The large pool known as the East Flood abuts the narrow lane to the old ferry to Harty. The waders and wildfowl within the nature reserve feed in the shallows at the water’s edge, nearly all immune to passing cars and a slow steam of walkers, some with dogs and others with binoculars and telescopes. A…
Tag: Birds
Shellness and Leysdown-on-Sea
The wind tears the waters of the Swale into waves. The grey plovers do not linger on the drowning groynes. The high tide roost of oystercatchers and others shelter on the tip of the shell beach. High tide roost mainly of oystercatchers on the ness. A male hen harrier twists over the wide saltmarsh carried…
Cliffe on the Hoo
Cliffe Pools, north of Higham on a breathless, sunny day in mid January is full of sleeping waterfowl. The RSPB reserve is a peaceful, patchwork of large lakes adjacent to the Thames; former clay diggings that fed the local cement industry. Now the industry is all around; power stations with huge chimneys, wind turbines, piles of sand and gravel,…
Warm Harty and Shellness
Capel Fleet is sunny, warm and windless; today there are only timid sheep in the field and the brown bulls are gone. The Fleet is stacked with waterbirds and the large maize field full of geese, lapwings and the rest. Suddenly, the entire sky is on the move, sound fills the air and for a…
Cold Harty and the Swale
The winding lane to Harty Ferry passes through Capel Fleet where a distant herd of great, brown bulls deter most away from the footpath that runs from the road across a flat landscape towards the distant Swale Estuary. The raised path is a stumble, being water-logged and pot-holed by heavy hooves; it arcs endlessly round a wide expanse of huge,…
Mid Wales Midwinter
Aberystwyth is dark under a deep depression and saturated from the incessant rain. On the seafront, the high-roofed Old College squares up to the sea, foaming waves beat the high sea wall that protects this alarming Gothic pile. Safe on the landward side, we look in vain for a wintering black redstart that often sits high on a gargoyle and repeats its wheezy,…
Trimley Marshes on the Orwell Estuary
The stone track from Trimley St. Mary runs down the hill passing ancient limes and oaks before turning east below a dense cordon of tall and stringy ash trees that runs round the huge container terminal at Felixstowe for a mile or so; here the sounds are not of the countryside or the coast but grating metal scraping metal, sirens,…
A Dreich December Day at Lower Halstow
The sou’westerly blows hard and the cloud and drizzle drink the life from the coastal marshes and, usually picturesque, small boats squatting in the inlet on the wide expanse of rivened flats. Small numbers of redshanks and black-headed gulls potter across the mud, the redshanks perfectly camouflaged in soft grey. Black arrows of Brent geese fly…
Oare and Conyer
The arctic winds across the marshes at Oare are killing and unkind, bending heads towards the frozen earth; but the Sunday morning promises a warming sun but only after a heathen slab of grey cloud has inched slowly away to the east. The high tide is falling and a dense flock of black-tailed godwits takes off from their island roost,…
Deserts of the Emirates
The endless dunes between Abu Dhabi and Al Ain are golden waves of lifeless sand, dead and uninviting. They are also increasingly defaced by power lines, pipes and water tanks and demarcated by endless walls and fences as tenure and utilisation are settled. They are still traversed by camels but now also four wheel drives with tyres flattened to…
Yas Island – A Photographic Guide to the Birds of Muddy Mangroves
Yas Island is one of the many great infrastructure projects in the United Arab Emirates, located close to Abu Dhabi airport and 10 miles down the highway from the city. In 2012, it already had a Formula 1 racing circuit, a huge red panini of a building called Ferrari World, hotels, marina and golf course and…
Dungeness B
The dawn sky is a wash of saturated purple and vivid orange like an overdone postcard; the sunlight edges the curved hulls of the fishing boats, warms the waves of shingle to a russet and whitens the windows in the small wooden houses. The view just before sunrise. Boats, winches, sheds, containers, all manner of boxes; coils of rope,…