Dream big, Brambling and beyond

You know that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail with the Black Knight, no arms, no legs but still deluded enough to think he can carry on, “Come back here, I’ll bite your legs off!”. That’s kinda how my blogging currently feels, eminently deluded. I’ve mostly been confined to the mothership this month as my health continues on its downward spiral, post house move. Going beyond my front door in order to chance upon the wild has largely been impossible. But, nature comes alongside. It is the antithesis to my restless, roiling psyche and my debilitated body. It is a steadying, soothing companion, pulling the senses outward, bathing them in life and colour. From my living room window, I see birds! Be assured, not a breath of fresh air was consumed in the making of these images...

Since moving in 9 months ago, visitors to the garden feeders have grown. Robin redbreast was the pioneer (isn’t he always), followed closely by a couple of Coal Tits, 2-3 Blue Tits and a pair of Great Tits. Occasionally, a tinkerling flock of Long-tailed Tits flutter through and 3-5 Starlings peck at the fatball thingy. 8-10 chirpy House Sparrows quickly became regulars.

Then came the Goldfinches and, currently, I have a daily flock of 16-18, all messily gobbling sunflower hearts as quickly as I can refill the feeders. Two pairs of Greenfinches often accompany them...

8 of the Goldfinches & a Blue Tit

At least 14-20 Chaffinches, 2-4 Pied Wagtails, 3+ Blackbirds, 2-3 Woodpigeon, a pair of Collared Doves and a Dunnock or two hoover up the leftovers under the feeders

12 of the Chaffinches (one hiding behind the sprigs of green) & 6 of the House Sparrows

And, on the 1st January, a single Siskin perched in the neighbour’s garden with the Goldfinches and transformed my day! Since then, at least 2 birds, a male and a female, have visited sporadically, mainly when the weather is at its worst. There’s a row of Alder trees just up the road, so I had been hoping Siskin and Redpoll were a possibility but you just never know.

Finally, on the 26th January, a Goldcrest came to sample the goods on offer. He/she didn't seem all that impressed and took its sunny mohican elsewhere. But, these tantalising one-offs keep you curious and engaged and wondering what else might pop in to say hello. Perhaps those 2 Brambling at Warwick racecourse could flit a mile or two down the road... The one and only time I had Brambling visit my garden in Hemel Hempstead was also the first time I’d ever seen the species. Dreams do come true! At least 6 of them turned up, late afternoon, at the end of October 2010. I was so excited that every photograph I took was out of focus! After that, it always felt like the possibilities were endless. If it had wings, it could conceivably land in my garden…

Brambling, Hemel Hempstead garden, 24/10/2010

All the better for butterflies!

Hello! *as the tumbleweed rolls across my toes*….I know, it's nearly a year since I last wrote. The thing is, I had a cunning plan. You know the kind, where you decide to up sticks after 20 years living in the same area and almost 18 years in the same house. It really did seem like a good idea at the time. I was blissfully ignorant of the crippling stress, chronic sleep deprivation and sense of total bewilderment that accompanies a process like that. Still, I am alive, just, and I’ve survived more than 6 weeks in my new pad in leafy Warwickshire.

Moving 75 miles away from cherished wild spaces and a landscape which has woven itself into my very soul is a big adjustment. Nestled within me are all those hundreds of hours of quiet wandering, wondering; the joys, frustrations; the patience and the pleasure of discovering new species; of accompanying them through the seasons and finding that their lives have become intimately connected to my own. As the years went by, the rhythm of relationship forged deeper and more lasting grooves, and the visceral familiarity of old friends blossomed. Each visit brought profound comfort and relief.

Thankfully, Warwickshire does have wildlife! In the face of hot tears, and anxiety as persistent and rampant as Japanese knotweed, the medicine of birds and butterflies and their living landscape has begun to trickle into my life here.

Common Spotted Orchid back there & Dark Green Fritillary on Hawkbit sp (I think!?!), Harbury Spoilbank

Reed Warbler on the River Avon

The Bramble Wars of Silver-washed Fritillary near Stratford-Upon-Avon

Last Sunday, I added two new species to my butterfly life-list. I cannot tell you how chuffed I was. I’ve spent many hours standing under Oaks on Box Moor Trust land, cricked neck, staring up in hope. I never did find a Purple Hairstreak. An hour spent at Goldicote Cutting, and I’d seen my first Purple Hairstreak alongside the other new species, White-letter Hairstreaks which included an egg laying female! The photos are atrocious but who cares.

Purple Hairstreak

White-letter Hairstreak

Hopefully, it won't be another 11 months before I write again....!

P.S. Garden delights so far include nesting Blackbirds, bouncy Frogs and a big bumbling Hedgehog

GSWs: In the shade of the Oak

Hemel (BMT): I have tried and failed to muster up an opening with a pinch of pizazz. Instead, I shall jump straight in with the reality that the last 9 days have been largely a sedate affair (or perhaps more accurately, a stationary affair, as I’ve barely moved). Selecting highs and lows from the week seems like an easy way to carry my thoughts, so let’s go with that. The obvious low which has dominated, is the fact that my energy levels remain near rock bottom (it's attributed to ME/CFS, a condition - for those not in the know - where particular biological processes essentially fail to work properly. Recent findings suggest that the underlying pathology is significant impairments in cellular function but the cause and treatment are speculative and the duration of debilitation can be anything from months to a lifetime). Anyway, for the moment, even contemplating the (hilly) ~600 metre walk to the Small Blue butterflies has felt beyond me, although I may just give it a go tomorrow.

The definite high of the week was being able to return to the nesting Great Spotted Woodpeckers. A bit of sneaky parking reduced the walking distance to around 150 metres. The nest site was such that I was able to set up my gear (including handy camping seat) out of sight of the Woodpeckers and watch/film them without causing any intrusion or disturbance. I couldn’t manage more than about an hour but even in that time the parents were bringing food to the intensely demanding young almost every 10-15 minutes.

Pa (left), Ma (right)

The nestlings never shut up (evidenced in the video!)….which is how I found their home in the first place. Squeak, squeak, squawk, squawk, rising above the sound of nearby traffic. I wish I was as adept at finding interesting caterpillars as ma and pa woodpecker, and I did note that the female was ringed although couldn't read the code, unfortunately. The light was extremely awkward (harshly backlit) but, quite honestly, I would have been happy with any record of this wholly absorbing scene. I was transported into their world of vitality and bonding and the striving for life. I loved how the young were cradled safely within the limb of a mature, ostensibly healthy Oak: the tree providing complete shade, protection and rooted solidity; the woodland around them their larder.

[The video is best viewed in 4K: press play then click on the cog, bottom right, and select 2160p^4K quality. In the last scene, it's the female that exits from the nest hole, taking out the rubbish]

I'm not back & sunlit Buntings

I’m not back. I’m just kinda popping my head around the door. I’m here but I’m not here. And, whilst I’m here but not here, I thought I’d see if I could surreptitiously pave the way for continued blogging whilst unwell which doesn’t involve invading my own privacy too much.

I’ve lived with unipolar depression for most of my life. It’s been an unwanted and unwelcome appendage-to-my-psyche for as long as I can remember. It didn’t come alone either. It brought mates (disorders of anxiety etc) and, given the right circumstances, it multiplied into other more extreme and incapacitating conditions. Whilst I’m not able to work, I have found a way to live a small, quiet life which is mostly stable and functional (and isn't quite as pitiful as it sounds!). At times, you might even describe me as being useful to society, which, believe me, feels like something of a miracle.

Living with a mental illness is to have a constant and unpredictable companion. Sometimes it’s fairly quiet and easy to ignore. Other times, it’s like a ravaging cyclone: completely engulfing, completely destructive and utterly overwhelming. At the moment, it is tugging at my shirt sleeves like a needy 4 year old. It’s distracting and limiting and requiring most of my attention but, every so often, the chaos clears a little and I can do more than put one foot in front of the other, like Wednesday morning’s frosty, sunlit walk along the River Bulbourne.

Many years ago, I read William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. I can’t for the life of me remember whether I thought it good/bad/helpful etc, but I did mark up a few paragraphs.

“Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self - to the mediating intellect - as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

At the heart of depression is pain. Extreme, unrelenting, psychic (of the soul) pain. I think the best description I’ve ever read was that it feels like someone is holding a naked flame to your soul. It is pain so acute and otherworldly that, at its worst, it is an effort even to breathe, never mind stand. Being conscious is excruciating: you’ve lost all capacity to feel comfort, hope, joy, interest, etc. It is, I think, the closest thing to hell on earth.

Thankfully, I’m only at the tugging-shirt-sleeve rather than ravaging cyclone stage. And, last Wednesday, I was able to enjoy a group of feasting Reed Buntings in the tiny Fishery Moor reed bed. Had they been difficult to photograph or required delicate fieldcraft to observe, I’d have given up. As it was, with the sun behind me, the birds remained perched on the tops of the reeds, skilfully extracting the seeds. There were at least 8 of them (my highest count here) and there could well have been as many as 12. I managed to photograph 5 of them.

One of the biggest difficulties with depression is that it is an invisible illness. It’s not possible to see how someone’s thoughts and emotions have drifted and skidded into an obscure realm of darkness, confusion and thick, treacle-like chaos. You can’t see the constricting anxiety and the trapped, walls-closing-in-on-me feelings; nor the struggle to remember what the world used to look like before its sinister transformation into a twisted, dark, distorted reality where nothing is as it should be. There is no comfort, no joy and no clarity. Just a heavy, suffocating blanket of confusion and pain. I am so very glad that I write these descriptions largely from memory and from the transitory echo that is my current experience. It is perhaps easy to understand why depression is so deeply isolating.

OK, time for a photo of a Goose, I think. Another from my sunny Wednesday walk. By the Hemel “magic roundabout”, on Plough Gardens & Balderson’s Moor, there is a resident flock of c40 Canada Geese. I mostly ignore them but this week they seemed like a nice, easy target.

The strange thing about depression is that you really do feel as though you’re walking around with a gaping chest wound, heart exposed to the elements. You feel intensely vulnerable and flinchingly raw. It is made all the more painful by the fact that no-one can see it. It’s no wonder that bursting into tears “for no apparent reason” is the all too frequent consequence.

William Styron shared this sense of wounding and I think his exploration is worth sharing in full (skip it, if you're pushed for time). After that, I’ll bring this blatant departure from natural history to a close.

“In depression [a] faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying - or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity - but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. And this results in a striking experience - one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded. For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devastation would be lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting. His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honourably attained. However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

And so, there we have it. I really did not intend to write such a mammoth post. I hope you weren’t in a hurry! Well done to anyone who has persevered this far…and thank you. I’ve only touched on a few of the psychological symptoms of depression and I inadvertently shared one of the many physical symptoms at the beginning of January - the brutal insomnia. Many years ago, at its worst, I was taking a nightly cocktail of tranquillisers, sedatives and sedating antidepressants in order to get the bare minimum of sleep. It was not pretty. Anyway, enough of the intricacies of mental health…how about a Crow harvesting grassy icicles from a frozen flood on Fishery Moor. There was a group of 4 of them all gingerly traversing the ice and breaking off the shimmering protrusion, presumably to eat/drink.

I came across a wintering Chiffchaff and both Kingfishers perched up in the sunshine on Wednesday. The female (below) was just down stream from the Reed Buntings, tucked into a tangle of branches. The male was fishing along the Bulbourne through Station Moor. It really was one of those extraordinary mornings, full of unexpected pleasures and sensations soothing to the soul.

I hope I haven’t scared off the few readers I do have by delving into the mire of mental health. If you haven’t already run for the hills, I hope that by sharing a little of my situation, you’ll understand why there are periods - like the past few weeks - when blogging is more difficult or will need to be brief. Every so often, all my energy is suddenly taken up with putting one foot in front of the other and simply holding on while the mental chaos churns. In spite of a longing to connect and to be involved in a wider (on and off line) community, sometimes I cannot overcome the feeling of brittle tenderness to do anything other than withdraw. Thanks for reading and I hope to be back soon.

Briefly ducking out

Slavonian Grebe, Goldeneye (m) & Goldeneye (pair), Wilstone Reservoir, January 2016

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I can normally bluff my way through a stretch of poorer health but, for the moment, stringing a sentence together for public consumption is ridiculously hard work and I've not got the resources for photography (except for the occasional snap of a celebrity grebe or duck, above. The A-lister Bonaparte's Gull flaunted its grey nape way out of range of my lens). Hopefully, it won’t be too long before I'm back to regular blog updates. In the meantime, here's a duck with a feather up its nose. An eclipse male Red-crested Pochard from a couple of years ago at Tring reservoirs.

The insomniac's friend

According to the RSPB website, and excluding owls, the UK hosts just 3 true nocturnal bird species which sing at night: Corncrake, Nightjar and Nightingale. Unless you are an exceedingly fortunate insomniac, none of these will be in your back garden, ready to comfort you with song in the darkest hours. Reed and Sedge Warblers can also sing profusely through the night but, again, not likely to be in your back garden. So, who is the insomniac’s friend? Who inhabits gardens throughout the land? It is, of course, the Robin. Of all the common species, it’s the little redbreast that sings most frequently and most extensively during the night.

In its pursuit of tasty insects, the Robin is used to foraging in dim light and, even under artificial street lights, well into the night. It is one of the first to start up the dawn chorus and one of the last to stop singing at the day’s end. Robins also hold a territory all year round and so sing all year round. They are ever present, ever busy and ever ready to sing, even when woken in the night!

Anyone who has endured long periods of insomnia will know that in the darkness and the quiet, the minutes can feel like hours and you’re often helplessly and completely alone. It is, after all, the dead of night. But, inject into that the song of a Robin and you’re no longer alone, no longer engulfed in silence and darkness. You have a companion. And, there’s an intimacy too, as you realise that it’s likely that your ears alone are hearing his voice. Two night’s ago, as I lay awake at 1am, this little chap (photographed below) piped up. He sang for an hour below my bedroom window before, I suspect, settling back into the shelter of a nearby bush. I like to think that together we drifted off to sleep.

The nighttime singer, on his favourite perch, photographed (& filmed) from the sitting room

Wishing you all a very happy new year and hoping that insomniacs everywhere have a Robin in their garden!

Ring-necked Duck: another quacker at Startops

Tring reservoirs: Hmmm....with a pun like that in the title, is there any hope for the ensuing post? I’ll crash on regardless.

I’ve been about as dynamic as a hibernating hedgehog for the past few days. The chance of anything vaguely creative, even accidentally finding its way here, is pretty slim. Still, with a self-imposed goal of hitting the publish button at least once a week(ish), I’ve climbed out from under the duvet, left Don in yet another whiskey-induced spiral of self-destruction (Mad Men, season 6) and gone to see a bird.

At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is just a Tufted Duck, without a tuft, and with the addition of a couple of flashy bands around its bill. It isn’t, honest. It’s a very smart American, male, Ring-necked Duck. It turned up at Wilstone reservoir on Friday evening, disappeared Saturday, and reappeared today at Startops, long enough for the young, the old and the middle-aged and infirm (i.e. me) to drag themselves out into the blissful warmth and sunshine, and be dazzled by rarity. The last (and first) one I saw at the reservoirs was a dull juvenile at Wilstone in 2013. Prior to that there had been less than 15 county records.

View across Startop's End Reservoir, from SW shoreline + digiscoped inserts. Distance to bird approx 200 metres

Serenaded by a Wheatear

Last Spring, I had a severe Meniere's flare up (degenerative inner ear condition) and was essentially confined to home or to within a 5 mile radius of home….for 3 months. I missed Spring migration! It's not surprising then that this year's sights and sounds are especially fresh and exhilarating. Every Wheatear is a bonus! And, when 23+ were reported on Ivinghoe Beacon on Wednesday, it seemed silly not to go and take a look. I didn't bother counting them. I just enjoyed them. I sat on the hillside, in the sunshine, and watched these pretty little travellers flitting and calling and even singing.

I'd never heard a Wheatear sing before. I'd heard the tongue-clicking "chack", which these guys also did but, in flight, and especially from a prominent perch on the hillside, one male in particular was singing.

The best, similar recording I can find on Xeno Canto is this one:


What made my day, though, was, as I sat in the warmth, that male (photographed above, in the messiest setting possible!), stood tall on his mound of earth, just a few metres from me, and sang his subsong. Quietly but determinedly as if he was unable to hold it in any longer. As he sang, he looked left and right and backwards and forwards, projecting the quiet, sure sound all around him. Having never seen or heard it before, it was pretty special.

A similar subsong recording from Xeno Canto


You can never see too many Wheatears!