Common, Blue, Beautiful

I took this picture at the weekend Whitlingham Country Park, probably the busiest wetland in Norfolk, a place where people go to literally re-create themselves, through a myriad of outdoor activities from running to sailing, birdwatching to photography, walking the dog, picking Blackberries and much more.

Common Blue Damselfly

This place was until the turn of the century a sand and gravel quarry. Then after landscaping it opened to the public in 2004, a new blue green lung for Norwich and a new Broad over 700 years after our ancestors peat diggings that when they flooded became the Norfolk Broads we know and love today.

Those original wetlands have had centuries to develop layers of ecological complexity, Whitlingham is newer and it’s ecology will develop in the years to come.

But Whitlingham is still a wetland and full of life, including common but stunning creatures like this Common Blue Damselfly, who's company those who visit and who take a moment to pause and stare into the wild and the wet can enjoy.

Shifting baselines and a Red Backed Shrike

The first time I can remember seeing a Red Backed Shrike was when I was working in the Scottish Highlands during the summer of 1990, a singing male had been reported somewhere near Loch Ruthven and I was given a lift to see the bird on the simple condition that I kept the news secret.

Male Red Backed Shrike, Roydon Common

By 1990 the baseline for Red Backed Shrike in the UK was of a very rare breeding bird, nowhere regular with pairs breeding occasionally around the country one year and not returning the next, and whose presence had to be kept secret from egg collectors and anyone else who might disturb them.

Yet not so very many years before I started birding in the 80s, they would have been regarded as a widespread and familiar bird of the countryside, they even had a well-known colloquial name, Butcher Bird, on account of their habit of impaling prey on thorn bushes. That was the baseline an early 20^th century birder would have been familiar with.

These days I regard any day that I see a Shrike as a good one, an occurrence that with luck I might experience two or three times a year. That’s the early 21^st century Red Backed Shrike baseline.

So, when a summer plumaged male turned up at Roydon Common a few miles from my house recently I didn’t take long to decide that I wanted to go and see it.

I arrived at the Common after work in lovely soft, golden summer evening light, and quickly found a group of half a dozen birders standing around where the bird had last been seen.

After an uncertain and mildly stressful few minutes the bird was relocated, and we were soon able to enjoy the Shrikes company as it hunted for spiders in the heather and scrub. As folk having seen the bird started to chat the conversation became a living history of the species fortunes and changing perceptions of its status over the last half century.

One birder happy with the views he’d had fell into conversation with me, he remembered when he first started birding “...they still nested around here” and gestured vaguely in the direction of the Brecks where the last regular breeding pair in England hung on until the late 80’s. For him they had once been a regular but special part of his youthful summers. Something that I guess made the evening twitch to see this lone passing bird all the more poignant an experience.

Why did they disappear? Perhaps an answer can be found in The Netherlands from where my Dutch birding mate Arnold messaged me to say that “Red Backed Shrike was almost gone from the Netherlands years ago, but they are making an impressive comeback. They are back on the coast where I live too. So good hopes for the UK I guess”! But why?

The evidence would seem to suggest that where localised recovery in Shrike numbers has happened in The Netherlands it is because the conditions have been created to increase the amount of large insect prey, they depend upon.

So perhaps as we strive to create bigger areas of more resilient habitat in the UK we too will one day have created the conditions to encourage passing Red Backed Shrikes to stop and redraw their baseline in the English countryside as a regular breeding summer visitor.

But until that happens, I will just have to content myself with the occasional treat watching migrating Shrikes around my home on the Norfolk coast.

Otterly Splendid

After over 30 years of walking Titchwell's trails and West Bank path I don't often get to see something new for this special corner of the Norfolk coast. Today I'd got to the reserve relatively early and as the temperature started to rise and the light became ever hazier I started to wander back towards where my car was parked near the Visitor Centre, pausing briefly to take a picture of The Warden of the Marshes a  Redshank, perched high on some saltmarsh vegetation alert for predators.

Otter West Bank Path, RSPB Titchwell Marsh

I could see a birder wandering along the path towards me and my brain immediately recognised the familiar shape and walk of my old friend Digi-Scoping Dave. Like so many people in the birding community the last time our paths had crossed was on this 2 metre wide strip of path that heads directly north towards the sea. We greeted each other and had a rambling chat, catching up on each other's health and wellbeing and that of our mutual acquaintances, the weather and what was about. But being birders our brains were not 100% focused on each other and the conversation and we were both distracted by a commotion over the Fresh Marsh when all of the Black Headed Gulls nesting on Island Hide's green roof took flight and wheeled around our heads in a noisy flock. 

Thinking out loud I uttered the entirely predictable line "What's caused that?" as Dave and I, with close to a century of birding experience between us went into automatic scan the sky for a predator mode. Who knows we might even get lucky with something a little unusual, perhaps a migrating Osprey or a hunting Hobby scything through the blue summer sky.

Bizarrely after a few seconds we couldn't see the expected large gull or bird of prey. Dave was the first to lower his gaze and soon had my attention when he immediately announced "There's an Otter!". Again I initially deployed my decades of experience of looking at wildlife, and glanced at the lagoon on the grounds that was where you would expect to see an Otter, only to realise that this Otter was in fact wandering down the main West Bank Path towards us completely unfazed by our presence. Eventually it deigned to take notice of our presence and slipped down the vegetated bank towards the lagoon only to reappear a few seconds later its head poking out from the grass verge. Then after a minute of checking us out it ambled across the path, over the seawall and disappeared into deep cover on Thornham Marshes saltings.

I could have missed this Otter if I'd relied on my instinctive search patterns triggered by the behaviour of the resident nesting gulls. Not because I wouldn't have eventually looked at the path where the Otter was walking towards me, but because by the time I stopped searching the sky for the cause of the commotion the Otter might have slipped away. 

Now I've seen a few Otters over the years, perhaps most memorably on the river in Thetford where a couple of well grown cubs chased a large brown chicken and caused it to panic and decide that the way to escape their attention was to plunge head first into the river, this was a bad thing from the chickens perspective as the Otters followed it into the water and they and the chicken soon disappeared below the surface. When I think back about the conversations I had in the 1990's when for a year I lived and worked at Strumpshaw Fen on the banks of the river Yare and never saw an Otter, and the wardens discussed the disappearance of Otters some years before from the river due to a pollution incident, it really is heartening to see their return. Indeed I half expect to see an Otter these days when visiting the Broads. I just hope Titchwell's latest residents continue to focus on eating the plentiful supply of fish at Titchwell and leave the nesting Avocets alone.

There is a lot of chatter at the moment about AI and its uses, misuses and risks and opportunities. How it feeds off data and learns from patterns and comes up with responses as a result. But how would it cope when the data doesn't make it onto a database, when the information it has tells it to advise looking up at the sky, this would lead to a self reinforcing pattern with no data gathered from other directions and a sloppy distorted view of what to do would emerge, or as I'm not an expert on AI maybe not. But I do have some expertise in watching birds and wildlife and know that as well as recognising patterns, being able to read a landscape and animal behaviour, I've also learnt to anticipate what might happen next based on my brain constantly weighing up the information it is receiving from my senses enabling me to adjust my behaviour as a result. 

So if for example I am watching the Avocets on the Fresh Marsh at Titchwell I know when something exciting is about to happen by their behaviour and what they might be about to do, meaning I can get my camera settings ready to try and capture the moment. 

Black Headed Gull and Avocets, RSPB Titchwell Marsh

Dave and I watched the Otter disappear over the seawall and the Gulls settle back on their nests another enemy seen off and a few minutes calm before the next panic. I headed back to the Visitor Centre where Trevor was showing someone a Spotted Flycatcher, too rare a sight these days but a common in the London Park I birded in my youth. So I had experience of what the bird might be doing where and what to look for.  I immediately scanned the tall trees overlooking the VC and there it was, where I expected it to be sallying forth from a dead wood snag at the top of the trees to catch flies, my sophisticated in built AI, aka brain, had long ago learnt its most likely behavioural pattern and helped me get onto this special little bird quickly. 

Simon Busuttil an appreciaton

When I started drafting this note on Monday, I really wasn’t sure how to begin and as the week has passed finding an ending has proved similarly challenging. 

On Monday morning I opened up my emails, and one quickly caught my eye, one of those emails with someone’s name the solitary occupant of the subject line. Deep inside I knew that emails like this can hold the worst possible news, but even so as I raced down the page, my brain was searching for a scenario that didn’t hold the message that I was starting to fear. 

Sadly, the news in this email was shockingly bad, Simon Busuttil, my friend and colleague of over 30 years, had died suddenly and unexpectedly at the weekend. Simon was based on the Turks and Caicos Islands [TCI] in the Caribbean, running a portfolio of RSPB conservation projects. 

When we met in London last summer it was clear to me that he was loving life in TCI and full of plans for the future. Simon and I first met in 1991 at Loch Garten, then got to know each other a few years later when he was RSPB Site Manager at Dungeness in Kent. There in the old low-ceilinged rooms of Boulderwall Farm we plotted a five-week expedition "Wings Over Kazakstan" through the Ili River delta in Kazakhstan. A journey that took us and four other English birders through a wetland twice the size of Kent, a boat trip 20km across a large lake in a couple of small aluminium boats with tiny outboards, where a sea monster was reputed to eat the bodies of drowned fishermen (that or it was big, deep and remote and there was no one around to find the bodies) and we “enjoyed" a very messy night in a campsite in the middle of nowhere when our guides tried (successfully) to get us drunk on homemade Vodka that smelt vaguely of bananas and we retaliated with a bottle of duty free Grouse. 

Our RSPB careers took us to different parts of the UK, Simon to Aberdeen to manage the RSPB’s reserves in East Scotland and me to Norfolk. But we kept in touch, attended each other’s weddings, and just before my first son was born had a trip to Spain together where we marvelled at the vast flocks of wintering Cranes and spent a bitterly cold dawn listening to the squeaking door song of Dupont’s Lark.

Simon revelled in people and places, whether the shingle peninsular of Dungeness, the Montrose basin from where he’d tell me about the skeins of wild geese flying over his house in winter, or in more recent years the people and places of his adopted Caribbean home in the TCI. 

When Simon moved with his family to the Caribbean our friendship played out on WhatsApp, only last week we exchanged messages and photos. And whenever he was in the UK, we’d meet up usually in Chinatown for a all you can eat buffet and afternoon talking squit in a London Boozer. When we met last summer, I remember how happy he was as a south London boy and lifelong Crystal Palace fan to have seen them lift the FA Cup earlier that year. 

And so, to the shocking news contained in that email of his untimely death. Gone way to soon with so much left to do and a family to watch grow up. Whenever we met at some point the conversation always turned to our families, and Simon with that familiar glint in his eye would come alive as he updated me on Emily his wife, his two boys and daughter. I never had any doubt that he loved every moment of watching his boys become young men, becoming independent and holding their own in conversation with him, and the extra time he was looking forward to having with his daughter, his youngest child, as the boys left home. 

And I know that if I’m going to miss my mate “Busty” hugely, that I can’t even begin to imagine the hole his passing will leave in his wife Emily and their children's lives. 

Another one of the good guys gone.