Category: Birds

The cranes aren’t flying

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

March 2012 631

– Lakenheath Fen, Suffolk, March 2012

We’re standing on the raised bank overlooking Lakenheath’s reedbeds. It’s a warm, clear day but cooling gusts of wind disturb the peace, ushering us away from the viewpoint. On calmer days bearded tits move across the tops of the reeds, today they’ll be down in the cover. We pass a rigid poplar plantation famed for its golden orioles which breed here in spring, what is perhaps the only nesting site in the United Kingdom. The trees grow out of swamp and some of them have collapsed, the soil clinging to the upturned roots making the poplars look like toy soldiers left supine by a child’s swooping palm. The trees have sent suckers out along the horizontal trunk meaning a new layer of woodland is growing from the body of one of the fallen, a new understory naturally occurring from a man-made habitat.

The cover of the plantation lessens the wind somewhat, a green woodpecker yaffles from the cover of the trees. Along the bank are anthills home to yellow meadow ant. I’m with David Norfolk, a friend and expert ornithologist, and he tells me these are rare. The hills could be hundreds of years old. ‘They wouldn’t exist in today’s farmland,’ he says. ‘A tractor will destroy them’. He takes a small chunk of the mound and golden-coloured ants move busily across the grey soil held in his fingertips. On the other side of the bank a blue river runs away to where the sun is going, a flock of oystercatchers pass, chattering as they fly against the flow. On the riverbank near to us pristine white feathers are strewn like discarded quills around the skeleton of a mute swan. David has seen it before: ‘That’ll be a fox kill.’

We’re alerted to a faint, hoarse bird call wafting from beyond the poplars where a swathe of reeds stand for perhaps 200m all the way around. We stand to face the reeds and the wood beyond where trees have collapsed, fieldfares pass through on migration north on their return to Scandinavia. We hear it again, the muffled, bugling call of a crane. I have longed to see or hear these birds, Russian symbols of peace in the aftermath of Hitler and Stalin’s tyranny. The poet Anna Akhmatova described hearing cranes as she lay in her sickbed, the birds fleeing the dry autumnal fields after the harvest. Our cranes are not forthcoming but David is convinced they’re here. I’m prepared to wait until dark.

A group of men in their sixties arrive and we point out the vague sound of the crane, but they look in the opposite direction, instead to the sun setting over the lake. I suggest to another man that the cranes can be heard, he complains that he needs to sit down. ‘That’s a dog barking,’ he retorts. Bearded tits are pinging in the reeds, a water rail is squealing like a pig. We follow the path back to the start. The bugling goes on, it has to be cranes. But the beardies are closer and closer and even louder now. ‘Watch for their flight between the reeds,’ David says.And here they go, the pale brown flash and long tail, something I’ve never seen before. From behind us a crane calls clearly into the lilac sky.

F16s tear up the sunset with their apocalyptic thunder, a train careers along the bank next to us, the two carriages a little pathetic-looking and exposed in this vast open space. The lights shine inside, juxtaposed against the light dying down around us. The sun is stuck behind a strip of cloud and its colour cannot be revealed, jackdaws are roosting noisily in the poplar plantation, the green woodpecker continues its laughing fit, escaping its perch in an undulating flight overhead. The water rail is squealing still, a kingfisher bolts around a swoop of reeds. Two giant birds appear from the path we’ve just taken, grey and white. It has to be! Two cranes, flying together, approaching us on the bank, moving across. They are within a stone’s throw… but the joy evaporates. They’re swans and it’s a trick of the light.

The flavour of open landfill

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– Beddington Farmlands, London, April 2012

We walk a clay-coloured path towards the landfill and stop to listen to the subsong of a whitethroat newly-arrived in the country. It sings from the obscurity of bramble and other scrub, evidently practicing before it’s ready to give its best rendition. We leave it and head for the hill. To the left is a gravel pit blocked by fencing, a hillside of green grass and garbage growing up and out of it on the bank. At times I fail to differentiate the flagging bin liners from the crows and jackdaws which gather in vast numbers, picking through the bits and pieces. On the track there’s a Nike basketball shoe and the Caucasian limb of a Barbie doll, a cassette tape of ‘90s Wimbledon and a plastic water bottle. This has been carried-over by the wind and evidently the landfill is not being contained. And then it touches my face, the sickening flavour of open landfill, like the whiff of pure alcohol. If I’d eaten I’m sure I’d be gagging, I hold my nose and breathe through my mouth.

At the surmount we can see everything – the Crystal Palace ridge, now recolonized by trees after the Great Exhibition’s twilight stay in the heights of south-east London, and Addington Hills in south Croydon, an undulating snapshot of landscape. Down below we can see the crows feeding on the recent landfill, clinging to the fence as a buffeting wind moves across, it’s too cold on the eyes to look through binoculars. The landfill slopes down towards a large pool with islands scattered throughout. It’s manmade, the aim to lure migrating birds like yellow wagtails, one of which passes overhead, and provide habitat for snipe, plovers and terns. The scene is teeming with life, herons at every corner, gulls, ducks, all living amongst one another. From the landfill perimeter garbage has escaped, a stream of multi-coloured items leading to the water where a white swan is preening its wings. I look across the water to the opposite side where a crude tin hut has been constructed by the Beddington Farmlands Bird Group, they’re gathered at the water’s edge, telescopes, cameras and binoculars to hand. Behind them is a feeding station supporting London’s only colony of tree sparrows but they can’t be picked out with the naked eye from up here. On one side of the water you have people who devote their lives to caring for wildlife, and on the other side the waste which so harms ecosystems. And somehow wildlife can live with the crap we don’t want, the plastic, the rotting food and even our stool. But the question remains: can we?

The sparrows fall to pieces

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— Eastmoor, Norfolk, March 2012

It’s evening, the light is fading to a greyish hue, the robin slips out its fragile song in the dead bay tree by the window. My cabin backs out onto a field of couch grass and sprouts which I face away from when I sit at the desk in the evening, all that goes on in the field and woodland behind me feels as if it were in the back of my mind. I know there is killing and fornicating going on out there. In the wood beyond the field a male tawny owl calls once, following up with its second, longer ‘twoo-ooh-ooh’. The ghostly call has the appeal of a siren, but this is a male marking his territory. The blackbird signals the shift to night with its ritualistic roll of ‘tchacking’ alarm calls and the day is most certainly at an end. That is by no means it for the noise. The ceiling is home to a colony of house sparrows roosting in the rafters. We are separated by slabs of insulation material which is of such texture that the slightest movement from one of the birds is clear to me.

They take hours to settle, tucked-in long before the blackbird or robin has gone to its roost, they tremble and bicker over space well into darkness. At around midnight I hear them scratching about, their feathers purring against the insulation. My host apologised to me about them: ‘they’re supposed to be endangered,’ she said, with a grimace. The house is a new-build and was immediately taken-to by house martins arriving in the spring but the house sparrows didn’t like that and have waited up there for them every year since. The family favours the martins but the sparrows outnumber them greatly. There is still the contempt for animals brought about by familiarity. This is how it has been for centuries, and in the main, is a harmless effect of living in a place where wildlife thrives.

It’s late now, the goose has gone to bed and ended its insufferable honking shriek. From the road beyond the house the deep bass of a motor comes, getting closer and closer. It’s a quad bike, the engine purring past the side of the house and into the field directly behind the cabin. I can hear the faint sound of the ducks quacking in their huts in anticipation, the sparrows are nervous, moving around above, perhaps huddling for protection. But from what? The lights of the bike are in the window, shifting, becoming longer and brighter as it approaches, the speed and resonance increasing. The sparrows fidget more and more, growing in anxiety. And then it comes: a spine crunching gunshot. I feel it in my back and shoulders, the sparrows fall to pieces in the rafters. The engine dissolves, and now is gone.

Silence.

Hit the road, muntjac

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Foulden Common, Norfolk, March 2012

I walk the road from Oxborough, scanning the verges for unusual flowers. At times I am rewarded by small blasts of sweet violet, little white flowers which have been used down the centuries for their perfume and act as indicators of ancient woodland, particularly here in eastern England. But there’s no woodland anymore, just these elliptical patches of tiny flowers showing what might once have been here. The sudden end of the farmland is marked by a Scot’s pine, its bark fissured by wire that’s now part of the tree’s anatomy. Foulden Common opens up, a field of dry grass and mole hills, a wintry wood of birch and oak. A hare scarpers.

I sit beneath an oak tree riddled with dead branches and living lichens, a reedbed and crack willow behind me. Immediately I’m alerted to a large animal amongst the reeds, its fur dark brown, it turns its head towards me and disappears. I’m looking out at the fields, divided from the common by a fence and wire. Pheasants are calling back and forth from the wood behind me, its metallic call reverberating, to the field ahead. Gunshots boom, deep and bassy with a final, rippling crack, the pheasant screaming in the wake of the artillery. Overhead, military jets run drills from a nearby airbase and I am reminded of accounts of the Iraq war by civilians, the terrifying sound which hinted at what was to come. It takes over everything: the rooks and woodpigeons fly off in the distance, the robin singing in the scrub is silenced, a red breast moving, beak opening and closing as it sings into the machine’s roar. But it doesn’t last and the occasional gunshots resume, the soothing song of a yellowhammer coming over and over underneath. The release from the barrage makes me want to sleep, like being released from a grip, the yellow bunting luring me further with its repeated phrase, and so I give in.

I wake and the boredom has lessened, the endless trudge of hedgerow and arable land is distant, the lack of people is not so peculiar now. I feel the quiet throb of lichens, the bark against my back and the sun touching my face, the black eyes of an animal which thinks I’m still sleeping, a small, dog-like mammal with a head like a wood mouse. We hold eye-contact and it dithers, moving behind the collapsed willow and into the reeds. And then it begins. A volley of harsh, bark-like shouts fired from the cover – is it going to attack? The voice is intense, hostile. It’s unnerving. ‘Alright,’ I shout. ‘Alright!’ I put my camera and map away and head back to the road, the monotony of walking returns. The muntjac has shifted me from the Common.