by Matt Merritt
I’m grateful for the cover and the little bit of warmth that the hide provides, and I start scanning through the birds closest to hand, a mixture of ducks such as mallards, goldeneye and the odd pintail, and waders such as dunlin and redshank on the bank just below me. I am, I admit, slightly baffled as to where the hundreds of waders I’d watched skimming low over the sea wall and into the pits not fifteen minutes ago have gone, but I assume they’re in the next pit.
I’ve been here fully five minutes before I raise the binoculars to take a close look at that far bank, and as I do one of the oystercatchers starts to move down towards the water. Then the whole bank seems to move, with the small, uniformly grey boulders that are part of it separating to let the bird pass. And then I realise – and only the combination of the cold and the early start is any excuse for my foolishness – that every one of those boulders is a bird.
A knot to be exact. With each of them standing stock still in the same position, head tucked away and little but a grey expanse of wing and back showing, they were creatures of stone, but the bigger, black-and-white bird’s intrusion into their silent vigil softens them again suddenly into a single seething mass of avian life.
I try counting them, but I give up long before they start to pose any threat to my state of wakefulness. They stay obligingly still but there are so many. Given the numbers I can count, packed into an area roughly ten feet by ten feet, I estimate I’m looking at seven or eight thousand, on this pit alone. Seven or eight thousand tiny Cnuts – one theory is that their name derives from that of the eleventh-century monarch who told the sea to turn back – just biding their time before they can return to the nearby mudflats and order the tide to retreat.
In fact, there are other waders amongst them too – dunlin and redshanks again – but for the most part each species sticks to its own little area. If you were so minded, you could teach yourself a decent amount about the finer points of winter wader ID, but that would be to lose sight of a wider picture that’s unique in Britain – unique pretty much anywhere. Snettisham RSPB reserve has made its name and become a magnet for wildlife photographers, partly by design and partly by accident, and its greatest glories depend on the rare conjunction of a number of factors. When they fall into alignment there’s little to match it.
So much of the landscape of Britain has been shaped and tamed by man that we tend to forget the strange and wonderful shapes it must once have taken. The Wash, that great bite out of England’s east coast, is our biggest river delta, for all that it now looks nothing like our stereotypical image of that word.
If you visit the Wash expecting sparkling channels of water threading through stands of reeds and rushes, the air thick with the shapes and calls of egrets, storks and flamingos, then forget it. Well, except the egrets maybe. No, this area is a delta shaped and tamed by man. Rivers run down dead-straight miles, through sluice and lock, to emerge onto wide mudflats. Between them, huge fields of black soil are punctuated by dykes and bunds, the occasional hedge, and little farms huddled behind flimsy spinneys, the only cover against a wind that can arrive straight from the Urals.
For many centuries this delta formed a key access point for migrants and invaders set on making Britain their home. Archaeological discoveries at Snettisham have uncovered early Anglo-Saxon villages, and common sense dictates that settlers arriving from northern Germany and Denmark would have headed straight for sites such as this, almost adjacent to the open sea to make retreat possible, yet close enough to a host of major rivers to make penetration into the heart of the island a possibility. From the Wash, the Ouse, the Nene and the Welland are highways to the English Midlands, the ‘champaine ground’ as one medieval chronicler was to call it, that would eventually be a major foundation of the country’s wealth.
And while some passed on into the interior of England, others remained, settled down and lived in this landscape, which must have felt reassuringly home-like for those who had arrived from Jutland and the like. As they converted to Christianity, another enduring feature of the Fens emerged, the great cathedrals and abbeys of Ely, Ramsey, Thorney, Crowland and Peterborough, like great grey ships breasting seas of green.
Later, Viking armies intent on harvesting the riches of those great churches sailed their dragon-prowed ships into the same muddy estuaries, only to be gradually absorbed into the country in the same way. But the landscape remained the same. When Hereward the Wake led resistance to William the Conqueror from the Isle of Ely in 1070, Ely really was an island, a small, raised area amidst a trackless wilderness of rivers, channels, marshes and pools, and the rebel had high hopes that his insurrection would be supported by the ships and men of the Danish king Sweyn, who could sail right up to the city if need be. He was to be disappointed, but even in the centuries following the Conquest little changed, with the fen-dwellers developing their own distinctive way of life that made good use of the natural riches – both piscine and avian – available to them.
It wasn’t a healthy place to live, admittedly. The ague, as malaria and similar feverish diseases were then known, was a constant threat, and it’s a mark of how difficult travel across the boggy, treacherous country was that King John lost some or all of the crown jewels in the whirlpools and quicksands of the estuaries in 1216. No one knows exactly where, but legend has it that there’s a fortune out there waiting to be found.
Eventually someone did make a fortune out of this distinctly unpromising countryside. A Dutchman by the name of Cornelius Vermuyden. In the seventeenth century, a growing population and the burgeoning economic and political power of the gentry meant that there was ever-increasing pressure to bring more land into cultivation, or under enclosure for sheep and other livestock. Marginal upland pastures were walled and fenced. Others disappeared beneath the plough. By far the greatest untapped riches, though, in terms of land, were the wide acres of the Fens, stretching from up near Skegness in the north down to near Cambridge in the south, and from King’s Lynn in the east to Peterborough in the west.
Vermuyden, with other engineers from the Low Countries, applied centuries of accumulated expertise to drain the mires and swamps, although their efforts met with any number of setbacks and even active opposition, and the process wasn’t completed until well into the eighteenth century. Since then the drainage has been refined and perfected, until the whole area is probably the richest and most productive agricultural land in the UK. As with other places where intensification of farming has taken place, this hasn’t always been good for birds, although a winter afternoon on the Fens can produce a surprising wealth of avian life.
This includes not only the flocks of lapwings, golden plovers, gulls and corvids, or the barn owls hunting wide field verges and making use of the many abandoned outbuildings (the bleakness of the landscape, perhaps, has reined in the renovations and conversions that are so prevalent elsewhere). There are corn buntings, for example: chunky, seed-eating passerines once widespread across arable land but now struggling badly in most other parts of the country. There are marsh harriers, only thirty years ago a major rarity, yet now revived to the extent that seeing one from my office window at the edge of Peterborough isn’t a huge surprise. There are even cranes, long-necked, plumed and exotic, and finally making a strong comeback in a country whose place names tell the story of their abundance as both breeders and passage migrants in centuries past. These range from Cranborne (‘cranes’ stream’) in Dorset, to Carnforth (‘cranes’ ford’) in Lancashire.
Nonetheless, birds aren’t here in anything like the vast quantities they would be were this still the delta of our imaginations. Only on the far side of the earthen sea walls that line the Wash can you find anything on the scale of the world’s great wetlands. The greys and browns of the huge sea of mud might not be of the right hues to inspire painters or poets, but they do harbour an astonishing amount and variety of life, from microscopic organisms to larger crustaceans such as crabs. All of these are food to birds of one sort or another, and so these
empty and often bleak surroundings exert an irresistible pull on avian life from as far afield as the Arctic.
As autumn draws on, birds arrive daily. Pink-footed geese from Iceland, perhaps fresh from a stop-off in Scotland. Bar-tailed godwits from the same location, besides other waders such as knot and dunlin from the tundra of Svalbard, Greenland and elsewhere. Short-haul travellers, too, from the uplands of Britain: curlews and golden plovers, determined to take advantage of the daily feast on offer, rather than the slim pickings to be found on their breeding grounds during the winter months. Even some of the waders found around our coasts at all times of the year – oystercatchers, for example – find it hard to resist the magnetic pull of this incredible place.
For day after day it fills with birds, large and small, some easily seen, and others content to live their lives far from man, way out on the mud; but it takes a coming together of two natural phenomena to reveal to even the casual observer the sheer scale of what’s out there.
You need to do your research. This is one of those natural spectacles than can genuinely only be seen to its fullest extent on one or two days each year, and so getting your timing even slightly wrong is a recipe for disappointment.
First of all, you need all the requisite birds to be present. That means waiting until late December at least, because some of our winter visitors can take their time to get here, especially in a mild year. On the other hand, by the end of January some of the visitors might be starting to slip away to the north, especially those species that tend to make their return journey in stages. That means you’re working with a window of six weeks at most.
Secondly, you need a day on which high tide and dawn pretty much coincide – cross-reference that with your six-week window, and you’ve generally got a couple of suitable days, usually in early or mid-January.
Finally, as with absolutely any outdoor event that takes place in Britain, from the humblest church fete to the Lord’s Test match or Wimbledon, you need the weather. Fog, mist and drizzle all have the potential to obscure the extent of what’s happening, but clear days and nights have their own hazards, too. In the end, all you can do is hope, and having made all my calculations that’s what I do.
I’ve risen long before dawn and driven along the coast road from where I’m staying near the RSPB reserve at Titchwell. It’s bitterly cold, mainly due to the biting wind, and the skies are largely clear with just some high cloud away to the west. The moon is still riding high, almost three-quarters full and casting a silver sheen across the sage-green fields lining the lane from Snettisham village.
That worries me. Pink-footed geese are a key part of what I’m hoping to see, but they’re far from reliable in their movements. In recent decades the numbers wintering in Britain have increased markedly, in part because of their breeding success in Iceland and eastern Greenland, but also because they’ve found the farmland of Britain more and more welcoming. In some areas, such as north-east Scotland, they’ll feed mainly on stubble fields, but in East Anglia, and especially north Norfolk, their expansion since the Second World War was heavily linked to one crop – sugar beet. Once harvested the beet tops were left lying on the fields and the geese were happy to exploit this ample and energy-rich food resource. It helped, too, that the fields of East Anglia tend to be large and wide open, often without hedges, which suits this rather nervous bird perfectly – there’s little or no chance of a predator making a close approach unnoticed. Having fed on the fields inland throughout the day, the geese of north Norfolk return to coastal roost sites at night, either at Holkham or on the Wash near Snettisham.
But, and it’s a big but, catching them when they return to their roosts is just a best-case scenario for the birdwatcher. Sometimes if the weather’s fine and the moon casts enough light the geese will stay on the fields all night, taking advantage of the conditions to feed up while the going’s good. This is exactly what I’m afraid of, but there’s no way of knowing what will happen until I get down to the sea wall.
In the car park at Snettisham I pull up alongside three others, presumably here for the same reason as me. As I’m taking my scope and binoculars out of the boot, and adding a final extra layer and thick gloves to my winter outfit, a barn owl bobs across the track on its own little tide of silence. So intent is it on the rough grassland separating the parking bays that for a moment I think it’s going to fly straight into me, but at around five yards away it lifts it head long enough to detect my presence and veers left, at the same time lifting a yard higher into the air, as if on invisible strings. It disappears into the darkness, and as I follow its path I can see it’s not the only bird out and about in the pre-dawn hour. On the grassy fields curlews are probing for worms with their extraordinarily long, curved bills, paying similarly little heed to this lone birdwatcher trudging past.
I walk down a gravel path between holiday chalets as the first slivers of dawn start to streak the eastern horizon. Somewhere in the distance I can hear a faint but growing clamour of many birds, and I start to hurry on, worried that I’ve got my timings wrong and will miss the show. And yet, while the sound gets louder as I get closer to the sea wall, it never quite builds to a crescendo. There’s always the sense there’s yet more to come, and I comfort myself that the loudest voices – redshank and black-headed gull – are not the ones I’m really here for.
By the time I’m clambering up onto the wall itself, there’s enough light to see for maybe a mile in every direction – mist and fog are mercifully absent – and within five minutes that range has extended to the very far edge of the Wash. From where I am, on its eastern shore, my binoculars can pick out landmarks over on the Lincolnshire coast, such as Boston Stump, another of those great fenland churches that have been actual and spiritual beacons for hundreds of years. Rather more prosaically the great bulk of Sutton Bridge Power Station. And all along the shore as it sweeps right round towards me, the lights marking each of the main channels, where the rainwater of a third of England pours itself into the ocean.
On the mud itself … nothing. Not with the first scan, or the second; or at least, nothing more than a mottling of the browns and greys with darker or lighter browns and greys. They could be birds, but they could be different-coloured mud, or creeks, or cloud shadow. I start to feel that strange, subdued panic that afflicts every birdwatcher (or maybe it’s just me) when they’ve gone looking for something in particular – the feeling that it’s simply too much to ask that your presence and the presence of the bird or birds should coincide out there in all that space.
And then, beyond doubt, something is moving. Small, dark, wispy clouds start to rise from the water’s edge, like djinn from desert sands, and beyond them larger shapes, too. Everything, it seems, is happening at once.
In fact, dawn has the edge on this occasion. The larger shapes are the pink-footed geese, and the increasing light sends small groups of them spiralling into the sky, from where they strike out directly towards me in wide V-formations. I’m still worried that some may have spent the night inland, and that the scale of the spectacle will be massively diluted, but I start to follow the leading skeins with my binoculars anyway.
As they get closer I can see the small, dark, rounded heads, the shortish necks and compact overall shape, the dark underwings and the white edge to the tail, and as they get closer still their voices join the general clamour. In flight they keep up a constant chorus of urgent, high-pitched disyllabic calls – ang-ank, ang-ank, ang-ank – to each other.
It’s dangerous to assume we can ever know exactly what bird calls mean, but with all geese in flight I am given the impression that this is the sound of reassurance and encouragement, a sort of ‘all for one and one for all’ proclamation to the rest of the flock to reinforce bonds of mutual dependence.
And there’s scientific backing for ideas along these lines: certainly geese adopt those V-formations precisely because the trailing birds receive an aerodynamic boost from the updraughts of the wings of those in front of t
hem, with more experienced birds leading the way to ensure the flock has the best possible chance of reaching its destination safely and quickly. Even the lead geese are rotated on a regular basis, ensuring that every bird benefits from being part of the group.
So engrossed have I become in watching one particular group of pathfinders that, when I lower my binoculars to give my arms a rest, I’m staggered. Beyond them hundreds and thousands more geese have risen from the floor of the great bay and are forming up to head east.
For the next fifteen minutes I stand with my head craned skywards as skein after skein passes over to the accompaniment of its own strangely invigorating music (geese will never win prizes for tunefulness, but after a while it’s hard not to get caught up in their enthusiasm and sheer joie de vivre). And I count. It’s too cold to make notes on my phone, and even gripping a pencil might be a stretch – certainly here bare hands are a hugely unappealing prospect. So I keep the tally in my head, as best as I can, first adding in groups of ten and then, as the birds come thicker and faster, in fifties and even hundreds. And, if the final result does depend heavily on the ability to estimate numbers across a 180-degree arc of sky simultaneously, I’m quietly confident that my final total of fourteen thousand is no more than a few hundred out.
Think of that. Fourteen thousand birds, each of them only a little smaller than the typical farmyard goose, passing two to three hundred feet overhead in the space of fifteen minutes, all of them noisily eager to be about the short day’s business of foraging across the flint-spackled fields of Norfolk.
What feels extraordinary is that such huge numbers of this relatively large bird can spend up to six months of the year in a small corner of Britain without, apparently, attracting a great deal of attention, except from incomers like myself. Of course, the locals must inevitably get used to their presence, in much the same way that someone living next to an airport soon ceases to look up at the sound of every aircraft; but nevertheless you do find yourself wondering why there aren’t cars pulled over along every main road, with the drivers staring open-mouthed at a truly staggering wildlife movement.