Four Fields, Tim Dee, p. 51

A new sort of alienation has already been devised: the tristesse of the bird watching hide. I can feel it now in the strange log cabin that has been erected on Tubney fen. Nothing seen from its shelter seems as real as it does when seen from under the sky. Tim Dee, Four Fields, p 51,

And I was wondering if he uses binoculars. He never mentions them. For most of us what we see from the hide is more real, because more immediate, clearer. We observe, unseen. Extraordinary, the close and delicate patterning on a duck’s breast. I had no idea. Sometimes there is also a companionship, and a sharing of knowledge. A sharing even of sandwiches.

In a hide containing amateurs we searched for pink footed geese. I had met a contented birder coming away from the hide who told me they were there, that they were unusual in Cambridgeshire, and that you had to look carefully for them among all the Canada geese. In the water of course you couldn’t see what colour their feet were, but we found them all the same, and it was satisfying. Discovery. Identification. The out of the ordinary. A couple from Cambridge were there, and their daughter who was about ten. Why wasn’t she bored? And he made bread. They gave me a sandwich, it was really nice.

I said, why was that record breaking stream locomotive named after a duck? Someone said, apparently Gresley, the engineer, was a bird lover. I said, yes, but why not the Peregrine? Or the Swift? He said, well, mallards have been recorded at 70mph, which is pretty fast for a duck. Yes, but the Mallard reached a speed of 126mph! On a long straight length of track near Peterborough, on the east coast mainline, not far from here. As every school boy used to know. In 1930 something. Narrowly beating the previous record held by a German locomotive. But apparently, I now read, the effort almost burnt the engine out, it had to limp slowly off to be refitted.

No tristesse there, Tim. But sometimes absurdity: later I came across a bird magazine with an account of conflict among bird watchers. Apparently, dedicated photographers with their massive lenses have been annoying other bird watchers with the loud clicks their cameras make! ‘Craig Jones, professional wildlife photographer, tells me he’s witnessed conflict in a number of hides, with photographers asking birders to point out birds more quietly, and birders tutting at the sound of shutters.’

My experience of hides is very limited but the birds have been so far away from all of them that no birds could have been disturbed by clicks or conversation. On the other hand, birds on water are in plain sight, unlike all those warblers and other little brown birds that lurk in the bushes. And it’s the watery nature of all those reserves on mud flats by the coast or by inland lakes and reed beds that both attracts the birds and gives them a certain safety and privacy. People have to stick to board walks and embanked paths, and hides. But Eric Ennion (see my last post, A dream come true (and an easy walk) had a punt. I’d never thought about punts before. They were just for students and tourists in Cambridge. From ‘Adventurers Fen’: One sunday morning I had let the punt drift and strand itself on a stubble of sedge…. And there he lay – no need to stand up and wave that great pole around – he lay flat, no clicks or conversation, and life went quietly on around him. Once he sketched a sleeping duck: I did several sketches before he woke and fled creaking from the pool. This creaking note of the garganey was a curious sound: it reminded me of tightening the wooden screw of an old linen press. It was more dry and deliberate than the rattle of nightjars or a grasshopper warbler’s reel. I don’t know what the tightening screw of a linen press sounds like – Ennion was writing in the 1940’s – but I can imagine it, and the garganey too. I’m looking forward to looking for garganeys, they breed in Africa and spend the summer in Europe, unlike all the other migrating ducks which breed in Russia and Scandinavia and spend the winter here.

A word of explanation about this next passage from Ennion. (See my last post). He’s not alone in the punt on this occasion because he’s working with the gamekeeper. It maybe difficult for us to accept now, but at that time a love of birds could accommodate shooting some of them. Some clear water had to be kept because shot ducks that fell into the reeds would be very hard to recover, hence the references to reed cutting. (They weren’t doing it for thatching.) The cuckoo is the reed warbler’s chief enemy. She sits on the high willows and nothing escapes her yellow eye. But a nest made to carry a fairy and four eggs for ten days and featherweight mites for eight days more won’t always stand up to the wriggling of a fat young cuckoo for six weeks. With water all around there is no alternative until his wings are competent and the nest may begin to slither slowly down its stems. I have found his Lordship sitting dangerously near the bottom of a pancaked nest.

A nest was accidentally overthrown while reed-cutting. It was reset by entwining its supporting reeds with those of a cluster standing a few yards away. Three eggs were fished up and replaced. The pair accepted our apology and a fortnight later three young reed warblers had hatched. It was amusing to watch the old birds sliding down the bannisters, a reed stem in each foot, to feed them.

What would Attenborough’s camera people give for a shot of reed warblers sliding down the bannisters!

That’s a beautiful example of a human intervention – apologetic, restorative – in a natural process. I intervened in Greece earlier this year. I was walking in an area which you could say was being ‘rewilded’, although not from any form of human intervention but from a lack of it. When mountain villages become near empty and the fields are abandoned, and there’s no road building or house building, no crucial national infrastructure to be developed, like reservoirs or solar ‘farms’, no quarries, no military bases, when just about the only local human activities are shooting wild boar – and that not on a scale sufficient to restrict the growing population – and bee keeping, then you have a form of rewilding. I came across a shocking thing: a tortoise lying on its back on the dirt road, its legs slowly waving as if it were trying to swim through the air, its head black with dried blood. I picked it up and carried it to what seemed like a safe place among shrubs, but I have no idea if it might have survived. Later I found out that some birds of prey will carry tortoises high in the air and then drop them to try to break their shell, and that this practice was first recorded by a greek writer in the 4^th century BC. It has increased recently, and this is thought to be connected to the decline of sheep farming in the mountains, which means that it is a consequence of rewilding.

Ajay Tegala is a ranger on the nature reserve at Wicken Fen, which had expanded to include part of Ennion’s Adventurers Fen. In his book Wetland Diaries he records large scale interventions in the name of conservation. Konik ponies have been introduced. They are native to eastern Poland and, unlike other kinds of pony which are used by the National Trust in areas of rough pasture and moorland, they don’t mind having wet feet. They have become crucial to the business of the National Trust as well as to the landscape because they are attractive and popular; they, like Ajay, are TV celebrities, fund raisers love them. But they are far from wild. So although we are told that ‘the aim is for nature to thrive without our intervention’ the koniks are exceptional. During one year ten stallions are given vasectomies. Once a pony gets stuck in a lode – a deep drainage ditch – up to its neck in the mud, and has to be pulled out by an RTV. (A rough terrain vehicle, we are told.) However wild you wanted to go, you could hardly leave it to die slowly in full view of its affectionate public. There are highland cattle too. They had to be injected with anti-biotics for a highly infectious eye infection. And one of them, when old and sick, was euthanised. Then it was quite an operation to take away and dispose of the body. Bodies could be left for the crows and kites and foxes and flies and beetles, but Ajay says, without amplification, that practical, moral and legal considerations prohibit this approach. The National Trust’s vet bills must be enormous. No wonder the coffee is so expensive. Ponies and cattle all have names, and two appendices give us the histories of some of the favourites. For example: Adonis. Born: 5 July 1998. Origin: Netherlands. Stunning, chunky stallion that didn’t quite deliver the goods his name promised, as he was believed to be ‘sub-fertile’. Talitha. Born: 31 July 2019. Mother: Felicity. A small mare, Talitha tarted her way around numerous harems and stallions before settling in a group with multiple younger stallions. Tarted?? And a cow: Wendy, born: 21 March, 2001. Origin: Mull, Scotland. Colour: black. Hand-reared as an orphan on Mull, Wendy was an engaging cow with bags of character. One of Carol’s all time favourites, Wendy is remembered with much warmth and affection.

Ennion only gives a name to one wild creature, a fledgeling kestrel, the youngest of the litter, left alone in the nest for a week after his brothers and sisters had flown. For some reason he’s called Benjamin.

From Greece I also remember a dying goat. It was lying on a narrow track, an old mule path, on the edge of a village. One or two houses close by, no sign of people. It had been given some food, some leafy branches, and it was slowly chewing. But it didn’t seem able to move. There was hardly room to step around it. The next day it was still there, barely chewing. The third day it was still there, still just about able to flick its tail against the flies, but that was all. Why did no one shoot it? Why was it in such a public place, or had it just happened to collapse there? Why was there no one to ask? How much suffering does such a death cause?