I want more light!

My Scotland project is stalled, but I've been keeping a close eye on the weather forecast and the tide times. I'm not just looking at high tides, but at a series of spring (ultra-high) tides which have a big effect on one of the bird reserves I visit when I can. 

I'm talking about Steart Marshes, and an enormous project by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust. They have bought up most of the Steart peninsula which lies to the south-west of Bridgwater in Somerset. Here's a link: https://www.wwt.org.uk/wetland-centres/steart-marshes/

It's a massive project which I have seen occasionally in the last 2 years, and each time the flocks are bigger and more interesting, the vegetation more varied.   This last week-end I wanted to see what happens when, only at the highest tides, the whole reserve will be inundated. In theory that should push the birds closer to the hides. Carefully balancing the times when the tide would be at its highest with the weather and the absence of other fixed commitments, I chose this weekend at the end of November and the beginning of December.

 First though, I went to the RSPB reserve in the north Somerset levels: Ham Wall and Shapwick Heath, part of another huge project to maximise the potential of old peat diggings for wildlife.  I spent a happy hour waiting for the perfect shot of this fella with a fish in it's beak. Finally I got it, but the light was low and the quality too poor for a sharp image.

Sunday

Light was slow to come to the levels this morning. This is part of a huge area of old peat diggings now turned to marshland with Glastonbury Tor, grey in the dim light, looming above it. I arrived at the car park before dawn and made breakfast - my usual meusli, fruit (grapes today) yoghurt and hot milk, with a cup of industrial strength coffee from my aeropress device. Yesterday I did without my little Vortex Razor 50mm telescope and regretted it. Today I packed it plus tripod (which takes up much more space) into the small rucksack. Carrying camera and binoculars on a harness, I  set out. Five minutes later I was at the first viewing platform and a few of the typical birding fraternity were there, gear assembled, each in their own space, not talking, just waiting.

"Is it here?"

"Yes, but you'll get a better view at the next viewing platform - straight down the path." They're usually nice when you get past the carapace.

Light was low, but it was such a pleasure to be in this environment - all around are endless acres of reed beds and water with this long straight track running through the middle of them. The gravel path is  bordered by tall bushes just fading from a mix of yellow, pale green and brown, to just brown. All around, the colours are slowly becoming de-saturated, the landscape ageing gracefully into winter. No wind, no sounds but the first cries of the morning birds. It's a long and welcome walk, my feet crunching on this track  and the feathery tops of the reeds gently glowing in the pale light, until I see another group of bird people in their good outdoor clothes and their binoculars, telescopes and cameras. They are all gazing intently at the marshes to the right, and then I see it: a black mass, like a disease, like a million flies on a corpse, a moving, trembling stain on the reed beds: a thousand starlings muttering and twitching, waiting for the moment.

I've timed it well. Within a minute of my arrival the mass dissolves, and disperses into a sea of moving black dots which swirl upwards, across, around, spread out, contract and suddenly are gone. Then another black cloud appears and they all swarm over us, silently, determinedly, the hive mind in perfect control. This moving living being knows exactly where it's going once it has gathered itself together. It's impossible to photograph in this light but I try anyway. Click click click.

Within minutes, they've gone, and we all look around, grinning at each other in our joy at this encounter. We think it's all over, but no, another huge swarm from the opposite direction, bulging, swirling, breathing in and out, comes straight towards us and passes overhead intent on a different destination. Last year at this time I was thrilled by the sight and sound of thousands of  Pink Footed Geese in Norfolk. I've seen two of the greatest displays of mass movement in the living world.

Light of heart I set off back down the track, full of the hope of catching a bittern or a great white egret or a marsh harrier or even a little Cettis warbler. I stay in my favourite hide for an hour and, just as I had missed the bittern yesterday, I missed an ibis and a great egret today. There are Marsh Harriers, Mute swans and more Great Egrets, but it's not working for me. I take lots of pictures but it's still cloudy, it's December, the light is poor, and the big beasts stay tantalisingly  out of range. Hardly a single picture is worth keeping, and the telescope was a waste of space.

The highs and the lows of bird photography.

At mid-morning I set off for Steart and arrive in good time. I'm the first person at the first of the hides and there's a kestrel perched on top of it. He's in no hurry, but languidly flies off well before I can get the camera into action. With up to 2 miles between some of the hides and good solid paths, I take the (Brompton) bike this time with telescope and all, so lots of kit to sort out before I get into place. The hides here are glazed and leave the watchers rather exposed. As soon as I get to a window, the most interesting birds - a group of Godwits - takes wing, and they are followed less hastily by most of the other birds. The ones left behind are those you see at every wetland: the redshanks, gulls, crows,  and the heron. There's always a heron.

The morning passes pleasantly though. There's a big flock of Golden Plover doing nothing on a mud bank. I try to count them but get distracted when I get to the first hundred: the guess is 400. If that lot takes to the air it will be worth seeing, so I wait.

An hour later they have taken to the air twice and it was indeed worth seeing, though again the pictures are disappointing.  I've watched a crow swooping up to drop shellfish in the hope of cracking them open. Only corvids are clever enough to do this. I've also watched a gull and a greenshank interacting. Is it hostile or friendly? Are they competing for food resources or just teasing each other?

 

Tomorrow morning the highest tide of the month is at 6am; black night, but they will still be there, I hope, when it gets light, and so will I.

evening

I'm writing this on a patch of concrete in front of the garages belonging to a big campsite. It's a place I've stayed in before, but this time there is no sign of the management. I try to ring but there's no signal, so I put up the shutters and settle down for the evening, roosting in my little metal bower. 

Rain Stops Work

What do you do when the work you are doing demands dry weather and it's November in Wales? The short answer would be "nothing." However, there have been a few steps forward in my project to build a verandah for Jean Slater with help from builder friend Neville Hughes. My hope is that this work will pay enough to fund my trip to Scotland in May.

I have made a start. On two half days I managed to screw 2x2 battens onto the very uneven walls of the bakehouse. On top of the battens will be a waterproof, breathable membrane. Behind the membrane will be sheep's wool insulation and on top of the membrane will be hardwood cladding. Jean would have liked me to press on with the cladding, but until I know what the ground level is going to look like I can't decide how to finish the bottom row of cladding, and I have to start at the bottom and work up. In addition I have to keep the wool dry, so I can't really do the cladding until I have a roof in place.

We had a site meeting a week ago with Neville, Geoff the excavation expert and his side-kick Richard. It was a long process of looking at all the ways ground could be shifted to make this project work. The verandah is going along the SW side of an old building called "The bakehouse" this was where the bread for the farm would have been baked and it also has a second storey which became "The Schoolhouse" where children from the local farms came for Sunday School. The whole farmyard is on a level near the bottom of a bowl shaped valley. From the front of the house, which faces SE there is a steep drop down to the infant Marlais stream, and from the side an equally steep drop down to a tributary stream on the SW. In theory this should mean that the site is well drained, but as things stand at present, the bakehouse, and hence the verandah is cut into the slope so the ground rises before the water can get away. In this picture from left to right are: Richard, Neville, Jean and Geoff.

To sum up, these are the problems Geoff is facing:

• Exposing the foundations (or lack of) so that the walls can be protected from damp.
• Finding and protecting electricity cables and an oil pipe.
• Digging drains to take the roof and surface run-off water away.
• Working round the young but well formed poplar tree. (on the left in the top picture.)

We reached a consensus that Jean would pay for Geoff to do a day's exploratory work before he can decide on an estimate for the whole job.

Neville is liaising with him and will let me know when they hope to start. That was a week ago and the forecast today shows rain every day until next week-end.

So, a challenging photography assignment - this was the target I set myself back in September when I wrote the piece below. The website software (Wordpress) is doing its best to prevent me from creating the look I want, so lots more frustration in prospect there. The verandah job however starts today.

It's not going to be an easy one. Jean is a close friend and a sometimes delightfully, sometimes frustratingly eccentric one. I also have to co-ordinate our builder friend Neville and a digger driver to get the ground work done, so the job has a much higher than average potential for "mission creep".  This was the site this morning:

My first task is to screw 2x2 battens to the wall, fill the gaps with wool insulation (Jean is very keen on natural materials) then a waterproof breathable membrane and then clad with hardwood planks that Jean and her (sadly now dead) husband John had milled and stored in their barn. The timber is well air-dried now, but all different sizes.

Please feel free to comment!

13 September 2017

The days are drifting by.  No sooner have I brushed my teeth in the morning than I'm doing it again in the evening.

At the point where I got back from Iceland the project that had driven me for the last 6 months ended abruptly. For all that time I had been intensely focussed on the trip and all that went with it. Suddenly my focus was blurred, and darkened by a sense of failure - that I had not achieved as much as I had hoped. I was more than ever determined to become a better wildlife photographer, but July is the off season for warm blooded creatures - they've mostly done their breeding for the year and can take a bit of time off. The only immediate goal I had was to get the van running properly. What would happen after that was a confused jumble of intentions - writing? More van conversion? Gardening?

Through July and August with the summer slipping away, I felt that simply knowing the final total would be a relief. In a way it was though worry about the cost gave way to a feeling of shame that I had disregarded all the signs that the van had been hammered by the previous owner. It was dirty, the door seals were frayed, everything worn and battered, but by then I was up against the clock. If I was to do the conversion in time I needed a van!

I was angry too - that the garage we had been with for 18 years had led us into a dreadful spiral of cost and delay. Angry, ashamed and too often tense, what I needed was a sense of purpose.

Now, I think I have found it. My Iceland trip had shown that I could write a successful blog: I still hate the word - an ugly portfolio of web and log - but it is a term almost everyone knows and understands, so it will have to stay. I also discovered that the commitment to updating a blog is a powerful incentive to completing a project. From being a vague "thing I would like to do" it becomes a fixed goal with failure not an option. There are lots of things I would like to achieve in the few years of physical fitness which remain, but "becoming a better wildlife photographer" is much too vague. How would I measure this? What would tell the small world of those who read what I write, that I had proved to my harshest critic - myself - that I had succeeded? A quick scan of proposals for inclusion in my bucket list, and the answer is obvious: Which of the great charismatic creatures would be the most rewarding to catch in mega bites, which the most prized target to "shoot"? No contest; it has to be an eagle. Which of the two eagles in Britain, Golden or White-tailed? Both of course.

Even for the BBC with all its resources this is a tough one. Eagles have huge territories and where nests are known to the conservation organisations they are kept secret. I would either have to locate a nesting territory unknown to the conservationists, or  prove my so far non-existent credentials by volunteering, or pay someone local to help me.

All these cost money, and my base income - what comes in each month without earning - would not cover it. I would have to find ways of raising money, but that too could be an ingredient for the blog

.

There would also be some hefty physical challenges. You don't see Eagles by the roadside, and now that the last remaining Hawswater eagle has died that means I would need to spend time in Scotland and be ready to carry a heavy pack over many miles of rough ground. Scotland in May can be cold and that means a constant struggle to keep my hands warm. All this would be grist to the bloggers mill.

My one regret about my Iceland blog was that I didn't have a card with a web address to hand out to people I met on route. I can easily design a card, but it should be linked, not just to the blog, but to a website from which I could sell things to raise money. Isn't it getting nicely complicated? Let's get some order into it: a to-do list:

Get some help with a website. I plan to offer prints and greetings cards from my pictures, but I've not made much progress yet with setting up a new website to do this. I really need to rope in Chris Robertson. Would he be OK about featuring in a blog?

Earn some money from woodwork: this means making real progress soon on Jean Slater's verandah/conservatory. Will she be OK about being in a blog?

Start researching the trip. I will need to read books as well as search the web. More money needed, which leads to the next item:

Set up a budget. I can start with the one I did for my last trip to Scotland.