Village Voices Nature Note: a Local Success Story

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I see that the Minsmere bird reserve is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.  Congratulations!  It’s a haven for all kinds of wildlife, of course – some 6,000 different species at the last count – but its long history has been especially associated with one particular bird, the avocet, surely one of our most charismatic national species.  Avocets are quite unmistakable.  They’re tall, graceful wading birds, a picture of elegance with that pied black-and-white plumage – both bold and delicate at the same time, like fine porcelain.  They have unusual upturned bills, which they swish from side to side, sifting the saline pools for small crustaceans and invertebrates, and they have those lovely long legs in an extraordinary shade of pale blue.  Even the name sounds attractive.  It’s derived from the Italian and sounds so much more elegant, as you might expect from the Italians, than the old English names of scoop-bill, clinker, yelper and barker. Avocets are impossible to miss if you are near a colony, since they keep up a chorus of soft fluting calls should you approach too close.  In fact, if they think their chicks are threatened they can become quite aggressive and the avocets turn into exocets, dive-bombing the intruder. 

Even if you’ve never seen a real avocet you must have seen an image of one, since they have long been the official RSPB logo and appear everywhere on their badges, signs and products.  This was a very shrewd commercial choice by the RSPB, since not only are the birds beautiful to look at but they are also the perfect symbol of a great conservation success story.  Avocets disappeared from Britain as a breeding species in the nineteenth century, as a consequence of human persecution and wetland drainage, but they miraculously reappeared in 1947 just after the end of the war, ironically returning to a habitat of flooded farmland and marshland which had been deliberately created as part of our coastal defences.  They found their own way back to the Suffolk coast at two places:  Minsmere, which is now the premier RSPB reserve in the country, and Havergate Island in the Ore estuary, where they bred successfully under conditions of high security (the RSPB even had a secret code name for the place – Zebra Island’).  Since then avocets have spread along the East Anglian coast in suitable habitats, but they still need our protection in the breeding season, especially from uncontrolled dogs on the local seawalls – we had a tragic incident at Shingle Street a few years back.  Let’s help preserve our avocets as a happy symbol of national recovery and regeneration – the return of a native. 

Jeremy Mynott
11 May 2022

Village Voices Nature Note: In Praise of Life

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One of these days we shall wake up and hear that David Attenborough has died.  There will then be deep and widespread national mourning, since he has become a sort of secular saint – a new St Francis of the birds and animals.  But one should praise people while they are still alive and with us, not just write solemn obituaries when they are dead, so here goes.  

For years Attenborough has been our guide to the natural world – infectiously enthusiastic, knowledgeable and, what is not at all the same thing, wise.  It has become a sort of televisual cliché, but now an addictive one: the camera shows us some impossibly remote and inhospitable terrain from a great height; we pick out a tiny, distant figure in the wilderness of ice, marshland or desert; the picture zooms slowly in; and there is Attenborough, spreading his arms outwards to welcome us in, swaying around somewhat erratically to emphasise his words, and telling us, almost confidentially, in that so familiar, slightly hoarse voice, ‘And here, even in these extreme conditions, there is life, abundant life, and just over here behind me is something really quite extraordinary …’ .   

In his autobiography he tells the story of his first job-interview with the BBC.  His interviewer recommended that he be given a job, but should on no account be allowed in front of a camera, because of his peculiar facial movements and body language.  This is precisely his great charm, however.  He has the priceless gift of conveying his sense of wonder and excitement about the natural world in a way we can share and can see to be genuine.  He is the perfect guide and intermediary, who invites us in and then lets us see what he saw and enjoy our own reactions.  So many other presenters seem over-rehearsed by comparison.  They spend more time presenting themselves than the wildlife, and their flirty chit-chat and highly staged conversations just get in the way.

I once heard Attenborough give a talk.  The hall was packed, of course, and at the end of his spellbinding performance the chairman invited questions.  A little boy at the front shot up his hand and asked in piping tones, ‘Please, Sir, how can I be like you when I grow up?’  The audience collapsed.  But the great man took him seriously and said, ‘Well, the first thing you might do is go outside in your garden and look hard at something.  I mean look really closely, for a long time, and then try to draw or write down what you saw and think of some questions to ask.  It may become a habit.’

Jeremy Mynott
12 April 2022

Shingle Street Settlement (from Village Voices)

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As regular and long-time visitors to Shingle Street, many of you will be very aware of the significant changes we all saw last year in both the number and nature of visitors to the hamlet. Lockdown, increases in local housing and hot weather all contributed to this, and we noticed a marked shift away from the respectful leisure use of the beach towards much less considerate behaviour, with associated problems of littering, use of the natural area as toilets, damage to protected plants and landscape, and dangerous and thoughtless parking.

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Shingle Street flora survey 2015

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Shingle Street is an exacting place for its flora, especially plants of the shingle, saltmarsh and ultra-arid concrete. They are all superbly adapted to their hard life, from plants with taproots that probe metres-deep into the shingle in search of water, to species daily submerged by the tides, and tiny, rare clovers flourishing in compacted soil that are grazed by rabbits right down to the ground. They are all specialists in their own way: finding them, photographing and recording them in 2015 helps create an important benchmark.
Laurie and Jonathan Forsyth
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The wild flowers of Shingle Street

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Salty wind, sea and stones are what you get at Shingle Street, and lots of wild flowers. They are a hardy bunch of survivors, and superbly at home in the tough environment where land meets sea. Some live in the mud; others in shingle, grassland, on seawalls, in lagoons and some even manage to exist in the cracks in concrete. Summer at Shingle Street produces a palette of colours from seemingly impossible raw materials. Yellow, pink, white, red and deep blue: any gardener would be proud to have flowers as striking if they came from a garden centre, and a glance at the gardens of the cottages proves the point.
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Shingle Street bird song

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I’ve been keeping records of which birds are singing in which weeks for the last dozen or so years at Shingle Street and a clear pattern has emerged. I’m attaching a little chart illustrating this, which you could check to see what you should be particularly listening out for at any time of the year. I’ve only included those birds that sing regularly here and their usual song-periods. There are lots of exceptions involving birds just passing through, rare visitors or residents occasionally singing at untypical times. I have notes on all these if anyone is interested, but for the sake of simplicity have not incorporated them into this table.
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Shingle Street Flowers

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by Lydia Vulliamy.    

Shingle Street is a magical place, right by the mouth of the River Ore. Typical shingle flora grow there in profusion. The great mounds of sea kale Crambe maritima predominate. The leaves die back in the winter; in spring the first shoots appear, very dark purple, crinkly and succulent. The plants fully grown are as big as shrubs, and their roots penetrate deep into the shingle.
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