhyd-Ddu car park, we were still with those Ravens.

Collective nouns

Collective nouns, whether traditional, a pride of lions, or comic, a dose of doctors, have always fascinated me; and not just because they offer all sorts of problems when writing letters, particularly whether to use a singular verb or plural verb (Burchfield, in The New Fowler’s, allows the use of either). There are, apparently, some 200 collective nouns in common use in English and put “collective nouns” into Google and you will get 1,070,000 results.

The world of birds has a wonderful range of collective nouns, although many are rarely used, or indeed known. Is there anything more descriptive than a charm of goldfinches, an exaltation of larks or a murder of crows? When thinking about this piece, I found Terry Ross’ website, Group Names for Birds: A Partial List. He does not think much of a murder of crows (as the noun is not in the Oxford English Dictionary as a group name), but this has not stopped Heinemann publishing a book under this title in its Animal Group series.

What started me thinking about collective nouns was the Starling roost at Whiddon Down. For a week or so in late February, the stand of conifers between the village and the A30 saw one of the largest Starling roosts I have ever seen. As the light went, flocks of starlings (not the right collective noun, but more of this later) flew in towards the roost, meeting and merging, swirling shapes and syncopated patterns filling the sky; and then, in an extraordinary five seconds or so, dropping into the trees, as if sucked down. We stood in the dusk one Saturday tea time and watched the performance for 20 or so minutes, captivated by one of the most extraordinary wildlife spectacles it is possible to see in Britain. How many of these somewhat nondescript birds there were was difficult to guess: certainly tens if not hundreds of thousands. The sky was filled with them, and in the silence we could hear the rush of their wings. At one moment part of the flock detached itself and settled in the hedges behind us. It was then we understood why the collective noun for Starlings is a murmuration (in the OED, murmering, a low, continuous sound).

The children do not share our fascination with birds, and I suppose we are, to use yet another collective noun, an embarrassment of parents.

January Goldeneyes

Reading my past posts, a recurring feature is the weather, and in particular, in this part of the West Country, rain (or at times this past year the lack of it). Before starting to write this afternoon, I decided to avoid any mention of weather (or rain) but it so governs our lives that it is not possible to ignore weather; or not for very long. It may no longer dictate the course of daily life, as it did for my great grandfather, but it still plays a large part in that everyday life. Today was no different: where to walk and what to wear? Having heard the forecast, and more importantly looked west from our bedroom window over the Moor, we chose to drive up to the Hennock reservoirs.

Evidence of the recent storms was everywhere: some trees down and branches snapped off. There was wind this morning but walking up through the woods the air was still at ground level, even though 50 feet up the treetops were moving. With the wind these past couple of weeks, we have had rain, and the reservoirs are full, water tumbling down the spillways. In early October the reservoirs were as low as we had ever seen them; they are now filled to overflowing.

Bird life is sparse both on and along the edges of the reservoirs. It is not one of our favoured bird watching places although this morning we watched Coal and Marsh Tits in the trees, and on Kennick Reservoir, four pairs of Tufted Duck and, very unusually, two Goldeneye drakes. Roger Smaldon’s The Birds of Dartmoor describes Goldeneye as a very rare winter visitor to the Dartmoor reservoirs, most often at Burrator, and so to see them on one of the Hennock reservoirs was special. Both drakes were displaying, throwing back their heads but it was too far to hear to hear the growling call they make. Why they were doing this with no duck present is anyone’s guess: perhaps just practice for Spring.

Ending this post, I am afraid that much of it has been about weather, but then according to Samuel Johnson, when two Englishmen meet their first talk is of the weather, and so perhaps all I am doing is reinforcing a national stereotype.

A wild ending

Wild weather has kept us off the High Moor this holiday, but the upside has been the opportunity to watch birds. This we have taken and have spent the last four days doing just that.

On Boxing Day we were at Lydford Gorge: a short walk as the main route is closed over winter, but after the descent to the waterfall, we climbed back up and along the old railway line to the hide at the end. Just before high tide on Thursday, we watched squadrons of Oystercatcher and Dunlin arrive on the Dawlish Warren mud flats, the sun catching the flash of wings like glitter. We watched Marsh, Coal, Blue and Great Tits at Yarner Wood very late on Friday afternoon, with fleeting glimpses of a Nuthatch and a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker in the half-light. Yesterday we saw more Godwit along the margin of the flooded area at Bowling Green Marsh than we have seen before, and mixed in among them Redshank, Lapwing, Pintail, Shoveler, Wigeon and Teal, as well as Canada Geese; and in the tree next to the hide, Longtailed Tits. Add to that watching Dippers on the Teign just up from Clifford Bridge on Christmas Eve, and seeing a trout (or perhaps even a very late salmon) jump in one of the pools.

This morning we were closer to home, back up to our favourite walk on Mardon Down, the weather rushing in from the south. In the space of 45 minutes we lost sight of the Moor completely but we missed the rain, which came just as we reached the Landrover (very clean and if not new, then definitely more pre-owned than second hand! One result of the problem with the central locking which I posted about in Technology is not all it is cracked up to be, was being persuaded by the silver-tongued salesman at Matford to trade in and up: another 110 Defender but three years and 70,000 miles younger).

2006 is not going out gently. The rain is hammering on the windows and it could already be tea-time, not just after lunch. It is all too easy to concentrate on our own small corner of Devon. But perhaps I do so because to understand the world beyond sometimes seems so difficult. These past few days have seen the unfolding drama of Saddam Hussein’s end, and yet more turmoil in Iraq. We caught the last half of Brian Walden’s Sunday reflection, A Point of View, on Radio 4 as we lay in bed this morning.

In five minutes, he put into words far better than I could ever hope to, a view many share. He spoke of lessons that need to be learned about the occupation of Iraq, calling it one disaster that we must never repeat. While entertaining no doubt about the physical courage of our troops, he asked our political leaders “to find the moral courage to face some unpalatable facts about Britain’s status in the world”, and in particular “the embarrassing impression that other countries look to us for ethical leadership”. As he put it somewhat bluntly, they don’t. And as for the rest of the world standing in awe of our righteousness, this illusion, he averred, is the source of many of our follies.

If I were to have one wish for 2007, it would be a government that understands this.