North Devon

 

 

It's 6. am and the sun is just rising to a clear sky.  The video footage shows a small black car pulling up to the barrier. A man reaches out and presses numbers on the key pad. Nothing happens. He tries again. Nothing. He gets out, goes round and tries to lift the barrier. It's not possible without breaking it. He tries the key pad again. The he gets out and walks round the building until he sees a sign on the other side - the way in to the campsite - where he sees a notice saying that the barriers are shut between 11pm and 6.30 am. Half an hour before the campers can escape. He locks the car and walks off down to the beach.

When the office staff get in at 8.30 they watch the video and see the man come back for the car at 6.30, punch in the numbers which raise the barrier and drive off. They note down the number of the car and check it against the owners . It's the Stenning car so they go to where the Stenning party is camped and ask if there is an emergency. Someone wishing to drive out at 6 O'clock is so strange, it must be an emergency!

All I want to do is get to a place called Isley Marshes while the early morning light is still good. Now it would be past its best and more people around to disturb the wildlife. Still,  I get to see and photograph the beach before the people arrive. It's beautiful. I lean on the railings and watch the few gulls who have reclaimed the territory.


A man is walking towards me. He has long curly hair and a pleasant face, wearing shorts. He stops, comes up to me and points at the little stream running through the rocks to the sea.

 

"There's a kingfisher comes here most mornings - just down there."

"Wonderful. At this time?"

"Yes, you might be lucky."

"Very difficult to capture on camera though!"

It's nearly 6.30 so I don't wait for the elusive blue streak whistling past, and walk back to collect the car. The satnav leads me down roads with grass growing down the middle; even one with a gate across it. Bloody thing. Now I'm lost and losing time, but my phone finds where we are and sets me on the right road. We used to have maps, printed on paper. Hey ho.
 

I've unshipped the Brompton bike, loaded it with all the gear and set off to find a good place to set up the telescope and do some watching, but the few curlews and gulls around the water's edge are too far off to get any decent images.

The marshes are edged with ancient grassland full of wild flowers and gorse, and the cycle path runs straight as a die towards the north. I stop to look at a patch of land with picnic tables and a curious building. The building looks like a reconstruction of an Iron Age hut, and nearby is evidence that some poor person has been sleeping rough here.

It's good to watch the curlews preening, but nothing much else is happening so after a while I give up. Driving back along the estuary I see a sign saying "Fremington Quay Café & Heritage Centre" so I drive down a long winding single track road to the small café car park "for customers only." I enjoy a coffee and cake and stroll around. A large dark bird is flying out over the mudflats. It's a Peregrine; female. She makes a few passes over the estuary and then disappears. I wish she had turned up when I had the telescope set up.  Still, not a bad morning.

Newport July 2015

Thursday 31 July 2015

I've done it! It's 9 pm, 21 hundred, the sun is low in the sky and I'm alone with my plastic beaker of wine. It’s just me and the van and this contained wilderness. A small group of people, a male family carrying fishing rods, have climbed the gate just ahead of the van, walked round it and gone. They have violated one of the rules of this place - do not cross locked gates - so they are not going to challenge my slightly illegitimate presence.

I'm in a lumpy grassy space where there is room for a few cars. On one side is a very rough potholed track, on the other is the reserve boundary. It’s a no-man’s land, a permitted access to the reserve, and it’s summer which is the bird-watchers off-season. The birds are moulting or spreading out away from their home territories. Most of the migrants are still in the far north – Iceland, Russia, Spitzbergen, Sutherland, but the advance party are here: a few gorgeous black-tailed Godwits. The birds are in small groups, relaxed, preening and feeding. There is none of the frantic massing; the huge flocks of thousands birds all eager to gorge on the millions of creatures that live in the mud. That’s for November.

On my last visit, when I had bought my telescope at the RSPB visitor centre, I was told I MIGHT be able to stay near the hides at the other end of the reserve. Other end? As far as I knew the reserve was the patch of reed-beds intersected by paths and adorned with notices to inspire children to "Make a Home for Nature".( How I hate all that marketing stuff - the corporate bullshit. I love what it buys though so I don't complain.) The reserve, most of it below sea level, begins at the power station, goes down to the sea wall, and ends at a hide which overlooks a lagoon. Nice place, but not on a par with Pencalcwyth to the west or Slimbridge to the north east.

Back in June, I had driven five miles along small fenland roads which made abrupt right-angle turns and then arrowed out straight, drawn with a ruler. The villages have wonderful English names: Nash, Goldcliffe, Whitsun, Undy. They show how close we are to the English border. The houses are old and handsome, picked out with roses and hollyhocks. Wildflowers - meadowsweet, knotweed, valerian, sneezewort - decorate the verges. I've learnt how to recognize verges with natural low fertility. In the others there are rank grasses, dandelions, hogweed, buttercups, all the plants which thrive on artificial fertilizer. Now that I know them they seem ugly.

I got to where the sketch map indicated a right turn, but it just led to a few houses with a green space. I couldn't park up in front of someone's house, so I drove on another 5 miles to a little campsite at the hamlet of Undy. I'm the only van there, and walking down to the coast I can see the huge and beautiful second Severn Bridge just a few miles away.

So I missed the track and never found out that there were a whole series of brackish lagoons with three hides spread out over a distance of half a mile. The first hide is only a hundred yards from where I am eating my dinner. Tomorrow morning I will be able to be there at sunrise - bliss: I am, and will be, alone in the landscape, and the landscape is much bigger than I thought, stretching along a good 5 miles of protected beach, farmland and marsh, with these lagoons at the eastern end. Like a number of the best bird watching sites it has an industrial heritage, and somehow the stark uncompromising lines of the power station complement the severe horizontals of the marsh land.  

The hide looks west so the evening sun is a backlight. In the morning it’s behind me and the curlews, glowing in the deep golden light, begin to move around, preen, stretch their wings and fly off to feed. I’m practising “digiscoping” – taking pictures with my phone through the telescope.

 

Like everything to do with wildlife photography it’s difficult. These Avocets – later in the morning - were too far away for real clarity of image, but they are very special. The icon of the RSPB, they were one of the first re-introductions after the native population had been driven out by the loss of habitat. The Society set up reserves like this to lure them back, and here they are - quite a common breeding bird round the southern estuaries.

I have no ambition to earn money from photography, but I am intensely driven to come close to the quality of image set by the ferocious competition between the pro users and between the optics companies. No matter how much you spend on gear (and the pros spend in five figures) you cannot succeed unless you can begin to think like your subject. Above all you need a quality I have always found elusive: patience: sit or stand still and watch. Even after a mind and body numbing wait the bird or animal you are hunting may still be too far away. Then you have to learn to stalk. If you are on a reserve that option is seldom available. We are the modern hunters, looking for the perfect shot. We don’t kill but we can cause great damage simply by our presence.

How very much part of the human condition it is to destroy the things we love. It used to be the collecting of specimens – corpses and eggs - which drove the trophy hunters. The story is that the man who shot the last Red Kite in Scotland was very proud of his achievement. Now we kill in much more subtle ways. Our weapons are pollution, road building, farming, house building, and leisure. With one hand I help reclaim their habitat, with the other I want to become part of their world, but they would much rather I kept away.

The Somerset Levels

 

Friday 14 August

Not  good day. A fresh start was supposed to redeem the mistakes of yesterday, which ended badly.

I noticed what looked like a nice pub in the village where I was staying so decided to ride down and have an early evening pint. The pint was lovely. The pub was OK and the people seemed friendly, but I didn’t try to get any conversation going - too difficult. So, I hadn't been there long when I drank the last of my pint, put the glass on the bar said "Thanks, cheers", and walked out. The world was fine and I was a fine old duffer, but so what. I looked forward to my meal  - bacon and veg, and of course some wine. I parked the bike at the back of the van and lumbered around sorting things out. Before settling in for the evening I needed to get it more level, so I got it going, backed up and moved to a slightly more level site. No, that was no good either, try again. Right, go and get the levelling wedges. Oh my God, the bike! It was lying there in the furrow it had ploughed as it  was pushed back. Damage assessment: handlebars badly bent, front mudguard damaged, otherwise not too bad, but bad enough. I would now have to get a new handlebar. Bollocks!

The day began with drizzle, got into its stride, but never quite hit the hard stuff. It has been raining most of the day - nasty insinuating wet stuff: "Don't worry about me I'm feeble, I'm not your real rain." Oh Yes? Then why am I  soaked to the skin. "You've been sweating - you know, when you did that walk through the  woods in the hope that you would get  a view of the marshes." True, but my shoulders don't normally sweat.  The unfortunate conclusion is that not only was the rain steady and unremitting, but my waterproofs no longer keep out the water. And, how utterly miserable that walk was - designed to punish the real bird watchers for thinking they could get the feel of the place in the rain.

You have to hand it to the RSPB. They are expert at gently persuading their punters to keep away from the places that really matter. What I wanted to do was simply to get a decent view over the West Sedgemoor marshes. Well, they did say on the website that it was probably the most important site in Britain for breeding wetland birds. They encourage you to book a guided walk  - but not in the summer. In the summer there are public footpaths that go round the reserve boundaries. But there are no car parks, and no guided walks; none of the "information centre" infrastructure - the desk manned by charming staff, the volunteers desperate to be helpful, the nice café with only slightly expensive food and drink, and all the display information, the leaflets, the posters, the world of the RSPB.  None of that. Just wet trees.

That was before 9. I pootled around for a while, but then decided to go back to the Shapwick Heath and Ham Wall reserves where I had been last month. On the way is the Graylake reserve - relatively small with just one hide, and I was the only person there. At least I was in the dry. The telescope was unshipped, the cameras prepared, the binoculars round my neck, and now all I had to do was look out at the wet reed beds and hope something would turn up. It did! I had a very good view of a pair of Marsh Harriers hunting - too far away for the cameras, but with my new smooth video head on the telescope I could easily track them as they flew in a languid figure of 8 over territory they obviously knew well. One was dark - almost black, but still with the pale head. He pounced, wings up and then the sudden drop. No obvious result. They don't hunt together, but a while later I found them both perching in a tree, looking like mates.

There were a pair of kestrels hunting much nearer, and I got a few pictures which were "almost" worth keeping when I loaded them in to the computer. Kestrels are rare now in Carmarthenshire, so it was good to see them several times in the levels.
 

Then in the afternoon to Ham Walls, the only place in Britain where a pair of Little Bitterns have nested, another good place to see Marsh Harriers, and an even better one to see Bitterns - the normal ones, the ones which were almost extinct in Britain 30 years ago. And I did! Several times. Once I even got the camera on them but it turned out not to be in focus. I also saw our latest immigrant, a bird that was unknown here only a few years ago - the Great White Egret: lovely heron-sized birds with yellow beaks.

I'm still not sure whether talking to the big handsome man with the Cannon gear was a good thing. The Canon men are the elite of the birding fraternity, the ones with the kit the pros use. This one was a prince amongst them - no binoculars, no telescope, just the EOS camera - the big square ones with the 35mm sensors, and the huge lens covered with camouflage material. Camera - around 2k, lens probably 5k, and he's not getting massive close-ups with it, only the kind of magnification you get with a normal pair of binoculars. What he is getting is the holy grail: the detail. He's a very nice man this member of the elite, and he lets me have a go. It's ridiculously heavy but he has no tripod. The image stabilisation is so good and the sensor is so good that he can work at an ISO of 1200  (what used to be called a fast film), a fast shutter speed, and still get crisp detail.

I am discouraged. Why have I decided this is what I want to do? I have so much to learn it's ridiculous, and I'm not even sure I have the temperament for it - all that waiting around doing nothing.

Meanwhile I framed a common summer visitor, a whitethroat,  in a typical August habitat - cow parsley. Slowly the life of the plant is moving out to the seeds and then sinking to the roots, ready for another year. It's just rough brown and green but so much part of the season it's beautiful.
 

Take heart. The forecast for tomorrow is good. I have found a little camp site which charges £7 without electricity, and I will get up early and be back here by the time the gate opens at 6. Good plan.

 

Saturday 15 August

I got lost. There were road diversions and the satnav was not help. In the end I trusted to my own sense of direction and set off at high speed down a little road which seemed to wind for ever, but did finally get me where I thought it would. I was amazed! It was 6:30 when I finally got to the reserve car park, but there was only one car there and the light was stll good.
 

I should explain that there is a golden rule in photographic circles that if you want to do wildlife and landscape you need to catch the early morning or late evening light. I's a rule made in countries with lots of strong sunlight. In Britain, and especially in Wales, the light can be special at any time of day, but very early is still the specialest.
 

Disappointingly there was little activity on outside the main hides - lazy little sods couldn't be bothered to get up and get to work feeding. I went to find a new hide on the other side of the reserve. It had not been built yet but on the way I saw something quite astonishing. There, hiding behind the reeds on a narrow patch of open water and mud were three heron species. The common Grey heron was there with a mate. There were lots of little egrets - dainty pure white birds with a black beak and legs. They have a charming way of feeding by pushing their big feet to and fro in the mud to stir up the crawlies. The real surprise though was the much bigger bird sharing their feeding ground - no less than 5 Great White Egrets. The name sounds ominously sharkish but they are harmless heron-like birds with very long necks, yellow beaks (at this time) and brilliant white plumage.

The Great White is an important bird for the RSPB for it was their long display plumes which used to be used to decorate hats and almost led to their extinction. The RSPB was founded to protest against the trade. They were succesful an dhave never looked back.

I wasn't quite close enough, but there was nobody around so I decided to do some stalking. Crouching low I trod carefully through the shoulder-high reeds until I was much closer. However, there was a dip in the ground and even standing I could not get a good view. Fortunately my Panasonic has a tilting screen so I was able to hold it way above my head and frame the picture.

Walking back, a young man on a bike came towards me. He had a special back-pack which held a tripod with a telescope across the top of it.

"The best place for the birds today is over on the other side." He gestured behind him. "I've just come from there. We've just lowered the water level and there are hundreds of birds there."

"Thanks, but I was hoping to get a shot of a bittern where I saw them last night."

"Oh, there's bitterns, great whites, godwits, all sorts."

"Right - over on the Nature Conservancy side? Which hide?"

"You don't need a hide just walk along the main track and  you will see them - on the right hand side."

It's a fair old walk, stepping out smartly with the heavy kit on my back. After 10 minutes yomping I see a little group with tripods and optics. The man on the bike overtakes me and points up ahead -

"Just by those people there".

Well, he's right in a way. There are great egrets and godwits and greenshank and little egrets, but no Bitterns and they are all too far away to get decent shots, even through the telescope, but again the new video head with the telescope enables me to get some really good views of some pretty spectacular birds. Good enough for the day. Now I need some coffee and a route for the long drive to Combe Martin.

Ogmore and Ewenny

30 July 2015

I'm at Ogmore castle, Bridgend, Morganwg (sounds better than Glamorgan). Ogmore is another of those miss-remembered Welsh names. Orginally Eog Mor - salmon water - when it was a famous salmon fishing river.
It's a fine looking heap of stones; probably the work of some Norman baron consolidating his ill-gotten gains at the expense of the natives. We live with a surfeit of castles so I'm not going to walk round it reading about the keep and the portcullis etc. I'm more interested in the sturdy looking stepping stones across the Ewenny river. (Confusingly the Ewenny joins the Ogmore river just past the castle.)

Astonishingly there is a woman leading two horses across. If she can do that then I shouldn't have a problem. The stones are medieval; worn smooth by centuries of shoes, boots, pattens, clogs, even feet, and reduced from 52 to 38 by natural attrition. They are all more or less the same height so they must vary in size according to the height of the river flow. Surely that would have changed with time? Perhaps originally they were all perfectly level with the flow - unlikely; their present heights are probably quite random.

It turns out that Ogmore Farm above the castle specialises in riding trips on the beach and they use this short cut (and the one detailed below) to get through the dunes.

I get together what I need for a 5 mile walk and set off. When I get to the middle of the river on the stones, I realise that there is some 2 feet of fast flowing water just below my feet. How many thousands have hesitated here and had the same thought?

Pause for thought. Place my feet carefully. Take it steadily and it's easy. I'm over and on over the Ogmore river on a picturesque footbridge to the impossibly cute village of Merthyr Mawr. Translated that would be "Big Merthyr" but it's a hamlet. Evidently the name has been miss-remembered from a Welsh word I can't now find. It's a blend of gorgeous thatched cottages in earthy colours and magnificent mature trees.


My plan is to walk towards the dunes to the south west of the hamlet, follow a path to the west which leads back to the Ogmore river, cross it on a bridge half a mile south of the stepping stones and so arrive back at the castle and the van. A little road leads to the access point for Merthyr Mawr burrows - a huge dune system. Here you walk (or ride a horse - a better option in view of what follows) through sand: soft, well churned sand. It's hard going so I take alternative tracks higher up which are carpeted with an amazing variety of miniature plants. There are blackberry bushes six inches high with 4 fruits on them; tiny wild roses, a miniature form of valerian and dozens more I can't identify. It's a good walk and it brings me naturally down to the river again where I can see the ugly concrete bridge I intend to cross to get back to the castle.

I have a moment of unease when I realise that the bridge is unreachable. It's the access road to a concentration camp pretending to be a sewage works. There is another interesting access to a similarly defended shit-stirring facility at Solva near St. Davids. There the access is via a tunnel, also locked. Hm. Is there something going on they don't want us to know about?


There's a sign on the bridge saying "No Footpath", but horses have obviously gone past recently, so there must be a path under the bridge and on to the castle which I can now see. If I see a path in front of me leading to where I want to go, it's going to take more than a "no footpath" sign to put me off. The sign was right though. The feet it refers to are human feet, not the feet of a four footed beast with long legs such as a horse. This is because the path takes a neat short cut - straight through the river. This is it - the end of the human's path.

You can see the castle, and the van in front of it. I could be there in 5 minutes. One of the women riding across tells me that the only way to get to the castle, is to go all the way back the way I came. Now, being human, being male and being an obstinate old fart I HATE retracing my steps. Normally I will take all sorts of risks to avoid doing so, and am contemplating taking off shoes and socks, rolling up trousers and having a go. However, I have binoculars and camera with me. If I miss my footing they will be ruined and that would be much more painful than going back. I check the bridge again, but its defences are impregnable. I can't actually see the watchtowers, but I'm pretty sure that if I try to climb the fence I will be shot.

In the end I enjoyed the walk back, setting myself a cracking pace, enjoying the feel of my new and wonderful walking boots, and feeling the soothing rhythm of the tramp of my feet. The return trip only took half an hour: I can do this walking thing: give myself a high four and a half!

Just as I was leaving I spotted this sign. I really hope it's a clever pun.

Stolford and the last Mud Horse

Stolford and the last Mud Horse
I’m in Bridgewater, Somerset,  with the van and looking for somewhere to stay. There is a “Certified Location” near where I want to be tomorrow so I ring the number of "Mud Horse Cottage".  CLs are the human side of the Caravan Club – small sites with few facilities but people with some character. I’ve no idea what a mud horse is. A ripe Somerset accent is saying hello. Would they have space for a camper van and one person tonight?

"Oh yes, there's a couple of spaces. When you gets to the gate come right on through. We're down by the beach."

Stolford is a hamlet of 10 or so houses tucked in behind the sea wall on Bridgewater bay. Most of them have pantile roofs and stone walls: it looks French. Looming just to the west of it is the solid cuboid structure of Hinckley Point nuclear power station. From there lines of pylons march over miles of rough grass, marshland, pebbles and sea; the stark metal seeming to emphasise the harsh beauty of the  landscape.

I opened the gates and drove on gravel through the cottage garden to the little walled paddock behind, which sloped up towards the sea wall.  I was the only one there, and I was glad. Deafness and solitude: they feed off each other. The deafer I get the less inclined I am to attempt conversation. I embrace isolation, but I still try. A simple exchange of views or information without too many “sorrys” or “pardons” can make the day.  I realise that I actively search out times and places where I can be alone in a big landscape, and this gives me an idea for a series of pictures.

I make a lunch of packet soup and bread and then lie down, read a few pages and fall asleep. With hearing aid removed, I am deaf to the sound of a thunderstorm rattling the van. I don't sleep for long - never do in the day -  fifteen minutes perhaps. Another rainstorm, some reading, some map perusal, and a few chores later I am ready to survey my surroundings. I lug the telescope through a gap in the hedge, down some rough sand steps and then onto  the sea wall where the whole great expanse of the Severn estuary is laid out before me. Away to the right is Burnham on Sea; on the opposite shore are Newport and Cardiff and in the middle is the aptly named island of Steepholm. Out on the mud there are shelduck, a few curlews; nothing much else. It's a quiet time of year for the birds; a time for nurturing fledglings and moulting.

A  4x4 truck passes me with some sort of contraption on the back and it's making its way slowly out onto the pebbles and rocks. Scrawled along the side of the truck are the words "THE MUD HORSE". Surely he can't be planning to drive out onto the mudbanks? They stretch as far as they eye can see and notices tell us how dangerous they are. But he does - or seems to. He must know where the rocks are. He is perhaps half a mile out from the land when he stops. I focus the telescope on him. After waiting a while – for the tide? -  he unships the contraption and begins to push it out onto the mud, leaning on it for support and paddling with his feet. Unknowingly I have chanced upon Adrian Sellick, the last of the Mud Horse fishermen. Once common in the area and on the opposite shore, he is still doing what his grandfather and father did - set nets across the tide and harvest the catch. I walk round to the fish stall next door and find what must be Brendan, Adrian's father, scrubbing off a strange looking marine creature with a shape like a vertebra - a sole perhaps? He hangs it up on the gate alongside what looks like a miniature shark. There are sole fillets for a pound so I buy one for my supper.

Here's the info:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/3337013/Last-round-up-for-the-mud-horse-fisherman.html.

How lucky I am to be here where an old way of life goes on beside an ugly new one - the doomsday box and its metal veins alongside an ancient skill being superseded by supermarkets.

Back at the van I unfold the Brompton bike, and loaded with optical gear, I set off eastwards, parallel to the shore, along a rough track which should lead me to the Steart peninsula. It does - as long as I am willing to take in pebbles and grass as road material. After perhaps 45 minutes I reach the little tarmac road heading northwards towards Steart village, and more importantly to the huge new area of saltmarsh which the Wetlands and Wildlife Trust and the Environment Agency have established. I am at the "Steart Gate car park" and the signs pointing south say "main car park 3.4k" "Polden Hide 3k". The one pointing north says "Breech 2k" These are big distances for a nature reserve, but this is more than a reserve, it’s an answer to rising sea levels: don’t fight the sea, channel it.  Breech is where they've let the sea in. I get to within half a mile of it and find it's closed to protect the nesting birds. There's another path on the west side which leads up to the northern point of the peninsula.  There, cycling across a field of grazing cattle, dodging the cowpats, I find the old tower hide looking rather forlorn. Climbing the stairs expecting to be alone again, I am surprised to find a young man with a Swarofski telescope and various charts and papers. I scan the view with the binoculars and see two Shelduck. What is he doing observing 2 common ducks with a 2k telescope? It turns out that Steart is a major moulting ground for Shelduck and if I look closely out beyond the shore I can just see a small flock of the white and brown birds. These he tells me can still fly and are probably the locals. He expects them to be joined by up to 3000 migratory birds later in the summer when all of them will be flightless for a few weeks. The survey is to get the details - how many, when and where.
It's a long haul back on the roads - a huge detour south - but it feels good. The sun is shining again, it's warm and  have my lovely piece of fish for supper, with some veg and rice, and the last glass of a carton of wine. More reading, and as the light declines, a DVD of "The Shining". I get halfway through but find it boring.

The Steart Marshes

The people who live in Steart village must be used to being surrounded by the wild. Over the centuries they had built the sea walls and drained the land to keep livestock and grow crops. Now the land is being deliberately flooded – farmland to saltmarsh. From human food to bird food. Perhaps the people were too baffled by this change so they retreated into the twentieth century tradition of mechanical, high energy farming. It was and still is all about maximising yield, and using oil-derived chemicals to wring the most food from the land. That was a concept they could understand: you put fertiliser on and crops grow better. You get paid more for your harvest. The price of fertilizer goes up, so does the price of food. How could they adapt to a philosophy of fertility reduction and the encouragement of weeds?

Impossible. They had, I guess, sold most of their land so the obvious thing to do was to invest the proceeds into producing food on a much smaller area. In this tiny village there are now at least 3 farms devoted to intensive poultry – concentration camps for chickens. I had to make way for an 18 wheeler, one of the biggest articulated trucks allowed on our roads. It was delivering feed. Enough to fill several of those skyscraper silos - probably the dry, dusty meal which is the chickens’ only food. Why would they want more? It contains all the nutrients they need.  
A few miles on I find this sign:

Why are the ducks free? Because there is not enough demand for their products from the supermarkets? I’m still amazed by the contrasts here: a pocket of industrial farming surrounded by its polar opposite. A bleak and beautiful landscape, a string of charming villages, and always above and beside them the symbols of man’s war on nature, the metal and the concrete, and ten thousand chickens.
I’ll be back. I’ve seen what’s been done and it’s amazing. The destructive power of the highest tides will lose itself in this great wetland. The plants, insects, invertebrates, all the strange creatures which like living in salty mud – they will multiply and feed new flocks of migrant birds. I will come with my telescope and someone will tell me what to look for: the odd man out, a stranger consorting with a crowd of regulars, a spotted redshank among the ordinary redshank. Ordinary? They are wonderful, magnificent birds, but they are common so we look between their legs for the oddity. I will hunt it down with my optics and shoot it with my camera. Bang, click, it’s there in the bag. But like a fish thrown back it will be none the worse for the encounter.
Collecting things is a very male pursuit and I never thought of myself as a collector of anything. I love photographing the birds, but they don’t have to be oddities. I just love the experience – getting up close to nature.

Scotland May 2015

Scotland May 2015

14/5 Tulloch Moor near Loch Garten.

Wonderful light. Bog cotton, heather still dark and grey from winter. Bright green new leaves of birch. Roe deer, black mountains with patches of white. Loch looking white in the distance. One roe deer not too worried by me.

15/5 Tulloch moor again:

7:00 Cuckoo mobbed by small birds. Herd of deer - tried to stalk them upwind but they knew I was there and moved off. Curlew flew in calling. First time I'd heard that call in many years. Tried to stalk it but no sign - must be nesting. No grouse to see. Red and green moss. Wood ants nest.

16/5 Lochindorb

Gulls roosting on the moor. Mountain hare. Amazing views of ruined castle in the lake - rain and sun.
Black Throated diver - good view through telescope. Proper birdwatcher now! Bitterly cold. Rain and sleet showers but then sun - wonderful light.

Osprey flying over in sunshine. Walked up track to little sheltered valley. New farm owner putting in new fences etc. Different climate. Woodcock twice. Partridges? Where is the Osprey nest?

What is so different here is that the species we see in the winter in Wales and England are nesting here: divers, woodcock, widgeon, goldeneye, curlew etc.
                                                
All sorts of emotions about this trip. What makes it for me is the special moments - times when my life is lifted out of the ordinary: yesterday when the rain set in and I parked up, put the heating on, put my feet up and read an inspiring book: ‘Gathering Light’ by Jennifer Donnelly. Then in the evening, back to the pull-in at Tulloch moor where I had walked in the afternoon. I watched a DVD about a journey - the modern pilgrimage to Compostella - perfect. Then this morning up at 4:30, before the alarm as usual. The "Caper Watch" was disappointing - no sign of any Capercaillie, but one quick sighting of a flying Osprey. Heating on again for breakfast, then a longer walk on Tulloch moor - roe deer, a weasel, curlew (see above), some great pictures with cloud and sun.

16/5 Geddes

Military road to Dulcie Bridge - several Wade bridges. Dulcie Bridge quite special.

No word from Sasha at Cougie, so stayed in a Caravan Club Certified Locaction - £10 inc elec, so heated up water and had a shower.

17/5Cougie

The satnav bit was easy enough. It took me as far as a place called "Cougie Lodge". It didn't look right. It wasn't. When I got to what it called "my destination" I was still on a metalled road and there were a few normal looking cottages. There was also, fortunately, a sign saying "Pony trekking, Cougie" with an arrow pointing to a rough track. That looked more like it. The track started bad and got worse. It was full of potholes: the van could barely reach 15 mph and it went on and on and on, but all roads lead somewhere and this track was leading me through a landscape that looked less and less man-made with every slow mile. The rain came in and lashed the van, tore down the valley and then disappeared as quickly as it had come.

I'd heard so much about this place: from Steve in our many conversations over a pint in the Neuadd, and from the TV documentary "Power to the Pococks". Sasha was a star in that film, but she had not replied to my messages and I didn't really know what sort of welcome I would get. Iain had said fine when I first asked about a visit, and Sasha had sent two thumbs up signs in reply to my facebook message, but I had no phone number, so I just had to hope someone would be there and I could pitch up the camper for a couple of days. I knew Iain was away because he was with Steve on a lads party in Prague for one of the nephews.

The track got no worse; the sun came out and there at last was a big clearing in the forest with what looked like a rough and ready hamlet - all sorts of buildings with signs saying "Camping", "Pony Trekking", "Self Catering", rows of stones marking the tracks. It's beautiful. The houses look home-made but sturdy. There is a fast flowing river, small fields with ponies and all around is the wilderness - rough pine forests and bare mountains, some with patches of snow. It reminded me so strongly of my first experience of country like this - in Canada. That was an experience which had shaped my life ever since. It had given me an abiding love of the sort of landscape where mankind is no more than one of the players; on a level with the beavers, the scrub, the trees and all the rest of nature. In this place the balance has shifted back. The commercial forestry has been felled. The stumps are still there, covered in moss, but the natural forest - birch and pine - is slowly reclaiming the land. Not any old pine though, this is the noble Scots pine, one of our most magnificent native trees. It grows slowly - doesn't make enough profit for the foresters, so the true ancient Caeldonian pine forest is almost gone.

I have just spent 2 days in the largest remaining fragment - Abernethy in the Cairngorms. It felt like being in the restored fragment of ebony forest I saw in Mauritius. Most of the island of Mauritius is a brash tropical supermarket of trees, vines, shrubs, cats, birds, monkeys - all from somewhere else. With hybrid vigour they grab any unprotected land and move in. To save the ebony you have to keep them all out with fences and traps. You go through a locked gate, the aliens swarming behind you, and you are in the cathedral splendour of the native ebony trees. You know instantly that this is what forest should look like.

It's the same in Scotland. The harsh dense stands of alien conifers give way to spaced out shapely trees, bark like the skin of some ancient scaly reptile, rough brown and red, glowing in the light filtering through the dark green needles. It's not just that native forest looks good, it also supports far more species. It is a richer landscape in every sense - except the narrow one of profit, money. Alien species make more money.

Intending to be out for hours, I walked up the track beside where I have pitched the van. It follows the river up a valley through this captivating landscape until suddenly nature stops and the desolation of a recently felled forest begins. The track became a river within a bog and I had to turn back. I saw Wheatear, seeming to be more green and yellow than the familiar brown and black. Perhaps they are a Scottish race, like the hoodies which are an alternative race of Carrion Crow. I saw one of them too, and a buzzard, the sort of wonderful bird which we call "nothing special". It was the wrong track anyway. Tomorrow I will take the other one which leads to a small remote loch. Perhaps there will be divers there.

(Long walk next day – saw eagle twice.)

20 – 24/5 Orkney

(Written later)
Sometimes sunny, sometimes wet, always windy and always cold, Orkney was a challenge on several fronts. I was staying initially with a distant relation by marriage who I didn’t know very well. Ben is the husband of my second cousin Victoria. He is tall, a serious, attractive and highly intelligent man with, unfortunately for me, a soft voice and quiet disposition but a wry sense of humour. I had to keep asking him to repeat things which is embarrassing and because he doesn’t necessarily speak unless he something to say, I tended to speak too much and further embarrass myself. He, like Vicky, is a catholic convert and (unlike her) had once been a monk. With his wife on course for a high flying career in medieval studies, he has adopted the house-husband role and works part time at a historic house and part time as an independent scholar. Vicky was away teaching in Iona when I arrived and Ben had plenty to do looking after their bright, lively daughter Stella, whose bedroom I had usurped for the 4 days. By the end of my stay I felt we had established a good rapport, but Ben remains something of an enigma. I hope they didn’t find me too difficult.

Luckily my first day was sunny, and with Ben at work until 4 I had 5 hours to cycle the 16 miles from Stromness to Evie. It was bright, but with a biting cold wind. Assuming I would find a nice warm café for lunch, I set off with just an apple, some water and a chocolate bar I had bought at what turned out to be the only shop on the route, and the only place selling food of any kind. I don’t have the muscles for serious cycling and soon found I was carrying far too much weight. It was hard, and a lunch break of water and one precious sweet bar was not enough to set me up well for the second leg so I finally got to Springfield Cottage pretty much exhausted.
It felt wonderful to be in a bright warm space, well used but not cluttered, with everywhere nice decorative touches. Before Ben arrived I lay down in the garden enjoying the sunshine.
That was a pattern for my stay: abrupt changes of mood – an intense challenge followed by sunshine, beauty and joy: a cold wet and miserable visit to the sensational Neolithic village at Scarra Brae followed by the welcome of the gorgeous Skaill House and a gourmet lunch in the visitor centre; cycling in bright sunshine but a 45mph gale; a cold grey early morning with close views of friendly eider ducks and then an amazing iron age “broch” or fortified village.
The past in Orkney is not ‘heritage’, it is woven into the fabric of the place. The dialect is more Norse than Scottish, and you feel the Vikings are never far away. The great stone circles and the excavated 3000 year old houses are part of a continuity of settlement enabled not by roads or airports but by the sea.

My last day was all good. Vicky was back and the conversation flowed. I rode up to a windfarm where a new luxurious RSPB hide looks over a loch with breeding red-throated divers and a hunting male hen harrier. Then I put on my one smart shirt and best pullover for a family lunch in Stromness which I managed to persuade them to let me pay for. After this we went to a big airy theatre in a school for a slapstick family concert as part of the Orkney Folk Festival. On the way back Ben drove me to another stunning RSPB hide in the moors, but no birds then.
Long straight roads with no traffic; wide open spaces chased by cloud shadow, and everywhere the sea; there is no doubt that the Orkney main island is a special place. But it’s not human activity that has made it special for me – almost the opposite: it is a place where the people have had to live with nature, rather than try to dominate it. There is a vibrant community life with a university and several theatres serving a population of 20,000. The climate is unforgiving: spring felt like winter - a month later than Wales. Summers are cool, but winters are often frost-free. The wind stops the trees from growing, cropping them off like some giant grazing animal.
Rather than every square metre of land being under pressure for food production, huge areas are left as open moorland and many of the fields are unsprayed and unfertile – wonderful for the grey lag geese you see everywhere. The land is dotted with ugly cement rendered farms and wind-turbines dominate the hill tops, but nature still has things her own way here and the bird life is astonishing: iconic species like divers, harriers and eider ducks flourish.

26/5 Sandaig

the pilgrim

A day of pilgrimage, of special places, and being the only one there. The special places I had to see on this trip were: Loch Garten and the Abernethy forest, the Flow Country of Sutherland, the Orkney main island, Loch Torridon, and this, the last of them: Sandaig, known all over the world as "Camusfearna" the house by the sea where Gavin Maxwell wrote "Ring of Bright Water". I had a hard time finding it. First off I misremembered the map and drove for miles looking for a little group of houses round a bay, not realising that I had passed it within a mile of Glenelg. Then I was looking for a path through forestry, but the forest had been felled. In the end I was glad because I got to see the village at the end of the road – Arnisdale, with deer strolling up the high street. Eventually I found the footpath marked on the map, but there was no sign and the path was very obscure. When it became a matter of hopping from one rock to another over the river I did wonder if I was in the wrong place, but it then joined up with a forestry path and a brisk walk brought me to the first view of a place which had been in my head since Natalie painted a picture of it on the kitchen wall of our little house in Pewsey - early seventies? 


How easy to be disappointed - so many things could have changed for the worse, like another magical memory of an old house by the sea in Wales - now a caravan park. Sandaig however did not disappoint. It was wonderful. Towards the end of his time there, in the 60s Maxwell over-developed the place with more buildings, power lines, roads. Now they have all gone. A few fallen telegraph poles show where the power lines used to be. The road in is now a path. The house has gone, and nature has come back: a shingle beach with ringed plovers nesting, a rough grass foreshore with at its centre a stone marking the place where the house had been and where Maxwell's ashes lie. There is an old boarded up cottage, a waterfall in the trees, and out towards the water a little string of islands placed there just to look right. It was a grey day with some drizzle but from time to time the sun came out to show just how special this place is.

I was alone, but I could see footprints, and other pilgrims had left shells and stones round the two memorials - one to Gavin and one to his famous otter Edal. On the way back I found the forest track I should have taken - a proper bridge and easy walking. So easy I met a family group from Birmingham carrying a picnic. They come every year apparently.

It still felt special though. I can't wait to re-read the books.

As usual I had made an early start so it was barely mid-day when I got back to another magical place:
Glenelg.

To kill a little time and absorb a bit more of the place I had a pint of local IPA in the Glenelg Inn where a roaring log fire was burning - in late May. Lunch in the van - packet soup and sliced brown bread - and a snooze had me ready for more low-key adventure: a trip on the little five-car ferry to Skye. This too was special - the last of the locally invented turntable ferries now community owned. It's £15 for a car but £3 for a foot passenger so I left the van in the little car park and took the bike over. There is not much to see the other side except the view of this side, but there is a permanent wildlife hide and, looking very new, a temporary hide with an RSPB pro in attendance. I stayed there for an hour chatting about birds and animals and searching for an otter or a diver or an eagle. There were three divers but so far off we could not clearly identify them. The bird man said most of the divers there are Great Northern - the one I hadn't seen yet. He also told me that the best time to see a sea eagle would be next morning around 9 as the tide comes in. As I cycled along a rough track to the permanent hide my itinerary got changed. I would have to set off for the long drive south a bit later. At the main hide I enjoyed a conversation with another bird man, this time a part-timer with a London accent who had recently moved to the area after years visiting. He was about my age and also travelled round in a camper.

I explored a bit further on the bike and then took the ferry back. "How far did ye get?" said one of the ferry men. As far as I wanted and more.

27/5 Glenelg Ferry 

What he has learnt, this restless person, is that you will never understand the natural world by walking through it. Walking you catch glimpses - a deer sticks its head up, worried, then bounds away; a bird flies towards you but changes course. Even the butterflies flap their way onwards, never resting for long when you are there. It's only when you stay in the same place for some time - half an hour, an hour or more - that you slowly become aware of the patterns of behaviour going on all around you but unseen unless you are still.

The man at the hide had told him to look for a pattern: the incoming tide brings in the fish, the gulls collect above the shoal, snatching what they can. The sea eagle sees the gulls and flies in for his due as the top predator. The next low tide is around 8 am so the eagle might appear in the following hour or more. He had intended to do an early spell of driving - from 6 to 8 - then have breakfast a hundred miles south. The chance was slim, but it was a chance, so there he was at the little ferry station at Glenelg just over the water from Skye and the rain was drifting in, soft and steady. He got the van parked in the little car park - empty until the first ferry - with the open side door overlooking the sound. He set up the telescope and got the camera ready, and began his wait, moving from side to side to scan the water with the binoculars. The rain held sway, a trio of cormorants flew past, the rain eased a little and he looked around outside. Not for long, the next drift came in and he retreated to the van. Time passed.

Ah - a large white bird is flying round above the water. It has black wingtips so probably a Gannet, but he gets a few good shots and sees the bird on the screen with wingtips raised and feathered. Surely Gannets don't fly like that? They are so sleek. Could it be a Hen Harrier? Surely not above water. It is gone and the pictures are enigmatic. But it's all about patterns of behaviour and in due course it comes back. More pictures but still no final proof of Gannet-hood. It is gone, but there is a black dot on the water. The binoculars show it to be a seal, and there is another, and another. He had seen that there were many seals here the previous afternoon, so while interesting, they are not exciting.

There is another black shape and the bins show this to be a bird with a pointy head - it's a diver, but which one? The man at the hide had said that the Great Northern were the most frequent here. Does it have a black head? Yes! White streaks on the back? Yes! That's a great moment: the first sighting of a Great Northern Diver in Britain, and in its natural breeding environment.

The white bird is back and this time it is definitely a Gannet: not rare, but a first for the camera and a charismatic bird after all. Two dark birds with long wings are flying just above the water. They look like gulls or even falcons, but there are no dark gulls and they are too big to be peregrines. Not cormorants or divers, the wing beats are too slow. They can only be immature greater black-back gulls surely? They would look dark in a bad light.

It's 8.45 and time to set off on the long drive to Lancashire. No eagle, but some good field-craft learnt and the gannet and diver justified the time and the cold hands and feet.

The trials of authorship

It's August, six months since "The Vandervelde Documents" was published, and I am now fairly sure that the only one of my objectives it will achieve is that of having a book published. I always knew it would be hard to sell a decent number of copies, and I accepted that I would have to do most of the work myself, but I did anticipate some help from the publisher. So far I haven't yet heard of a single copy sold through their agency.

I can cope with constructive criticism, but I find it very hard to deal with indifference. Although I'm hungry for approval, I do not at all like promoting myself. It feels undignified. Dignity? I don't feel like a proud person. I can very quickly go from being proud of some achievement - the garden for instance - to feeling ashamed of it. I'm not ashamed of the 'Documents' but I can see all its faults, and would much rather set it aside and move on to a new project.

A month ago I set myself the task of writing a thriller with a very complicated and difficult plot line. The idea was to start the book in the middle and then work back to that point again from the future and from the past. Writing on a reverse time line has been done, but I only know one example - Time's Arrow by Martin Amis. This revolutionary structure would, I felt, make it conspicuous. If I could get it published by a 'proper' publisher it would also stimulate sales of the 'Documents' because it would be set in the same near future world.

I had got about a quarter of the way through this project when I was swamped by feelings of inadequacy. It was not working. I could not do this thing. I changed the format, did some sample chapters, changed the format again. Now it was making me tense and my particular brand of nervous tension is a project killer. Once something, some feeling of inadequacy, becomes a trigger for it I cannot escape. It strikes suddenly and lasts a long time. Migraine sufferers may know this mechanism, but I've never had a migraine so I don't know, and I certainly don't want to find out. The crawling sensation I get in my stomach is very unpleasant but I can still function. It spoils a day or two, but it's not disabling.

It is, though, something I am afraid of, and it is this fear which constructs a feed-back loop. If a certain activity - in this case writing - sets it off then I am afraid of the process of writing. At that stage even thinking about it becomes a trigger. For a week I tried, with the aid of beta-blockers alcohol and pain killers, to work through it. Teeth clenched I wrote and organised and wrote again, but it just got worse so 2 weeks ago I stopped. I had given in to one of my demons and I was ashamed.

Now I've had a holiday from writing and have begun again. I have written up my illustrated diary which has garnered some very favourable comments from the few facebook friends who have read it. Now, though, I have to bite the bullet and decide how to share it on the web. I have 4 blogs, most of them neglected. I have a facebook page for the Documents which has been neglected since April when I found that paying for it to be promoted had no effect whatsoever except to introduce me to a number of young ladies in far away countries who for some reason wanted to 'like' my page. I could simply post the diary entries on facebook, but I couldn't then insert the pictures in context.

I have decided to revive this blog. The early morning are even more important to me now that I have focussed on travelling alone to seek out the natural word. After mid-morning I usually have to share it. Even quite early there may be a few other dedicated souls around, but this space is big enough for the like - minded to enjoy each others' company. What I can't stand is anything that begins to look like a uniform. There are too many of us old men going around nature reserves in camouflage clothing weighed down with a mass of gear - the big telescopes and tripods, the huge zoom lenses and the expensive binoculars. "Look", I want to say, "I'm not like those people." But of course I am. I have the camo jacket (by favourite jacket, bought from Tesco for £15) I even have two camo caps. Now I have the 'scope' and the tripod. I started with just two gadgets: a super-zoom compact camera and compact 25 x 8 binoculars. I saw lots of lovely creatures and landscapes and took lots of amazingly sharp pictures, but in low light and at full zoom all I could get was a blurred dirty looking picture: enough to identify but with no artistic merit. I still use both, but now have a big super-zoom 'bridge' camera, a pair of 40 x 10 binoculars and an 80mm telescope. I have several books on wildlife photography and it seems all the pros use very expensive Canon cameras and lenses. Before I even consider this I am determined to get the most out of the two cameras and the telescope, and this is partly what I will be exploring in this diary.