To everything there is a.....

Season of Misses....

Walking by the Wash, I can almost feel the tug of that harsh mistress (Artemis, or Selene, sometimes known by other names) the moon, as she slips toward the west in the early light.  Even though she was at her fullest last Tuesday, in combination with the sun she still has the power to flood the world until it is out of its depth:

The moon's a harsh mistress

She's hard to call your own

Jimmy Webb

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

(As sung by Joe Cocker)

This exceptionally high tide has driven flocks of waders to feed on the few remaining slips of beach, and feisty sanderling skip and splash as the waves splutter and suck.

Dunlin skim the wave tops in tight formation,

 

while turnstones, 

 

curlew and oystercatchers strut up and down at the water’s edge, less keen to get their feet wet.

A kestrel skims low across the waterless marsh, a dark shrew clamped in its talons.

Then a family of swans beat past, their necks stretched toward the shore,

and I remember Yeats at Coole:

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

W B Yeats

Wild Swans at Coole

On the lagoon thousands of knot are resting until the tide ebbs again, having performed their synchronised whirling for the morning crowd.  

I walk past a field where over a hundred curlew seem also to be taking a breather. I wonder what they are thinking? Which turns my thoughts around..... It seems only the other day that we swam off, and walked along, these beaches; where did the summer go?

And now there is no one - just empty shells; not even a footprint to show the tracks of time....

 

Then, across the grassy marsh the last camomile and ragwort still attract bumblebees and add some welcome colour,

but the cracked earth yearns for some consistent rain. Young greylag geese burst from the reeds alongside a still-wet drain as I approach, upset at my intrusion.

In the woods the Ken Hill Tamworths are rooting and snuffling, and the path is prickly here and crunchy there according to the mix of trees – now shedding their fruits:

sweet chestnuts, beech mast and acorns in vast quantities this year as the drought has triggered survival procedures.

 

The bracken is fading, although, having dropped redundant leaves earlier, most trees are still green, despite being torn by the wind.

It is a strangely slow autumn, though the poplars and the birch are beginning to turn, catching the low streaming light:

 

I stuff my pockets with crab apples from the hedgerow, to make delicate jelly:

and taste the few remaining blackberries,

though I leave the sloes,

and the rose hips for others with more patience. On the way home, avoiding fungi I don't recognise:

I pick a couple of parasol mushrooms: 

for an omelette lunch, and collect some of the larger chestnuts to boil with fennel seeds for afters. The season has its plenty and we are lucky that nature provides; it certainly is, as Keats would have it, a

Season of misses, and fellow moodfulness

However you see it:

Only lovers

see the fall

a signal end to endings

a gruffish gesture alerting

those who will not be alarmed

that we begin to stop

in order to begin

again.

Maya Angelou

Late October

And so I walk on upon this glorious autumn day, stealing images that hold the time, though time inevitably trickles on. As soon as the shutter clicks, the moment is gone, and the world turns, the moon falls, the dew evaporates and the day draws to night. It is what it is, and that is all there is to be said just now.....

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf,

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day

Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Questo è dedicato.....

Whirling Waders

Standing Room Only.....

September and it's officially "Autumn!" Where did the summer go?

But here we are, and at Snettisham the waders are back, and the tides are high. This morning, Saturday, September 2nd, I got up early and at 6.30 I was trudging along the two kilometre path to the RSPB Reserve, which, as the RSPB website informs us, consists of a variety of coastal habitats including lagoons, tidal mudflats, shingle beach and saltmarsh. These habitats form part of the wider Wash which is an internationally important area providing refuge for vast numbers of wildfowl and wading birds.

It is a lovely morning.  The sun is already above the horizon, and, though the dawn was not very colourful, it is good light, catching the underwings of the whirling waders as they lift from the incoming tide.

There are tens of thousands of birds out there, feeding on the mudflats of the Ouse Estuary.  By 25 past eight the tide will be tugged up to 7.8 metres high by the combined forces of the sun and the blue moon - that is 25.59 feet higher than mean sea level, and, though waders can swim, they can't feed when they are out of their depth so they come ashore to rest.

The majority of these birds are Knot (which, if you say it quickly, doesn't make sense, so don't.....) and there are around 265,000 of these on the shores of the British Isles during the winter months, having spent the breeding season in the Arctic (one could learn a thing or two there....) Knot are dumpy, short-legged, stocky wading birds (no comment). They form huge flocks in winter which wheel and turn in flight, flashing their pale underwings as they twist and turn. Some call these murmurations, though that word is more usually connected with starlings. A rather cute name for the flocking of Knot is "A Tangle," though one source refers to "A Cluster."

Whatever you like to call them, they fill the sky, almost covering the sun, and they fly overhead with a whirring of wings and excited peepings and twittering.  (Not unlike politicians at the Division Bell....)

They aren't the only birds in these vast flocks though. Handsome white and black Oystercatchers, with their red beaks and scarlet stockings, abound as well, and at this time of year there are also thousands of Godwits, mainly bar-tailed, but also black-tailed, (and a name for them in profusion is fittingly "An Omniscience.") 

The bar-tailed godwit is a long-billed, long-legged wading bird which breeds in the Scandinavian and Siberian Arctic, and hundreds of thousands of them pass through the UK, on their way further south, or stop off here for the winter.  (Flying, as opposed to surface travel, being their preference....)

The waders come off the Wash as the tide rises, and hurry to find a spot on the shingle banks of the lagoons here.  They hustle and shuffle and bluster and snuggle and soon they smother all available resting places.

They aren't the only ones having a rest though. Spoonbills and Cormorants may have picked the best spots, and there are geese, ducks and egrets around as well. All very cosmopolitan. Migration is a fact of life here, and ethnic diversity is accepted by all.

It's just that, for an hour or two, it is standing room only.....  Every now and then there will be a crazy flurry of activity, and one lot will flap up and off and turn and return, and then it will be all ok again....

Then there'll be another alarm....

Then it will be calm again....

All snug

All tight in there - standing room only.....

While the human factor is kept in a glass box, quietly snapping away, wondering at how all these different creatures get on so well together.....

Pip!  Pip!  Some of us (?) really do have a lot to learn......

RSPB Snettisham, Beach Rd, Snettisham, King's Lynn PE31 7RA

And, as the RSPB says on its website:

On the biggest high tides from late summer onwards, tens of thousands of wading birds take flight as the incoming tide pushes them off the vast mudflats. We call this the 'whirling wader spectacle', a special event which doesn't happen everyday. Before travelling to the reserve to see this spectacle, we'd highly recommend you check our Snettisham Spectaculars Dates and Times Guide found in the downloads section below [on the website, y ken?]

From late summer to early winter tens of thousands of wading birds gather on the mudflats where they roost overnight. During an incoming tide, these birds are pushed closer to the beach and on a high spring tide vast flocks of knot, dunlin and oystercatchers take to the air en masse [excuse the French] as the high tides cover the mudflats. The commotion of thousands of wingbeats, excited calls and swirling flocks creates an exhilarating nature spectacle.

Arrest my case.....

Well I know 'cause I think about it all the time

I know that real love is hard to find

 Maria Louisa McKee

Piano Concerto No. 2 (Rachmaninoff)

Going out with the tide.....

This morning I rose early.  Yesterday it rained, miserably, soaking my hopes of a useful BioBlitz at Wild Ken Hill, but today dawned well, despite the wind.

So I determined to walk to RSPB Snettisham to see and photograph the Whirling Waders before walking on to see (my wife) Amanda in her Home at Heacham.  

I was underdressed and the northerly wind was brisk and chilly, but eventually 32,000 Knot rose from the rising tide on the Wash, together with a large number of Oystercatchers, and whirred overhead to the shingle bars in the safety of the tideless lagoons behind.

Every day is different, but when the conditions are favourable, the human observer on the shore may see shoals of birds flinging themselves up and overhead.  The RSPB promote these as "Snettisham Spectaculars," or "Whirling Waders."  Many visitors confuse them with "Murmurations" as in the great flocks of starlings that fall to roost in many places.  Locals may refer to them as "Tangles of Knots".....

It doesn't matter.

Bird watchers, twitchers, photographers and others (including me) gather early in the mornings to see these wonders.  Over the winter thousands more Knot will join here from their breeding grounds in the far north, so they can feed from the rich mud of the Wash.

Behind the Sea Wall there are lagoons of safety, protected from the rising tides, and it is to these that these canny waders retire when the waters become too difficult.

Spooked perhaps by the turbulent winds they take their time to settle, but in their thousands they do eventually find a tiny space of sanctuary until the tide begins to fall and they can return to the muddy spaces where they can sift and forage.

But I have to make tracks.  I have miles to walk, to visit Amanda in her Care Home, where the tide of her life is going out.  I walk nine miles overall and my knees and feet are tired and bruised.  Nothing really.  The upside is that as I enter the Home I think that perhaps she recognises me and brightens.....  There is no way of telling, as she is non-verbal now, but it heartens me to imagine that perhaps she knows who I am.

She would love the clouds of birds.  She would be delighted to walk the shingle paths and see the watchers by the water.  But, we have to genuflect to the ghastly truths of life.....

Then, in the evening, alone in my capacious home, I tune the radio to a Promenade Concert and a young man (Alim Beisembayev - born in Kazakhstan in 1998) plays Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto Number 2.  How does he do this?  His fingers dance across the keyboard, his mind controls the pressures applied, but he has memorised the work and doesn't leave the orchestra behind.....  Not only dazzling, but beautiful.

Romanticism is not (yet) dead.  Tears come to my eyes as I wish Amanda could enjoy this too....

Although this is not connected to the flowing music of Rachmaninoff, Chapter 30 of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield rises in my mind:

The probability of his ever doing so, appeared to me, when I saw him, to be very small. He was lying with his head and shoulders out of bed, in an uncomfortable attitude, half resting on the box which had cost him so much pain and trouble. I learned, that, when he was past creeping out of bed to open it, and past assuring himself of its safety by means of the divining rod I had seen him use, he had required to have it placed on the chair at the bed–side, where he had ever since embraced it, night and day. His arm lay on it now. Time and the world were slipping from beneath him, but the box was there; and the last words he had uttered were (in an explanatory tone) 'Old clothes!'

'Barkis, my dear!' said Peggotty, almost cheerfully: bending over him, while her brother and I stood at the bed's foot. 'Here's my dear boy—my dear boy, Master Davy, who brought us together, Barkis! That you sent messages by, you know! Won't you speak to Master Davy?'

He was as mute and senseless as the box, from which his form derived the only expression it had.

'He's a going out with the tide,' said Mr. Peggotty to me, behind his hand.

My eyes were dim and so were Mr. Peggotty's; but I repeated in a whisper, 'With the tide?'

'People can't die, along the coast,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in—not properly born, till flood. He's a going out with the tide. It's ebb at half–arter three, slack water half an hour. If he lives till it turns, he'll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next tide.

With love from North-West Norfolk