I went to Rainham yesterday but between daylight-savings and the ridiculous state of Sunday public transport (which before setting off I’d lazily assumed couldn’t possibly be so bad that it would add over an hour to the journey each way) I got very little time there before being hounded round and out the reserve by a volunteer (admittedly a very polite and well-meaning herdsman of the general public). So I saw sod all and instead you can have what I saw the week before out on the remote bits of Hoo which, by the way I wrote about it, obviously put me in a beatific and slightly pretentious mood (Simon Barnes eat your heart out!):
After the usual public transport rigmarole that forms the beginning of any trip to the Hoo, I arrived at RSPB Northward Hill.
Spring is definitely here.
Small passerines were chasing and singing on all sides. Green woodpeckers were yaffling from high in the trees and could be heard tapping on wood all over the place, not in the loud machine-gun staccato of great-spotted’s but the slower, quieter sound of hard wood being excavated into a nest hole.
A tiny bird caught my eye, doing a fluttering plummet alongside some ivy. It was a firecrest! A long-overdue lifer for me and possibly one of the most beautiful birds I’ve seen in the UK. While it hung around for excellent binocular views, photographing it was almost impossible. (see crappy record shot below).
In some areas the wood opens into small glades or slightly more open path. Young stinging nettle was dominating the mostly clayey ground but where the chalk came through a little more strongly other species managed to make an appearance – dog’s mercury, common chickweed (which turns out to be an incredibly variable plant!), hairy violet, lesser celandine, red dead-nettle etc. These warmer, more open areas brought with them some new invertebrates for the year - small bees (male Andrena sp. I think), a comma butterfly, common green shieldbug and a beefly!
A visit to the heronry and rookery didn’t result in much but took up the time for the tide to head back out. I made my way in a big hilly question mark back around the hill and down onto the marsh, heading towards St. Mary’s Bay. A dense cloud of starlings shape-shifted back and forth on the horizon before draping itself over the sea wall. Then, seemingly without cue, they got up together, spread into a broad line and glided overhead in silence with just a gentle whooshing sound. Not long after, the raptors that had presumably been harassing them into flying so often appeared: first a buzzard being mobbed by gulls, then a close-by female sparrowhawk with the yellow eyes that suggest she was only a young’un. A peregrine was perched on the top of the dyke as I neared the bay. This is the first time I've seen one on the ground and the first time I've spotted one for myself. It gave me a great view for a few seconds before being unsettled by my stopping. Too late for the camera :(
At the edge of the St Mary's Bay I carefully crested the dyke and found the Thames now lay quite a long way out, the nearest birds being about 60m away and clearly not fussed by my presence at that distance. This was also a good opportunity to really try out my new scope (a Nikon ED50 with 27x wide-angle eyepiece). The ED50 is bleedin' awesome. A flock of dunlin went by that on my old Aldiscope would have been a smeary bunch of LBJs; now I could inspect their plumage without a problem! It was just like a fog had been lifted. I easily picked out grey plover and distant avocet that I would never have noticed before. And with the scope weighing so little too, it's definitely going to be a frequent companion!
The long trudge back went straight between two favoured fields for the lapwing which were doing their radio-tuning sound-effects and rolling flights. Reed bunting would make showy flights over the path before skulking in the reedbeds and a snipe surprised me as it exploded out of the trackside ditch from only a couple of feet away. All in all one of my best days out birding!
