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We tried hard to make the best of what the fens had to offer. We lived close to the vast Ouse Washes nature reserve for several years and delighted in the fact that the reserve’s wild Whooper and Bewick’s Swans would overfly the garden most days in winter, on route between feeding sites out in the sugar beet fields and their overnight roost on the washes. The collective noun for wild swans is ‘herd’ which works perfectly when they are out in the fields in their hundreds, picking their way slowly through the beet tops. Yet it fails the moment they take flight, conjuring unhelpful images of airborne livestock. Birdwatchers resort to ‘flock’ or even ‘flight’ to get around the problem. And every flight of wild swans comes with an unbroken soundtrack of soft trumpeting contact calls – the Whoopers slightly louder and more exuberant than their smaller relative. Whenever I heard this music from inside the house I would rush to the back door. If I was outside already I would pause from whatever I was doing to watch them pass low overhead. They had a knack for using the very last drop of daylight for their flight back to roost, calling down to announce the transition between afternoon and evening. If I was digging over the vegetable plot on a cold day it was like being told to go inside and light the fire.
A few years later we moved into an old, isolated red-brick farmhouse outside the village of Gorefield, near Wisbech. It had two things going for it. It was on the banks of one of the main fenland drains; a linear oasis of wetland habitat carved into a bleak desert of farmland. Sedge and Reed Warblers chattered their way through the long summers hidden in its reed-fringed margins. In winter the water attracted visitors from northern and eastern Europe: waterbirds including Great Crested Grebes, Tufted Duck, a few saw-beaked Goosanders, and, if you could find them, an occasional skulking Water Rail or Jack Snipe. The drain also attracted an eastern European or two from nearby Wisbech, casting hopeful lines into the water and furtive looks towards the house if they were successful; all too aware of the peculiar British tradition of wrenching fish from their environment only to put them straight back in again. They had other ideas.
Otters, too, fished the drain though we were aware of them only through finding the strangely sweet-smelling spraints, glinting with fish scales, along the bank and under the road bridges. Like an addict, I felt compelled to pick them up and smell them each time I found a new sprainting site, more by way of celebration than the need to confirm the identification. Even Badgers used the drain, constructing a sett in the bank about three hundred yards away from the house, no doubt constrained by the lack of any other significant landscape features in the area. With a judiciously positioned telescope (and no little patience) we could watch them from an upstairs window in the early summer evenings, until the surrounding crops and bankside vegetation grew too high and screened them from view for another season.
The other great attribute of Riverside Lodge – as it was called, rather grandiosely – was the garden with its dozen or so mature Sycamore and Horse Chestnut trees. In most of England the trees would have blended into the background and been of little significance. In the fens they stood out for miles around; a tiny refuge of woodland canopy rising above an ocean of cereals, potatoes and oil-seed rape. It looked like an island and it acted like an island of habitat for the local bird life. Birds requiring the seclusion of tree holes or leafy branches to site their nest, or to find food, gravitated towards one of the only local opportunities. Little Owls bred in an old Sycamore opposite my study several years running. The owlets would bob up and down on the lip of the hole, in a line of sight just above my computer screen, checking to make sure I was still working. When Little Owls didn’t use the hole one summer, Kestrels took their place, shredding the air with their calls and bringing in a conveyer-belt of small birds and mammals from the surrounding countryside. One year, Barn Owls nested in a pole-mounted nestbox just the other side of the garden fence and they too could be seen from the study, the adults surprisingly active bringing in prey during daylight hours. Regularly, I would bore my colleagues with a running commentary of interesting behaviour when it interrupted a phone call.
The ’island-effect’ of the garden trees was especially apparent during migration periods in the spring and autumn. Small birds looking for a place to shelter and a chance to refuel had limited opportunities if they were flying over our part of the fens. Much as real islands attract migrants flying over the sea, our trees lured in waifs and strays traversing the surrounding arable wastelands. Usually it was common birds – Chiffchaffs, Willow Warblers, Blackcaps and the occasional Brambling or Goldcrest. But there were red-letter days too: an impeccably-dressed male Redstart by the small fish pond on the first morning of May, and two weeks later a Black Redstart, its rarer cousin, flicking its tail nonchalantly from the low roof of an outbuilding – as if it had lived there for years.
We grew to love the house and its island refuge of wildlife during the five years we spent there, but it could never fully compensate for the dearth of wildlife in the surrounding countryside and the relentlessly flat landscape. Talk to old time fenlanders and, in desperation, they eulogise about wide open skies and dramatic cloudscapes. When a landscape is reduced to a thin smear of annually sown vegetation, it seems the only way to love it is to look up and away from it. To be continued tomorrow…