Would rather not witness too many encounters like this over the spring. Foxes can cause havoc for ground nesting birds like lapwing and only by restoring more wet grassland for waders can we ensure that predators and prey have enough space to co-exist.
This boat house at Woodchester Mansion in Gloucestershire comes with elite tenants. Endangered Greater and Lesser horseshoe bats use the rafters as a maternity roost with at least 7 other species of bats breeding and feeding close by.
Heading out for a morning survey
The survey protocol requires everyone undertaking these surveys to do so within the same window of time, roughly 14 days for the first round and 21 for the second. With 14 sites to survey this year, including 3 large new sites in Sussex, this called for some very tight scheduling.
Thankfully the weather has played ball and the surveys have been conducted in mainly early morning sunshine.
As always the results are a mixed bag with some farms punching well above their weight and producing skies full of birds while others could do so much more to secure a future for our wildlife.
After 5 years of working with North Kent farmers I realise that you can’t win them all and persuading some people to make changes is a very long game indeed.
This is something I impress on Martin Hole, who is heading a facilitation fund for the Pevensey Levels. “You can’t win in year one,” I tell him over lunch at his farmhouse. “bide your time and it will get better.”
Having got to know the land at Pevensey over two surveys I believe this is true. The sites have a fantastic open aspect and the birds are coming to investigate. The problem is the fields do not hold water for long enough. Not something that is instantaneously solvable in the increasingly dry South East but not unachievable.
We need to turn this.
into this.
Pevensey is at the very start of a road that we have taken a few steps along in North Kent. Sometimes that road is longer that you would like but when you’ve turned a corner you know it.
This year I have been blessed with sunny mornings, fabulous wildlife sightings and the excitement of seeing new sites with bags of potential but my spring highlight came on the 1st May when I visited three farms outside of Conyer village.
For 5 years me and the farmers have worked at trying to improve the condition of the land for waders; a bit wetter here, a bit shorter there and…nothing. The birds refused to come. I had begun to think there was something fundamentally wrong with the site that I just couldn’t see.
Then, on a windswept day I was literally bought to my knees with joy as lapwings exploded from the grass and plummeted over the fields. A sky full of wader calls was something I thought I might never see at Conyer and now they are back.
A moment like that makes every 5am alarm call worthwhile.
Early morning joy was bought to my heart when I stepped out of the car at 6.30am to find this beauty perched on a fence post.
It was all go in my newly restored pond this afternoon. 12 newts chased each other round and round enjoying some hot love under the afternoon sunshine.
These little lemon wheat field dancers are always a pleasure to see.
Good Morning to the Bird Surveyors
Us crack of dawners
Stumbling from under the duvet with the alarm
Trying not to wake the wife, the lover, the kids, the neighbours.
Bumble headed along country lanes
Flasks of coffee and second breakfast tucked away.
Ours is a society of the solitary
Lone wanderers across the fields.
United by a jumble of survey forms and binocular straps.
Ours is the world of the dawn
Sunrise and curlew calls
Night time predators startled by our arrival.
Ours is the world of the spring
Speeding along so fast we struggle to keep up.
A headlong rush of pairing and production.
Ours is a morning of bird song
Tricky bird song,
Yellow wags and lesser whitethroat. Corn buntings jangling on gate posts.
Ours is a love, more than a love, a vocation.
That drives us from the warmth of slumber
To walk the soggy fields in the early hours while others zoom on motorways to spend the day locked in high rise boxes.
Ours is a mission.
To record it while we can
To witness is while it’s there
To mourn those who won’t arrive this year.
Ours is the morning, Ours is the Sunlight, Ours is the dawning
Good morning to the Bird Surveyors
Spring is waiting for you.
