Nature Calls: Elmley marshes has unique wanting birds and owls

Every week Metro flees town looking for birds. And generally different issues. This week, we’re at… Elmley Nature Reserve

This time subsequent week will probably be darkish. On the time of writing, it’s the final Saturday of British Summer time Time and the solar – nonetheless heat – sends lengthy shadows throughout the inexperienced grass.

Nothing is richer in color than at the moment of day. The golden hour.

We’re on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, at Elmley Nationwide Nature Reserve – privately run and a mixture of farmland and marshes with the Swale estuary as its southern border.

There was a village right here and a cement works. The ruins of a small Victorian schoolhouse stay. Little owls use it as a roost now.

And they aren’t the one owls right here. Lengthy-eared owls roost deep within the small copse behind the pond by the automotive park, barn owls hunt right here at nightfall and, from autumn onwards, short-eared owls quarter the fields for voles.

We cross the schoolhouse on the observe right down to The Swale however we don’t see the little owls. From the tideway we will hear the whistling of wigeon – geese that overwinter right here having bred as far north as Iceland and Siberia.

The drake has a chestnut head with a gold crest operating from the highest of its invoice to its crown. They’re chunky, like tugboats, and they’ll flock right here of their many a whole lot, their mellow name a characteristic of winter marshes and mudflats. 

The tide is absolutely excessive as we method, the Sheppey Crossing away to our proper, carrying the A249 excessive above the water to the mainland. On the alternative shore are factories – tall chimneys and taller cranes.

Tufts of grass break the floor the place the Swale is at its most shallow and round these collect shorebirds in search of refuge from the rising water.

There are six species – so as of dimension, largest to smallest, they’re curlew, black-tailed godwit, avocet, gray plover, turnstone and dunlin. Every feed based on their invoice – or have a invoice based on their feeding.

The curlew’s is massively lengthy and downcurved, the godwit’s not fairly as lengthy and pretty-much lifeless straight. Each are used to poke about within the mud for invertebrates. The avocet, in the meantime, makes use of its markedly upturned invoice to comb throughout and thru the water or unfastened sediment, once more for prey corresponding to crustaceans and worms. 

Gray plover and turnstone each have quick, stubby payments they use to select their prey – the previous from the sand and dirt, the latter by upending pebbles and the like. Dunlins have a medium-sized invoice, which they use to select organisms from the floor or simply under it.

Turning again from the shore, the wind whistles by means of the phragmites reeds whose heads swish and glisten within the lowing solar.

A snipe zooms up and away from inside the reedbed – its lengthy invoice unmistakeable. One other shoots as much as comply with it. Then two extra. Then one other six. It’s as if somebody is firing snipe like missiles. One other 4 comply with, whirring on busy wings.

Alongside the reeds is a patch of teasel and on to the spiky heads a appeal of 30 or so goldfinches lands, tinkling and twittering as they do.

These sociable birds have a crimson face adopted by a white band then a black one and have a vivid yellow flash on their wing with a white-spotted black tail. They’re nearly too unique in search of this land.

They stab their tremendous, triangular payments into the husky teasel spikes to prise free the seeds.

They solar is correct at our again now and the colors are even brighter and sharper – as if seen with new glasses – as daring as they ever can be. 

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