Today I did two things I've been vaguely meaning to do for a long time. I went on a Thames barge, and I went on a birdwatching trip where somebody who knew about birds told me what I was looking at. The trip was cold, but worth it. (If you aren't interested in birds or barges you might as well stop reading now, and save yourself some time).
I have been on Thames barges before, in the sense that I have clambered across their decks when they were moored to a quay, and our boat was tied up alongside them, and we wanted to get ashore, but I don't think that counts. Today's barge the Victor set off from the Ha-penny Pier at Harwich and took us up the Stour as far as Mistley, under the auspices of the RSPB, so that we could see the birds feeding on the exposed mudflats.
Victor was built in 1895 for the linseed oil trade. Nowadays she makes her living as an offshoot of the leisure industry. You can hire her for that special party, go along for a sightseeing trip as part of the throng, follow a barge match, or subject your employees to a never-to-forgotten teambuilding and training day, and if any of your staff get seasick that's just tough. Today the Stour was extremely calm, and we did not get seasick, though we did get very, very cold. The instructions said to wear trainers or deck shoes, and while I thought I might have got away with purpose-designed yachting boots, I didn't know where mine were, and failed to find them in the two months which elapsed between booking this trip and going on it. That left me with deck shoes, which aren't large enough to let me wear more than two pairs of thinnish socks. Reader, if you are contemplating spending four hours standing in light drizzle in north Essex in January, then I can warn you from personal experience that deck shoes are not enough.
We did see lots of birds, despite the drizzle. Curlew, oyster catcher, cormorant, great crested grebe, lapwing, shelduck, merganser, goldeneye, teal, widgeon, pintail duck, dunlin, redshank, black tailed godwit, bar-tailed godwit, grey plover, turnstone, Brent goose. Marsh harrier, peregrine, shag. Eider duck, but I'm not sure they count in my case. Seals. The RSPB man said some avocet flew in front of some trees, but I missed them. Gulls and crows, but the RSPB man didn't say so much about those.
Curlews and oyster catchers I'm OK with. I've seen many over the years when we've been sailing, and could even recognise their calls, though I didn't know until today that female curlews have longer and springier beaks than male curlews. I can recognise cormorants as well, because not much else looks like them, or dives like them, or has their habit of sitting as though crucified while their wings dry. There were some great crested grebes on the Exe when I was growing up, and I've always been reasonably confident about identifying them as long as they're on the water. They have those long necks, and long heads, and they dive, so you see them out in the middle of the river and not just on the mudflats. I was pleasantly surprised at how many we saw today, having not realised they were that common. They are rather weedy fliers, but I'm not sure I'd recognise one if it was in flight, and not obligingly diving not too far away from me.
There were always lapwings in the winter on the grazing marshes along the banks of the Clyst, so I've grown up more or less knowing what they look like, and am shocked that nowadays their numbers have reduced so much that sighting one is a noteworthy event. When I was a child they were just there. Today's lapwings weren't feeding, and the RSPB man said that this was typical. Lapwings don't feed in the estuarine mud, just stand there resting in their downtime.
Once you get to the great mass of birds feeding in the mud my bird knowledge becomes extremely hazy. There are ducks and waders and that's about it. Mergansers it turns out are large ducks. When swimming they sit low in the water so that from a distance you scarcely see their backs, and the males have punk tufts on their heads. By this stage of the winter the males are starting to display to the females by throwing their heads up. In flight they show a dramatic mixture of dark and light patches. I might recognise a male merganser again.
The dunlins were fairly unmistakable, once somebody had told me what they were, because they are tiny. They run around the mud in spread-out flocks, and fly in flocks low over the water. Apparently in flight people confuse them with knots, but knots are more silvery in flight. I've seen flocks of dunlins before, without knowing what they were, though not watched them feeding, because they are so small that without binoculars you would scarcely see them.
Shelducks are large ducks with a lot of white in them. I used to know which they were, and felt a vague sense of familiarity looking at them today. Pintail ducks have the longest necks of any British duck. On the Stour they have their favourite corner just below Mistley, where the RSPB man said they gathered every year. You could not possibly see a goldeneye's eye from the deck of a barge, but they are darkish birds, the female having a white ring round the neck. Teal are small, or possibly that was wigeon. I couldn't identify the smaller ducks after today's trip, or tell the difference between grey plover, greenshank, redshank, and turnstone. The light was really not good enough to see which ones had red legs, or dark armpits (truly), or any of the other distinguishing features the RSPB man told us to look for. Some of the experienced birders on the trip were identifying all sorts of things, and as the other experienced birders didn't contradict them, there was either a conspiracy of public solidarity and they were unwilling to show each other up, or more likely they could tell from the whole jizz of the bird, without being able to see the colour of its armpits.
The eider duck had been spotted previously on the Suffolk bank of the river, just five of them, and the barge skipper agreed to nose the barge in as close as she would go up a creek to see if we could find them, until she ran aground. This was a calculated risk, since by then the tide was rising. Some of the party said they did see the eiders, which are large brown ducks. I looked at all the bird-shaped objects I could see in that part of the river, so may have seen them in the sense that light reflected from the eider duck fell upon my retina and I identified it as a bird, but since I never knew which were the eider duck I'm not sure that counts.
Quite a few seals bobbed up through the course of the trip, including one near the ferry terminal at Harwich which obligingly took a long time to eat a flatfish. Initially it had one end of the fish sticking out on each side of its mouth, and it gradually turned it around (no flippers allowed) until the fish was held head-first in its jaws, at which point there was still a lot of fish sticking out each side. The seal swallowed it anyway.
The marsh harrier appeared on the Suffolk shore near Holbrook, and flew downstream for a time. They are big, powerful fliers, and I would not have known it was a marsh harrier if people hadn't told me. The peregrine was sitting on one of the cranes at Harwich, initially outlined against the sky on a narrow ledge, and becoming much more difficult to spot as we moved on so that it was no longer silhouetted, but sat against a blue background of crane. Peregrines will eat small waders and ducks, up to the size of a wigeon, and apparently in past years they have been seen roosting on the old lightship moored in Harwich Harbour.
The gulls were only given bit-part mentions. We saw great black-backed gulls, which are the largest gulls, almost as large as cormorants, a common gull, black-headed gulls, and some others that nobody bothered to identify. The distinguishing feature of the black-headed gull was not its head, but the white flash along the front of its wings (just as the way to tell black tailed godwit and bar-tailed godwit apart is not to look at their tails). Bird watching is like gardening, in that like some plants, some birds have more cachee than others for the bird watcher. Gulls clearly come a long way down the list, an avian equivalent of Spiraea or shrubby Potentilla. As a non-twitcher I'm as happy to learn about gulls as waders, and was intrigued to see the large number of crows feeding on the stonier mud banks at low water, that never got a mention from the experts at all.
We docked an hour behind our scheduled time, presumably because of the detour to see the eider duck, and my feet were so cold as I walked up the pontoon that I wondered whether I'd be able to drive. When I got home the Systems Administrator was not at all concerned that I was late, having tracked the whole progress on-line, including the part where we stopped moving because we'd run aground. There is a site that displays ship movements, using the information they are constantly transmitting to each other and the port authorities, and it turns out that Victor is on it. That is rather a surprising thought, almost as incongruous as the sight of the barge skipper steering with one hand, and holding a mobile telephone with the other.
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