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The Island: encounters
“You want to spend time on that island you’re on your own.” That’s what she said 2 years ago, that obstinate wife of mine, yet here we are, on her initiative 500 miles north of home on the Isle of Muck. We’re battling against gale force winds trudging the long mile from the tearoom – where we have just had an excellent pizza – to the cottage overlooking the bay at the other end of the road. She is silent, trembling with the dread of falling, silently cursing me for not realising she would not be able to walk up the rough path to the cottage from the road without my help.
When we do eventually get there the views are to die for.
It’s comfortable, warm and we have all we need . . .
except for food. Yes, we brought the basics with us when we arrived on Thursday, and ordered more in advance from the co-op in Mallaig, intending to make a second order to be delivered on the Tuesday boat. Then came the storms – two days of ferocious gales, lashing rain, brilliant sun and crashing waves. We cancelled the order, bought some cakes and a frozen meal from the tea room and made do until the winds died. Clouds, sun, islands, mountains and sea then conspired to deliver views so sublime as to make it all seem (almost) worth the effort – oh and the boat arrived 2 days late with a reduced order.
“It’s such a friendly place” I told her, “that even if you don’t enjoy the wildness of it, you will not be short of interesting people to talk to.” So who and what did we encounter?
The first two days we were in the bunkhouse where we met Wendy and John Palfreyman, recently retired dentist and professor of “dry rot”. If they had stayed longer we would have become real friends. 82 year old Rosie who lives alone in comfortable “disarray” in a futuristic pod house came briefly to see us in the bunkhouse, but with 2 other couples there we couldn’t offer her a meal so she didn’t stay long. We had coffee with Ewen McEwen, the laird’s uncle and his wife Judy who were already friends of mine and keen to meet Thelma. At the teashop we had a warm welcome from Pam and Bruce, but they are not open much this week. Ruth who runs the accommodation and is wife to Colin McEwen, the boss man, had a drink with us and filled in all sorts of gaps about how the island works, but we have not seen her since. Yesterday we had a visit from Phoebe the infant teacher. There were two infants in the school last year but this year they have gone so with more time for other things she wanted some pictures and advice on a bid she is working on.
There do not seem to be any other visitors staying for the week which is surprising. Perhaps it’s the economy, stupid.
Social life disappointing, but even Thelma has been thrilled by our encounters with wildlife. On our first full day, which was fine and calm, we had a close encounter with a Short Eared Owl – the only day-flying owl in Britain and considered in Wales to be a cherished rarity. Here, suddenly they are in our faces.
The glorious white sands of the three beaches here are home to a small colony of Dunlin and an even smaller one of Ringed Plovers. We stood still at the tide line as the little flock moved busily towards us probing the sand for tiny marine life. They did not decide to fly until they were within a few metres of us. We breathed out, grinning with joy.
My best encounter though was with a very scruffy looking Golden Eagle. On a previous walk I had seen an eagle in the distance over a high escarpment which looked like eagle country so, even though the wind was still intermittently at gale force level, I set out to see if those rocks could be a possible nest site, for I had not seen a sign of any eagles at the place I had photographed them before.
Until I hit the high ground the walk was on tracks and quite easy, but as I came in sight of the escarpment a huge gust of rain hit me head on. I managed to stumble up to some rocks and find a degree of shelter. Then the eagle appeared above me. What followed was like some sort of conversation between an aristocrat of the skies and a lowly human.
Eagle: “I see you human, and I’m not comfortable with you being here in my territory. I don’t much like you pointing that thing at me, but I’m not afraid. I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”
Human: “I’m so pleased to see you, Iolair, lord of the mountains. Let me stay by this rock and watch you.” Iolair moves off downwind but is still curious and comes back.
Eagle: “I don’t know what you are doing down there but you seem Ok. I’m coming down to have a closer look.”
Human: “I feel so privileged my lord. Thank you.”
Eagle: “Well, you seem Ok, I’ll move to my usual place,”
Th eagle’s place is clearly not an eyrie or there would by now be quite large chicks. It’s probably a place to pluck and dismember prey. I had been crouching behind my rock for some barely 15 minutes, but didn’t want the bird to feel threatened, so decided to leave.
Cold hands? Hard going? Couldn’t care less -I’m punching the air!
The Little Things
If you love Nature and photography you can’t help being drawn to birds – they are the most visible of our wildlife and often the most challenging to catch. The learning curve in the first few years is exhilarating, but once you’ve taken hundreds of pictures of all but the most elusive (Hawfinch, Bittern, Long Eared Owl, Corncrake for example) it no longer seems worth clicking the shutter button for yet another Avocet picture, gorgeous creatures though they are.
There is another way in which my camera can see wildlife: it can record their behaviour, and sitting quietly watching for half an hour in a good spot can bring great rewards – little things.
This picture combines both kinds of record. It shows the rare Garganey ducks with the males in full breeding plumage. They are part of a little colony at Leighton Moss in Lancashire. It also shows that the Greylag geese are under pressure from predators here – just one gosling. The pair in the top picture did better, but the goslings are younger. How does a goose feel when 80% of her children get killed every year? It’s why they have so many.
There is also a large group of Pochard ducks and I got great amusement from watching 5 drakes competing for the attention of one duck. A drake crouches, head level with the water and rushes at one of his rivals. The rival retreats a little and the scene is repeated by other challengers and other rivals. While I watched this drama only one gave up.
My attention was drawn to some little spots of bright red and orange in the reeds: 3 coot chicks. The mother enticed them into open water but they were soon back in semi-concealment.
I have visited this place many times over the last 10 years. There is a large colony of Black Headed Gulls here which over the years has been slowly supplanting the much smaller Avocet colony. One of the wardens told me that they have now found a way to give the Avocets a better chance. Avocets nest later than the gulls so they keep the water high when the gulls are nesting but lower it to make more room for the Avocets later. Numbers are now up to 80. Here are a few of them still clinging on among the gulls:
Meanwhile it is fascinating to watch the behaviour of these quarrelsome birds. Here one has picked up such a large bit of nesting material it struggles to get it to the nest site. On the same little island there is a conference going on. Caption competition?
Opposite the wetlands reserve is a butterfly reserve. Although the weather was perfect, it’s still April and butterflies are not conspicuous. Still it’s a lovely place, a good example of what is called “limestone pavement” where slabs of limestone break up the rough vegetation. Here a sessile oak tree and an early purple orchid.
It’s a rich habitat and, though I had seen little bird or butterfly life so far I decided to sit in the shade and watch. Something much smaller than the smallest bird drew my eye: tiny insects which looked like small hoverflies were flitting around me. They moved in rapid spasms to and fro, never alighting: a constant tease to the camera’s autofocus abilities. At last I get one nearly focussed and can see they are tiny wasps – about 8mm long. Suddenly one becomes entangled in a spider’s web. This is how it gets free:
A Battle of Wills
I’m involved in a contest with two young ladies. It’s a battle of wills. They are determined to continue what I see as a privilege but they see as a right. Meet Hettie and Holly our two hens. Since November they have had free run of the whole garden and have managed to spread compost all over the paths, scratch up the flower beds and create a dust bath under one of the trees.
On the credit side, we both love having them around and have spent a small fortune on safe housing for them. They may well have reduced the slug population, and I enjoy having “daddy’s little helpers” when I am weeding. Kitchen scraps are hoarded so that they have a treat each day and in return we get two eggs every day.
However, now that Spring is here their assistance in the garden is no longer required, so more money has to be spent on a fence to keep them in the orchard area where their house is.
They view this as a great challenge. Every day they find some way of getting through or over the fence and every day I stop up gaps and add extra netting. So far they are winning. I’ve even clipped their wings but somehow they fly or burrow their way out.
I had no idea hens were so ingenious.
The River – the end of Winter
It’s March and nature holds its breath. Everything is stripped back. Winter is in disgrace. It lost its temper last month and battered down the trees, washed away the leaf litter, flattened the daffodils, and took huge chunks out of the river bank at Dinefwr Park where I do a very small scale Winterwatch.
Last week I went to check the damage before the new season gets underway. The birds which come here for winter are mostly gone and the ones which arrive in Spring have not yet arrived so it’s quiet; water level is still high, but there are still big areas of flattened vegetation and debris where it has been much higher. There is one area in particular where sand has been washed in, gravel has pushed further out and some big trees have been undermined. This is where the next Ox-bow lake will form and it will be a big one, creating an island perhaps a hundred metres long and shortening the river by half a kilometre. Will I live to see it? That depends on the number of big floods.
A week later there had been a subtle change. On one of the smaller oxbow lakes I watched a pair of Swans laboriously waddling across a stretch of land from the big lake. As soon as they got into the water the male adopted an aggressive display posture and swam strongly towards where I had seen another swan earlier. This is part of a territory where they have been nesting for years and it’s time to begin.
Out at the river the resident Greylag Geese came to check me out, but even better were the first summer visitors – 20 or so Sand Martins.
That’s it: Spring has arrived.
Epynt – military land.
These are the Epynt Ranges. I am at the northern end of the military land, known at its southern end as the Sennybridge Training Area. It has a familiar feel to it – rough grass, thousands of sheep and plantations of dark Sitka Spruce. Don’t be misled. This is not the normal Welsh upland. For a start, there’s an old pub in the middle of it called the Drovers Arms, owned by that well-known brewery the Ministry of Defence. It has a parking area and toilets but no outdoor seating, no fences; everything shuttered and closed.
A mile down the road is an old farmhouse with a sign saying “Epynt Visitor Centre” but it too is shuttered and closed – at least in early March. However from there is a clearly marked 4k trail which takes me deep into the extraordinary landscape of the safe northern section of the ranges.
The views are outstanding, with the Bannau Brycheiniog 20 miles to the south, but it is a strange landscape. The rough grass and the sheep are familiar but here there are also very odd lines of small trees or bushes. They look a bit like very sparse hedges but around the roots is plastic fabric so they must have been carefully planted. My guess is that they are simulations of some landscape which our soldiers might come across when fighting in some corner of the world where hedges look like this. The clumps of trees too must be for soldiers to hide in. Further south there is a simulated village for them to practice door-to-door conflict. Do soldiers need picnic benches?
I’m not here for the landscape though but for something even stranger. I’m learning how to talk to a part of me that has been lurking somewhere between mind and body for half a century. Despite the fact – or non-fact – that it has been tormenting me for all that time I must learn to love it. It is now “he” and has a name and he has been trying to look after me and protect me from harm! What, a few years ago, I would unhesitatingly have dismissed as “therapy bollocks” I now pay per four times what I could earn in the time and drive 23 miles to spend an hour talking to a very nice lady about an aspect of myself I barely understand.
It reminds me of something I wrote a few years ago:
So many of us live in a world in which we are seldom cold or hungry, seldom experience real pain, and are free to moan about our awful politicians. Most of us trust the police not to harm us and we have money to do most of the things we think we want, but we are full of dread and unease.
So, I am spending some of the kids inheritance to get closer to this state of mind: “If we cannot have what we desire then let us desire what we can have.” It’s hard enough trying to find out what I desire!
Posted in This Domestic Life, This Wild Life
Tagged Epynt, Military land, psychoanalysis, Upland
1 Comment
Winter in Mayenne
This is not a place I associate with cold. Here, 600 miles south of where we live, Spring comes early. It’s a place of flowers, butterflies, turtle doves, red Squirrels, hares and warblers. I come here to be with my daughter in a beautiful big old house surrounded by trees and nature – and warmth.
Not this time: temperature 3 degrees, cloud, fog, frost at night. The trees stand in long dull rows; everything is brown or grey except the dull grass and the lake covered in duckweed. Inside, the old stone walls keep the house cold. Only the sitting room with its big woodstove is always warm – as long as we keep it going. My bedroom is big, three tall windows; rugs on the floor, nice lamps, books, a table to work at, but I have to keep an electric heater going all the time to get the temperature up to something my old bones can tolerate – 15 degrees or so.
I’m here for several reasons. One is to try out a different way of travelling. Instead of relying on a campervan as a temporary home, which has been my way of doing things for the last 10 years, I am using my fold-up electric bike and trains. In theory I can carry everything I need on the bike and dismantle it to board the trains. However, everything I need includes a sturdy backpack full of lenses, a camera, binoculars and bits of tech for photography – weight around 9 kilos. The bike weighs 18 kilos, my big bag perhaps 12 and the smaller bag with the battery about 7. That’s the sort of weight which young super-fit paratroopers carry on training exercises!
When I got to the steep hill leading up to my daughter’s UK house in Wiltshire I had to stop pedalling and push. Oh dear. It’s lucky I have a strong heart. I hitched a lift with them in their posh electric car to the ferry at Portsmouth and the two hour drive south to La Bruyere.
That experiment clearly failed, but the camera tech is new and very different from my Sony system. It’s claim is to use lighter smaller lenses to achieve a result at least as good as the big heavy stuff. It’s called OM system and is the latest development in the “micro four thirds” type of camera with a much smaller sensor than my full-frame one. “Four thirds” sounds bonkers. What’s wrong with 1.33 or one and a third? Actually it refers to the shape of the sensor – four units long by three high. Because of the laws of physics the smaller the sensor, the smaller the diameter of the lens to create the picture, and the lighter the lens. That’s the theory.
So why is my backpack so heavy? Good question, and one I’m not sure I can answer yet. On this trip I am keeping my brain alert by learning a very complicated new technology and I love it. Finding interesting landscapes and wildlife to photograph in the cold gloom is another challenge, but I had a few successes, especially when the sun appeared at dawn.
Of all the challenges this trip has thrown up, the biggest is a feeling of disappointment, of disillusionment. I had so many hopes for this place in the last few years and slowly they have subsided. Walking carefully through the woods where I have watched, barely moving, as the deer approached, or taken shots of rare butterflies and warblers, now all is still and silent. I banish the disappointment demon by looking into the trees and seeing beauty there. Perhaps there is poetry here?
Hope returned when the sun came out after 6 days of gloom and I went off on the bike to one of my favourite spots by the river. There are Grebes and Cormorants there to photograph and a fascinating village and an old railway turned into a bike track. I remembered the first Spring flowers on a rough track down to the water. This time the grebes are there, a few celandines, but no magic. I can’t send disappointment packing.
The journey home was a great a challenge – a long drive, uncomfortable in the back seat; a confusion of trains; trying to manage my ridiculously heavy baggage; cold feet all day until at last I see Thelma waiting on the platform to take me home. The next day the poem comes to me.
The winter trees in lines of mist are
Guards of honour for a dark thicket
In the gloom ahead.
There is beauty in things half seen
Lurking there in cold suspense
Waiting for a flush of green.
Tangles of briar and dark wet leaves
A swirl of droplets held in air
Pale stalks of plants long dead.
Here winter holds its breath
In the cold damp air, and Spring
Does not wish to seem too keen.
Remember Remember
It’s the eleventh month – a time to look back. We remember the eleventh hour of the eleventh day because it’s embedded in our national culture, but we are forgetting to remember the fifth of November. Perhaps it is right that we should not celebrate the burning alive of a man whose greatest crime was to be a Catholic (blowing up parliament doesn’t look so bad these days!) but could we not remember still the joy of coming together among the fallen leaves, around a great fire, lighting a sparkler or a banger or a Catherine Wheel and eating parkin or toffee apples?
How many of us give a thought to All Hallows Day now that it has been supplanted by that imported celebration of all things plastic on the day before?
On a clear afternoon I went to explore again a place which, like so many similar ones across Wales, is another part of our culture we are forgetting: the lead mine at Rhandirmwyn. The village name means roughly “division of the mineral land.” It was just one of hundreds of small mines working tin, copper, gold and lead all over mid and north Wales. Here are a few others I went to explore back in September.
Thousands of men worked these adits lodes and levels and hundreds died in them or were poisoned by them, but who remembers them?
I particularly wanted to see our local mine again because it is under threat from a planning application which would turn it into a bike park.
Walking alone up the stony track as the sun dipped behind the hills I was moved by the stark beauty of it, a beauty which comes from being forgotten, because yes, there is a great benefit to any patch of land, its plants and creatures, when we humans lose interest. We the great despoilers blasted our way into this hillside, pulled out thousands of tons of lead and tin and a million tons of waste which we dumped in great piles beside the nant -the stream which still runs clear and lifeless down to the Towy. It is a place now where things are abandoned. Look at those little patches of land, in the next picture,bounded by ridges. Were they fields?
A hundred years of rain and wind on those spoil heaps have still not made them fertile, but some rare and special plants, lichens and fungi are slowly colonising this hostile land and with them come rare insects and birds.
So walking through the heather and rough grass and shale and seeing the slow decay of that once beautiful building (top) set against the slow regeneration of the natural world around it is a very special experience. I’m holding contradictions together in this coppery light, as with the contradiction between Gunpowder, Treason and Plot and the simple pleasures of Bonfire Night, or the modern plastic “frights” of Halloween with the real burning of eccentric women in 17th century Salem USA where the modern Halloween has its roots.
Soon no doubt big money will win again and this fragile place will be lost. Go and see it while you still can.
Posted in This Wild Life
Tagged All Hallows Day, Guy Fawkes, Mineral mines, Mines of Wales, November, Rhandirmwyn
1 Comment
The Night Visitor
It’s 9:30 in the evening, dark and cool and in the wild bit of the garden there is a small pool of light from a low powered spotlight. It lights up a small area of the deck outside our rustic garden cabin, and I’m heading out there to sit behind the glass door and watch. For the last week or so I’ve been putting out hedgehog food and our resident hedgehog has been captured several times on the trail camera.
However for the last few nights the visitor has been a lot larger.
I have my camera with me. It’s warm and comfortable in there so sitting watching is no hardship. I think I have at least a chance of seeing it and, even though the light is very low, taking a few pictures. I put out some more food, gently enter, set up my chair and get ready for a long wait.
Ten minutes go by. I’m used to this, and quite expect to be staring at this patch of boards and a few leaves for the next hour. I doze a little and am quite unprepared for the rush of adrenaline when, suddenly, there it is, right in front of me, quite unaware of me a couple of metres away!
I gently raise the camera and focus: the slowest shutter speed I can get away with and the widest aperture, but what I see in the viewfinder doesn’t capture the WOW, the sheer live presence of the animal. Oh Fox I love you!
Interaction with nature is a sort of mantra for me, and I have been very distressed by the declines in wildlife in this area. I used to keep bees years ago and wondered about starting again, but decided they are not very cuddly so we are going to keep a few chickens as pets.
This will be their safe house at night and when we are away, but they will be out during the day normally.
So, brer fox, (or sister fox) how can I love you and the chickens?
An Invitation
Join me in an exploration of some interesting ideas and some special places in Britain, France and Ireland. I love to photograph wildlife, islands, wild places and interesting communities. Just hit the subscribe button and write your email. A lot of time and thought goes into each post so I don’t post very often – perhaps once a fortnight on average. You can of course unsubscribe at any time.
The pictures and text below were inspired by my first trip to the Isle of Muck in May 23.
Posted in This Wild Life
Tagged birds, Golden Eagle, Isle of Muck, Scotland, Small Isles
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