Can you ever have too many Avocet pictures?

Avocets, Frampton Marsh

I enjoyed taking this image, the marsh was full of Avocets and I was having fun trying to get pictures of them in flight. I started to try and make sense of the activity around me by focusing on single birds, but as I became more attuned to the action going on around me, I noticed that often pairs of birds would take flight together or that two or three birds would converge in the air as they chased each other away from their patch of ground.

There is something very elegant about Avocets. Their plumage the crisp lines between the black and white feathers, the long blue grey legs on which they daintily wade through muddy shallows, and that distinctive long black scimitar bill for sifting small shrimps out of the marsh.

Avocets have a suitably tragic and well known back story as a species, a history inextricably linked in with that of the RSPB who have adopted the species as their emblem in acknowledgement of the hope that their work on these birds in helping them to recover from extinction as a breeding bird in the UK. Work that gives hope to their work on other threatened birds.

By dint of where they live and also perhaps where they don't, Avocets will be associated in many birders minds with great days out in amazing places on the coast: Minsmere, Titchwell, Frampton a roll call of our best nature reserves, where today you are almost guaranteed to see these special birds. Hope made real in flesh and feathers, a Lazarus bird brought back from UK extinction and whose spread has been facilitated by the creation of new nature reserves with suitable habitat for Avocets and a range of other wetland birds.

In response to some frustrating behaviour by some photographers, I once heard an exasperated warden exclaim something along the lines of "Aren't there enough pictures of Kingfishers in the world!" Indeed sometimes when leafing through portfolios of award winning images of UK wildlife I have felt the same. But I think on reflection that misses at least part of the point. Taking pictures of Kingfishers, Avocets and a whole range of other species gives people pleasure, it gives them a sense of connection and it can give friends and family pleasure too. All of which I hope leads to a sense that these species and the places that they live are worth looking after.

Taking this picture gave me pleasure, I have taken pleasure from the reaction of others to it over on my Instagram page and I have taken pleasure from the fact that there is more to it than may be apparent on first viewing.

Looking at it I feel that the image has a balletic feel to it, the upper bird appears to be releasing the lower bird to let it swoop elegantly away, as if they were performing some avian version of Swan Lake.  And yet that isn't what was happening, this 1600th of a second moment frozen in time is not of two birds in a loving aerial dance, but of a dog fight above a east coast marsh on a mid-summer morning. The Avocets here were in a constant state of agitation, as soon as I opened my car door I was hit by a soundscape full of their kloot, kloot calls as pairs of Avocets chased away their neighbours and any other birds who had the temerity to enter their air space.

In essence they were behaving less like ballerina's and more like badly behaved super models. In doing so they were living up to their reputation as notoriously anti social birds. Thinking back I can vividly remember watching an Avocet colony on a Dutch marsh where one adult bird grabbed a neighbours chick in its delicate bill and throttled it under the water until the young birds parents flew in screaming to rescue it. In Norfolk I have watched pairs of Avocets rising to the sky to harry and chase away birds many times their size including potential predators like Grey Herons.

I witnessed these behaviours and had the chance to grab on film fractions of seconds for posterity, because sitting overlooking a marsh watching the birds, anticipating their behaviour and thinking about technically how I can grab a shot worth sharing, all that gives me pleasure. It also means for me at least that I am even more inclined to want to protect and share the places where these elegant if slightly anti-social birds thrive.

Hope, Cranes and the Lockdown

Context is hugely influential in how we experience and think about nature and 30 odd years ago for me as a young birder that meant a frame of reference formed by the London parks where I had done most of birdwatching. On this occasion though I wasn’t in London, but with a friend who lived close to the Norfolk Broads. We were standing at the end of bitterly cold and snowy winters day on the edge of the marshes with the distinctive shape of Horsey Mill behind us. A family party of Whooper Swans had just flown past, Marsh Harriers were drifting over the large reedbed and then there they were bugling as they went by a pair of Cranes. To me back then these were mythical creatures, part of a tiny population of pioneering birds recolonising this wild eastern edge of England. Soon they disappeared from view as they dropped into their night-time roost site.

So when one evening this April, several decades later and in a different corner of Norfolk, two Common Cranes appeared over the rounded slope of the arable field I was walking past, not only did I feel the excitement I always experience when seeing these majestic birds, but they also triggered memories of that first sighting in the Broads and some of the work that I have been involved in over the years with RSPB to help create places where Cranes if they so choose can live and thrive.

Lockdown Cranes, Hunstanton

The Cranes as they flew past me high and heading north were unmistakeable large grey birds with long legs and necks topped by a red heads. I had thought that given the lockdown restrictions it would be many months until I got the chance to travel into Crane country, and it was this sense of them as an unexpected and short lived treat that made this experience all the more special. The birds were soon gone, my encounter with them lasting less than a minute, time to relish the moment and grab a couple of record shots with my camera. Then once they were out of sight I sent a text to a friend who lived half a mile away suggesting they get out in their garden in case they could see them from there. The message I got back was an unhappy one, pointing out that they had walked past the same field twenty minutes earlier and no they couldn’t see or hear the Cranes from their garden.

Cranes were once a widespread bird of the British Countryside, but like so much else of our native wildlife they disappeared from the landscape and our national consciousness centuries ago, victims of hunting and habitat loss. Then something amazing occurred they found their way back. Initially this happened slowly in remote marshland in the Norfolk Broads, where pioneering birds started their nesting attempts in the late 70’s on the Horsey estate. Slowly as this population grew in size, it started to expand its range across the Broads and then into the Fens where the first Cranes to nest in this famously flat landscape in four centuries chose to do so at the RSPB’s Lakenheath Fen Nature Reserve.

Now Lakenheath Fen is an amazing place to visit hooching with life on a spring day. This is a man made landscape,  a small restoration of the once extensive wild and wet Fens that were drained for agriculture. Until they were drained the Fens were England’s great wetland, but the drainage not only sucked water out of the fens but also wildlife. Then back in the early 1990’s the RSPB’s East Anglian region team based in Norwich were looking to buy a piece of land in the Fens that could be used to create a new wetland nature reserve away from the coast and the threat of sea level rise, where species like Bitterns and Marsh Harriers could thrive. Never in their wildest dreams did they think that within a couple of decades Cranes would be nesting on the wetland they created. Following an appeal the RSPB were able to buy the land for this project at Lakenheath, land which at the time it was being used to grow carrots. To lead the task of turning 400 hectares of carrot fields into a wetland they appointed Norman Sills as warden. Norman had spent the previous couple of decades setting up the famous RSPB nature reserve at Titchwell Marsh on the north Norfolk coast and is a bit of a genius when it comes to taking a piece of land and creating a wildlife rich wetland.

Today you can take the train from Brandon past Lakenheath Fen, a journey across arable fields until you pass the reserve, a landscape of swaying reeds over which glide Marsh Harriers and if you are lucky you may catch a glimpse out of the train window of one of the reserves two pairs of Cranes.

In 2010 whilst the Cranes in eastern England, in the Fens and the Broads, were slowly building up their population a partnership called the Great Crane project made up of WWT, RSPB and Pensthorpe Conservation Trust, with major funding from Viridor Credits Environmental came together to give our wild Crane population a boost in the west of England on the Somerset Levels. Here on England’s largest area of wetland and grazing marsh, a landscape criss-crossed by dikes and marshes dotted with grazing cattle over a five year period 93 Cranes were released into the wild by the project.

Helped by nature conservation organisations, landowners and other’s Cranes have done well in England in recent decades slowly reclaiming bits of the landscape their ancestors would once have occupied. A sort of long-legged giant Canary in a coalmine, whose presence is a symbol of where landscapes are wet enough and wild enough to have these birds back. They show where, as a society, we have been able to make space for nature, not just for Cranes but for the wild ecosystem’s and nature friendly farmland on which they rely.

Last year there were an amazing 56 pairs of Cranes nesting across the UK, and although their strongholds are still in the Broads, Fens and Somerset Levels birds can be found in other areas too. At least 85% of the UK population of Cranes are found on protected sites with a third of these on RSPB nature reserves, wild places where they can breed undisturbed safe away from people.

All of which means that at a time when because of lockdown my physical horizons had shrunk to the places I can easily reach on foot from my house. I was able to stand by the side of a non-descript arable field, on the edge of the small east coast town that I call home, with a pair of Cranes briefly adding some sparkle to my daily exercise walk and for the Cranes to remind me that when people come together we can bring nature back into our landscapes and our lives.

After the Cranes have flown out of sight over the wood to my north, I scribble the record in my notebook and remember the late American writer and explorer Peter Matthiessen’s book Birds of Heaven about his journeys around the globe in search of the worlds different Crane species. In this book he coins a lovely phrase to describe those of us who like him are smitten by these elegant and enigmatic birds and the wild places where they live, he called himself and us Crainiacs, I like that.