He's back again

Just a short post mainly to see if me new found iPhone gadget is any good. I have never stopped writing I just could fit things in round everything else so let's hope the all singing and dancing iPhone helps.

I had a late and short trip to the Farnes isles on Saturday, a reflection of our rubbish summer, this was supposed to have happened in early July. But still a good opportunity to improve my camera panning technique.

It was a nice day too with lush weather but sadly not many birds or anything else except a feww seals but those that were there we pretty cool. I had two very late swifts and some good shots of over head gannets, when I can work this iCloud mularky I'll put some up.

Highlight for me though was back on dry land and the obliging starlings of Seahouses, who even posed for me iPhone, some better ones will follow on here and my web site so keep dropping in.

So short but sweet but nice to be back with me new gadget:-)

Dragons and Damsels

Male merlin perched on a mossy lump

I had a week off earlier this month much of which I dodged the rain showers but to little avail and I had to settle for the odd often unexpected sunspot and a bonus of a merlin clutching a meadow pipit desperately trying to get airborne, only to be robbed by a massive raven. Poor beast I thought as the diminutive falcon slunk off deprived of lunch only to turn sharply and snatch a late summer time beauty from mid air, a large dragon fly.

Late July can often be a dull time for nature as most birds have fledged and they are hidden either in the leafy canopy or have moved from breeding grounds to other areas. As we have had a warmer than normal year so far with some wonderful spring sunshine, it could possibly be the bumper year we need after two particularly hard winters. One thing that is certain is that smaller creatures, the beetles, bees, bugs and other insects are certainly making hay whilst the weather is good.

To many chemicals

To many people bugs are pests but in reality out of the millions of species world wide only a tiny handful are actually true pests, most that we complain about are merely irritants, as they buzz about our heads and make a bee line for the jam (sorry). This doesn’t however stop us from reaching for the swat or more harmfully the chemicals to control them.

I got a call recently asking whether there were more bugs around than normal at this time of the year and I had to say that in reality there probably wasn’t as there is always a flush of abundance in summer. But the other harsh reality is that overall there definitely isn’t as many species or numbers of bugs around as there were in the past.

Lady bugs by the thousand

Why should that be important and why should we care, after all insects are pests?

Well for one, many of the birds species we all know and love and which we all moan about as their numbers are declining are doing so because of either secondary pesticide poisoning or the lack of insect food available, especially at breeding time. Lets face it everytime we see a bug we don’t want we reach for the spray, transfer that to an agricultural scale and you get mass extinctions on the scale of the dinosaurs, but because many are tiny little inconspicuous creatures that we rarely see, we don’t notice or care? This is a fact, three of the 25 British species of bumblebees are already extinct and half of the remainder have shown serious declines, often up to 70%, since around the 1970s. In addition, around 75% of all butterfly species in the UK have been shown to be in decline.

Now we all think this is a thing of the past and indeed we don’t use nearly as much chemicals as we used to; but the damage has been done and some cases unrepairable. Insects of all sorts play a massive role in our lives and indeed our survival yet we disregard them so easily.

Recent research has shown just how important many insects are to us least of which are those that are declining so much, bees and not just honey bees but all wild bees. Wild bees, ‘bumble bees’ are the unsung heroes of our food security and not as we once thought honey bees, it is these species we need to focus equally our conservation efforts, as insect pollinated crops are likely to become increasingly more important to UK agriculture in the immediate future.

Juvenile salmon parr

There is a long way to go as I saw when I was back in the Lake District for a few days recently. Reminiscing I stood on many of the same bridges I did as a kid around Uleswater looking down at the mysterious speckled inhabitants darting around the gin clear waters. Well, the streams still run gin clear but the speckled inhabitants are all but gone, no longer holding station sipping in a passing mayfly or dashing to snatch a falling grub. Taken not by the often quoted ‘too many predators syndrome’ but by insidious chemical poisons whose effects go on long gone after their initial use.

"It takes a long time to repopulate a stream from the tiniest inhabitant to the mightiest fish"

Notes from Sunny Portugal

Oooo the heat, the sun, the ladies!! Why cant this be sunny Sunderland. alass I was only here for a few days, but what a few days.

Soaring white stork

I stepped forth from the airport foyer to be greeted by over a dozen wheeling white storks directly overhead, what a sight; I was definitely in Portugal. The sun was shinning and on the way to the hotel, amidst the bouts of childish ‘lads’ humour I spotted numerous Mediterranean delights, hoopoes, a roller and several azure winged magpies and a host of small birds.

In the evening and quiet periods even in grog I noticed some lost UK prizes, things that were once just as common in the UK. Towards the end of the day, the sky above the town was filled with the screams of thousands of swifts and trills of martins and swallows. Walking the streets, the archways and eaves of new and old buildings alike had scores of nests beneath and nobody was batting and eyelid, nobody was knocing them down or denying them nesting opportunity.

Everywhere were ‘spuggies’ your common or garden house sparrow’, and the song of crickets and cicada’s, the real song of the ‘Med’, a wonderful evening chorus of bird and insect life.

Thinking back I remember, my granny used to have hearth crickets in her terraced cottage’s open hearth that would sing gently through the evenings whilst she poured scalding water over me in the tin bath in front of the fire.

What else did we used to have around our homes?

They were all here, in abundance too. Some slightly less welcome than others of course, like the many cockroaches cleaning the streets at night of abandoned junk food, but nevertheless now still largely absent from our sterile living environs. We never hear hearth crickets anymore and the sound of screaming swifts and chirping spuggies is no longer as apparent as it once was.

Peering over garden walls into secluded corners often brought a glimpse of a scurrying reptile, maybe a wall lizard or even, once I saw a large snake, probably a Montpellier. None of which would be allowed within a hundred miles of our safe urban homes but here all are tolerated as natural pest controllers. We were all in trigued and even through the beer goggles saw entertainment around the pool one day as a spuggie caught a very large cockroach and proceeded to bash the hell out of it before dismantling it and carting the bits off, “and you thought sparrows were seed eaters”. Well this one showed one of the reasons why they are declining so much ,they need protein, insects, bugs to feed their young. Little wonder our fields and gardens are so impoverished, as everytime we see an insect we reach for the poison spray

Stork nesting on street lights Faro, Portugal

Down on the golf courses and new apartments where you might expect northing they were going to extraordinary lengths to accommodate nesting white storks, other wildlife and a host of amphibians of all shapes and sizes. This view ,from someone who has worked in conservation for many years and dealt with developers ‘nightmares’ in the UK over and over
again was very refreshing but even more ironic given Portugal’s present economic plight.

Despite this, the key words that were obvious were, ‘tolerance’ and ‘acceptance’.

In the foyer of the hotel I picked up a local magazine where an article on the Iberian lynx stood out. Almost certainly extinct in Portugal it is now subject to a captive breeding initiative for future re-establishment, again against the country’s economic background they are determined to make this project succeed.

You just want to live in a country that has these in, well I do anyway, stunning!

The main factor for the decline in the Iberian lynx has been the disappearance of its main prey item, the humble rabbit, a result of human introduced diseases. The knock on consequence of no lynx has been an increase in smaller predators which in turn has seen impacts on prey species so the whole system is now out of balance because one link in the chain is missing.

The crux of this Iberian waffle is that predators are essential, especially top predators as it is these that create balance in the system. The UK is blessed with so few creatures that fulfil this roll, all have given way to ‘UK man’s’ intolerance.

Just to demonstrate this point as I alighted back in sunny (not) Newcastle my phone informed me of an incident in Northumberland; where hot on the heels of last weeks report, an otter had actually been killed by dogs ‘accidentally’. As I drove from this airport, depressed by weather and news, the fields were not lifting with small brown birds or multi coloured ones for that matter they were sterile agricultural spaces inhabited by nothing but pigeons and pheasants.

Somewhere out there we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and our priorities and give our heads a shake.

Fishermans tale’s

A mate of mine called the other day to say at long last after years of patiently fishing on many riverbanks and beaches, catching absolutely nothing but hypothermia he had just seen his first wild otter. The inevitable fisherman’s tales followed, “it was this lang”, he said (with arms spread wider than the room) “and that was just the hook I used to catch it”. To be fair he is a good angler and not as prone to exaggeration as many are and having been one for over thirty years I know quite a few.

He reckoned it stole his flatfish off his hook of which he was ecstatic about, the whole experience had been a wonderful once in a life time chance encounter where the otter showed exactly who was the better fisherman. I have fished for many years in wide circles and know many anglers whose feelings toward the king of the flood are just as reverential but my mate also pointed out a recent TV and press article that he was very concerned with, a very well know TV angling personality was calling for a cull of otters.

My mate rightly asked me questions about an otters life, me being ‘otterly mad’ (sorry!) and he went away happy, as most do with his ‘otter encounter’, but I could not stop thinking about the article. Watching it and reading the so called evidence really got me going and for someone so well known to publically state such things was beyond me.

The alleged angling presenter

So for the record Mr Wilson, I can put an equal amount of experience with otters as I have with angling, together that’s somewhere near a combined total of eighty years (god I makes me sound old), so I might make a little sense.


Otters eat fish! Mostly anyway, supplemented by rodents, rabbits, birds, frogs, anything really they can catch. Most of the otters in Britain originated from wild stock, dispersing naturally through careful habitat management and enhancement, plus huge improvements in water quality which incidently also improved fish stocks. Just over one hundred otters were ‘reintroduced’ into south eastern England up until 1999, No otters have been ‘reintroduced in the northeast of England, ever! The otters here in the northeast got there by themselves because of four legs, good habitat, water quality and fish numbers. Of this we should be justly proud and I am too for having my small part to play in this success.

Now much of this storey centres on southern England and commercial fisheries where, yes I can see there being an issue, but even here the mistruths are rife. If I opened a shop in Sunderland with no front door on I would expect there to be no goods there the following day, similarly if you dig a hole fill it full of fish and do nothing to protect them is asking for trouble, the same thing is often true for garden ponds you can protect them to from herons etc. yet when an otter turns up it is someone else’s fault.

I have fished the region’s rivers and mant more across the country for nearly 40 years and in that time my experiences and enrichment like the quality of the fishing has increased along with the presence of otter. It is no coincidence that what is good for us and fishing is good for otters too. I want to share my life and river with a creature as beautiful as an otter, I’m not sure about the latter with me mind.

A barbaric practice well lost in the mists of time

It was quite ironic that I also received a timely reminder of days gone by this week when someone sent me some photos of otter hunting in Northumberland at the turn of the last century. They are wonderful images of a bygone era and a pursuit that has long since pasted into the realms of history, which is where it should rightly stay.

There is no place in our modern society for a cull of any of our native creatures despite the length of some fisherman’s tales.

For Peat’s Sake

“What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”

 

So wrote the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins but how apt are these words are for describing a whole host of issues surrounding many conservation tasks that we all face. ‘All’, yes ‘all’, we all face conservation based issues everyday whether we choose to believe in them or are just not aware of them, we all face them.

Climate changes are occurring, to what degree they are occurring is the only real argument we should be having and as such we have a real battle on our hands to try and curb the many issues inbound amongst all of the arguments. One such issue is our treatment of peat or more precisely peatlands, no I’m not going to bang on about garden peat substitutes people really shouldn't need reminding about it, I mean the wider benefits of this marvellous substance. I still chuckle when i think back when i was kid and David Bellamy delving into 'miullions and miullions of years', but he was so true, you can see feel and smell the past locked into peat.

A misty peat bog

Carbon footprints, sequestration, bargaining, carbon trade offs all strange terminology we are all going to have to come to terms with. Whether Hopkins realised he held the key in his prophetic words above is very dubious as it was his generation that were largely responsible for the present day condition of our last remaining ‘carbon sinks’, our wetlands or more precisely our peatlands. They drained them in the hope of creating further land to farm or live on, not realising their true value or folly years on.

As a result of these actions our drained and damaged peatland in the UK now emits approximately 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year from these habitats alone, a significant contribution to our greenhouse gas omissions. Yet the UK is still very rich in peatland habitats having about 15% of the worlds upland blanket bog still intact. Covering an estimated 3 million hectares (12% of the UK land area), deep peat stocks provides a store of at least 3000 million tonnes of carbon, which is twenty times as much carbon stored in the whole of the UK’s forest biomass. Alas despite this large figure much of it is in poor condition and as such it is loosing carbon all of the time and that affects us all.




A cross section of peat 'miullions and miullions of years'

 You don't understand? The simple version of events is that dry peat soils oxidise and release their goodness, as such it releases trapped carbon to the atmosphere wet peat doesn't, it locks carbon in, storing it within the damp soils.

The lowland peat resource, for example the Fens of the east of the country is in even worse condition, much of it turned over to food production at great expense to the consumer as they are now subject to such high maintenance costs through irrigation, fertilisers and herbicides etc. to keep production on these areas so high, they are now no longer sustainable.

One location I am involved with locally is Prestwick Carr, it is an archetypal example of what not to do with a peatland, a microcosm of the entire peatland history on one site. Drained in the 1860’s for agriculture it is now a low lying area of very poor land to the north of Newcastle. Little populated, it is an area of poor quality horsey paddocks, rough pasture and prone to flashing's, standing water, as result of its continued drainage. Amongst this devastated land is one of the rarest habitats in the world, a lowland raised mire and yet we planted trees on it and continue to drain the peatland that surrounds it so devaluing its value not just as a wildlife resource but as a carbon sink. It is losing up to 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide per ha per year because of the drying peat soils.



Frozen standing water perched on a crust of impermeable hard drained peat.

 There is sufficient evidence available now to show that it is possible to halt these losses through habitat restoration and that this will have greenhouse gas benefits. On a local scale there is also evidence that it will reduce the flashy nature of the flood episodes on the area as the ground will absorb precipitation more easily when rewetted. This also will have benefits on water quality issues, water colour and flooding elsewhere.

Peatland restoration is also a cost effective means of addressing climate change, compared with other carbon abatement methods such as afforestation and renewable energy. Restoring peatlands can be considered a natural form of carbon capture and storage, preventing release of carbon from damaged bogs and preserving it for potentially millions of years.

His words ring eerily and simply true of what we need to do to achieve some carbon banking, O let them be left, wildness and wet!

Hide the Birdie

There are many changes a foot at the minute amongst our wildlife, it is the season for change or at least the start of it. It can be a time of great excitement or even heartbreak as all the effort comes to nothing, one thing however that is certain it’s never dull.



The 'Look'

The dreaded mother in law asked the other week, “there are no birds in me garden and I’ve seen that blasted hawk about again”. Quick as a flash I said, “well he mustn’t have eaten them all because he’s still hanging around”, there was no reply just, the ‘look’.

There is of course a much simpler motive behind the perceived lack of activity in grannies garden and the bird world in general than an overly voracious sparrowhawk. Even with the abundance of recently fledged youngsters about at this present time, blackbirds, blue tits, all the birds common to our back gardens, all looking like untidy school ruffians at this time of the year they all but disappear.



A slightly damp baby blackbird in the garden this summer

 But why do they all suddenly vanish for a few days at this time of the year, 'simples' they are moulting, that is they are all at the tailors getting a new suit. When the time is nigh they loose their flight feathers, the ones on the wings, they skulk about in thick cover avoiding detection as they cant fly away until the new feathers come through, until this occurs they stay well hidden from preying eyes.

This week however, all seems well my garden, a mass of multi-coloured blackbirds in half and half uniforms, hordes of marauding tits pillaging all the insects they can find amongst the last of the flowering heads and vegetables. They add colour and noise to an often drab and somber late summer garden.


Late broods of swallows

Elsewhere it is a time of exodus with the first summer migrants like the swift have already gone, the warblers too, are mostly winding their way south and last to leave will be the swallows and martins who hang on until late September and sometimes early October before departing.

All in all considering all the hardship bird species in general face I think they have had a pretty good breeding year, with lots of young visible in and around most locations. I can’t remember so many blackbirds and tits around the garden for many years which is great for future numbers. This week on my travels I saw several late broods of house martin and swallows still in the nest other species too like blackcap, whitethroat, sedge warbler and chiff chaff all seem to have done well this year too, I saw several family groups around the hedgerows in the past week.


Sedge warbler letting rip from a hawthorn

They will need these extra numbers too as harsh times lie ahead on migration, not least of which will be running the gauntlet of the Sahara desert and the even more more problematic hardships on many Mediterranean islands and some countries to such as Spain, France and Italy. Here ‘hunters’ lie in wait with gun net and glue to ensnare millions of birds, not just songbirds but every species that migrates. We spend millions on wildlife protection and habitat enhancement across northern Europe only for the benefits of this to be taken away in seconds as the birds migrate over Cyprus, Malta and Italy et al.

I took my own personal stand this year and cancelled my holiday to Cyprus, I have never been to Cyprus I really fancied going too as I like the Med. But after consideration that up to 1.4 million songbirds are killed for an illegal food delicacy each year; I said no and cancelled and let them know my reasons why.



Utterly deplorable situation in Cyprus and other Mediterranean countries


Not sure what good my individual stance may have but at least I have made it! I find it both tragic and appalling that we allow this wanton slaughter to continue in the EU when in certain circumstances such as Cyprus it is so blatent. I despair at times when such stories come to light what hope do we have. I often have a moan about our own UK fallibility's but even the blatent destruction of hen harriers and other predators on grouse moors pales into insignificance against this mass slaughter year in and year out.

So that's me off to Bognor Regis then, 'bon voyage', well Turkey actually but that's another store.

Another otter’s tale

The baby faced assissin

I cannot hide my passion for otters I have had it since I was a small boy, I don’t understand it, it is just one of those strange traits of life. I don’t however view them as a cute cuddly creature despite their almost fixed grin, much beloved by the media and I have often been at pains to point this out, much to their disappointment, the real otter, one day i might write a book on them.

That cute be-whiskered face hides a fierce and fiery temperament and an astonishing array of teeth set within very very powerful jaws. On top of this is the mustelid mindset of determination and that wiliness never to give in coupled with a brain powering logic to solve problems that most other creatures apart from the primates would find impossible to even ponder.

Eating a prime fat greyling will have some anglers squirming but this is nature at its finest

It is easy to see why so many people are captivated by them I never tire of watching them their graceful fluid movement in the water and their almost comic lollop on dry land, but as I say they are predators and top predators at that. They have too eat to survive it is in their nature to kill and to do so very effectively and efficiently.

The crocodile in our midst

Otters are specialist aquatic hunters they have adaption’s to do so, they are shaped to cut through water effortlessly, their nostrils and ears close under water and they have webbed feet, all of these and their thick double insulating coat make them very effective hunters in their chosen element.

They are however just glorified aquatic weasels and as such will hunt anything that lives or breathes if it is within their grasp, they have too or else they will die. So an otter’s diet is actually very catholic. If you have looked through as many otter spraints (droppings to the uninitiated) as I have over the years then you get a very real picture of just exactly what they will eat given the stakes.

I have found water shrews, rats, kittens, mink, rabbits, mice, water voles, bats and even dragonflies and of course countless bird species from starlings to swans, herons to cormorants, all and many more have found their way through an otter digestive tract at some point.

Two very nervous mallards look on ready for instant flight

So it was little surprise to me that I received a call recently for help from a local wildfowl collection, an otter was paying far to much attention to some rare duck species. I say it wasn’t a surprise, it was a surprise that it had taken so long to realise that otters have this trait and that they were right on their doorstep to do so.

Anyway visiting the site just emphasised just how incredibly ingenious they are at exploiting any chink in anything’s armour, including electric fences. This brazen little chap was entering via the tiniest of faults in the perimeter fence, that the owners had overlooked thinking it to small for an otter or anything to get through. Several rare ducks later and some camera trap footage and they changed their minds.

The camera traps also revealed that this ‘brazen chap’ was actually a ‘chapess’ with two little chaplets in tow. Otters utilise situations of abundance to teach their youngsters all the skills needed to hunt and survive in what is a very harsh environment. This mother was definitely exploiting an abundant resource. The footage revealed how she slipped gently into the pools and took ducks selectively from beneath the surface choosing the smaller or clumsier species in preference to those that could apply a rapid vertical take off manoeuvre.

Like a U-boat carefully selecting targets from the fleet she returned with each prize to her charges who watched diligently from the banks. She also brought them some hors d'oeuvres in the shape of frogs and toads showing them how to deal with both in separate ways, rejecting the skin of the toad and spawn of both.

MMMmmm frogs legs

Unfortunately the entry had to be sealed for the sake of the rare duck who were indeed even rarer now, her midnight feasts were ended prematurely; but at least the cubs will have learned first hand how to take a duck or skin a toad for when they start their own escapades down on a river near you.

They truly are the king of all creatures for me, the ‘king of the flood’, 'the goose footed hunter'.