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Sunday, August 23, 2015

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.


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