A damp morning

The still air hangs heavy with the scent of decay; autumn’s fragrance, deep with a richness that can be tasted as much as smelt. The damp leaves stick to my boots and the layer of decaying leaf matter holds an impression of my passing steps within its patterned surface. Black-headed gulls dance on light wings to snatch titbits from the surface of the swollen river, their crisp white tones contrasting with the deepening colours of fading autumnal light. It doesn’t feel like the end of November, but it is.

The morning air lacks any real bite, the temperature above average for the time of the year and kept higher by the insulating blanket of overnight cloud. Even now the hazel in the garden at home still carries a few green leaves, each of which looks oddly out of place against its yellow and brown fellows, starved of wanted nutrients and ready to be jettisoned. There is a sense that winter has been happening somewhere else. The arrivals of rough-legged buzzards, short-eared owls and waxwings all point to tougher conditions elsewhere, but not here. Here the hunting opportunities remain and the afternoon fen provides a stage for hunting owls and harriers, seeking out small mammals and birds.

There is an expectation that the winter must come, that the temperatures must drop and that the first proper frosts must replace the damp with a welcome crispness more befitting the season. Were it not for the damp this unseasonal weather might tease more strongly, to hint at a spring that is still many months away. Is this the shape of things to come? Is this how our winters will be? I suspect not but right now it feels as if this dampness will continue indefinitely.

The damp conditions muffle the landscape and increase the sense of stillness. Only the calls of newly arrived swans echo across the flat fenland fields from a distance, piercing the gloom of the afternoon. More closely, the ‘chack’ of fieldfares and the indignant alarm of a startled moorhen deliver a more immediate soundscape. It is time to turn for home, brush the mud from my boots and to shut out the damp and darkness for another day.

Out on the marsh

It has been a good winter for Rough-legged Buzzards, with three working the grazing marshes that flank the Rivers Waveney and Yare, inland from Yarmouth. It is one of my favourite parts of East Anglia and getting out on the marshes delivers you back into the wild and into the winter realm of these and other birds.

I had not chosen the best of days for my visit but I had been cooped up at home, head down and working, for too long. I needed to clear my thoughts and re-engage with the landscape and its wild creatures; the north coast would be too busy and so the marshes beckoned. Parking at St. Olaves I struck out north through the boatyards and up onto the bank that skirts Fritton Marsh, leading out onto ‘The Island’. A small team of reed cutters were at work, a stack of recently cut reeds the sign of a productive morning and their distant banter matched by the chattering calls of a passing party of Bearded Tits.

It was a good walk out to my chosen viewpoint and, with many stops along the way to scan and watch a mix of waders and wildfowl, I found that I had used up the best of the weather. No sooner had I settled down by the old mill than the darkening clouds released a flurry that moved from sleet to snow and back again. I had banked on these just being showers but right now this was not good weather for seeing buzzards. In fact two of the Rough-legged Buzzards were here but, like me and like a solitary Marsh Harrier, they were hunkered down and sitting out the shower. One was sat on the stout upright of a farm gate, several hundred metres distant; the other, further off to the right, was on the deck. There is very little that looks more miserable than a raptor in the wet and the mood of one of the two birds was not helped by the fact that it was being harassed by some of the local corvids. For the next fifty minutes we sat out the shower and then, gradually, a growing pale band on the horizon gestured at better weather moving in.

The brightening sky brought better viewing conditions. I was able to watch the closer bird, which also sensed the better conditions, as it shook itself and looked around. I didn’t think I would see it take to the air and begin hunting but it did make one short flight in response to the crows. More showers followed, prompting my departure, but I went away with the sense that I had shared something with these birds today.