Reserve Diary: Week 1

Brice Fleet looking back towards Northward Hill

It was certainly odd waking up on Monday morning and gazing out at the scrub and marshland that now rolls away beneath my window. No sirens, no horns, no faint rumblings of over-crowded buses struggling up Lewisham Way. Just the wind. And birds, lots of them: chattery, wheezy finches singing from telephone wires, Song Thrush, Blackbird and Blackcap skulking in the bushes. But the highlight of this window chorus was a Turtle Dove on Tuesday, gently purring away in a manner befitting such a beautifully plumed bird. A life-tick before breakfast? Not a bad way to start eh?!

The main focus this week has been familiarising myself with the Northward Hill and Cliffe Pools reserves – two very different sites a few miles apart. Northward Hill contains a mosaic of habitats including oak woodland, scrub and grazing marsh while Cliffe Pools is principally a series of saline lagoons and brackish pools interspersed with rank grassland. They are fantastic sites with varied and interesting histories, they are also hugely important for many species of resident and migrant birds.

Speaking of birds...while installing reptile fences at Cliffe on Wednesday a call went out on the radio reporting that a local birder had a confirmed sighting of a Black Kite in the area and reckoned it was heading our way. With the news neatly coinciding with lunchtime we headed up to a viewpoint on the Thames wall in case it decided to follow the river a bit. Unfortunately, this annual but rather rare vagrant to the British Isles, which was probably brought in as the weather in the south east broke on Tuesday night, eluded us and lunch was spent in the company of a few passing Common Terns and a Kestrel instead. However we had more luck at Cliffe on Thursday with a lovely Spotted Redshank in characteristic dark breeding plumage pitching up at the Black Barn pools on the east side. This was followed by several Ruff, nicely dug out of a flock of Black-tailed Godwits by Dave, another RV. This was another first for me and after scoping an individual (which I presumed male) for a while I began to see why this curious, mid-size wader often causes a few ID problems. It was an attractive bird, with faded ‘tortoiseshell’ wing feathers, orange legs and a pale streaky, ‘scuffed’ crown. Added to this were a few messy black splodges on an otherwise white breast (a remnant of the bold breeding plummage?) Somehow it looked like an amalgamation of several different waders but perhaps that is its charm and its giveaway.

 These sightings, along with the appearance of numerous Sand Martins over the reserves this week, suggest that some birds are already beginning to return from their northern European/arctic breeding grounds. Another few weeks and there should hopefully be some more interesting waders stopping off here before continuing the long migration south.



On Friday I visited another site to assist with the final Lapwing productivity survey of the season. This survey is designed to establish the success of certain key breeding birds and involves scanning the area for any signs of breeding or ‘alarming’ adults and hopefully well-feathered or fledged chicks. Although it is very late in the season, amazingly, after an hour and a half of searching, an adult female Lapwing flushed from the grass just yards from the truck and landed in a small ditch close by. And she was followed by two part-grown chicks! Ironically, due to the constraints of the survey we were unable to include these (the predation risk for such young birds still being high) but it was a nice way to round off the week.



Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus)



and a furry little ball of Lapwing chick!